Update, 4/5: Bumped up for weekend viewing and discussion!
Here's my near hour-long chat with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg during GDC week in March, a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation we had at Linden's HQ in San Francisco. Related to Second Life, we chatted about land discounts, the upcoming mobile app, cloud deployment, improving performance, and new user game mechanics for SL; related to Sansar, we discussed its low usage so far, its evolution as a PC-focused product, and finally, why Linden Lab is plowing profits from Second Life into Sansar. (Among many other topics.) Specific highlights include:
- Second Life saw growth of revenue and subscribers in 2018.
- "We've been over-monetizing land" in Second Life, Altberg acknowledges, and says new pricing options/discounts are coming soon (see below).
- We debate how much content in SL qualifies as "Adult", and the use of Adult ratings on SL land.
- His 5 year tenure as CEO at Linden Lab, and the user anger he faced when he first came onboard. "There were some policies that didn't make sense that we fixed."
- Lots of new features for Second Life are coming out "within weeks".
- Linden Lab's efforts to grow new user growth -- including the introduction of game-like mechanics, such as a quest system, and targeting mainstream users as opposed to niche audiences.
Many more highlights below:
- The erosion of Second Life's monthly active user base over the years, from 1 million to 800,000 -- and growing usage by first pushing for concurrency growth and retention.
- Improving Second Life performance by moving completely to the Amazon cloud -- targeted to happen within the next 12 months. (14:30)
- The challenge of improving Second Life performance when user-generated content is often so poorly optimized, it almost becomes (as one Linden vet put it) like a DDOS attack. Ebbe says it's ultimately up to users, not the company, whether they use resource-heavy content. ("Users are going to do what users are going to do.")
- Creating a mobile "companion app" of Second Life -- and the possibility of creating an OnLive-like streaming option. (Which Linden Lab is still considering, he says, when it can be feasibly done as a subscription service.)
- Sims/land discounts are coming "within the next few months". (24:00)
- On Sansar's beta launch so far, low usage, and preparing to roll it out as a mass market product. "We could have been baking Sansar in the dark for years... I'd rather go out early."
- Efforts to optimize Sansar and continue reducing Sansar's long download times.
- Sansar is statistically a PC product -- about 75% users access it through PC, only 25% through VR. Sansar was launched as a VR-centric product to take advantage of the hotness of virtual reality at the time of launch. (31:50)
- Why Second Life and Sansar have their own tech stack and engine -- to support a full supply chain economy, and to support backward compatibility of content made years ago. "That pretty much requires its own custom-built thing."
- Portability of content from Second Life to Sansar, as announced early on? Ebbe says there already is that option, through mesh -- and adds they company may enable purchasing Sansar Dollars with Linden Dollars, and vice versa. The challenge is enabling this portability when the economic models of each world are so different.
- Why is Linden Lab plowing profits from Second Life into Sansar that no one's using, instead of using that money to enhance Second Life? Ebbe's answer: "We have more people working on Second Life than Sansar." (About 130 staff on SL, with about 70 on Sansar.) (42:15)
- No, there are no plans to "force migrate" SL users to Sansar: "I have two beautiful products, Second Life and Sansar, I love them both for different reasons, and we're investing in both, and I would love nothing more than both of them to become extremely successful for a long long long time."
Highlights I missed? Please post in Comments below!
It would have been interesting to hear his response about a future viewer not based on openGL, something along the lines of Vulcan so sl can be shifted away from 1 Cpu Thread/core, to multi threaded and Vulcan to rely more on the gpu.
Heck even just a multi thread update to the viewer would do a massive performance increase. It would be a expensive long project for them but it really needs to happen and would solve so many issues.
Posted by: Shadoskill | Thursday, April 04, 2019 at 07:09 PM
I watched the entire interview without fast-forwarding. The highlight, for me, was the background architecture. I found the setting very beautiful and Zen. You know all of us who have contributed a lot of money to SL, over the years, have helped make that magical place possible. It's something to feel good about.
It's ironic that I walked away feeling the world that Ebbe is living in is more full of imagination and fantasy than Second Life. In Second Life, you have to be blind to not see blatant decline and hope leaking out of the cracks. In Ebbe Life, you get more choices in what you feel like looking at.
Posted by: Clara Seller | Thursday, April 04, 2019 at 09:37 PM
It's a cool office! The top floor and bottom floor have low ceilings which might tweak some, not to mention the mandatory Silicon Valley open office environment. But if the Lindens still have nerf gun battles, it's a really great FPS map. :) I took lots of photos on another visit:
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/06/in-linden-my-mi.html
Posted by: Wagner James Au | Friday, April 05, 2019 at 02:10 AM
Looks more like a survivor than a CEO with a vision. But that's what SL is, marooned without a future.
Posted by: Cormoran | Friday, April 05, 2019 at 03:03 AM
Good interview. I had to turn ALL my sound volumes up to maximum (that's three sliders) and normally I have things more in the mid level --- just a technical bit of feedback.
My only exception to what was said was about content from SL porting over to Sansar. Ebbe (who doesn't work in 3D modeling *wink*) made it sound like a couple of clicks and you have a Sansar model ready to put in the STORE. In practice there are quite a few changes that need to be made for Sansar -- size, larger textures for many items, joining items into a single model (that has a new work around feature just lately) and lots of little technical differences that are NOT spoken about until a new user (Chic waves hand wildly thinking back) has to ask what the hell is going on via DISCORD.
Happily many folks in the DISCORD building channel are helpful and so eventually creators work out their workflow. BUT it would easily take me a whole day to make all the changes needed in a fairly complex house -- and I am not all that slow. It is actually MUCH easier to build FOR Sansar and then "port" back to SL.
Just don't want folks to get the idea that it is as simple as he made it sound.
Posted by: Chic Aeon | Friday, April 05, 2019 at 12:04 PM
Really good to hear I have been to the town meetings but this is the good news.
Posted by: Christi | Friday, April 05, 2019 at 09:22 PM
Cannot wait (waiting already since 2009!!!) for the iOS app! Hopefully very soon it finally arrives!
Posted by: Rick | Friday, April 05, 2019 at 10:58 PM
Great interview. Altberg is always a straight-shooter and this doesn't disappoint. In the midst of so much success, we're fortunate to get this opportunity to hear about the treasure chest of exciting features and cutting-edge technologies he's rolling out for us to feast upon. The carousel never stops.
Posted by: Cookie | Saturday, April 06, 2019 at 07:52 AM
Ebbe touched upon a key point in his comparison of a virtual world to a government. The last thing he wants to do is get involved in the mess of co-coordinating resources to improve the experience of so many diverse factions. That would be incredibly hard work and require an unforgivable amount of wasted energy devoted to the needs of unimportant revenue sources. A good leader knows that a goal, such as endless war or endless development, provides a much easier model to redirect resources to while transforming people's expensive needs into a much more economical rally for hope. I honestly don't know what customers expect a few hundred a month is going to buy them. A future? It's almost laughable how little people think.
Posted by: Hillary | Saturday, April 06, 2019 at 01:23 PM
Users will indeed do what users do--give us the information we need to do the right thing. Builders should create an organization that does for Second Life what Underwriters Laboratories does for appliances. Give them the power, if they don't have it already, to set an upper bound on complexity of things it will render.
On the other end, document good practices for builders, so they have no excuse.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | Saturday, April 06, 2019 at 01:29 PM
Great interview and the features coming "within weeks" sounds pretty interesting if he refers to the ones that are worked on since quite a while (bake on mesh, EEP, name changing etc). Meanwhile there is a new LL homes continent that's being built between Sansara and Jeogeot, likely connecting them, which would be awesome: in theory you could fly from the gulf up to Heterocera and sail somewhat too (the 2 sims wide channel departing from Jeo looks promising).
Indeed user-generated content is often poorly optimized. E. Altrberg: "Users are going to do what users are going to do." Right, except if the "land impact" was seriously based on the the amount of trianges AND the total texture size in Mb, now users would optimize their items for that, rather than for a somewhat meaningless number. Fewer people would experience low framerates, texture trashing and crashes. I have a good gaming machine, but that's not an excuse to be lazy: games that requires better hardware usually offer more, while in SL now you need more to have the same and even less, just because somebody doesn't care and rather would tell others to get a better computer. Yes, raising awareness helps only a little and indeed users do what they do, that's why your land impact needs to make sense.
You can hardly change that now, nobody would be happy if their items get returned because of a LI increase. You can't even leave it the same, more or less, and give a bonus reducing the LI for the optimized things, because it's plenty of 1 LI items that are already a disaster with insane textures and triangles.
Thinking of a previous article, if by any remote hypothetical chance, LL would make an experimental grid that lets go the legacy stuff (or continent in the current grid: people would more likely go and stay in a grid where other people are) it would be great if they could calculate the LI in a way like that.
Posted by: Pulsar | Saturday, April 06, 2019 at 02:27 PM
Normally I am of the 'text or it never happened' camp but as it was your ser Au - and yeah up the sound.
Overall I got 'we have a working product and we don't know why or how'. Not a bad thing to take away. And yes around 4 minutes where Adult != pervo - nailed.
The throw away point on team members being on board an average of seven years - wow I feel old haha:)
Sansar stuff.. well there I glazed over a bit. Went once and it was closed. Bit like Wales.
Well the talking about assets was fun =^^=
More of this ser Au but better sound and keep it to 15 minutes. Also those complaining about the offices? Nice work places are the cheapest way to keep talent. Long term cost is fuck all compared to keeping people.
Posted by: sirhc desantis | Saturday, April 06, 2019 at 02:53 PM
@sirhc... Ebbe Life is going to be the wordpress of offices. =)
Posted by: Bett*r then E*ra | Sunday, April 07, 2019 at 06:01 PM
You could have titled this, ¨Send in the Clown.¨
-Gidget
Posted by: Gidget | Monday, April 08, 2019 at 09:42 AM
Wow, a really great interview. Well done Wagner. A shame that so many comments are about the video itself and the building you were sitting in rather than what was said. Some observations:
1. Poor Ebbe. I went back and double checked and he had pretty dark hair when he started and it looks like LL has turned him grey!
2. You sure did jump on the "adult" stuff early. Worth talking about maybe, but certainly not top of the list. No offense, but I think Ebbe has a better perspective on it that you Wagner. There are some NIGHTMARISH things you can fin in SL if you really want to and dig a little but by far what is going on on all those "adult" sims is nothing one would classify as adult or obscene.
3. I think the SL ap for the phone sounds like a terrific idea. I think what most people want to do on their phone involving SL (messages, payments, shopping) would not really require a full 3d view.
4. I laughed at how quickly Ebbe seemed to blow off the whole Sansar is mainly for VR concept. "yeah we kind of said that....."
5. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that the vast majority of LL employees are working on Second Life. SO many in world "experts" are constantly claiming otherwise
6. If he really wants to fix the mesh body problem, he is totally wrong and LL needs to step in soon. Maybe not as a dictator but certainly in an official capacity to lay down some ground rules AND share some knowledge and expertise.
7. If LL would lower its land significantly, it DOES have other revenue streams that it could increase and still be quite competitive. Land is stupid expensive, but many other things are far too cheap. And,as always, LL has to learn to make a premium account worth something. It still is not really there yet.
8. I think we are lucky to have Ebbe running things. I WISH you had asked him what I feel is the most important question of all: how much time do you spend in world? Ebbe seems to really understand the two products. He understands what the problems/issue are and he knows where he wants the products to be and they are trying to figure out how to get there. I liked that he looked you straight in the eye and said "I think it is possible". He clearly believes it.
9. Has LL ever thought of hiring a civil engineer to look at SL? I really think their are aspects of SL where someone who has built/ran a large municipality could actually be of great help.
10. One simple way Ebbe and LL could draw in more users of the type they are looking for is to simply do more of what he just did. Ebbe is as good if not better than Phillip at representing and promoting and explaining SL. He, and a few others maybe with him, need to be much more visible to the world.
11. Nice socks dude.
Posted by: Soda Sullivan | Tuesday, April 09, 2019 at 07:14 AM
Who is giving this guy his data? He's wrong on so many levels. I'm inside second life seeing for myself.
Posted by: Autistic _Robot | Friday, July 21, 2023 at 02:57 AM