Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Here's the latest lesson for metaverse platforms:

• If you give your user base incredibly powerful content creation and scripting systems, some of them will create in-world products and services that become so popular with the user community, they'll effectively become integral to the virtual world.* 
• That also means if these user creators were to suddenly quit (boredom, business, sudden death, etc), the entire virtual world economy will feel the shockwaves.
• So, congrats: Your user-made product or service is now an official part of the platform. Get out your checkbook.

Latest example just announced today: Linden Lab acquired Casper Tech, creator of various virtual world commerce services (rental systems, vendors, etc.), run by a mostly-anonymous Second Life user known by his avatar "Casper Warden". (Interview below.)

"My feeling is that this is a risk reduction move," longtime SLer Da5id Kronfeld observes. "So many people rely on Casper that the service suddenly vanishing represents a significant risk to the SL economy."

Variations of this have happened to Second Life before, with (for example) the L$ open exchange system and the SL Marketplace ecommerce website originally starting as user-made platforms.

"I suppose it shows they're still keen to keep Second Life going as a project if they're investing money in some aspects of it," Sler Natalie observes. (Then again, it's probably more cost effective to buy CasperTech rather than hiring 2-3 Linden Lab engineers to recreate its functionality.) Echoing other veterans, she suspects Linden Lab will adding extra costs to use CasperTech's tech: "I can see Caspervend being a subscription thing, maybe bundled into a Creators tier which would be Premium Plus AND Caspervend etc."

All that to one side, it seems like a necessary move (and much congrats to Casper). That said, it does feel like another duct tape fix on top another duct tape fix, with the Second Life platform kept online by successive layers of short-term hacks, since it would be too costly to do what's really necessary: Overhaul the entire thing.

On that front, very longtime Second Life user Allegory Malaprop has an excellent and salty rant:

Not letting Caspervend die and fucking over everyone who is using it is pretty important to the economy. Just from that aspect, it's in [Linden Lab's] best interests to NOT do anything stupid (or gougey) with it, but to just continue running it exactly as it runs now.

However as an actual official-run vendor system? it's just… it shouldn't be the official vendor system. It's a hack and slash around the limitations of what someone else can do in SL

If Linden Lab wants to "own" a vendor system, make a goddamn vendor system that actually works instead of some kludge that's got to have redundancies and workarounds and is held together by twine and duct tape.

Speaking of duct tape, Linden Lab does make some commitments to improve the CasperTech user interfaces, so we'll see what happens there. But a nicer looking UI won't fix all the zany shit going on in Second Life's complex, Shrek Ears-worthy backend.

Much more here on my Plurk thread, and thanks to everyone who shared their opinion there!

* See also VRChat's user-made UdonSharp which also led to a company acquihire.