
SecondLife Didn't Fail - spatten
http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/06/philip-rosedale-the-media-is-wrong-secondlife-didnt-fail/
======
danilocampos
The first code I ever wrote, I wrote in Second Life.

The first interface I ever designed was for a HUD I built for the robot avatar
I wanted to sell in Second Life.

The first time I ever heard the names Neal Stephenson or Charles Stross, it
was in Second Life.

The first time I ever paid my rent based on work I had done entirely for and
by myself, it was from selling hundreds of robots in Second Life.

I was 19. It was magic.

There's a substantial part of what I am today that I could not have become
without what I learned from Second Life.

Yes, the developer tools are awful and the laggy experience can kill a lot of
the fun. But fuck – I was selling killer robots to people and getting paid for
it in what could become real money, somehow. Because that's how I wanted to
use it. And it let me do all of that? Incredible.

~~~
fauldsh
This is entirely similar to my experience. I played when I was around 18 and
created a hacky fix for skirts (they were an object attached to your body and
when you sat down they would flow downwards still), this netted me a few
hundred £ and started an enthusiasm for programming which has yet to stop. I
still believe a 3D environment is one of the greatest ways to start learning
object-orientated programming (due to the visual and tangible representation
of your classes).

------
codered1200
I've been a Second Life player for about six years now, and there isn't a lot
of crossover between the audiences of SL and here, so I thought I'd weigh in
on the 'success' of the game.

Originally there was a a huge amount of hype about the idea of real world
businesses opening up an SL presence as something of a "new frontier", as well
as vistualised museums, art exhibits, music shows and so on, but these for the
most part never got off the ground.

Second Life generally has two sides; the first is an incredibly commercialist
(to the point of being fetishistic) sector, where the players that prefer to
treat SL as a kind of gigantic virtual dollset can buy clothing, hair, skins
etc for their avatars, and has the same kind of draw as The Sims games, except
this is real money we're talking about. This in itself gives one type of
businesses at least a good way to generate income; 3D content creators.

The other side of SL are the very large groups of people that play the game to
indulge in some sort of alternative fantasy. There are massive populations of
furries, Goreans, BDSM practitioners and so on, who again are usually quite
willing to pay for content for use in role playing in the virtual world.

I originally joined because I was interested in the technology side of things
(I read an article somewhere about players using the in-game scripting systems
to create 'virus objects' which spread across the world, which I thought was
interesting enough to merit checking out) but I stayed because I found I had
inadvertently formed a group of friends, and I even ended up getting engaged
(in reality) to somebody I met there.

In a sense, Second Life has thrived, but not as a clean, bright new frontier
as originally intended, but instead as a kind of collaborative roleplaying
framework for people whose tastes are not really catered for anywhere else.

~~~
rmc
Giving a voice and a space to people who have nowhere else sounds like a
success and social good to me.

~~~
mitra
It might also explain why they have a loyal but ultimately niche userbase.

------
Newky
In my first year of college, I bagged my first programming job using the
Linden Scripting Language. I spent the majority of that Summer working "in-
world" as part of Trinity College Dublin's CRITE project.

There was some real prospects in this area in terms of educational value for
children but unfortunately the questionable nature of most of SecondLife
clienteles activities makes it impossible to allow Children to just wander
around.

I spent a lot of time working with OpenSim, the open source version, which was
very very buggy when I used it but it allowed you to run the server, and I had
some experiences bringing it into schools. Unfortunately due to problems such
as "Wow my man just lost all his clothes", we could not go through with it.

I found it a wonderful environment for learning, particularly for coding. Its
a very hands on approach when you can set up a listener like

listener = llListen(1000)

and then set up basic events for when a certain thing was said. It had a
lovely feel to the programming and I made my first real money on it as well. I
made a set of playable bagpipes for some person online, he sent me $50 dollars
on Paypal. I also donated a lot of code free of charge and even had my name
included on someones PHD.

All in all, it was wonderful place to work when I was there.

------
Gring
If people from SL are asking themselves why it didn't grow more, here's my
story:

In the past 5 years, I've spent about 5 hours reading and watching videos
about SL. And yet I've never once downloaded and run the client. You know why?
Because the whole gameworld is just too ugly.

There are many reasons for its ugliness. A missing lighting engine, that most
of it is very empty, bad frame rate / low drawing distance, and also the fact
that it's all made by the users and the majority of users don't have any
taste.

I'd rather spend my time in WOW or Zelda, they appeal much more to my eyes.
Or, you know, meet in real life.

~~~
GoodIntentions
I can sort of second this. I paid for a sub and let it lapse shortly
afterwards. The akwardness of trying to do things, the ugliness of the world
and the fact that my nieghbour made a huge sky-reaching tower covered in
pornography and pictures of borat unimpressed me.

It was about 25% as cool as the hype.

------
pixie_
At the moment SecondLife is miles of empty houses, casinos, and furries, it's
pretty sad, but salvageable. First there needs to be zones with something like
property taxes based on foot traffic over an area. This would incentivize
change, and renovation of an area instead of static dead content that persists
forever. Next the viewer client needs to be scaled down a bit. SecondLife is
very much ahead of its time (advanced 3d modeling, advanced scripting of
objects) the result is a lagged experience. Wonder why Minecraft took off?
It's because building in Minecraft is simple, in SecondLife building is a pain
in the ass. Again - way too advanced, no simple options for people. Anyways I
hope someone eventually gets it right because SecondLife made the same
mistakes AlphaWorld did and is meeting a similar fate. Im holding out on
Carmack's 3d goggles to re-enter the metaverse and sword fight you guys.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Personally, I think the easiness of building in SL is its downfall. Users
obviously do not care about polycounts and performance, and the FPS is very
low as a result.

~~~
einhverfr
Also keep in mind sim costs are very high, which means sims end up abandoned
when folks decide that the few thousand dollars per month required to maintain
the contract is too much.....

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Yep, it's probitively expensive to rent a simulator, no wonder projects like
OSGrid get any support.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
*prohibitively

ouch.

------
greggman
Any second life users here? Speak up please.

I've always found Second Life strange in that they claim million(s) of users
and yet I've never met one. I've met WoW players, I've met EQ players, Diablo
players, CoD players, Halo players, FF11 players, GTA players, etc etc etc.
But I've never met a Second Life player. Just bad luck I guess?

~~~
lsc
I bet you have.

I'm not a second life player myself, but from what I've heard, a whole lot of
it is based around sexuality that would be impossible, or at least not very
acceptable (outside of the SF bay area, at least) in real life. I mean, if
your thing is dragons or something, well hey, they can make that happen.

With a reputation like that, most people aren't going to be as 'out' about
being a second life user as about enjoying 'modern warfare' or whatever, I
mean, depending on local culture.

~~~
rmc
This sort of stealth is common in gender and sexual minorities. It can happen
to people who are transgender. Lots of trans women have tales of being in a
group of cis people and to conversation turning to how none of them have ever
met a trans person. Or lots of (usually homophobic) straight people who think
they've never met a gay person.

If there's a stigma or negativity attached to a thing, then don't use "I've
never met anyone in $GROUP" as reliable data.

------
facorreia
One relevant fact that's not mentioned in the story is how deeply SL can
affect people. There's a significant portion that becomes obsessed with it to
the point it takes precedence over their "real life"'s responsibilities.

I've read many a story of both "addicted" gamers and family members of gamers
and some of them can be quite devastating.

[https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=second...](https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=second+life+ruined)

~~~
drostie
In a world where our interactions are ever more inauthentic, the virtual can
seem more Real than the real.

Beside the grind, virtual worlds have managed to solve the deepest fears of
human interaction, usually with the promise that you can reinvent yourself if
everything goes bad. So they provide an outlet for Ambition. They also enable
some sort of personal progress, some sort of real feeling of Change, which
enables Love to take hold: people who are otherwise stuck in situations which
they feel are beyond their power are enabled by this.

The question is not why videogames are so addictive. The question is why the
real world isn't.

~~~
MichaelGG
Want to elaborate on "inauthentic" interaction? Because that sounds like
something the post office would say to imply that physical letters are more
"authentic" than emails.

------
saraid216
How are we defining a success and a failure here? Second Life is still around.
They're not raking in millions, but AFAIK they're profitable, provide value to
their customers in return, and occupy a dominant position in their market. In
what way have they failed?

------
maked00
SL has always been a exceedingly poor technology implementation of an ill
defined objective. It's pretty much a failure and an oddity.

Korean MMO's do it better. You can have your x-rated chat with digital paper
doll avatars that will look as sexy as your credit card can muster in the cash
shop.

The fact that huge swaths of SL is outright advertising spam is another reason
to avoid it.

------
TwoBit
It's sad that companies are so often judged by their growth potential and not
their static value. It's of course the investors that are making these
judgments and not the players.

~~~
fauldsh
This drive for any business to continually grow (and this isn't a Valley
specific problem) is a topic I could rant about for hours. From my
understanding growth is necessary in public companies so shareholders can make
a profit (assuming the company isn't big enough to issue huge dividends). What
perplexes me is why people cared about SecondLife growing if it never tried to
go public (beyond the initial investors caring).

~~~
Tichy
I think (aiming for) growth is also necessary to offset risk. Naturally
business will not be equally good from year to year. If you don't create
surplus in the good years, you'll find yourself in trouble in the bad years.

~~~
saraid216
Growth is like... the opposite of surplus.

~~~
Tichy
How so?

~~~
saraid216
What fauldsh said, basically.

Imagine that you've got a bunch of VCs who have decided to give you millions
and millions. Yay money. You now have a surplus, but you have not grown. To
grow, you have to _spend_ that money. That's the entire reason they gave you
money. Goodbye surplus.

------
zephjc
I played SL since 2006 and until 2009 or so, and I still keep up with it from
time to time. I think one problem it has is that it tries to do a lot of
things, and does none of them well. Building was fun for a while, but you hit
a limit with what you can do with their in-world tools, and now they allow
users to upload assets created in 3rd party 3D modeling tools (anything that
can export to Collada format)

Users are slowly making SL better but it almost seems in spite of Linden Lab,
not because of them (the improvement from LL are few and very far between)

~~~
rsanchez1
I think its because SL is not growing wildly. Yeah, they generate $700M from
the virtual economy, but what do they do with it? Without a focus on growing,
there isn't as much of a focus on innovation. Plus, as the article states,
they've tried a lot of things to get past the 1M active players number and
haven't cracked it yet. This discourages them from trying anything expensive
to stimulate growth, like improving building or implementing a more realistic
physics engine to draw people into a virtual world that looks real and
immersive.

Simply put, it looks like they're unwilling to take any risks to make
significant changes to SL.

------
azakai
It's fair to say that Second Life didn't fail. It's profitable and has a large
stable userbase. It definitely didn't live up to expectations, though.

From my perspective, the problem was that the entire architecture is built
around simulating on the server. This makes servers expensive, creates lag,
and entirely prevents a whole type of 3D environments - anything that requires
lag-free responsiveness, like a first person shooter.

Imagine if people could create any kind of 3D game in Second Life. People
would be using that instead of Unity/Unreal/other game engines.

Games are a potentially huge market, if Second Life had tied into that it
could have grown its userbase tremendously. It had almost all the necessary
technology - it just was structured in a way that you just can't do responsive
games.

(Btw, why does the article use SecondLife without a space between the two
words?)

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mindstab
I don't understand why the article talks about Secondlife in the past tense
like it's dead. It looks like it's chugging along about as strong as ever

~~~
mcguire
In fact, that seems to be the whole point of the article.

------
stesch
"SecondLife has 1 million active users" and "$700 million a year in virtual
goods transacted" sound a bit strange together.

Users spend $700 a year in SL?

~~~
picklefish
"$700 million transacted" double(triple, etc) counts most of the money. I
trade you $1 you trade someone else that $1, that's $2 transacted.

~~~
bermanoid
Regardless, though, that means that the per user transaction rate is $700 per
year on average - the incomes of people in a country also reflect multiple
spends of the same dollar, which is why velocity of money is so critical to an
economy and why free flowing credit is so important to make sure people and
businesses keep spending even in the face of short term flow stop ups.

That's an incredible amount of spending per user, if true. Especially sine all
of that money could be converted to real world cash with relatively little
friction, unlike most in-game currencies.

~~~
gmkoliver
In niche MMOs it's not unusual for users to spend over 20 real dollars/month
on micro transactions. I don't know what an average multiplier in terms of in-
game transactions would be but 3x doesn't seem out of the question.

------
Zigurd
This is not succeeding:

"The problem — really the only problem, but a big one nonetheless — is they
couldn’t ever find a way to make those numbers grow. Nothing they did worked,
and Rosedale doubts that even early Facebook integration would have helped."

It has also stagnated technologically, since revenue can't fund a level of
development that would open new applications or market segments, nor market
such new capabilities.

Second Life is a spectacular and obvious failure. It isn't a game (but it
attracted all the trolls and griefers a game would attract). It isn't anything
in particular. If you go to the site, there is a question: "What is Second
Life?" Follow the link, and play the video. Now tell me if you have an answer.

~~~
makomk
Actually, one reason it's stagnated technically because Linden Labs aren't
nearly as good at UI design as they think they are and lots of users are on
forked older versions of the client software that predate their last UI
redesign and don't support new features. It got so embarassing that they
disabled the ability for users to advertise what viewer version they were
running.

~~~
fzzzy
Sad. I worked at linden from 06-08, and later, when I found out that Viewer
2.0 had been developed in secret and the source thrown over the wall after
release, I was stunned by the lack of awareness about how upsetting this kind
of behavior is for open source developers who were working on the previous
codebase. Even worse is the fact that those developers are _working for no
pay._

Forks matter, and dilute the mindshare of the already small number of people
that are actually capable of contributing to an open source project. I don't
understand why there are so many companies (google with android, for example)
who think it is ok to develop major new versions in secret and then just toss
the code over the wall. It is hard enough to follow the changes to a large
open source project, but at least keeping up with commits in real time as they
happen makes digesting the changes easier. Lots of small bites to swallow
spread out over a long time. With the huge source dump style, I would argue
that it is basically impossible for even an extremely competent developer to
understand all the changes, and the ramifications of all those changes.

Also, it's Linden Lab. Linden Lab. Not Linden Labs. That used to drive me
crazy, I guess I shouldn't really care any more. :-)

------
zitterbewegung
Why do we see failure in a sustainable business that makes money.

~~~
njharman
Same reason we see a Baseball team that wins lots of games every year but
never a world series as a failure.

More was promised / expected than delivered.

------
hexagonal
411 days ago, "The Failure Of Second Life":
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2574795>

------
derpmeister
The reason why SL doesn't grow is because of all those furries ruining the
place for everyone else. I never knew what yiffing was until I went on SL. Had
they placed a few curbs on it, their world would've been better for everyone.

------
georgeecollins
A long time ago when I was just starting out at Activision we had some early
virtual reality world pitched to us. Probably it was Knowledge Adventure
Worlds which became KA Worlds that became I don't know what. Anyway, the guy
pitching it said, "This will allow people to create their own entertainment."

The guy who ran the studio then-- Howard Marks-- said, "If people wanted to
create their own entertainment we would have gone out of business a long time
ago."

------
wslh
Isn't an opportunity to grow in the mobile space? I don't like to use Second
Life in "desktop mode" but when I am on "mobile chill out mode" it sounds
perfect!

------
joering2
It would be nice, given the thread, to hear experience of someone that makes
money in SL. I watched the show about some guy that sells sex toys and was
making seven figures. Wonder how hard it is to get there (I assume hard but
would be great to hear some real users' opinion).

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I think Second Life has failed. Sure, it lives, but in 9 years Linden Labs
have been unable to make the client run any smoother or load any faster.

~~~
einhverfr
Who uses Linden Labs' client anyway? ;-)

To the downvoters: The fact is that among SL folks the clearest way you spot a
noob is that they are running the Linden Labs' client. Everyone else is on a
third party one in part because, well Linden Labs is better at many things
than building clients for their system. The two biggest viewers seem to be
Phoenix and Firestorm, probably followed by Imprudence and a few others.

~~~
aneth4
Interesting. If "noobs" have an inferior experience because of the LL client,
they will not come back. If the hope is for the community to thrive and grow,
perhaps the existence and superiority of third party clients should be more
apparent. Seems the nobody else commenting on HN was aware of this.

~~~
einhverfr
I think you are right about this. In fact I would say it is likely a major
issue in LL not getting a much larger user base.

There are a couple big problems with LL's clients.

The first one is that while they are LGPL the range of supported hardware,
particularly on Linux, is vanishingly small. This means for most systems, it
might work or it might not. If you ask for help you get a reply like "your
video card is not supported. Sorry."

Again, it might work and on Windows it often does. On Linux it is another
story. Often it works until such a point as there is a minor update and then
framerates drop to maybe 0.5 to 2. Again, unless you have an nVidia or an ATI
card, you are on your own.

The other, third party clients (many of which are open soruce) are often
better in this regard. I have _never_ found that sort of problem to occur with
a third party client though some of them have stability issues on some
platforms.

I think LL more or less figures that since there are enough other open source
clients for their network they really only have to do enough to get people
started, but often this doesn't work. So I think that the poor initial user
experience may be a big factor here, where it is a factor.

~~~
EwanG
So which (if any) of these do you suggest for someone willing to give SL
another look?

~~~
einhverfr
Imprudence has the best reputation regarding stability. It has been a while
since I tried it though.

On Linux I have had the best luck with Phoenix. I found Firestorm to be
unstable on each of my systems. There are some quirks relating to music/media
tracks due to library versions the software was compiled against, but
solutions are readily found there if you run into them.

~~~
makomk
Imprudence is outdated these days, unfortunately. You'll find that a lot of
avatars and content don't display properly with it these days because of mesh
upload and other new features.

------
Tichy
I enjoyed SL for a while. Some ideas to get more users: make it easier to
obtain a good looking avatar, and fix the clunky controls.

------
tete
Just in case someone doesn't know. You can build your own:

<http://opensimulator.org/>

