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Originally Posted by Sooz Pascale  I don't clearly understand the position that others seem to have that NO ONE has the brains and/or wherewithal to compete with SL. This is utter nonsense. If the idea is good, it WILL be copied and the market WILL have competitors. Someone will come up with a 3D animated world that includes content creation and runs on a more stable platform. LL's monoploy will not last forever. |
There will likely be competition someday, and it will come from an independtly-funded small developer just like Linden Lab. (Possibly even based on LL's own open-source server code.)
But immediate, serious competition really is unlikely, for one very simple reason: User-created content is a legal and political nightmare. No major corporation is EVER going to allow the kind of unmoderated freedom that LL does in terms of user-uploaded/created assets. Sony, Microsoft, Google, Nintendo, whoever tried to do it would have some kind of review board for every piece of user-generated content, thereby resulting in a PG and liability-free metaverse. Unfortunately, the Web 2.0 generation doesn't play by those rules.
The only way any competitor is going to attract current active SLers is going to be by offering an innocent-until-proven-tos-breaking content policy and a comparable R.O.I. for in-world businesses. This isn't going to happen on any of those "add your own sim to our grid!" projects because no content creator's going to trust an environment where every single sim is run by a potential content thief. There will have to be a known, trusted body who operates the servers.