Hitomi Tiponi

What does everybody reckon are the chances of Linden Lab making Second Life available over Valve's Steam service?

The reason I ask is that the latest copy of the dev viewer is being prepared for a 'steam' skin. Maybe it is just a hot and humid version of the standard skin, a special version for the steampunk community, or maybe they have something else planned. I know that a new 'basic' skin had also been mentioned in the past.

Ramen Jedburgh

Could be interesting. Maybe you coukd trade SL hats for Team Fortress 2 Hats?

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Ramen Jedburgh
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Vaelissa Cortes

Steam seems like a good way to attract more users and advertise in general, and as such, goes against the way Linden Lab does things. So it doesn't seem very likely.

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Myf

Hrmm, sounds interesting. Could lead to Achievements, that could be fun...

Lucifer Baphomet

STEAM SALE....


SECOND LIFE TIER 90% off


Nah.... I can't see it happening

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Andromeda Rage

They're waiting for you Gordon... in the test chamber...

Imnotgoing Sideways

Seems fitting since half of SL's freebie grunge textures are from Halflife2. (^_^)y

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Kara Spengler

Can we say bloatware?

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Ramen Jedburgh

Achievement Unlocked! Virtual Whoopie - Use a poseball on Zindra.

Jopsy Pendragon

Considering some of the $4.99 dreck on Steam... they might as well throw the SL Viewer Download at steam as well, and let people use their steam account to pay for premium/tier as an alternative to paypal/credit card.

I used to sometimes launch SL through steam anyway so that my steam-buddies know where. Could be kinda niffy.

Lucifer Baphomet

If you were Valve, would you want to be roped into the frequently fucked up world of Second Life billing?

Ramen Jedburgh

You know Steam's new cash cow is F2P Freemium MMOs right?

Lordfly Digeridoo

Even the Freemium MMOs need some minimum level of quality control, which SL, by its very design, does not have.

There's no way to classify SL in the Steam gaming pantheon. It's a thingie, not a game.

And it's unpolished, and it's got a terrible reputation outside of the current userbase, and the intricacies of running it well are something north of an arcane dark art, and the user interface is bizarre, and the world is ugly and doesn't run well.

If you want an epic PR disaster, put Second Life on steam, next to games like Super Monday Night Combat, Lord of the Rings Online, Teamfortress, Arma2, and all the other AAA titles.

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Jopsy Pendragon

Granted I'm a small-fry Steam/Valve customer... but the titles I have tried from them would put SL pretty much somwhere in the middle of their offerings, not the lower end.

Gomi Mfume

as long as you can still access it without steam.

not a fan..

//luddite

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Cindy Claveau

Gradually over the last couple of years I've come to appreciate some of the things Steam offers. For one, I have a nasty habit of having PCs or Hard drives crash on me. It's just so much easier to redownload the client from a digital service than trying to dig up old CDs - or in the case of Direct2Drive, digital services that went out of business.

But though I have about a dozen games feeding through Steam, I don't always want Steam to automatically update my client. If I'm running mods, there's no guarantee they'll still work with a newer client. So I keep Steam's auto-update turned off, thus removing one possible advantage for using it in the first place.

Mostly I'm just skeptical that Steam would care to bother with a free client like Second Life. The money in SL is in land and content creation, not in selling copies of the client. LL would have to pay them to do it, and then accept that a lot of customers aren't even using the official viewer.

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Penny Patton

I think putting SL on Steam would be an great move!

AFTER LL has solved some horrendous problems with design, broken features, presentation and default settings. Until then any mass market exposure for LL will backfire and further cement SL's reputation as a shockingly bad piece of software.

Seriously, there are fundamental problems with SL that Linden Lab could easily fix. As long as they continue to ignore those problems they're treading water at best.

But, sure, if they ever address those problems and make SL into something that won't drive most potential users away within minutes of their first login (if they even get that far), then marketing SL through services like Steam would be a brilliant move.

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Johnnie Carling

Part of this maybe?

News - Steam Expands Beyond Games

Myf

And that's pretty much why as interesting an idea as it is, I'm rather sceptical too. I really can't see many ways for Valve to get any sort of financial benefit out of pushing the Second Life client.

Void

sure, but how do you sub monetize SL even more than it already is?

I don't see SL on steam because it's business model is already fleshed out, and it's still in active develoment, which are two major things steam doesn't tend to deal with. Add to that the fact that it's a server service with multiple optional clients (pretty much unheard of for any subscriber model) means the only thing steam can really offer for it a client download.... not much for them to do with it.

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Darien Caldwell

I vote for "steampunk" or just some coincidental naming. Still waiting on the PS/3 and XBox versions of SL. ;p

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Ramen Jedburgh

Didn't mean to Thanks that...

Anyway, its simple put the SL cloent in Steam, now you can buy L$ in SL using Steam Wallet, LL gets some exposure, Valve skims 10% off the top, gove or take.

This is more or less how other F2Ps work. They even sell premium memherships kaybe through Steam, Valve takes a bit, LL gets some exposure.

Khamon

I CAN HAS AN AMUSEMENT1 THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH HA HA HA HA HA

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Cerise

The only real change in this skin so far, is that a referral code is added to the in-viewer "join now" link. This change would only be semi-useful for tracking since it can be invoked manually. It could be really useful to trigger a custom new user path. The initial avatar selection screen looks the same, haven't gone through deep enough to see if an alternative welcome area might be in there.

Hitomi Tiponi

Agreed - not many big changes for now. Revision 263441 failed to build and 263484 is also still building, but I doubt anything major is in there. With the removal of a fixed 'join' URL I wonder if that means they are allowing joining routed through a third party system (e.g. routed through Steam), or it could be just good housekeeping. And they also increased the minimum screen size (or number of pixles) needed for the full login panel to appear correctly, so not a version for mobiles .

ETA: Just noticed this came in with a DRTVWR number (where DRT means Deploy Request Tracker) which usually indicates a new chunk of work rather than just maintenance.