What "Other Products" Will Linden Lab Launch in 2012?

This year, Linden Lab will launch "some completely different products" from Second Life, some of which "will be very experimental, but all will fit within our company’s proud history of enabling creativity". But what? At least some of them will be deployed on the web and tablets, as Linden CEO Rod Humble has said, which gives us some hint of what they'll look like. Here's my own three guesses, not drawing from any particular inside info, but from an "If I was Linden Lab..." perspective, and from what the company is already doing now:

• MMO Developer Kit: I would expect something like this to be announced in March, in time for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, with a website and perhaps an SDK that would make use of the game features we've seen in Linden Realms. (Botgirl Questi and Gwynneth Llewellyn have suggested a similar direction.)
• Web/Tablet game with prim-based construction: In 2010, prim-based world construction finally became a huge deal in gaming. It just happened to come not from Linden Lab, but Markus Persson and Minecraft. And while Minecraft remains the indie game champion, it's also created a market for games with similar features. Now that Second Life is slowly but surely moving toward mesh-based building, why not showcase dynamic prim-based construction in an entirely new platform, and market it to people more familiar with Minecraft, than SL?
• Fashion-oriented social game using SL assets. Avatar fashion remains one of Second Life's best and most attractive assets. Unfortunately, these assets are obscured behind a large, cumbersome 3D client. Meanwhile, games like It Girl on Facebook have proven there's a huge market for light roleplaying games with fashion as a mechanic. At the same time, these games are stymied by the cost involved in creating new fashion assets -- something SL has in abundance.

Again, these are mainly just my own personal speculations, though I'm fairly sure we'll see something like the MMO kit launch soon, if only marketed to existing SL developers. But if Linden Lab doesn't soon make games that leverage Minecraft-type gameplay and fashion roleplaying, I think they're missing a major opportunity.

Comments

[Nalates Urriah]

Well... at least you are rational. No psychic space aliens arriving in time for the end of the world. (See Tateru)

I suspect the fashion game would be popular.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Whatever it is the black hats will expose a way to exploit it. Blackhats always rule.

[Ezra]

I agree completely that Linden Lab should look to Minecraft to understand what easy, shared creativity can mean for a game, if its a game they're making.

Right now, with all the YouTube videos showing off creations, the active forum community with texture packs and mods being shared, Minecraft has become an embodiment of a shared creativity platform.

To do better or as good, Linden Lab has to create something where creation can occur in the first few seconds. Something equivalent to the chop down tree with bare hands and make a house first few moments of Minecraft.

Linden Lab is also in a unique position where they can nail the "shared" part better. Its entirely incidental that Minecraft has a large YouTube community where most of its creation sharing goes on with the lack of widely available multiplayer servers.

Linden Lab has experience running a marketplace, a quasi-social network (my.secondlife), a virtual economy, and other 99.99% uptime connected experiences. Things Notch is striving for in future directions with Minecraft in some regards. Linden Lab is already a wizard tower with that stuff, they just need to nail an easy to use, attractive, usable client.

Given Rod's background I think they can nail something great.

My one worry though for any new Linden Lab product is simultaneously my solace in believing Second Life wouldn't be neglected or impacted much, and that's the fact LInden Lab doesn't seem to be devoting a whole lot of resources to a new project.

No Lindens have been shifted as we know, and there's no job listings for artists, designers, writers, composers, etc. Just engineers as usual. It's hard to believe they're creating anything too robust, unless they're outsourcing a lot of content creation, or somehow will cleverly repurpose Second Life's asset servers.

Startin' to wonder if what they're developing is even happening in the same building.

[jo yardley]

It would be great fun to have a prim based building app that will allow you to build 3D virtual objects and buildings that you can then share with others, look at from all sides and eventually import into SL when you get back home.
This can be interesting to people even if they are not in SL.
Just a nice little basic builder on your ipad just like in SL, just without the whole online virtual online world.

[Metacam Oh]

MMO Developer Kit - We already have Unity3d, Crytek, Multiverse just went out of business etc etc.

Web/Tablet game with prim-based construction - not sure why anyone would buy the labs version of Minecraft Pocket Edition

Fashion-oriented social game using SL assets - If we learned anything from Blue Mars, its do not copy Blue Mars.

Let's be honest, if these products are not assisting or making Second Life better, Linden Lab is digging their own grave as we speak.

I hope I'm wrong, I hope what they are working for on friggin genius, but odds are this is just another giant waste of money and resources that could just go into further advancing Second Life.

[Hamlet Au]

"We already have Unity3d, Crytek, Multiverse just went out of business etc etc... Fashion-oriented social game using SL assets - If we learned anything from Blue Mars, its do not copy Blue Mars."

Unlike Crytek and Multiverse, SL already has a relatively large install base of MMO-type roleplayers, something like 100-200K, who can be marketed to. Unity 3D is a good model to follow, though.

Blue Mars was not a social game in the sense I meant -- i.e. deployed on Facebook, like It Girl. Also, it did not have a built-in audience already on Facebook. SL's official Facebook page has 225K fans, many of whom would immediately be interested in a SL-based fashion-oriented social game.

[GoSpeed Racer]

Blue Mars went the smart phone/tablet route with their world. I've messed with it a few times but haven't logged in for quite a while.

[Joey1058]

What Linden Lab needs to do is quietly let Second Life finish running it's course. The virt land aspect has played itself out. What IS thriving is their Marketplace and virtual currency. It's time to put some clout behind a strategy to establish themselves as VR's version of Sears, Roebuck, & Company. Why limit themselves to just prims and mesh? They already have a catalog called Marketplace. I'd bet a pocket full of L$ that Zinga would drool to affiliate into that!

[Ezra]

Second Life users find value in buying clothes and other fashion because of all the other things one can do in Second Life: dance at a club, roleplay in a fantasy realm, have ones avatar whipped in a BDSM dungeon.

To detach fashion from the reason users buy clothes in the first place would be missing the whole point, and illustrate exactly why Blue Mars' gamble on making an iOS Hot Or Not tanked.

Two other things Linden Lab has been very successful at is being original and making a profit. It'd be many steps backward for Linden Lab to copy a barely, or not at all, profitable iOS or Facebook startup when Linden Lab already knows how to make money and deliver highly popular experiences without splitting profits with Apple or Facebook and getting lost in the sea of some 500,000 apps.

Even Facebook popular companies like Zynga and Playdom are moving away from Facebook. Zynga's pushing forward with "Zynga Direct" to bypass the 30% cut Facebook takes, and Playdom already allows playing games directly on its website.

If Linden Lab did anything other than a browser-based client hosted on their own website it'd be silly. They already know how to get some 16k+ sign-ups a day without being in an AppStore or on Facebook.

[Pussycat Catnap]

I kinda think 2012 is too late to jump on the Social bandwagon. Anyone getting on the pyramid at this point is missing out on most of the potential.

These ideas to turn SL-potential into just another Facebook app seem short sighted.

Better to stick it out and find web 3.0...

[Ann Otoole InSL]

If LL can come up with little apps that have lots of brightly colored objects with jingly sounds and increased points that have no value other than giving the player a sense of accomplishment and the app has a similar effect as ritalin or adderall on player brains then LL can make a fortune off of the ADHD generation. That appears to be the future these days. Just keep dumb drone people staring at a 3 inch screen and remaining unaware of what congress and the oligarchy are up to. /sarcasm

[Pussycat Catnap]

@Ann:

Ooooo... piece of candy... Ooooo... piece of candy... Ooooo... /flyswat.

If Marie had lived in modern times, and told the peasants to just eat cake, her PR department would've gotten right on it, and she'd still have her head.

[supra sneakers]

Great stuff here.

[elizabeth (16)]

virtual money for other 3D games and worlds. like a forex

make a api that enable other worlds, incl opensim, unity, etc, to have a instant currency adminned by someone like linden that ppl already trust

make a API and a inworld HUD, like the realms one, that autoattach to the viewer - click here to dl and attach. make it so that it not interact with the hosts sim server. just direct on secure channel to linden forex, like a wallet. only info the host servers get is transaction notification and not transaction capability. is no man in the middle holding the purse

cut the other worlds hosts into a revenue sharing deal on forex fees

allow ppl to get a forex dealer license, same as lindex dealer, for liquidity. make so that every worlds dollars, same as linden$, is floated and traded same like is now on lindex. ppl buy and sell for whatever they think they worth

trusted currency equal safer economy. safer economy lead to growth and profits in all worlds. whoever do that will be the banker. linden probly best placed of all companies with the knowledge and infrastucture to do that. they also got a large customer base who trusts them with their money

[Frans]

I would be surprised if it isn't Will Wright's HiveMind.