Should Second Life Have an Export / Licensing Option So Creators Can Sell Their Massive Trove of Content to Other Metaverse Platforms?

Here's a really interesting editorial video from veteran Second Life advocate Luca, arguing that Linden Lab and the user community are sitting on a goldmine: Nearly 20 years of 3D content, much of which could be exported and licensed for use in other platforms. "There's no way," as Luca puts it, "for any company on Earth right now to be able to match Second Life's existing diversity of assets." 

This idea, as you might imagine, has some hurdles to overcome. For instance: Wouldn't optimizing and wiring up an SL avatar be really time consuming and difficult? And maybe even impossible for the top mesh bodies -- most of which are very poorly optimized?

Luca think it's possible:

"Linden Lab will probably have to overcome the challenge of developing a built-in optimization feature (like VRoid's) for the exporter and other things like the rigging, voice-activated mouth movements, etc which VRoid does have, before the average person can use it to make their own custom avatars easily -- like sliders with effects which can be seen in real-time by the users when exporting, so they can see exactly what they're getting straight out of the exporter [along with' info about the model (polycounts, etc.)... So I guess there would be cases where certain avatars don't have certain things straight out of the exporter but even then I still think it's a way more affordable way of making a decent, unique custom avatar than hiring a professional artist."

There's probably some other technical barriers being missed here, but far as the market, it's definitely a big one. To take just one platform, VRChat has a huge informal economy of avatars on Gumroad and other third party sites, but it doesn't come close to the Second Life marketplace. For instance, there's currently 6,940,027 items for sale on the SL Marketplace website, and there's likely at least as much only available for sale in-world. Unless and until, that is, Linden Lab expands its reach into other 3D marketplaces.

Comments

[Joey1058]

Between SL and IMVU, it's a question which company will suddenly see the light of day and open their inventories to the world. They would instantly make hundreds of thousands from VR Chat users alone.

[Bohny Spad]

Exactly what Joey1058 said.

[Liam Carter]

Opensim already have access to lots from SL, all free and ripped from SL. The last figure I saw was that at least 80% of objects in opensim are items ripped. The residents are so used to having free objects that stores actually selling legit clothes are far and few, with little if any sales

[Luther Weymann]

For almost two decades, Linden Research has had a shot at the title of owning the virtual worlds, the metaverse. By now, Linden Research should have had multiple interconnected virtual worlds with Second Life as the original. Each world is better more technically advanced than the previous world. But now, what is Linden Research? Is it a thoroughbred entrepreneurial software company acting as a serious software company? Or is it an investment company whose primary function as an investment company is to just hold and manage assets for investment and cash flow purposes? For me, Linden Research’s track record has already answered that.

[sirhc desantis]

Well, ser Luca there has a point but two major problems.
First off, the SL perm system would need to be revamped to at least add an 'allow for LL controlled export' flag*. Case in point. A lot of stuff is made from FP templates that are retextured, modded etc then sold on with more limited perms as per license from the template maker. That might hit a few snags. To put it mildly (I buy the odd one myself for personal use - worth the extra cost just to play with even if just for me) *export flag has been used in OS at various times, see Kitely for where it actually works

Secondly - conversion. Some sort of universal standard for (fill in item here)

Thirdly - people have been making stuff that can be flogged on multiple platforms for a while. I know I have. Not just for SL/OS either. Not much but still. Why would I want to add another layer + charge on to that?

Slight off topic - yeah there is a lot of ripped in OS (will not name names) but there again that market is tiny to start with. Anythng I sell goes through Kitely Markt- not going to piss about with multi grid currencies and you can forget Glowbites :) Again, only a tiny seller but the odd ten bucks every so often is nice + goes direct to paypal (family security measure - means I can't touch it =^^= )

[William Romanowski]

Export would just hasten SL's demise. Many users create avatars, but almost always with purchased components.
It wouldn't solve the high-priced-avatars-for-other-platforms problem. We would just see (some) people ripping avs, without rights, and selling them for high prices anyway, with no way for compensation that's trackable backwards. And *please* don't require a new block on the chain every time one slider gets changed.

For now, first make SL visually work with Oculus, and whoever else gets popular.
Then we'll have a platform to explore the new control and editing paradigms that will be needed.
When that's working ok, we can work towards a platform agnostic internal avatar model so we can
convert SL_old to SL_universal, all inside the viewer.

We shouldn't need an "export" conversion. We should already be in the universal format internally.
Keep it in the family, not just strip mine SL assets.

[Medhue Simoni]

As a content creator, I can already do that on my own. It would be a waste of engineering effort on LL's behalf, as other game engines don't have the specifics of the SL engine, making anything outside of an object not worth exporting. And again, I can do it on my own. I'd don't need LL doing it, taking a cut. lol