New World Notes

Second Life Officially Acquired by Holding Company, Ending Era as Aspirational Startup

2021 starts with an ending of some kind, as briefly mentioned at the tail end of a New Year announcement on from Second Life management:

Another noteworthy development for the new year is that Linden Lab has new owners! As announced in mid-2020, an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager signed an agreement to acquire the company subject to regulatory approval by financial regulators in the U.S. related to Tilia Inc.’s status as a licensed money transmitter as well as other customary closing conditions. We are pleased to share that the regulatory review has been completed and Linden Lab is now under new ownership. 

Specifically Linden Lab is now officially owned by the Waterfield Group, which buys companies that make a decent profit and helps keep them profitable. Second Life is even listed on Waterfield's homepage as a network property (screengrabbed above), alongside a host of obscure/semi-obscure firms. (And, surprisingly, Goldman Sachs.)

And as the author of The Making of Second Life, I have to admit that this is not at all a future I saw for the virtual world. Twelve years ago, insiders (including myself) fully expected Second Life to enjoy a successful IPO, or perhaps as likely, to get acquired by a major company like Microsoft or Electronic Arts. Around that time, we saw Second Life becoming an integral part of the Internet's next generation, transforming multiple industries and mainstream culture itself, with Linden Dollars even becoming the world's most used electronic currency. Now, instead, it's listed as a portfolio holding beneath software companies specializing in contact center technologies and strategic solutions (Digital Data Voice Corporation) and cloud-based oil and gas software (NeoFirma).

It's an ironic end, but I don't mean to be completely downbeat: While Second Life didn't turn out to be the next generation of the Internet, it did pioneer the path for the many next generation virtual worlds that do stand a chance of becoming just that, and will continue being an inspiration for that goal. 

Anyway, what's all this mean for the average Second Life user?

In the short term, likely nothing -- for good and bad. As the announcement insists:

Second Life's Amazon Cloud Migration Helps Make SL's Annual Snowball Fight Actually Look Fun

I pretty much gave up watching/participating in the annual Linden Lab vs. SL user snowball fight years ago, because it inevitably became a lagtastic mess from the very moment the first snowball was fired. But! Watching this year's fight as hosted and streamed by social media goddess Strawberry is actually pretty fun. Lots and lots of flying snowballs and avatars! Actual physics! Halfway decent framerate! (Maybe 30-40MPS?) If you randomly came across this video and didn't know its providence, you might actually first think it's Fortnite, with a wacky new playmode.  (Seriously, check out the screengrab I took of Strawberry jumping like a badass.)

A skeptic's first response might be, "Well sure because they're streaming this from Linden Lab HQ with seriously great broadband". But I believe Strawberry is still based way over on the other side of the continent on the US East Coast. So while the Winter snowball fight has been a holiday tradition for Second Life since 2004 (as I recall),this year's fight might also reflect the best gift that Linden Lab has given to the SL user base this year: Substantially improved performance by migrating the venerable old virtual world to a shiny new Amazon cloud.

SLers Are You Feeling the Uplift Into the Cloud? 'Cause It's Happening

Originally announced to happen by end of 2018, it looks like Second Life will finally move into the Amazon cloud by end of 2020, says Oz Linden as only Oz can:

We've been working hard on the Uplift of Second Life. If you have not been following this project, that's what we're calling the migration of our Second Life simulators, services, and websites from a private datacenter to hosting in The Cloud (Amazon Web Services)... Overall, the Uplift project is on track to be complete or very nearly so by the end of this year (yes, 2020… I know I've said "fall" before and people have noted that I didn't say what year 🙂 ; the leaves haven't finished falling at my house yet…). It's likely that there will be other (hopefully small) temporary disruptions during this process, but we promise we'll do all we can to avoid them and fix them as fast as we can. This migration sets the stage for some significant improvements to Second Life and positions us to be able to grow the world well into the future.

More here. Cloud transfers are even being announced in grid status updates. Substantial performance improvements are promised. But are you feeling it yet from your part of the virtual world?

Second Life Bans Political Billboards from Public Lands After Pro-Trump & Anti-Trump Signs Choke the Virtual Sky

Photo credit: Animats

Another US Presidential election year, another clash of ideas in Second Life. As has been the case since 2004, the virtual world has recently been festooned with political billboards, much or most of them pro-Trump or anti-Trump -- though as with Facebook, it seems like the pro-Trump forces have had the upper hand.

"There was a couple of people setting up lots of mini ad farms for Trump and some places had been plastered in far right slogans and adverts," SL veteran "0xc0ffea" tells me. 

Some commonly trafficked areas in Second Life have devolved into a veritable battle of billboards, with "Re-elect Trump" and other Trump friendly signs such as "Police Lives Matter" having to share the same space with snarky rejoinders like: "Trump/Putin - Make America Hate Again". 

This time, however, Second Life owner Linden Lab responded, updating its policy on virtual world advertising to prohibit ad content that are "political in nature" from the SL mainland, which the company maintains. (This policy does not apply to privately-owned regions and continents.)

I've contacted Linden Lab for an official reply and will update this post if I receive one. It is a marked departure from Second Life during the 2016 election, when a skyscraper-sized Trump billboard spewing fireworks freely loomed in the sky, while Bernie Sanders' unofficial campaign headquarters in SL was invaded by swastikas and literal pro-Trump gargoyles.

To judge by user reaction in the official community forum and Second Life's subreddit, most seem agreeable to the banning of political ads -- both for being an eyesore, and reflecting their desire for a place online that's free from election news:

Is SL's Move to the Amazon Cloud Really Improving Sim Crossing, Or Is It Just a Temporary, Unintentional Side Effect?

Update, 8/14: Linden Lab confirms some recent code changes have improved sim crossing.

Virtual world explorer Luca is the latest to stress test the new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, which seems to make region crossing near seamless. Though as you'll see above, region crossing delays vary by vehicle, being near-instantaneous with a World War II-era fighter, but being pretty muddy via, say, submarine.

"Maybe it depends on the amount of linksets now more than ever (the sub and steamboat have a lot of them)," Luca theorizes, "but I might need to do further testing to verify that!"

Luca adds that he got pretty good performance with more than one vehicle too: "I was able to do some sort of formation flying around Bay City with my friend earlier in our planes, which would've been a lot more difficult with the old crossing performance." I'm curious if performance would remain decent with many more vehicles.

But is this performance improvement real, and lasting? Reddit's /SecondLife co-host "0xc0ffea" makes a very good case that it's not:

What It Would Take to Truly Upgrade Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Fascinating conversation in response to Luther Weymann's somber analysis of Second Life's prospects under new ownership, featuring many comments by readers who seem to be longtime veterans of the game/tech industry, or at least write with that level of expertise.

Among them is  Russell Skyther, who wrote this really sharp breakdown of what it would take to upgrade Second Life. It's partly a response to an earlier comment arguing that "Updating SL isn't really all that hard cause they have done it is how we got mesh and rigged mesh and now animesh. They can continue to keep layering new content and it'll work just fine."

Skyther argues otherwise:

The issue isn't that you can't update Second Life's code. or even rewrite it from scratch. BOTH have been done, see: OpenSimulator, an Open-Source clone of SL functionality that's close enough [that] most 3rd party clients support it out of the box.

But ability isn't the same thing as willingness. And far from being 'not all that hard' as the above comment states, each one of the examples features: Mesh, Rigged, animesh, and now Bakes on Mesh are all hacks onto an engine that wasn't designed for it. Now you can do that, and they did. But that incurs a serious performance penalty unless you redo the entire graphics pipeline (which they didn't). That's what this guy's talking about. It's not that you can't update or rewrite SL, it's that it's not cost effective to do so on a level that would give you acceptable performance.

To better explain SL's codebase issues. This is what I would consider a minimum for a true SL-like game in 2020 (VR Chat isn't really SL-like, but more of a Sansar that worked):

SL Enthusiast & Veteran Tech Exec Predicts Dark Future for Virtual World

You read the optimistic view of Second Life's future from a top SL brand owner, now here's a necessary counterpoint from longtime reader Luther Weymann, a retired technology industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, and is an eloquent supporter of SL's creative power. Despite his love for the virtual world, his view as an experienced tech exec is quite bleak: 

The software that runs SL cannot be radically changed or updated, too much will break and the time it takes to fix massive changes only results in more problems. This is the inherent problem with very old software that a lot of people have worked on and the code is now very difficult. Happens to many legacy software that never gets a full rewrite every four or so years to stay competitive.

SL is not a growth business and any review of the user base will tell a good business person that diluting their investment so they can raise the capital to rewrite a new SL from scratch for use by the current user base is not good business. It's better to take the current profit and don't rock the boat.

That in mind, here's the scenario for SL that Luther sees coming down the road:

Want to Understand What Linden Lab's Acquisition Means for Second Life? Ask the Owner of a Top SL Virtual Content Brand

Above: Mishi IRL and her Blueberry brand on Facebook

While the SL community's opinion over the world's new corporate owners is decidedly mixed, I put a lot of stock in the analysis of Gizem McDuff, owner and founder of Blueberry -- which has been, since its founding in 2012, one of the most successful and popular virtual style brands in SL. As such, Mishi has some of the best insights on SL's economic operations and Linden Lab's relationship to it:

I see a lot of speculation and fear over Linden Lab's acquisition.

First, Lindens want you to know that nobody is even considering touching the adult content on SL. The new future board members are very aware that SL comes with adult content and they are just fine with it. They do not want to mess with anything that's working. That includes adult content. It would be cool to give them a warm welcome when they are officially on the board.

Let me explore two chief concerns with y'all.

1: SL will be dismantled and shut down.

2: SL will be milked for what it's worth and shut down.

Mishi goes on to break down these scenarios in-depth:

Survey Results: Under New Corporate Ownership, Plurality of Second Life Community Pessimistic About the Future of Their Virtual World

Here's the results of our not-super-scientific survey asking SLers how they feel about the future of Second Life under its new corporate ownership. With 212 respondents (a quite large sample size), the plurality chose "Pessimistic" as their attitude, while 1 in 3 chose "Optimistic". Meanwhile, 1 in 4 say it doesn't change their opinion either way.

As with surveys like this, there's alternate ways to read these results:

Survey: What's Second Life's Future Outlook Under New Ownership?

Read the news here, then make your choice above! And be sure to discuss your answer in Comments!

Update, 7/14: Bumped up for Tuesday morning voting!