What Second Life Creator Linden Lab Could Learn from Eve Online Creator CCP. And the Vietnam War. And Jesus.

Online community academic John Carter McKnight has a very interesting post comparing the corporate strategy of Second Life creator Linden Lab and Eve Online creator CCP. Both worlds are profitable with a relatively niche userbase in the mid six figures, and like SL, as we saw from tragic events in Libya this week, Eve Online also has a passionate and supportive user community. But CCP's approach is different from Linden Lab's, and here's fundamentally how:

The core difference, I think, lies in accepting reality over institutional wishful thinking. Both EVE and SL are niche products, but with a very devoted base of users who’ve been around for a long time. The reality is, that’s the product. If you have dreams of huge successes (and why, really?), build another product. Especially in online communication and gaming, don’t try to pile stuff on a seven-year-old engine.

CCP moved away from doing that, McKnight argues, by rejecting the "Jesus feature" (what one Eve player called "the awesome idea that will solve all of CCP’s problems"), while Linden Lab is imitating the mistakes the US military made after fighting the Vietnam War. Yes, really:

[Consider] John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam. Nagl looks at two institutions as similar as LL and CCP: the American and British armies, and two similar “products,” insurgent warfare in Southeast Asia. The two institutions developed radically differently from similar origins: Nagl says that the British learned from their early mistakes while the US doubled down on them.

I probably disagree somewhat on this analysis, because here's another crucial problem: Unlike Eve Online, which always was first and foremost an online game, Linden Lab and a lot of its own most passionate users convinced themselves Second Life was ready to become something more than a game. (I include myself in that category, at least at the start.) To extend the Vietnam analogy, it's as if the US Army treated insurgencies as a problem for the tourism industry. Or vice versa. Oh just read the whole thing already.

Hat tip: Second Life's Subreddit, submitted by "themittanidotcom".

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Comments

[Alberik Rotaru]

Eve Online also does a vastly better job of listening to its users through mechanisms like the CSM and a much more user-friendly approach to customer relations. And it has a mildly logical revenue model based on actual performance rather than 'We charge high fees because we can't think of anything else to do'.

[John Carter McKnight]

Hamlet, thanks for the shoutout on this! I'm finishing up a dissertation on user community structures in SL, WoW and EVE, and I'm grateful for any comments along the way.

[Shug Maitland]

What LL can not seem to fully integrate into it's thinking is that Second Life is a partnership. LL and the residents are mutually dependent! The Lab creates the tools and provides the platform, but the residents provide the content, both in terms of objects and activities. That is different from almost any other on line community. If they can ever get over their Ivory Tower mentality SL will grow again, people will want to be here, they will no longer feel trapped here by the lack of an alternative, their extensive inventories and their relationships.
(To be fair, there are many Lindens who do "get" this, the ones who do not stick out like a sore thumb, however.)
The relationship between CCP and the Eve On Line players, while not all sweetness and light, is far more of a 2 way street.

[A.J.]

This McKnight post hit the bulls-eye regarding the problem in SL.

Thanks for making it available.

[elizabeth (16)]

i fell asleep reading that guys story

right after the bit where he said he got ruthed and end up as a naked shapeless blob. thats sooo 2010. he would have been a cloud if he did actual login

[Iggy]

I read the post and thought, "Jesus wept"

SL makes Baby Jesus cry, in fact.

Great line in the post:

"their actual userbase of perverts and teachers. Which I say fondly, being in the SL core demographic."

[Generic Viagra]

This is truly amazing I like the work that you have done.Thanks for sharing new post.I think you will be successful..

[Arcadia Codesmith]

We need engines designed to be upgraded rather than replaced. "Piling stuff on" a seven or ten or twenty-year-old engine shouldn't be an issue because the engine should be flexible enough to reinvent itself on a continuous basis.

Our problem is that we're designing virtual worlds in the 20th century industrial mode, complete with the wasteful concept of planned obsolesence. We're still not thinking in terms of long-term sustainability. To an extent that's understandable -- the industry is very young, very susceptable to hype and trends and pronouncements of impending doom.

But either we fight that tendency, or we end up with a series of fragile, ephemeral, balkinized niche worlds rather than a strong, unified virtual reality.

[Iggy]

I did a double take at "Generic Viagra"'s post. You know, it *could* be an SL display name these days.