Ace

Actually the regulars of the Residents Answers forum are more relevant to the current SL community than any of the people here who left the official forums behind.

It's not 2004 any more.

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Wildefire Walcott

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.

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or they may hail from someplace other than the usa.

Khamon

At the risk of sounding like a radical threat storming into the night, I will say that the steadily increasing time it takes me to log in, including Try Again, added to the ever growing number of times I have to relog due to permanent freezes, teleport hangs and disconnects per session, have nearly reached a point of leaving me no time to actual be inworld doing anything constructive.

The client eats my CPU and memory for breakfast and shits all over other programs running on my PC. That has to improve or my Second Life will soon be reduced to hacking at the client just to log in long enough say hello and walk around a few minutes a day. Even a hardcore junkie can't support the project if we can't at least fundamentally use the program.

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Travis Lambert

They could - but as soon as they wish to attract American consumers, they're going to need to worry about US laws.

Take gambling, for example. Sure, you could build up an SL competitor in, say, Austrailia. But if that Austrailian company got pegged by the US Governement as offering gambling services, US Banks would be unable to legally transfer funds to that Austrailian company: making it very difficult for US residents to pay for the service.

Personally, I think we wont see a viable competitor in the near future for other reasons other than the legal/political issues over content. The big issue I see, is that Linden hasn't yet demonstrated that this whole thing is profitable.

A Google or a Microsoft may posess all the technical skill & buisness acumen to 'Do' Second Life better. But if they can't do it better while simultaneously showing a profit - the value proposition is going to be a tough sell.

Cocoanut Koala

LL is already profitable, so they have demonstrated that.

coco

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i am sure there are ways around that.
i can use my mastercard at the tab (horse racing, sport betting), the crown (casino), or even a brothel. i am positive that where there is a will there is a way, and eventually somebody is going to come along and cut ll off at the knees.

Travis Lambert

Are they really? I was under the impression that they still need venture capital to function, and they don't generate enough cash yet to be self-sustaining.

If that's incorrect, I'd like to know

Malachi

The only reason that I've been able to figure as to why there are so little entrants into the Second Life space is that it has just failed to meet the market desires much like its nearest analog: There.

There is a wealth of information at MMOCHART.COM but the chart I find most compelling is the relative contributions to MMO subscriptions by game as attached. I'm not sure if I can even find the bars for SL or There in that chart. In short, SL type MMOs are viewed as money pits at present. Considering that SL Alpha took perhaps 10 developer-years to create, market entry would be trivial for anyone who thought they could make a buck off it; I don't think anyone presently does. And the more corporate cash that gets thrown at SL, the worse the business case for it looks.

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Quiplash

Truer words were never spoken.

I don't have a problem with Second Life as a name; I think it does what's intended--tell people that this is not like the other MMORPGs out there.

I am rapidly becoming fed up with SL's bugs and performance issues. The 503 errors i the website are not the last straw for me, but pretty close to it.

I am eyeing OpenlifeGrid as a possible alternative. Sure, it's buggier than SL at the moment, but it's all open source, and therefore we have the means to improve it directly if we don't like it. Here, we're at the mercy of bad management making what seem to be erratic decisions.

I may decide to start selling off parts of my land holdings if the situation does not improve, or gets worse.

Cocoanut Koala

Well, I wish I had taken notes on this. But recently, it was reported in a magazine article (Wired? One of those online ones?) where a Linden said that yes, they were profitable.

(I could find it probably if I looked hard, and I will probably try later.)

Then before that, a year or two ago, Philip said in the audio version of a Town Hall that they were "very close" to having the investors all paid off, and that the "game itself" (or similar words) was profitable all along.

In other words, that by itself, it would be perfectly profitable, but they had been paying off the investors.

Then, a couple of months later, he or someone else said they had been paid off, but I can't remember who or where it was said.

(I'm always assuming everyone always reads these various things, but they don't, and it would behoove me to realize that and keep notes.)

The recent article, though, saying that they were profitable - I should be able to find that again.

So my guess is they have been profitable for at least a year.

coco

Cindy Claveau

I agree with what you're saying, but MMOchart is normally 6 months to a year behind. The chart you linked to is from July 2006, a month after the massive influx of unregistered accounts actually began.

I don't know what they track - probably some 200-300,000 SL users are actually paying members (a number very competitive with COH, EQ2 and a couple other MMOs). The rest are on freebie accounts. If you count freebies (and especially freebies who never log in), SL would be up close to the WoW numbers for total "subscriptions".

But it'd be a bogus number.

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Cocoanut Koala

SirBruce seems to have left off this whole enterprise around 2006, looks to me like. Wonder why? It's disappointing. It was the best out there.

coco

Quiplash

I was just demonstrating the LINDEX to my boss here at work (she had a question about how the Linden dollar economy worked), and guess what - 503 error.

This fiasco is going to cost LL plenty in terms of promotion. Who in their right mind is going to demo this thing right now? Nobody would want to sign up!!

Malachi

I don't disagree with the questionable nature of mmoprgcharts.org, but Blizzard, being a division of the publicly-held firm is under regulatory requirements to provide accurate accounting. They recently put out a press release claiming 10 million paying WoW accounts worldwide including 2.5M in North America and 2M in Europe and 5.5M in Asia. Those numbers I believe accurate; compared to which I view any LL numbers as something this side of marketing fluff.

Incidentally, assuming $150k per developer-year, you should be able to clean-room clone SL for about $4M which should yield you $40M in revenue over 5 years (I'm a decade out of that industry, so my numbers are slightly suspect but very pessimistically biased). Incidentally, Blizzard claims an R&D staff of only 250.

Candide LeMay

I'm not going to claim that SL doesn't have technical problems, but at least for me, a much bigger issue are all those idiots and jerks who log in despite all the poor performance and breakage. Griefers, noobs rezzing penises, brazilian spammers ... you know what I'm talking about. A failed teleport will annoy me, but that's just a technical failure, nothing to get upset about. People make me want to stab them.


Okay you can argue this is also a result of a bad LL decision to open registration, and it is. They should have fired the whole 'community' team along with Cory

Beebo Brink

It's only sad if you drink Philip Linden's kool-aid and belive that the metaverse should replace the web.

Just as there are some things a book still does far better than a web site, there are many things that web-based features will do much better than the metaverse. Forums provide a platform for in-depth discussion among a large community of members that can never be matched by a group of avatars standing around in real time typing into a Chat window. Similarly, web catalogs provide a faster and more efficient way to search for products than TPing in and out of stores and wandering down aisle after aisle after aisle (I went shopping in SL last night, can you tell?).

Forums are a logical adjunct to community building in SL. My social life didn't take off until after joined SC and was able to develop a history of interaction with other people, learn their background and philosophies, get a sense of their character. Now I can hang out with them inworld and enjoy somewhat frivolous chats or raids on Cristiano's house. This is the fun fluff that has meaning because of the deeper connections forged elsewhere.

Which is why LL's abandonment of the official forums is incredibly short-sighted. The forums are probably their most powerful tool for increasing the woefully low retention rates. An investment in a full-time professional forum moderator and the most current forum software would pay for itself many times over with a rise in premium memberships and a reduced load on Customer Support requests.

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goddamnit beebo you are just too logical to be a texan.

Brenda Archer

I love SL. I hate SL. I was overinvolved in it, and I had to cut back. Now, I don't have the time to really get something out of it, but I can't let go either. I don't think SL is beyond repair.

whyroc

I really really wish it was name something different.. it leads to to many jokes..

the 503 errors.. hmm i wonder if it has anything to do with the new search feature.. everyone is constantly updating thier parcel descriptions etc to try to get somewhere close to the front. This has to be hitting a webserver somewhere in Linden Lab's farm. My guess is that it is related.

-why

Sooz Pascale

I don't, in all due respect, see this as an insurmountable problem. I could probably write a perfectly valid, easily understood, CLEAR and fair TOS in about a week. All it takes is a lawyer or two who understand SL and all the various aspects of it, in a legal sense. I deal with more complex issues every day.

Then, it just needs clear, transparant and even handed enforcement.

Look, this is what I tell clients who have seemingly complex, insolvable problems: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." you reduce the complex problems to their simplest components and solve them incrementally, piece by piece.

Sooz

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