Beebo Brink

Not that difficult given the low bar set by the average human.

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Noob: "okay.... im in a house with cages and people in gags and the door just locked and i cant get out :c"

DanielRavenNest

I forsee a mesh wasteland. Lots of mesh stuff (along with prims and sculpts still being there), but no people.

I made more money from Blue Mars last month than SL, but all of it was iPhone sales. Maybe there is a hint there.

Brenda Connolly

You sell iPhones in Blue Mars?

*runs

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Aribeth Zelin

I don't see SL shutting down, since its been around many years now - it would likely tick along in the same manner EQ 1 does - many people will migrate to the new shiny but enough will stickk around [and mu*s are still around too, and they have no graphics at all].

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Faerycat Designs In World -Marketplace 1- Marketplace 2

Seven Paragorn

I think SL will either stay pretty much the same, or improve. I don't really see it disappearing, it's lasted this long without any major disasters. Compared to certain other online worlds/games it's been doing pretty good. It's still around in 2012, that says something to me. I think if it were to die it would have done so already. By online game standards SL is a survivor.

I'm a fan of the recent projects too, I think the online marketplace is a good idea(once all the bugs are squashed). I love mesh. I'm looking forward to pathfinding, and the clothing deformer projects going live.

Eva Ryan

2015 - [13:45] Eva Ryan shouts: Will someone PUH-lease get this fallen sky off of me???

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ElyHynes Elysium

@EvaRyanSL is so FIC Humble follows her

Qie Niangao

Breedables are no longer the most popular form of gambling, supplanted by multi-level marketing of mesh avatar parts.

The displaced pets go feral and roam the Mainland in pathfinding packs, attacking any child avatars left unattended.

This gory spectacle rekindles the platform's popularity, particularly among teens, and Second Life thrives!

Soen Eber

Linden Labs will leverage its ability to rapidly prototype content by "liberating" HUD displays into drop-in web page widgets that can be used by casual developers. A downsized and tuned 3D rendering engine will also allow 3D view of objects and clothing in web-widgets.

Second Life will essentially follow two tracks: the traditional immersive experience, and web gadgets that can be quickly and dynamically developed by average users who do not have extensive design, modelling, or programming backgrounds. They will be less polished, sometimes downright ugly and hard to use, but will become immensely popular because organizations won't need to employ high-cost technical staff for their development.

This will also bring back modable casual games which will not be locked into a particular developer or site.

In short: it will be a virus spreading over the web.

Ciaran Laval

Nobody else can compete with LL's reach when it comes to the marketplace. Casper having an alternative would be healthy, but he can't compete with LL's reach.

Porsupah Ree

Come, now, you surely do know the answer to that - it's simply a matter of preference. Some people enjoy visiting in-world stores, others prefer browsing the grand catalogue. I'm firmly in the latter - if it's not in the Marketplace, it's all but certain I'll never get around to buying it.

This isn't born of any haughty airs - I'm but one bunny, and of no special significance. The Marketplace is simply a much more comfortable place for me to peruse, and consequently, buy. (How often I've wished Bare@Rose had their full presence in the Marketplace, or any other, at least, of those which remain)

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"Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars - all the beauties of creation." -- Victor Hugo

Ceka Cianci

loved that movie..
Hanna handles it while eating her cheerios and never spilling a drop.

Jopsy Pendragon

SL will still be around in 2015 unless something external like bandwidth-capping cripples it.

SL (and its copycats) has a flurry of management/legal nightmares orbiting it that scare the living shit out of any big-money investors that might bankroll something SL-like but bigger/better/different.

The 'next big shiney' will not have the same degree of creative freedom that SL does. Or, if it does, it will be locked down into cellular fiefdoms which don't share 'vulnerable content' like copyrighted intellectual property or 'dangerous content' like scripts.

LL may have slid into 'maintenance mode' for SL and, if so, can probably sustain it for as long as it remains cash positive.

Of all the things I'd like to see changed in SL, I think the atrocious inventory browser is at the top of my list. I get flashbacks of dealing with the win95 registry editor every time I use it. =( =(

But I doubt there'll be any improvements in that area. They'll probably roll out a few 'shiny new feature' things that don't substantially improve the SL experience noticeably from time to time, just to make it look like it's still a live service.... but I think for the most part, it's baked and done as far as LL is concerned. :-/

Stagnation is *boring*. To flourish, there needs to be a steady stream of 'anticipation'. It's what keeps religion going after all.

Desmond Shang

This makes a lot of sense, actually. It is, of course, logical and obvious.

But I'm still surprised at the course of action. Here's why...

Sure, the way SL is now, pretty much anyone could duplicate the marketplace if it wasn't there. Or even if the platform tried to block it, there would be workarounds ~ how hard could it be to 'jailbreak' SL, even if they tried to defeat such a thing as a web marketplace?

Even so, that's what most companies do ~ go against one of their core business tenets, and you are cast out of their warranty, their service, basically whatever they can do to you. And it works, well enough. A solid percentage of the mainstream won't ever take one simple, easy step to 'get around' stuff, even if it's to great advantage.

Back in the day, shops were rampant ~ I'm going to throw some poorly supported stats out here, just for comparison. In 2006, I'd say roughly 40% of my estate was commercial land: small shops, big shops, you name it. An honest estimate. Now? 5% would be generous. Is it fair to conflate that anecdotal experience to the rest of the grid? To some degree, yes. I'm pretty sure we'd all agree that there were FAR more shops in the old days, than now.

So... what's the loss? By my numbers: about 35% of *all* land revenue. Let's take 35% of the grid as it stands now, presuming it would have been larger otherwise ~ that's roughly 10,000 regions. Of course that's too rich, and not fair to blame it all on a web marketplace. Let's assume I'm FIVE TIMES overestimating and it's only 2,000 regions worth of commercial land dumped in favour of the marketplace.

2000 * 195 * 12 is 4.5 million dollars of missing revenue, conservatively speaking. Personally, I'd put the number to at least double that, or about 10 million a year. Anyone ever work at a 10 million a year gross revenue company? We are talking maybe 100 employees averaging 30,000 dollars in wages a year, more or less. With SL Marketplace... buh bye guys! And for.. what? Last reported, the 'revenue' of SL Marketplace (actually a kind of 'sink' for $L) was on the order of a million or two?

* * * * *

Of course, it's a very customer~centric thing to do, to give the convenience of a web marketplace. But the cost is withering: hard multimillion dollar direct revenue losses, significant loss of the shopping experience as a pasttime on the grid, significant loss of merchant presence (green dots) and participation on the grid, and most subtle and crippling: a significant loss of immersion too. After doing the Blue Mars thing I can't talk down to anyone about "what makes a world" ~ but I'd daresay that even Lineage2 was a more "worldly" experience than this in many ways. If you wanted to buy something, you generally traveled overland to a weapons shop, where you traded with a character. Or at least: another player. Some experiences are more immersive; some are less. A web marketplace is less.

I personally think immersion is the critical difference between 'world' and 'glorified chatroom with a brutally ineffective chat client' ~ and immersion has been ripped to shreds.

But say the logic of having a web marketplace is the right one... where does that line in the sand exist, that says: "No, you can't have Convenience X, it ruins immersion too much." Consider the number of people logging into SL on their mobile devices ~ "I say, hey, it's been ages, want to drop by?" ... and they answer "I'm on a chat client only, bored waiting for my ride" or something like that.

I'm not totally against that either, I mean, come on. It's just a chat client, it's not going to obliterate the grid. But eventually... Second Life --> #secondlife, no? And somewhere in that slide, the value of 295/month pricing slips away... in fact even 2.95/month pricing slips away.

* * * * *

It's a philosophy, I think.

I guess the big question is: did anyone really consider these knock~on effects, when working so hard on a web marketplace? When working on Linden Homes? Linden Homes has definitely drawn down the 'first land' mainland experience ~ weren't they going for the opposite, but yet... they roll out more? It's on par with: "gee if I start unbolting parts of the car it gets better gas mileage, so disassembly is our new policy!"

There are a lot of things that feel... not quite right to me, but I can't quite put my finger on it. For instance, recently I converted $L 300k to USD credit on LindeX and it just so happened I did this at a REALLY slow time. And yet... I was able to move $L 300k nowadays, as fast or faster as I'd ever done, even during the boom times. Doesn't that seem a bit odd? Wouldn't LindeX activity have slowed a lot, or at least become more sporadic? Most merchants are reporting dismal sales, yet... the currency market is just fine? It can't be the currency traders; a million small purchases racks up unnecessary fees. Fishy, somehow.

Just thoughts.

Ann Otoole

LL would just ban the competitors and block their crap. A fight in court would have to happen and LL would just close SL just to be that way.

You guys have no idea what you are dealing with.

Brenda Archer

I can't remember the name of it now, but early on in my SL experience I became curious about its predecessors, and so I wandered into an old world that was little more than a few rooms left, or so it seemed.

The graphics were AWFUL. But a few people still hung around. It was their home and their friends.

SL might avoid that because makers still have ways of enhancing the base experience. But it is a sure thing something better will come along, and then SL too will be that place of memory.

This really can happen to any online community. I am watching it happen to WoW, which was thought once by some to be too big to decline.

Vibrant communities online seem to have a lifespan. It's sad sometimes to be nomadic, but all I can do now is beat the same old drum: make sure you have ways to contact your cherished friends outside of SL.

DanielRavenNest

It's not currency traders on the Lindex, we don't trade with each other, we trade with people who want to buy and sell L$. And the trading turns are getting so slow that I am cashing out in favor of corporate bonds. There are 340 million L$ in Lindex orders sitting at the primary price at the moment, that is a whole lot.

DanielRavenNest

Google Goggles, and replacing how your friends and your room looks with a computer generated overlay. Bonus points if you interact with a Kinect device and are able to move virtual objects around. Want to make that prim larger? You grab it with your hands and stretch it.

Flea Yatsenko

Are you selling the basic way without setting your exchange rate? If you don't set your exchange rate, the LindeX will just keep giving you a crappier and crappier exchange rate until it sells.

As for people still buying L$ (I manage to sell at L$249/USD in a few minutes) they seem plentiful. I wouldn't be surprised if it had to do with SLMP eating merchant's L$.

EDIT: As for 2015, every feature LL adds breaks the grid a little more. I expect by that time there will just be the die hard fanbase who won't let go keeping LL barely afloat. At least, if things don't change and keep going in this direction.

Kick Frenzy

That makes 2 for this thought train.

Desmond Shang

Not selling the basic way. If I had been... ouch!

As for the app thing... I do agree that's one possible direction, though the interface for such a thing would be verrrrrry subtly complex.

Cameras would have to see the hands, even while (another?) camera presented the view... this is a nasty 'compromise' situation for a camera. And a hands free display is now critically important... then consider that you'd have to climb a very real ladder to get the overhead cam angles we take for granted now. Sure, there's such a thing as scaling and rotation to deal with that, but it starts to become complicated.

Mobile tech is still in its infancy, and much like any new thing, we have barely begun exploring what we can do with just the bare basics.

I really want the computer interface / display in Tony Stark's lab, though... (Iron Man / Avengers movie for the uninitiated). It's inspiring, if perhaps not 100% possible. We could go a long way toward it if we tried.

Couldbe Yue

welcome back Des,

I'm in two minds about what is going to happen by 2015. When I look at the path LL are taking with sl I keep telling myself that sl has always been successful despite LLs best efforts so it's possible it will still be going.

The geeky, non-attractive to the once core consumer of the product, stuff seems to be rolling ahead (think pathfinding et al) They're finally managing their income and costs better. They've driven away most of their most vocal supporters so they no longer have the screaming rage and they have managed to disengage themselves from even the most cursory of interactions with their customers. I'd say they're thinking they've got a win on their hands.

Yet the assumptions they seem to be using doesn't give me a lot of confidence. They're appearing to move to make sl more mums and dads gamer friendly, which is no bad thing since people appear to be more comfortable with spending large amounts of time gaming in some form rather than anything else. Yet rp regions are an indulgence unless the visitors contribute to tier. Search inworld in the v2+ viewers is screwed in away I didn't think was possible and inworld shops are just not as profitable as the marketplace. $1000 usd worth of monthly sales on the marketplace will cost you $50usd in commissions, to get that inworld you probably need half a region (depending on what you sell of course) which will cost you upwards of $125 depending on the land. These costs exclude advertising of course. If you're smaller, the differential is greater and the majority of the shops inworld are smaller. If you're turning over around 50usd a month in the marketplace you're paying 2.50 usd in commission yet you probably are spending 15usd pm on a piece of 2048 to get the same return inworld.

Down the last 12 months the vast proportion of the non-customers I've met do not own a home. Rod said last year that a lot of the new users don't stay long inworld hence they don't seem to have had much of an impact on concurrency. From my sales data I'd say this trend of non home owning has been going on for a long time now. Most I've met pop in for an hour or so and don't really do anything more than participate in some kind of human interaction thing (rp, dancing - that kind of thing). They don't seem to be creating a life in here, so the ties that bind them are less than before. Content diversity seems to have declined and many of the long term content creators - who should by now be on top of their game and producing jaw dropping stuff are leaving or stagnating rather than embracing the new opportunities. Which I put down to the declining income and the need to use third party tools rather than ingame tools (for builders).

I can also see sl morphing into a full on dolly dressup game like blue mars, so a glossy, shallow, shadow of what it is now is possible. Certainly the breathtaking potential that was there in 2006 is long gone.

I certainly think Rod has pulled SL out of the death spiral but I'm not too sure the new approach is going to retain the existing users, let alone bring more in. So I have no idea what it will look like, I just suspect whatever it is, as a consumer, it won't interest me in the slightest.

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Qie Niangao

If you mean the constant gushing sink of Marketplace commissions, yeah, I think that's it. As others have observed, the LindeX is rock steady now. The L$ has long been managed with Supply sales to prevent the currency from becoming too dear; what seems new in the past year or so is that there's just no apparent end to the demand. Data aren't published now to know, but I strongly suspect that Marketplace commissions have become the largest L$ sink--so large, even, that Supply must be selling replacement L$s almost constantly, forcing the currency into a very narrow trading range.

If that's correct, the Lab is dependent on Marketplace commissions in a way they may not fully appreciate. It's not just a revenue stream; it's what keeps the currency from collapsing.

Many are probably bored of my constant rant about how the Lab needs to

1. raise Marketplace commissions to 30%,
2. remove the rule that Marketplace prices be no higher than in-world, and then get off their dead asses and
3. link the goddamn Marketplace and in-world Search into one corpus and one unified front-end.

That last step is impractical for any potential competitor to do nearly as effectively; that advantage is how the Lab can protect those 30% commissions. (They could go further, too, with analytics no competing service could even begin to match--"they know when you've been sleeping / they know when you're awake...")

The point of the commission rise, obviously, is to rebalance Land and Marketplace. Currently, absurdly high tier is subsidizing the Marketplace margin, and Land is way less popular than it needs to be for SL to grow. The Lab has the lever to fix it--and increase revenue from both products. What keeping them from moving that lever?

Emilly Orr

Well, good gods, who doesn't? But I'm watching tech development with the Google display glasses, and augmented reality making slow, steady improvement. Even the Kinect and similar console devices are a step towards this--integrating graphics, games and even advertising into a augmented world.

I think it was Extra Credits talking about augmented reality in one of their segments--what we have now isn't even baby steps compared to what will be, if we develop it right.

That's for 2015 and dates farther out, though, and that's mostly for other games. What worries me now is the constant push for innovation, without consumer retention. Or, put another way, the sheer tonnage of folks on the grid who are deciding they don't need an in-world store (I'm part of this problem; I stopped being able to afford land, and moved an incrementally small amount of items to the Marketplace--and am now weirdly making more sales than I did when I had an in-world store), and are instead choosing to move from being active participants in the process, to casual gamers. Between a genuine lack of customer support, a constant lack of communication skills with the community, and the seeming willingness to do themselves harm rather than address some basic interface issues, I'm wondering seriously if SL won't, in another two to five years, be in the same position as There.com or the Matrix Online game.

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Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
~Pema Chodron

DanielRavenNest

I have old premium accounts that get more stipend. Thus Linden Lab pays *me* $1.72 a month after stipend for my mainland. I have no reason ever to shut my in-world shop, tiny as it is. I just lost interest in building in SL because *they* lost interest in improving the building features.

By that I mean things like mesh was left broken in the sense of not conforming to avatar shapes, and a materials system is nowhere to be seen. Even things like prim alignment, a basic building function, were ignored forever. So while SL looks better than it did 10 years ago, relative to everything else in the graphics world it's falling farther and farther behind.

Aribeth Zelin

I still enjoy building things, but if not for stubborness, friends and liking anything that involves being creative, I'd probably just quit and go back to wow full time or something.