New World Notes

Top 6 Posts Including New Second Life Economy Numbers, A VRChat Game Case Study, and a Now-Paused AI NPC Project from Linden Lab

• Kickstart This: Trip the Light, a VR Game That Teaches Hand-in-Hand Partner Dancing! - UPDATE: It's successfully funded!
• Watch: Machinima Artist Shows How Hand-Made Visuals Are Better Than AI
• Amazing User-Created VRChat Adventure Game World Gets 200,000+ Visits / Favorites... But Only 29 People Paying to Play. Here's Why.
• Linden Lab Alpha Launches AI-Powered Character Designer for Second Life -- Community Concerned About Impact on Virtual World, User Accounts. UPDATE: Linden Lab "pauses" project.
• SL Mobile App Has Not Increased Peak SL Usage (Yet). Plus Other 2024 Predictions I Got Wrong (or Right).
• 14 Second Life Creators Became Real Life Millionaires Last Year -- And Other Surprising Economic Stats Linden Lab Just Revealed

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14 Second Life Creators Became Real Life Millionaires Last Year -- And Other Surprising Economic Stats Linden Lab Just Revealed

Originally published on my Patreon

Linden Lab just publicized a trove of impressive Second Life economic data through a new VentureBeat article which headlines the most impressive stat: Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators.

Yes: The company has taken very little profit from Second Life over the course of the virtual world's 21 years, instead re-investing it into the platform, while giving the lion's share of in-world earnings to its grassroots creators.

This is great, though not completely surprising: As I reported in 2017, SL's grassroots creators were likely earning more money from Second Life than Linden Lab itself. Now we know the company is earning slightly more.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi frames these revenue splits in comparison to Roblox, which has vastly more users than SL, yet still shares far less earnings with its creators. (See chart above.)

Further, Linden Lab gives 90% of in-game transactions to user creators, while Roblox only shares roughly 30% of transactions with theirs. Philip Rosedale told me something similar in 2022, but it's good to see the company publicizing this story to a major tech business outlet.

Anyway, the economic meat that's likely to interest SLers most is much further down in the article:

SL Mobile App Has Not Increased Peak SL Usage (Yet). Plus Other 2024 Predictions I Got Wrong (or Right).

Originally published on my Patreon

Courtesy Tyche Shepherd, Second Life's unofficial (but highly qualified) demographer, here's a chart of SL activity since the mobile app was made free to play in mid-November. She shared these peak concurrency numbers -- i.e. how many people are logged in the most during a given period -- after I asked her if she'd seen any usage trend upward since the app's launch. (See above.)

"No, it hasn't, there was no noticeable uplift in in 7 day moving average of concurrency metrics around the public release on the 13th." (Check out the data for yourself on her Grid Survey site.)

So that's surprising! Especially now that over 100,000 SLers have downloaded it. My interpretation is that existing SL users are trying it out, but it's not (yet) increasing their overall usage or changing their log-in behavior. I'm talking with Linden heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale next week, so will hopefully have more insight then.

At any rate, this also means I muffed one of my metaverse predictions for 2024:

Thanks to the launch of its mobile app, Second Life increases peak CCU by at least 20%.  Jury is still out whether Second Life's upcoming iOS/Android app actually grows the total user base with new users (especially if the initial launch targets existing users) but I do think we'll see it enabling more of the existing user base log into SL more often. Peak Second Life concurrency is now around 50,000 (hat tip: Daniel), so growing that by 20% to 60,000 seems quite feasible!

So, well, whoops. And also: Dang.

Anyway, here's a review of my other predictions on new startups, acquisitions, ROBLOX growth, and Apple VisionPro adoption:

Linden Lab Alpha Launches AI-Powered Character Designer for Second Life -- Community Concerned About Impact on Virtual World, User Accounts

Linden Lab just Alpha launched an AI/NPC character builder for Premium Plus Second Life users in collaboration with Convai, the startup that tested out some NPCs in SL earlier this year (to somewhat dubious if comical results). Now they're rolling out an entire toolkit:

The Character Designer provides a solid foundation for immersive roleplay, offering a range of features that let you shape and refine the personalities and behaviors of your inworld characters. Current capabilities include:

Early-Stage Roleplay Support – Characters respond intelligently through IM, adapting and evolving as you interact.

Custom Personalities and Backstories – Define unique histories, preferences, and communication styles to bring your characters to life.

Integration with Existing SL Systems – Connect through a dedicated alt account, set arrival points, and fine-tune behavior filters for a seamless inworld experience.

As this is an alpha release, several improvements are planned:

Expanded Communication – Beyond IM-based interactions, future updates will include local and group chat support.

Voice Integration – Upcoming versions will allow characters to speak, enhancing immersion.

Contextual Awareness – Characters will gain awareness of nearby objects and avatars, enabling more relevant responses.

Advanced Actions – Over time, characters may perform tasks like exchanging inventory items or changing outfits.

Extended Configuration Options – Additional LLM models and Character Designer APIs will provide greater customization and integration possibilities.

More here. To judge by early community response as here on /SecondLife, there's much more consternation, than enthusiasm. 

"We already have a problem with a LOT of residents staying logged in and being AFK a majority of the time," as SL author Hari Sutherland just put it to me. "Sim owners place animesh faux people in sims already. Add in NPCs, and the chances of human-to-human interaction, growing community, and forging friendships plummets... it's just statistics."

This is an Alpha launch available only to a few thousand Premium+ users, so we may see these concerns addressed before the official launch.

In the meantime, if you are planning to play with these tools, be careful with what the AI characters you create say. Reddit host Coffee Pancake points out a pretty perilous warning in the documentation, if you uncheck the subject matter filter:

Cajsa's Choices: Beautifully Icy Photographs of Virtual Winter in Second Life

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Maka Orion’s picture “The light of winter is the poetry of patience” struck a chord with me. I immediately recognized the COLD he is portraying. It’s not just his breath condensing in the cold. It’s the way his shoulders hunch forward, how he brings his hands up to warm them despite the gloves, and it’s the effect of black and white. It feels colder. The only thing is he really should unroll his cap and pull it down over his ears. You know it’s cold from the way he holds his body. It’s not below zero (-18 C), though, or the snow flakes would not be so big and soft. 

This got me wondering. There are thousands of winter pictures taken by Second Life residents, but how many capture the COLD of winter? After all, in Second Life we have people posing on frozen lakes in bikinis or even less. Most of the snow in Second Life is the soft, fluffy snow of warmer winter days, not the hard dry pellets of a COLD snowy day. I wanted to see the kind of COLD where it has to warm up enough to snow. 

To see some real virtual COLD, click here:

Amazing User-Created VRChat Adventure Game World Gets 200,000+ Visits / Favorites... But Only 29 People Paying to Play. Here's Why.

Bullet Time Agent, as we covered here, is a VRChat-based, free-to-play adventure game (trailer above) created over several years as a one person labor of love by longtime community creator "Lakuza". Near pro quality in polish, ambition, and gameplay, Lakuza even hired voice actors for Bullet Time Agent, which takes up to ten hours to complete; VRChat the company helped him stage and promote it.

Launched last month, it's earned some... interesting user stats since then:

• Here's how many times VRChat players have visited it: 168,445+
• Here's how many times VRChat players have favorited it: 31,914+
• Here's how many tips VRChat players have given him through several tip jars located throughout the game world: Twenty-nine.

Yes, only 29:

"A world that took 3 years+ to make and so far it has had 29 tip jar donations (roughly $291, which I believe Tilia takes a portion of too when cashed out)," as Lakuza explains on X/Twitter. "So this is 29 people supporting out of somewhere between 32,000 to 100,000 people."

This is a painful case study on what kind of worlds monetize on VRChat, and which decidedly do not:

 

Watch: Machinima Artist Shows How Hand-Made Visuals Are Better Than AI

Remember Teal Aurelia's Second Life-based machinima promoting real life pop singer SEMINA, which led to a radio station picking up the song? Here's Teal's behind-the-scenes video, showing how she manually, painstakingly integrates SL footage with her post-production editing and artistry.  

On her social media, Teal's bio reads: "I make videos. I don't use any AI."

This production video visually expresses that statement:

"I just prefer transparency in art," she tells me. "Especially in a community where people are trying to learn from each other. I post editing videos so people can see how much work is involved in what I do. I'm never going to believe that AI is more valuable than actual skill."

You can not only see that technical skill here, but the personal artistic touches she brings to the task, giving the video a hand-made feel.  (For instance, how the butterfly and shooting star travel between paintings, or the blink-and-you'll-miss-it rotating stars in the diorama.) While it's heavily post-processed machinima, flourishes like these make it distinctly recognizable as a Teal Aurelia production. 

Saying "I don't use any AI" is now also necessary to distinguish what she's doing here from the torrent of flashy but mediocre AI slop now choking our social media feeds:

Subscribe to My Patreon on the Supporter/Creator/Partner Level, Get an Ad for Your Virtual World Brand on New World Notes

Starting this week, my Patreon subscribers on the Supporter level* get an additional benefit option that'll show up here on New World Notes: A 300 x 150 permanent ad to your virtual world brand! (Subscribers can also gift their ad to a friend with a brand!) I just added my first ads for Rapture, a long-time SL mesh fashion brand, and the new book by Tom Boellstoff, and will be adding others soon.

With about 100,000 monthly pageviews (give or take), this is a cost-effective way to reach readers of Second Life's most-read news/culture blog, which also draws thousands of readers interested in VRChat, Roblox, and other metaverse platforms/immersive games. It's also a good way of helping New World Notes keep on noting!

Speaking of which, Patreon subscribers on the Creator or Metaverse partner get another NWN-based benefit:

Cajsa's Choices: Leloo Ulf Whimsically Depicts the Animals of Second Life

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Leloo Ulf captured a small scene at Cica Ghost’s fantastical Spring creation. If you go now, you can see her Snowflake world, just as fun and whimsical. Cica’s work often makes me feel like I am visiting a Dr. Seuss world. I love how Leloo composed the pic. We get the feeling he’s looking at us and holding back a chuckle at how silly we humans are. Others have shared their photos in Cica’s Flickr group but only Leloo has captured this expression. It’s quite amazing because it’s not like he has a Bento head. 

For more of Leloo’s whimsical pics, click here: