New World Notes

Ebbe Altberg & Other Linden Lab Team Members Answer (And Don't Answer) SL User Questions About the Company's Acquisition

As promised, here's the questions I asked Linden Lab after they announced the imminent acquisition of the company:

• How will this acquisition change SL specifically? Will management or staffing change at all (layoffs, etc)?
• Will it create a cash injection into Linden Lab?
• Since the acquisition is led by the Waterfield Group which specializes in buying profitable but slow growth companies, is it fair to say Linden Lab is in that category?

Spokesman Brett Linden replied by saying this:

"We aren't 'formally' commenting beyond pointing people to the official announcement."

And as legendary journalist Bob Schieffer once told Philip Rosedale and I during dinner (but that's another strange story): "When someone refuses to answer, that in itself is an answer."

However, Brett added, "Grumpity and I have answered a few questions on the forums - but the key message is that this is a good thing for the Second Life community and operations are status quo. Here is what I said on the forums:"

A few folks are speculating that this is the end of SL and nothing could be further than the truth. Any talk of dismantling or radically changing the fundamentals of SL that we know and love is inaccurate. While we can't get into specific details about the deal itself, I want to emphasize the fact that this keeps Linden Lab as an independent venture led by two investors who have a great deal of awareness about what SL is and isn't. They are excited to join and help us grow both SL and Tilia while also respecting and recognizing the needs and sensitivities of the existing culture and community.

Brett also notes that Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg has been on Twitter taking on all questions posted to him there -- here's some highlights:

Linden Lab Acquired by Investors After Months of Rumors, Layoffs & Sansar's Sale; Second Life to Still Expand, Official Announcement Promises

I've heard rumors by various insiders that Linden Lab was looking to be acquired for the last few months, and now that prim-based shoe has finally dropped:

 Linden Research, Inc. announced today it signed an agreement to be acquired by an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager. Closing of the acquisition is 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. Upon closing, Mr. Waterfield and Mr. Oberwager will join the Board of Directors of Linden Research, Inc.

This announcement follows fast upon the recent acquisition (in March) of Linden Lab property Sansar by a little known turnkey operation called Wookey. In fact, that's when I heard rumors of Linden's coming acquisition -- just as I did when Linden Lab made a round of layoffs last February. In retrospect, both moves appear to be in preparation for this purchase.

However, the overall gist of this announcement is very much: Don't worry, Second Life will continue and grow. Which may or may not be true, but that's definitely the intended theme:

Mobile Companion App for SL "Coming Soon", Says Linden Lab CEO -- Who Hints at 3D Viewer for Mobile Down the Road

His avatar festooned in both a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and Pride-themed pants, Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg gave an in-world "state of SL" talk yesterday in celebration of the virtual world's 17th birthday. You can watch the whole thing below, but as far as I can tell, Ebbe doesn't really make any major announcements. However, he does drop a hint at the company's plans for developing mobile apps for SL (at around 1:06 in the video): 

We're still trying to figure out when we can actually enable the 3D viewer aspect of it into mobile but that's much further out for now we're working on what I would say is a communication companion app and I hope to see a beta of that pretty soon.

I'm assuming "pretty soon" probably means this year, but we'll see. This companion app has been in development since at least early 2019, and sounds very similar to "light viewer" third party SL mobile apps like Pocket Metaverse for iOS from over a decade ago. (Unfortunately now defunct.)

This is the first time I'm aware of that Altberg has acknowledged to the SL community that the company is working on a 3D viewer for mobile, which raises an interesting point:

Linden Lab Now Removing Hate Speech & Derogatory Terms as Keywords & Product Tags in the SL Marketplace

Last week we noted that the SL Marketplace was allowing racist slurs to be used as product tags -- and that some vendors have been taking advantage of that to advertise virtual world content promoting racial stereotypes. While a Linden Lab staffer said they were looking into this issue at the time, it had not been fully addressed as late as yesterday.

Spokesman Brett Linden tells me why it's taken this time to have them removed:

Linden Lab Announces Support for Black Lives Matter, Donates to Civil Rights Groups, Promotes Community-Run BLM Fundraiser in Second Life

While many companies have come out in support of Black lives in the wake of George Floyd's killing, Linden Lab's statement last Friday comes with some extra heft:

We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, all victims of systemic oppression and violence, and with Black communities across the U.S., the globe, and the virtual world in condemning racism and any and all actions that promote division.

Our mission at Second Life has always been to help build a better world, and in support of Black Lives Matter, we will be donating $10,000 each to three charities that are active in helping to fight oppression and injustice including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

How can you help? This weekend, you can participate in the Stand for Justice fundraising effort dedicated to raising funds for Black Lives Matter, Black Visions Collective, Campaign Zero, the National Police Accountability Project, and a Split Bail Fund benefiting 38+ bail funds nationwide. 

More here. Promoting the community-driven Stand for Justice fundraiser is also notable, because as many reader comments suggest, some Second Life users object to it. ("I am making a list of all the shops participating in this and will boycott each of them", one angry reader even vowed.)

However, this is not even the first time Linden Lab has officially made a political stand on a potentially controversial -- to right wingers, at least -- issue:

You Can Buy Linden Lab's Street In Upland, the New Virtual Real Estate Game Powered by Linden Lab's Tilia

Well, maybe next door to Linden Lab on 940 Battery Street in SF, for the low low price of 31,500 UPX.

This is Upland, a new virtual real estate acquisition game -- sorta Monopoly meets the real world, where virtual land is registered on the EOS blockchain -- and as it happens, is the first paying customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service:

Linden Lab created the digital payment and wallet functions (also called Tilia) for its Second Life, which supports annual commerce of about $500 million per year. The residents of that virtual world can create digital objects and sell them to each other. Now Tilia will be implemented in the Monopoly-like Upland, which is available on iOS and Android. [Also on the web - WJA]

The Upland game uses blockchain — the decentralized, secure, and transparent digital ledger — to verify ownership of the digital properties that its users buy in its virtual world, which is an overlay on the real world. To handle the money transactions, Uplandme turned to Linden Lab’s Tilia, which has a digital wallet and transaction system that enables players to trade virtual properties for fiat currency (real-world money, such as the U.S. dollar, as opposed to cryptocurrency).

So with Sansar sold, this is Linden Lab's other revenue stream besides Second Life. Far as gameplay, it's not something I'm personally into, but then again I was always heavily preferred Risk, to Monopoly. Gameplay video below:

Second Life's Virtual World Unable to Grow Further, For Now -- Pandemic & Cloud Migration to Blame, Says Linden Lab

SL land grid circa 2018, photo by Daniel Voyager

There once was a virtual world that kept growing and growing (and often shrinking along the way), with dozens of new islands and continents suddenly emerging, seemingly from the digital ocean, every month. But then in the real world, a global pandemic caused many to seriously reconsider how they spent their leisure time, and return their attention to that aging virtual world. Which in the meantime, was moving away from the old way of existing, on a network of thousands of connected servers, and go instead into the cloud.  And then those two factors coming together at once caused a major interruption, and stopped the world from growing. (For now.)

Or as Linden Lab just put it:

Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.

While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn't expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.

As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.

And so if you want new land, Linden Lab recommends renting it from an SL land baron -- or renting mainland territory from Linden Lab itself.  In any case, it is an unfortunate hiccup for Second Life's prospects, which was starting to see more usage and land ownership in the wake of the pandemic:

Travis Scott's Giant Fortnite Show Is a Wake-Up Call for Linden Lab (Comment of the Week)

While Travis Scott's literally giantic performance in Fortnite inspired some to think about the metaverse's future, it inspired reader "Seph" to also think about the metaverse's past:

It's incredible how technically impossible 95% of that is in Second Life. Does Linden Lab hope for things like this? This is where so much of Second Life becomes a non-starter.

Take just Travis, he'd have to be an animesh object rigged with Bento, a winged cenotaur glued ontop of Ruth who outside animators will not want to deal with. Then having to understand what LI is and why Travis is 10k and can't be bigger than 64 meters and the space he occupies is only 256x256m with a 40 person capacity.

Nevermind how uploaded sounds can only be 10 seconds long and they'd need a shoutcast server.

Nevermind how with even 100s of emitters, SL's particle system couldn't accomplish 1/10th of those effects.

Nevermind even with recently released EEP glued ontop of old Windlight, they woudln't be able to accomplish dynamically changing the sky and world so drastically.

Second Life still wins in that anyone can join anytime and throw on a concert to tens of people a day whereas this is obviously super coordinated and we'll only get a few a year from a few big artists. But still, incredible how technically behind Linden Lab has allowed Second Life to be, and how they built Sansar even more crippled when Sansar had all the resources in the world to be able to match something like this.

It's not completely a fair comparison, since the Travis Scott performance was completely pre-recorded and took place on thousands and thousands of separate servers. But to Seph's point, I don't many people really care about those technicalities, when the actual product is so awesome.

It does make me wonder how much of Scott's show could be pulled off in SL or Sansar:

EEP for Keeps? Will Second Life's Finally-Released Environmental Enhancement Project Change Your World?

A week after finally unveiling the long-awaited return of last names for Second Life avatars, Linden Lab finally unveiled its long-promised Environmental Enhancement Project, better known as EEP, giving SL users more granular control over the way their virtual world experience appears. Specifically:

• Environment objects that you can keep in your inventory and share with others
• Parcel-level control of environments
• Up to four different, independently controlled sky layers
• More options for customization

So for instance, you could use EEP to turn a sim into an entire space flight simulation, with daylight on the ground, and different looking layers of atmosphere (and then finally, deep space) the higher you go up. However, I'm not sure if many developers are still around to take on a project as ambitious as that. (Hope I'm wrong there.) 

Most popular application of EEP? My guess: Sharable light settings for Second Life fashion photos. And if that's what you're looking for, Gogo of the Juicy brand has you covered with these starting EEP settings for just 1 Linden Dollar.

Official overview video below:

Less Than Two Days After the Return of Optional Name Changes for Second Life Avatars, Someone Already Paid $40 To Switch Theirs to "Freddie Mercury"

I had a feeling this would happen soon after Linden Lab brought back last name options for Second Life avatars, but I didn't expect it happen so quickly: Less than 2 days after that feature was announced, some SLer looked at the first pool of available surnames, and did the inevitable: Became Freddy Mercury. I was hoping for an avatar profile pic with a handlebar mustache or at least a few lines from "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the bio, but the Second Life version of Freddie Mercury is pretty shy, at least so far.

Sad to say, however, still no sight of anyone named "NegativePress Covfefe", another now-available option, but I will keep checking for that awesome occasion.

Becoming Freddie Mercury in Second Life, by the way, is no small investment: It costs $39.99 to make the switch, plus an upgrade to Premium Second Life subscription (if not already upgraded). That's like $160 to be Freddie Mercury in Second Life for just a year! Update: According to the name change FAQ, Freddie Mercury can discontinue their Premium account and still keep on being Freddie Mercury (thanks, Mondy).

And it might even be more than that: As Canadian virtual world blogger Ryan Schultz points out, many global currencies have taken a beaten against the US dollar during the pandemic, so non-American Second Life players will likely pay way more: For instance, due to its recent devaluation, it would currently cost Ryan nearly 80 goddamn Canadian dollars to change his SL name.

As for Freddie Mercury of SL, I reached out to him to find out more, but so far no reply: