New World Notes

Can Second Life Ever Grow Again? A Veteran Game Designer Has Some Very Good Insights

Pictured: Alexia in High Fidelity (as a cloud)

Rather than write yet again about what went wrong with Second Life way back when, I recently asked veteran game designer Alexia Mandeville what could go still go right.

She's in a very good position to offer her perspective: An SL user herself back in the day, she's now a designer at Niantic (creator of Pokémon GO, the massive AR-based virtual world), and a designer on the early iteration of Horizon, Facebook's social VR world. Even more pertinent, she was also a UX designer at High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's follow-up virtual world to Second Life. She sees a shared corporate culture to that startup and SL developer Linden Lab, which has hampered consumer adoption of both their virtual worlds:

"[A]cquisition was never a strength at these places," as she puts it. "You need a strong aesthetic style (Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite) and the ability to communicate your use case articulately to attract mainstream people."

So what are her recommendations to Linden Lab, to grow the Second Life userbase when so many previous attempts by the company have failed?

Ms. Mandeville makes four key suggestions:

Andy Baio on Skittish, His Charming New Animal Crossing-esque Space for Online Events and Collaborative Creators

Skittish is "a playful virtual space for online events" now in closed beta, the brainchild of beloved tech veteran Andy Baio, a longtime advocate of Internet-driven creativity. As the video teaser above suggests, it combines the whimsical charm of online games like Animal Crossing, with video sharing and other features associated with platforms like Zoom, along with virtual world-type user creation tools and spatial audio chat.

As Andy explains on his blog, it's his bid to create a new kind of virtual event platform for the pandemic age and beyond, synthesizing the online experiences many of us found joy and relief in during the quarantine:

As depressing as most virtual events were, there were three bright spots of creative experimentation happening over the last year:

1. Experimental Events. The brilliant MUD-like environment created for Roguelike Celebration and the ongoing series of LIKELIKE events showed how event spaces could draw inspiration from games to great effect.
2. Proximity Chat. Second Life has supported spatial voice chat for nearly 15 years, but a crop of experimental new platforms started using spatial/positional audio and video to make virtual parties feel more real.
3. Social Games. Approachable games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Among Us, and Fall Guys were breakout stars of the pandemic, giving us new ways to connect to with friends when we couldn’t be together in person.

There are some amazing projects out there, but I started outlining a hybrid of these ideas: an online event venue for large-scale gatherings that used spatial audio, didn’t assume people were comfortable being on camera, with real-time customization of the space, and built in a 3D engine for a more immersive game-like feel.

Go here to apply to become a beta tester. Andy tells me he and his development team are architecting Skittish to host events with very large concurrencies:

As Unreal Unveils MetaHuman, Oculus/Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Has Advice on Bringing Ultra-Realistic Avatars Into a Social VR World

As Unreal unveiled its new MetaHuman system for highly detailed ultra-realistic avatars, I happened to be chatting with Oculus / Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick, who's been thinking quite a lot about the best avatars to use in a social VR space.

"Increasing the visual fidelity of avatars raises the expectations for realistic motion to make those realistic features look alive," Jim notes about MetaHuman. "The more realistic the avatars look the better you have to be at tracking facial movement in VR to avoid the avatars looking dead. If you can't capture sufficient movement you have to instead be good at synthesizing it based on the social context, but if you get that wrong the avatars look creepy not because they look dead, but because they don't respond in a natural way given the social context."

Realism in social VR introduces a new challenge:

"Most of the current attention is on improving motion capture by the headset," as Purbrick puts it, "but the better that gets the harder it becomes to escape your real identity: all of your habits and movements are transferred faithfully to your avatar whether you like it or not... Short version: people don't want creepy avatars more than they want realistic avatars and it's a lot more work to make realistic avatars not feel creepy in VR."

These points are a good place to introduce a recent talk Jim Purbrick featured on his blog, largely drawing on his experiences developing avatars for Second Life:

Apple Is Hiring Dozens of AR/VR Developers (Which Actually Isn't Much)

Apple has posted over 40 job AR/VR openings since last August, which more than any recent rumor swirling about, convinces me that Apple is moving into the AR/VR space.

But! 40 or so employees is actually not that much amid a company with nearly 150,000 total staff. (And translates to Apple paying these new hires roughly $10 million a year, a pittance for a firm of such size to pay.) More key, competitor Oculus has 1,300 employees listed on LinkedIn, while a significant portion of Sony PlayStation's 8000 employees are dedicated on some level to developing for the VR market leader, PSVR.

My take: Apple is still in very early, prototype stages of any VR/AR headset launch it has planned, and don't expect an Apple HMD to hit the market a year or two before you see them start hiring AR/VR developers by the hundreds and hundreds.

Core Launches Game Dev Competition With $120,000 in Prizes

Speaking of creating virtual worlds with in-game modeling/scripting tools, behold: The Core Invitational Game Jam, awarding $120,000 in prizes to games created on the platform. (Think Unreal meets ROBLOX.) Details:

Manticore Games, creators of the Core platform for making and playing games, is calling on all indie game devs, creators and modders to apply now for one of only 50 slots in the first-ever Core Invitational, an exclusive game dev competition with $100,000 USD in prizes...

Categories and prizes include:

Few ROBLOX User Creators Make Much Money from Their Creations

Venture capitalist and metaverse expert Matthew Ball has a new must-read (and Tolstoy-length) essay on Apple's relationship to the metaverse's future (spoiler: It can totally control it), but this particular passage punched my eyeball:

Roblox’s platform is full of happy users and talented creators. But few of these creators are making money. Although Roblox has $2 billion in revenues, three billion monthly hours of playtime and more than 160 million users, only 29 developers (i.e. companies) netted over $1 million in 2019 and three crossed $10 million. This is bad; more developer revenue means more developer investment and better products. But revenue through Roblox is limited by the company’s paltry payment rates of just 24.5% of every dollar spent on their games, assets, or items. While this makes Apple’s rates 70-85% payout rates seem generous, the reverse is true.

That's much less a split for creators than I inferred from Roblox's IPO filing last year. The fact that Roblox keeps growing suggests most user creators are OK with this revenue split -- for instance, teens just starting out and overjoyed to rake a few hundred dollars, and creators more interested in attracting large groups of visitors (such as with this historical sim in Roblox, featured above). Then again, contrast that company/creator split with Second Life:

Virtual World Concerts Aren't Ideal for Acts With Great Real Life Stage Shows

Protip: It's not a great idea to announce "X in virtual worlds is the future of Y" before checking to see if there are instances of Y successfully happening without X.

For instance: "Live performances in virtual worlds are the future of music concerts." It's part of that future, we can safely say, but as reader "Mint" reminds us,  it's definitely not the only one:

There have been a number of live online shows done in a more traditional streaming method. BTS, Dua Lipa, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne, Niall Horan, and other Top 40 musicians have all done them. My guess for artists not doing Fortnite concerts would be because A) their core audiences aren't active there or an immersive experience in a virtual world wouldn't interest them and B) the costs of doing a traditional show are lower. Take BTS for example - they did a more traditional livestream concert and made approximately $19 million to $26 million in ticket sales alone. I wouldn't imagine that most of their fanbase is on Fortnite, and a more traditional format may enable the viewer to better see their dancing + choreography. I'm also not sure if fans are really looking for an immersive experience - at least from what I've seen amongst fanbases of artists that have offered virtual concerts, it's more about getting to see an artist perform songs live than to have any unique experience. 

Yes: Top bands are making quite a lot of money just from selling tickets to oldschool video streams of live shows, without the added addition (and time, and money) of creating a whole Travis Scott-in-Fortnite-type virtual world experience on top of that. As Minty notes, fans of artists like BTS will probably prefer watching the live real world stage act that's core to the BTS experience. Where virtual worlds will probably shine most is by elevating shows put on by performers who don't have a lot of dancing and other choreography in their stage acts. (Off the top of my head: my neighbor* Billie Eilish has a great stage presence, but a virtual world performance which turns her dark and moody songs into interactive 3D animation would be amazing.)

Which isn't to say there's no place for amazing stage acts like BTS in virtual worlds -- as a matter of fact, they mocapped some of their dance moves for avatars to buy and use in Fortnite:

If Fortnite the Future of Live Music, Why is Fortnite Staging So Few Shows -- and They're Much Less Immersive Than Before?

Fortnite! It's the future of live music, as many say (I even said so here!). It sure seemed that way when artists like Travis Scott and Marshmellow brought in millions to experience "only in a virtual world"-type shows -- not to mention lots of revenue for themselves.

But thing is, Travis Scott's show as a literal giant in Fortnite was last April. And since then, live shows have been few and far between. This one above, with J Balvin, is the most recent that I can find -- and it's from last October. Maybe I'm missing others, but I can't find any announced on Fortnite's official blog. Also concerning: Recent live concerts aren't anywhere as amazing and immersive as the Travis Scott event; instead, they mainly seem to be non-interactive video streams. (Another example, with BTS "in" Fortnite, below.)

What's the deal? I've reached out to a contact with Epic for their take. If I had to speculate, I'd say there's a few possible factors at work:

Philip Rosedale Issues Metaverse Challenge: What Virtual World Besides Second Life Has Collaborative, Dynamic, Complex Content Creation?

Here's a great Twitter thread: Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale challenging people to name a virtual world besides Second Life that enables collaborative dynamic creation of "interesting things" while users inhabit the same space as avatars. Based on his follow-ups, "interesting things" means it must enable complex scripting/interaction and 3D objects. So not just simple building blocks but, for exaxmple, a fully interactive 3D recreation of Van Gogh's "Starry Night", as in in this classic machinima above.

On that view, Minecraft wouldn't count by Philip's lights: "Love Minecraft, but: Can't build together without elaborate specific permission from admins. Can't build many important things (jointed objects, curved surface)."

Second Life is the only virtual world that allows people to build interesting things while also being together in one place. Despite being 17 years old, no other game or world has yet fully achieved that goal. Agree? Have at me.

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) January 17, 2021

Also, by one "place", he means a single shard world that many thousands of users can inhabit at the same time, and not instanced mini-worlds or rooms: "Try making a pocket world like Anyland or Horizons or VRChat seamless," as he explains. "Very difficult issues with asset transfer, serialization, load balancing (for example)."

Do any come close to meeting this criterion? A few standout candidates:

IMVU's Plan to Make VCOIN the Most Used Blockchain-Based Currency in Virtual Worlds -- and the Real One

IMVU just announced the availability of VCOIN, an Ethereum-based digital currency for use in its virtual world with 7 million active users  -- and, by design, for buying and selling goods and services in the real world, too. From the announcement:

Available now for the IMVU desktop, mobile web, and web platforms, VCOIN is seamlessly integrated into the IMVU experience, enabling secure, global peer-to-peer transactions at the click of a button. IMVU’s high-velocity economy currently sees more than 27 million transactions and 13 billion Credits changing hands each month. With the addition of VCOIN, users can now easily and instantly pay for goods and services on the platform -- no complicated crypto wallets, or even bank accounts required -- and then convert their earned VCOIN into cash at an established rate.

This is a major move for at least a couple reasons: While blockchain-based currencies have attracted much hype and speculation, they are not actually used very much to, you know, buy goods and services. (As I never tire of noting, more people use Linden Dollars in Second Life than use Bitcoin every day.) At the same time, while there are other virtual worlds with a cash-out option for virtual currency, they also have small user bases -- and aren't authorized for use in the real world. While Linden Dollars outstrip Bitcoin in usage, for instance, they still only count some 400,000 daily users, and aren't intended for use as a RL currency.

Enter VCOIN, which hits the market with 7 million built-in customers. John Burris, IMVU's Chief Strategy Officer, tells me the company fully intends to encourage VCOIN's use outside IMVU -- and even approached the SEC with that in mind: