Cannibalization Conundrum: Will Linden Lab's Second Life Sequel Meet the Fate of Blizzard's Titan?

When Blizzard announced it was cancelling Titan, its long-delayed MMO, a game developer veteran friend who knows some Blizzard staffers told me this was one of the key reasons why: "Blizzard is terrified about cannibalizing World of Warcraft". Which of course made me instantly wonder: Will Linden Lab ever worry that its recently announced Second Life sequel will do the same to SL? After all, World of Warcraft and Second Life are roughly the same age, and while starting to wane, both are still profitable (the former much more than the latter, of course).

Governor Marley has some related thoughts, and a close analysis of Blizzard's "Titan is dead" announcement:

[Blizzard's] Chris Metzen is absolutely right about the discipline of knowing when to quit and it’s a decision I’d reached myself before reading Chris’ words. Linden Lab should pay attention to those words too. Linden Lab, with a combination of luck and judgement struck gold with Second Life. The new virtual world has far more ambitious aims but Linden Lab need to ensure they don’t tie themselves in knots trying to make it happen. Second Life is still there and many people will be happy to engage with Second Life for many a year yet.

This is roughly true, though WoW's revenue base is much more solid than Second Life, since it's a lot easier for millions to keep paying $15 a month than it is for thousands to keep paying $300 or more in sim tier a month. (Which is what SL's profitability depends upon, a base that's impossible to change.) But that brings up the cannibalization concern: What if the several thousand Second Life sim owners decide to invest their energies (and cash) into SL2, and decide it's time to close up shop?

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[Franny]

Thing with Linden Lab is they don't care about anything or anyone. They don't care about the customers aka the whackadoodles, they don't care about the staff. Linden Lab in their own wisdom does as it pleases as they have always done before.

You should view Linden Lab as a dictatorship that likes to stay in control. Of course dictators only get to dictate as long as there are people to force their will upon. In order to do that Linden needs to make sure those people stick around and offer a reason to do so.

The current platform should receive updates yes but there is no need for a new one. Linden Lab might want to refrain from hiring all these kiddie coders on the cheap like they are doing now. Hire some real programmers who know how to code, pay them with the money you are wasting now on all the little side projects you did engage in the previous years.

I will quote Jessica Lyon from Firestorm: "I'm afraid they do not have what it takes."

They don't, they used to have the talent in the past but they fired it or the talent left. Now they have doggies at the office and tweet.

[Pussycat Catnap]

The risk is there but the equivalency is not.

SL has a very real chance of being obsoleted, and has some major issues that simply cannot be fixed without breaking core functionality. At the same time it is somewhat predictable what a next-generation VR needs.

It is not as predictable to guess what is needed for the next generation of MMO - the ball is still moving on that question. Guessing wrong could kill a company.

Blizzard today is where LLs was with Humble: feeling a need to diversify in case its core product loses the lead, and feeling it cannot safely simply replace that product.

LL needs to replace SL. It has aged past its prime and the users are pushing at the seams (all of the innovation in mesh avatars as an example of a realization that the current avatar simply is no longer acceptable... but the tools available are ill suited to replacing it).

Blizard CAN obsolete old content, update the engine, and keep going. And unlike LLs, they have succeeded in their diversification attempts - buying them room to let their MMO age with more grace.

Either LLs will replace SL and keep alive, or someone else will, and LLs will be gone.

[Ezra]

Cannibalizing Second Life is a stated goal of SL2. Here's a good quote from Ebbe about it:

"If all users move rather quickly from SL to our next gen then I assume things went very well. If few are, then I think we'd have more work to do and SL will keep on tickin until only the new one makes sense to operate..."

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Linden-Lab-is-building-a-NEW-virtual-world/m-p/2756212#M185201

So...no problem. Cannibalizing SL would be the greatest thing that can happen. It'd mean they built another great product.

[Cyberserenity]

I am not that shure that LL ever will get the new world online. I suppose it is better to start a program to slowly update SL over several years. SL is still the best virtual world. Just got my Oculus rift and it is amazing when i visit all those places inworld. And the avatars really blow me away. A piece of new tech that intergrated with SL makes it new and fresh again. It will be very difficult to create something better. So many have tried and failed.

[Qwerty89]

You have Facebook and Cory that has been sitting there for several years and the Oculus Rift, what will they do with that?

You have Yahoo who bought up Cloudparty staff, what will they do with that?

You have Sony who closed Home (a money generating product) but did invest in Project Morpheus. What will they do with that?

You have these three large companies ready to get on this new technology wave in the next 6 to 8 months.

Then you have Linden Lab and their urge to belong with the big boys. In a desperate attempt to accomplish this they are willing to slaughter their main product, scamming their customer base out of their investments (which they gladly took advantage of for over a decade). Taking advantage of all time spent by creators to build the world that is there today.

Second Life does consists out of consumers and tourists and a dedicated userbase such as creators and traders and hardcore users. Annoying the dedicated userbase will be fatal for Linden Lab as they depend on them.

A content creator needs several years to gain respect, establish their brand and gather a customer base. Then that content creator can run a steady business on the platform of Linden Lab. This takes a lot of time and effort. Once that gets destroyed that creator will get burned. That creator did work at a very low hourly rate for years to get to the point where they were now. Telling that creator the place where he does business will get shut but he can come and rebuild it all over again on new tech, you can be sure about 70 to 80% will say thanks but no thanks. It is just not worth it.

Everybody has been able to see how Linden Lab did do business in the past.

Flooding the Mainland with sims driving all the Mainland traders out of business by devaluing Mainland by 95% in an attempt to fill their pockets.

Damaging communities who did set up rentals by the introduction of Linden homes.

Scamming the educators by luring them with 50% discount on tier and then increasing the price in the middle of the academic year.

Causing havoc in world by letting Redzone go ballistic for months without caring.

Damaging stores by not acting properly regarding copybot violations and letting Merchants lose sales.

Disrupting Estates and shopping malls, roleplay regions, venues by letting everybody list for free on the Marketplace and promote the crap out of it towards residents.

Forcing all the people interested in seks to a porn ghetto, again disrupting stores, Merchants their business and causing damage to Estates.

Selling 10000 Homesteads to people for 250$ and 75$ a month to then suddenly forcing customers to pay 95$ for them and 125$ and those who did not pay got their land stolen back from them.

Deceiving customers by charging 295$ tier a month to one guy and 195$ a month to the next guy for a wild variety of reasons.

I can keep going on and on and on about this. Still Second Life is only declining a bit at the time. Any other company would have gone bankrupt years ago. The FTC should be informed about this, they sure have reason enough to look into this matter.

Linden Lab should call their new world Scamarama. Like Futurama but with drama Linden Lab style.

Scamarama - Our world where we pluck you like a chicken!

[Flashing Merlin]

Qwerty89 says it very well, although I have dealt with Linden staff who seemed to care, and went out of their way to be helpful.

If the current SL closes, and I lose my investments in land, my builds, my virtual inventory, the scripts I've written, etc. there's no way I'll get involved in their new venture. It would push me into running my own server in Open Sim. I know there's hardly anybody there, but I don't depend on making virtual sales, so I'm not in the position of people dependent on LL.

In fact, I intend not to even visit the new SL venture, so I don't encourage them. If enough of us boycott it, perhaps LL will either abandon it, or find a new audience. It seems to me it would make a lot more sense for LL to try to cannibalize WoW, and attract that crowd with a free to play version of combat SIMs, rather than attempting to cannibalize SL.

[Estelle Pienaar]

This article is kind of comparing melons to apples.

I fully agree with Pussycat. It's a total different situation for both products.

WoW is a giant market leader and the future landscape for MMO in VR isn't clear yet. So for the company it is much more clever to let other people invest and experiment, as long as they buy out the most successfull one(s) fast enough and build on top.

Second Life is a fairly successfull niche product that might loose too much of its population to new VR virtual worlds if they do nothing. So on one side they run a great risk and on the other they have more than a decade of experience in running a virtual world. LL would be plain stupid not to bring their knowledge to the new market opportunities.

[Mazey Songlitch]

Even if LL 'does it right' the opportunity has been missed, and some time back. SL2 is just a prolonging of the inevitable. People are leaving and will not,in my opinion, migrate to the 'other place'en masse. And please save the energy about lowering tier, that is so simplistic and not the root of the real issue. It was fun while it lasted.

Yes LL is still making money but they are making less of it with SL nowdays. /game over.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

The Second Life revenue model is dead. Like any dinosaur, it's just taking awhile for the tiny brain to receive the signal that the heart has stopped.

If it's impossible to wean Second Life off the overpriced virtual real estate racket, then a successor is not just desirable, it is inevitable.

The only question is whether Linden Lab will make that successor, or some other studio will.

For the time being, I'm back playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, which for all its myriad shortcomings, gives me a Coruscant apartment about 10 times the size of a 512 crackerbox for a small sum of in-game cash (i.e. FREE). And that's just the entry-level housing.

Make me a better offer.

[Betsy]

Mesh really did lower tier--- you can have an amazing place for so many less LI.

Builds look better-- remember the houses with air gaps and plywood edges showing?

The quickest best thing I think Linden could do tier wise-- is drop the group thing-- just let all land have the 10% credit and remove the nightmare donate land etc. The excess land capacity is out there already. No new servers needed.

If people could just buy land in a simple manner -- they would buy more. The whole hokey pokey group thing is stupid.

[Adeon Writer]

No one has successfully topped SL, big names like Google have tried and failed. No one, except SL users, get why. LL needs to understand what they have, i feel not even they will be able to top themselves unless they understand exactly why they are so untouchable.

[Adeon Writer]

And yes it would be really nice if the 10% land bonus was standard. For those not familiar, you can hold 10% more land if you put your land credits into a group instead of buying land directly.

[Ajax Manatiso]

I believe LL needs to make a whole new SL MMO just as I believed it was impossible to make a 1.X style viewer for SL. They don't need to and because SL is conveniently seperated into sims, it would be so simple for them to upgrade the current SL sim by sim. The whole reason to make an entirely new MMO is their same old cockeyed thinking - it will be new and improved and millions with flock to it overnight! The same type of thinking that had them believing mesh would bring droves into SL - when it actually had no perceptible effect on the number of new users or retention of old. SL2 will fail within months and LL will take it away and then wonder why they thought it was ever a good idea.

[Nerim Fibonai]

It would not seem very smart to follow Linden Lab to their new grid and leaving all you did behind to start over from scratch. What if in 5 years 3D hologram tech becomes all the rage or laser projected 3D. Then Linden will jump on that tech and you would lose it all over again. When you would rebuild your store and by the time you get up and running then stuff can start to decline soon after and nothing is left again.

When a site like Renderosity would tell their customers they are going to revamp the site and everything needs to be uploaded again to the servers by every creator, that alone would harm Renderosity very badly, this is 100 times more worse even.

With opensim at least you know nobody can destroy it, it will keep going even if the current developers would lose interest opensim will still exist and later new ones could pick up again and update the code. It's much safer than depending on Linden from my perspective.

When a certain game updates from version 1 to 2 people are out of 40 or 50$. With Second Life some will be out of 100K or even a million K, not Linden$ but real bucks.

I'm pretty sure the reason Linden says no backwards compatability is because people would not have a need to buy on SL 2 with their full inventories. It is better for Linden to put everybody in a new place without anything so they have to buy it all over again and blaim it on the tech. I find that a form of robbery because it is perfectly possible to create a converter to transfer prim data to mesh.

Put the sheep in a new world and lure them with cheap land but charge 30% Marketplace fees.

Besides and most important, even if the new world would be perfect fantastic and everything would be smooth, no lag great physics and graphics with fantastic building tools. It is the same company like before.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Some of you are looking at this in terms of the inconvenience to merchants that are slow to adapt.

You should look instead to the consumer, the casual user, the social user.

Those people have benefited greatly from the changes to SL over the past few years. Faster connections, better loading of items, better technology in the viewer, mesh, etc...

- But the platform has severe limits.

The mere concept of a 'sim' is one of them.

The users need more than a creature made in the late 1990s, that was already 'outdated' the day it went live.

Mesh has extended the viable lifespan by a few years - but its still a pretty limited format compared to what it could be.

If LLs doesn't make SL 2.0, somebody else will. Several somebody else's already are working on it.

LLs may not be the best one to do it. BUT they do know that they are dead as a company if they don't. They must do this, or die. They might very well die anyway... but if they can pull the talent together, and if they can keep the users from going to some other company - they will survive.

If you log into an MMO that came out within the last year and move around, then come back to here - it is stunning.

MMOs like Everquest Landmark and even Wildstar now have limited forms of content creation, on friendlier UIs, faster interfaces, no 'sim' zoning system but whole interconnected worlds, and easy building tools.

- It is only a matter of time until somebody marries all of that with full freedom to upload original content.

And that day, is the day SL 1.0 will begin to die.

LLs has to be the company that does it, or they will die. From their POV: this is a survival gambit.

For the users... NOT the merchants, but the regular users of SL: we benefit the most if we can keep our communities intact in the transition rather than being absorbed into some alien community with different norms (such as a Facebook VR).

Merchants... will adapt and go with wherever the customers go. They don't matter in this - there is an endless supply of people looking to make a buck on 'teh interwebz'.

But you need communities to survive. And you need to capture them before your competition does.

LLs has to do this, or it will die as a company.

The merchants have no need to feel loyal to LLs - they can make a buck here, or on any other VR.

The regular users - they only need to be loyal to their communities, and to the social norms they desire to see in place in the future.

Facebook: where everybody knows your name, and your mother's name, and what your private parts look like.

Or SL 2.0: where everybody knows the name you chose for yourself, and what identity you feel is you, and its your choice whether or not they know about your mom and your bits and bobbles...

[Leonard Craven]

@pussycat

The social user buys 2 dollar hair and a dress and wastes precious Vivox voice bandwidth.

The Opensim platform does not have a lot of discomforts with the concept of a sim. Var regions appear to fix that. Servers can host decent RPG areas stretching 60 sims without border crossing. The technology is there.

Creature made in the late 90's. They do exist but there can be creatures in mesh, opensim has NPC's a new skeleton with more bones is all that is needed. Not hard to implement even.

Some good game engine coders could make your jaw drop on the floor pussycat demonstrating what they can do with the current codebase. They could code in a seamless dynamic ocean shader that runs from sim to sim with real waves so you could see boats dance on waves in the sim next to the one you are in. That takes skill of course and is hard but possible.

The correct thing for Linden Lab to do if they need to code a new platform from scratch is to provide 100% compatability to the current customer base. That is preserve all inventory or make it compatible with the new platform. Not a single prim can have a scratch. More work yes but residents did pay enough to have that done.

The new platform also needs to provide to all real estate businesses and their customers equal property value and rental income to migrate.

Linden Lab could do this when moving people to Zindra, they should do it now as well.

All store owners need to get a replacement parcel or area equal in value and time to migrate and also protection of their brand and identity during migration.

That would be the normal way to transfer the userbase. When Linden would do that nobody would mind their need to rebuild everything. Residents would stay and not run to opensim or any of the new upcoming platforms and Linden Lab would save their skin in the process.

I did visit the Mainland very recently, one occupied parcel of 4096 metres per sim appears to be the standard from what I could see.

A very large section of the customers today comes from the Anshe Chung era of 2006. Those are the ones doing the spending and paying for the bulk portion. Those are the ones invested. You annoy them and they will leave they aren't idiots either and are well aware of what is happening.

Second Life does have the communities, these are what sustains the platform, well the ones that are still here and were not driven out yet by Linden Lab for all the well known reasons.

The Amaretto horse breeders
The Bloodlines RPG
The Goreans
The Steampunkers
etc...

There are plenty large communities around. Make them lose their stores, business, inventories and they will be extremely mad.

The casual user would have nothing to experience without the hardcore userbase. There are thousands who work part time or full time to provide enjoyment to the casual user. Annoy them by taking away a part of their income building a new competing platform without any consideration or compensation for them and watch. Suddenly it will not be worth their while to stick around, that is when both SL 1 and SL 2 can go RIP.

Today you see the fault of the mismanagement by Rod Humble who rather wasted company time and resources building cute games instead of doing the hard work that needed to take place on Second Life. Humble did not like Second Life he did mention that multiple times. Humble likes to make games and he did not understand Second Life so he rather made his games because he felt more confident doing that. The moment his contract was up he ran as fast as he could. Years and years of time adding up to almost half a decade, now suddenly Linden panics and they try yet again to make the userbase pay for their screw ups.

If I were Linden Lab I would do everything that I could to make sure that migration would be nothing more than clicking a button to go to the SL 2 website, downloading a new viewer and logging in to the super fantastic updated version. I would also throw in a free gift for the trouble of each user once they open their inventory and see all their stuff is in there.

[Issa Heckroth]

"The correct thing for Linden Lab to do if they need to code a new platform from scratch is to provide 100% compatability to the current customer base. That is preserve all inventory or make it compatible with the new platform. Not a single prim can have a scratch. More work yes but residents did pay enough to have that done."

Never going to happen. LL have already said so. They will port what works, drop the rest. Prims as we know them will probably go all together in favor of mesh based voxel editing. LSL is an old dog that needs to be put to sleep too.

I would imagine mesh creators will be ok, but prims? Unless LL figure out a way to optimize prim builds into mesh (again, never gunna happen) Kiss yo primz goodbye.

I imagine all in all there are going to be a lot of peeved peeps out there, but LL is banking on netting more users from......somewhere else.

I have my doubts any of this will end well. But I AM looking forward to High Fidelity, which seems to be going more down the route of Opensim style self hosting.

If given a choice between the incompetent genius who "made" SL, and the incompetent company he left to chase other things, I put my money on the former. But its a crapshoot either way.

[Leonard Craven]

@Issa Heckroth

You will have more choices than that. The moral of the story will be Linden Lab cannot be trusted. Even drug dealers who cannot be trusted don't stay in business.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

You can arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic however you want. It's still going down. My primary concern is that they'll use the same engineers and the same fatally-flawed revenue blueprints to build the Titanic II.

[A.J.]

Really interesting conversation with a variety of convincing points of view. Made me bounce like a ping pong ball in agreement.

The task of building a new virtual world is starting to feel like getting everyone on earth to agree on a new design for the planet. It's daunting. We would probably destroy the planet in war fighting for what we passionately feel we need to survive.

Nothing about Linden Lab inspires confidence that they have the goods to build greatness. Their new world must be great or it's DOA. They are a heartless company with an addiction to feckless leadership. The Lab has already marched ahead to Armageddon. They're out of sight. Where will they decide to drop their bombs? Right on our heads.

Surely, none of us will be shocked when we again see the inevitable leadership change amid a pile of rubble.

[cathartes aura]

What attracted the majority of residents to SL was for the first time anyone could create game content. Many folks discovered that they were very good at it. This was viewed as a threat by the existing game content developer community... A threat to their bottom line...

So, all these "amateurs" have to be shut down... By any means necessary... And big golf clap to LL and the "pets". You have been very successful. ;)

But your success comes at the expense of 99% of the other residents of SL. And from what ole Eb's and the other morons have been saying about SL 2.0, these freakishly corrupt practices will be expanded.

SL 2.0 is DOA... And whose fault is this? Linden Lab and the idiot VC's. ;)

[cathartes aura]

My Apologies...
Forgot the following in my last post...

And the Turkey Vulture goes... Hiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssss... LMAO! ;)

This ole carrion eater begins circling a beautiful island... Noticing a delicious feast awaiting my ravenous hunger, I begin to fly closer and closer to the beach... Seeing no obvious predators around(Lindens or their "pets") I land on top of the already bloated from the sun carcass...

Whewwwww... Even for this ole carrion eater, the stink from this one was almost too much to bear... Looking down I can begin to see what it is I'm about to feast on... It's a hu-man with a tail... A mermaid...

An ancient sea ditty comes to mind... Something about a vast sea... Blake. And a wonderful island. Inhabited by sirens. A beautiful place, created by a company that once made it possible for anyone to create content, own land, start new businesses...

Sirens Island may be there to the bitter end until LL shuts down their grid. But one thing is certain. It will go dead/offline at some point. All due to 8 years of complete incompetence by the "ones" making inworld policy at LL. ;)

[Cao]

Very good discussion here!

I have to agree with Pussycat. If you look at the trends, SL peaked sometime in 2008 and has been on a slow but steady decline ever since. The technology is dated, and the risk to the current SL is that some other company will roll out a next generation virtual world that will suck all the oxygen out of the room, which will mean that SL will not attract new users and will continue a slow decline until it no longer makes sense for LL to operate it, at which point everyone's inventories, builds, and businesses will go into the electronic black hole. So I would rather that it be LL that develops that new kick butt world.
http://gridsurvey.com/

From everything I have read about what Ebbe has said, they are not deliberately refusing to move inventories and builds forward to the new VW, but are instead not limiting themselves by requiring that it be 100% backwards compatible. He has stated that identities and groups and relationships will be moved forward into the new VW. To me, not placing a constraint on themselves to make the new VW backwards compatible is a good decision so that they can take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies.

Regarding LL, take a look at their profile on Glassdoor. It gives some good insights into the culture at LL. The impression I get is not of a company that is intentionally out to hurt its customer base but rather a company that is adrift and a bit dysfunctional.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Linden-Lab-Reviews-E100549.htm

[Miss Lizzy]

@Cao

"
From everything I have read about what Ebbe has said, they are not deliberately refusing to move inventories and builds forward to the new VW, but are instead not limiting themselves by requiring that it be 100% backwards compatible.
"

Well officer I did not deliberately ran over that child with my car, I just could not be bothered to lift my foot and put it on the brake.

I did not deliberately let that man drown when I heard him scream, I just did not bother to stretch my arm and pull him out.

Linden is only doing that because it will make them more money while they hope people will buy into their lie. There is no hocus pocus anymore, the days of the million dollar Crytek engine are over, anyone has access to these top game engines and their SDK for a couple of Dollar per month. It's harder to make people believe poor excuses.

The public will make the choice to buy a ticket for Titanic 2 or not, this time people will know they are not going to participate in the next generation of the internet but in the new sequel of Linden Lab their "game" and budget for just that. IBM won't come running with 10 million $ this time.

Also members of society who are adrift and dysfunctional get locked up in jail or a mental institution to protect them from themself.

If you want some entertainment take a look at this. Linden Lab the 11 year old company in the middle of a crucial period for the future of the company has to hire a senior director of business operations. https://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?b=nSoXwowC&j=oWiDZfwA

Right now in a period of turmoil somebody needs to step in with zero knowledge and background about the company or its history to fill in such an important position. What happened with the previous guy? He got desperate?
Look at the job description, this guy they do not have now needs to manage the Second Life economy. Can you believe that?

We all should feel confident everything will be fine because a noob is coming in to manage the Second Life Economy or what is left of it.

[elizabeth (irihapeti)]

pussycat wrote:

"You should look instead to the consumer, the casual user, the social user.

Those people have benefited greatly from the changes to SL over the past few years"

^^ that ^^

this has been the future of SL since 2007

casual user meaning a person who enjoys playing the game goes: it isn't that SL is to expensive. Is that is really hard to do stuff inworld. Cant sail my boat and plane bc crash. My textures don't rez. My mesh clothes that I spent a fortune on don't rez either. I go to a concert in SL and is like mud on my pretty good computer I actual bought to play this game. And why don't my groups chat work, etc etc

if LL just fix these on the betterworld then we are coming. All of us with our purses and wallets. With money to spend on our entertainment

+

just on money

i listen to a convo yesterday. about breedables. A guy said he is only into gorrillas bc they cant be sold for less than 1,000L. He cant be bothered spend what time he do have to play breedabels for less than this

I was at a charity concert last night. A lady came and she donate 5,000L. She said she wont be able to buy any shoes for her avatar this week now. Was her shoe allowance she donated. She thought the charity could do with it more than her

[Shockwave Yareach]

What everyone at LL is missing in the whole backwards compatibility is this: creating a new grid will not make people bleed money to go out and buy all new stuff either. If we can stay in the old grid with our stuff... Why do you think we hang around instead of going to inworldz as it is?

If SL2 is a seperate grid then the same forces making us stay in sl1 today will also be true tomorrow. Eliminate sl1, and you'll be in a very bad spot indeed as you've taken everyone's property without reason, which will make people run not walk away from anything you do.

However, if you turn sl1 off and take a few days translating sl1 stuff to sl2, and turn everything back on again as sl2, customers will have no reason to be unhappy. And new sales of new products made for the new grid will follow.

Look at Microsoft and WinRT. Wouldn't run existing x86 code because the tablets are Arm based. People stay far away from it, some returning their Surfaces because it couldn't run anything they already bought. If you think it can't happen to LL, better get those resumes updated now.

[iisingh]

Sometimes my shoes feel too tight.

[Aeonix Aeon]

What Adeon Writer said.

Same situation with what happened to ActiveWorlds and others before Second Life existed. The users knew what made those systems untouchable at the time, but the actual companies had zero clue. When the companies start jerking the community around (and they have), that's when a dose of reality kicks in and they face plant.

[michael destiny]

""""For the time being, I'm back playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, which for all its myriad shortcomings, gives me a Coruscant apartment about 10 times the size of a 512 crackerbox for a small sum of in-game cash (i.e. FREE). And that's just the entry-level housing.""" POSTERS QUOTE:

That is spot on actually, Im level 60 trooper and an agent 24, Im in a great guild, and its always busy and hectic. Second life I been in 8 years, but left on 2010 because of health and finance problems would never be able to cover tiers for a month let alone for 6 months or more. many people like me have £3000 or even more locked into 8 years inventory of 38,000 items. If I lose all that, then I wont be going to a new Second life platform , simply because its illogical to spend all that again, and painstakingly make products you made that will just get flushed down the pan. So my second life as a sim creator with a business model, is dead, I know I only just opened a sim, but even with 1500L% spent on advertising it, visitors are few and far between. The only people who do make substantial profits from SL is the mega sim owners who own up to 120 sims which they let out, and put a bit on top. But the amount invested in these sim at possibly £26,000 -£40,000 if SL closed down, would be lost along with peoples inventories, so these mega sim owners would lose £25,000 worth of land and not have any recourse to any rebate or refund, because quite simply LL calls this a game, which is actually inaccurate its a business model, and until LL realizes that fact, any new SL2 I think would be doomed