Second Life Unveils Strange New Homepage Featuring Real Life Model, Other Odd Non-Second Life Marketing

Either this is a belated April Fool's joke, or this is the new official homepage for Second Life. Which is an online virtual world with 3D graphics, but for some reason, now features not an avatar, but a real life model.

Yes, really: The flying elf is from an upcoming promo that Linden Lab teased late last year (watch below), featuring many more non-avatar models pretending to be avatars. Suggesting an implicit marketing pitch on the order of, I guess, "Sign up for Second Life so you can be a flying elf... but not the one here, as she's not 3D graphics, but you'll feel like this in your mind."

The explicit messaging on the new homepage also feels as if it emanated from a marketing company with no actual first-hand knowledge of Second Life, or virtual worlds in general:

Expect the Unexpected

With thousands of virtual experiences and communities, you'll never run out of places to explore and people to meet. Music clubs, roleplaying communities, virtual cinemas and more. Second Life is always wonderful, sometimes weird, and 100% wow-worthy.

This is not wrong, but then again, would also describe any number of other virtual worlds (IMVU, VRChat, etc. etc.) which have a larger and more active userbase, and are far more accessible, since they have a mobile app. Who exactly is this messaging for? 

Missing from the new homepage (then again, this was absent from the previous homepage), are the actual unique and differentiating features of Second Life, including:

• Collaborative prim-based content creation.
• Largest explorable land mass with hundreds of new regions to explore every month.
• Largest user-driven economy with best revenue sharing deal of any competing virtual world. (For example, ROBLOX the company splits revenue with creators 50/50, whereas with SL the creators take the lion's share of sales.)

And so on. Another odd item is the homepage is actively promoting virtual meetings for real work:

Remote Meetings Redefined

Make meetings fun again with virtual hangout spaces, classes and conferences. For over a decade, leading companies and educators have trusted Second Life for branded social spaces for events and remote meetings.

Which, again, is not wrong, but sort of misses the fact that most leading companies and educators have left Second Life after trying it out for virtual hangout spaces, classes and conferences many years ago, and that the current client falls short against immediate follow-up questions most any company or educator would ask. Such as:

• Can I have virtual meetings with over 40 people in the same space?
• Can this work behind a corporate firewall?
• Is there a mobile app?

Does anyone at Linden Lab remember that "SL for RL meetings" was messaging that was attempted with little success during the Kingdon era over 12 years ago?

Also, finally:

There are literally 10,000+ Second Life users who could create a far more appealing image than this.

All in all, it feels like a homepage for a product in maintenance mode, owned by a massive holding company with no experience in virtual worlds. Which continues to obscure a still vibrant, still creative user community. I've been calling for years for a brand refresh for Second Life, but be careful, as they say, of what you wish for.

Comments

[Robert L McNay]

"Collaborative prim-based content creation.
Largest explorable land mass with hundreds of new regions to explore every month.
Largest user-driven economy with best revenue sharing deal of any competing virtual world."

They are trying to sell SL to a young adult base and get people in, and you want them to use a spreadsheet to do it?

[Rufferta]

Their last comment, about Tilia, seems like an indication of the direction they are going.

Also, I understand that, of all the virtual worlds, Second Life has more creators coming here to sell their wares because we buy stuff.

That "elf" is scared.

[Joey1058]

All I keep thinking of is, they spent how many hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce that video, and they can't rewrite their codebase to correct the flaws we've been bitching about for years.

[Summer Haas]

Seems to me like they should get back to the "Your world, your imagination" thing and start showing all the cool mesh building and editing tools they are adding to the viewer... I mean surely they have been working on something with a huge priority while the maps have been broken for 6 months, right?

[sirhc desantis]

'.. feels as if it emanated from a marketing company with no actual first-hand knowledge of Second Life..'
They never used a company with no clue about the product shock horror Viewer 2 development *coughs*

[Adeon Writer]

Website looks very corporate like they are trying to sell the company rather than the product. I’ve been sayin for a while they need to stop using photoshopped images of real body parts on avatars in promotional images, but this isn’t what I meant.

[Mint]

The new picture reminds me of material that'd be used to market an MMO, or perhaps a high-fantasy video game. Somehow, I don't think the crowd who usually goes for MMOs/high-fantasy video games is going to enjoy SL, especially when it's impossible to recreate the image on the front page in-world.

[Adeon Wtiter]

Oh I need to clarify I totally dig the ad they are working on. What feels corporate is the advertising is the screenshots.

[JubJub Forder]

Why deceive people as to Second Life's realities? IMHO the footage in that promo video is worse than the ripoff gaming companies that use highend 3D foootage to fool people into playing their shitty phone games.
This is not going to gain fans/users. Coulda used the money to fix the bugs that have sat there for months/years untouched.
Showing wind in the hair? Really? SL disabled wind how many years ago?

[Guni]

The problem of Second Life never was that not enough people sign up and create an account. The issue has always been that most of them don't stay once confronted with the actual experience. Any advertising should be far more precise and better targeted at the kind of people who are looking for a complex, deep and very time consuming immersive, social virtual world experience. At the same time, the user interface and early Second Life experience would need to be vastly improved.

If Linden Lab creates kick-ass advertising material showcasing a very high fidelity, fluent, intuitive, lag free experience, they urgently need to improve the actual Second Life experience to deliver on the promises they make with such ads. I hope this will be part of the effort.

[Luther Weymann]

How does that old saying go again? Oh yeah, the more it changes the more it stays the same. There is no point in my worrying about an investment company buying Linden Research because it's a financial investment company, not a software company with an innovative entrepreneur at the helm so let's have the new board members try some different things, and let's see how that goes.

[Mila]

I don't know how SL is still alive. I just bought a new 800€ PC and SL still runs like crap and crashes the second I see avatar parts flying around. How come I was able to run this shit decently enough on a late 90s trashcan PC back in 2006 and can't run it at all on an expensive PC in 2021?
SL is only for the rich who can afford 3000€ PCs and then they wonder why is no one joining lol.

[do better]

instead of continuously saying what is wrong - maybe do better, create the perfect start page and offer them as alternative. Otherwise you sound like the one who is an expert of creating a perfect first page, just Lindens didnt realize that and didnt offer you a job. Simple - create your own version, much more better, see whether others agree with your choice and it is so perfect that there is not a single negative comment from the community. Okay? Try it! :)

[Han Held]

instead of continuously saying what is wrong - maybe do better, create the perfect start page and offer them as alternative.

Lemme guess ...do it for the "exposure", amirite?

LL is a private company, they're professionals and it is they who ought to do better.

[logical review]

This blog post has good points.
The two comments above, instead, give no contribute and are from someone who is deaf to critiques, won't learn from mistakes and won't improve. The post gives constructive inputs too, also explaining what's missing, and that's right. However, it doesn't take a chef to know good taste from bad. At the restaurant, if you get a dish with hair and flies and you point at those facts, do you think they should answer you "then do better if you can"?
Professionals can and make mistakes and "LL is a private company, they're professionals" are the same who delivered the Sansar flop, by the way.

[Han Held]

Hi Logical Review. The formatting in my post came out mangled but there's no way for me to fix it. The first part of it ("Instead of continuously saying what is wrong", etc) was intended to be a quote from the post before me.

My point was -why would we (the customers) do the work (creating the perfect start page) that a private business (LL) makes money from and has the expertise (mistakes aside -yes, Sansar was a dud) to do for themselves.

I'm a huge fan of pointing out the flies in the soup and sending the dish back to the chef; I'm not so big on being told by the chef to cook soup for the whole restaurant (as the poster "do better" seems to want us to do).

I'm not telling people to not complain -that's not me! :)

I think you and I agree? I'm mostly replying to clear up the mistaken impression my post gave.

[do better]

Yes, i hear you, of course LL should do it - but then again - if they wont do it right who will suffer? Their business, their employees - but do we think about someone else except us? Of course, what we care about is our SL world, our daily experience in it, how many ppl are in it, etc. Yes, you can point your finger at LL saying - they should do it, this is wrong, that is wrong and yes, i agree, they should! The only problem here is that you'll still suffer to some degree if they wont. SL will receive less new players, less business, less this and less that. If you haven't noticed - you are part of SL (want it or not). Your daily experience depends on LL's decisions and actions. So not sure to what degree you'll just keep pointing your finger in all directions except yourself. Has that really helped in your life before? Or you just want to believe it did? Think about it ...

[Han Held]

you are part of SL (want it or not).

I am the change I want to see in the world. That's why I'm in opensim a lot more often than I am in SL these days.

[LM]

This new homepage is embarrassingly bad. Even if it was a good idea to have this photo on the home page (which it's painfully obvious that it isn't), it's a bad, blurry photo. Also, there is zero explanation of how it's even related to Second Life. Not even a link to the video.

Sadly, I'm not surprised at all.

[Resident]

The more I think about it the more it sucks: Why does Linden Lab have to put some Everquest-style Fiona Vie rip-off with Avatar skin color to confuse visitors to their homepage about Second Life?

Seriously? RL model??? And even rip-off some Everquest marketing crap? Just trash its residents' amazing achievements in avatar creation and photography?

Show everyone how vastly inferior they are with their mediocre avatar bodies compared to some real-lifer?

They still did not get it.