Ebbe Altberg, the CEO of Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life and Sansar), recently gave an interview to Tonya Hall of ZDNet:
A couple of quick facts from the fifteen-minute interview:
Ebbe Altberg’s previous employment history includes stints at both Microsoft (12 years, working on Microsoft Office) and Yahoo! (where he was a senior vice president);
Last year, Second Life users cashed out $64 million in earnings;
Second Life has had over 200,000 virtual marriages in its lifetime!
Ebbe spends the bulk of the interview discussing the in-world economy of Second Life and Sansar (which Linden Lab is currently building based on the lessons learned from the 16 years of experience the company has gained by operating Second Life). He also talks about recent corporate branding partnerships in Sansar, such as Monstercat, Sanrio (the brand behind the Hello Kitty phenomenon) and Levi’s.
It’s clear that Ebbe wants to pursue more corporate partnerships and branding opportunities with Sansar. One thing that puzzles me is that this video, posted on Sept. 24th, 2019, had only had 22 views so far on YouTube! So please give it a watch, and spread the good word. Thanks 😉 perhaps we can send a few more companies Ebbe’s way, to strike a few more deals!
Yesterday, I had a different soft of experience in Sansar: I gave a guided tour of the social VR platform to an up-and-coming YouTuber from Las Vegas named Vbunny, who is a VR game vlogger and Twitch livestreamer!
Because I wanted to keep the tour open-ended, based on what she was interested in, I made the mistake of not visiting these worlds beforehand (in order to have them added to my Codex). I had just casually assumed that they would be in my Codex somewhere because I had visited them in the past. Wrong! Obviously, the Codex only took into account my most recent world visiting history.
Because of my mistake, I landed up having to drag Vbunny back to the Nexus three times, in order to go to the Prime Portal, find the world I wanted to show her in the listing there, then open up a portal for us both to use. It was totally awkward and inconvenient, and it has made me wonder if replacing the Atlas with the Codex is such a good idea after all. (I couldn’t use the Sansar Atlas as my backup plan, as I had intended, because you can’t spawn a portal from the listings on the website. Perhaps this is something that Linden Lab could consider adding?)
Anyway, aside from that minor quibble, Vbunny had a great visit. She kept remarking on the quality of the lighting in the worlds we visited, a strong suit of Sansar. She likes the avatars. And she just loved killing zombies!
While waiting for her to show up at our agreed-upon meeting place (of course, The Nexus!), I spent a very agreeable hour or so chatting with the various people who showed up there, in a wide variety of avatars. One charming young woman’s avatar was a Chinese bowl of food, and we landed up sitting around her in a huddle, in an impromptu communal conversation! Other avatars popped in and out, both old acquaintances and new. It was a wonderfully convivial way to pass the time waiting! Despite my misgivings about the Codex, I do think that Linden Lab creating The Nexus as a meeting place was a stroke of genius, and clearly a good move overall for the platform.
Another thing I discovered: I might make a great host of a pre-taped show, but when it comes to being a part of someone else’s show, I found myself surprising tongue-tied! I felt I was noticeably short on banter. Perhaps, again, it was because I did not prepare enough beforehand for this visit as much as my producer, Andrew William, and I prepare for taping an episode of the Metaverse Newscast. (And yes, we have not posted a new episode in quite a long while. Both Andrew and I have been phenomenally busy with our respective real-life jobs these past couple of months.)
Anyway, I very much look forward to seeing what Vbunny and her husband/producer come up with! She sent me the following message on Discord (which I have her permission to share with you):
Thank you so much for showing me around Sansar yesterday. I stayed on for another almost 2 hours just talking to some people and visiting the Hello Kitty world. I also customized my avatar and was blown away by how much customization you can do!
Dr. Fran hosts a weekly salon on the social VR platform High Fidelity, where various topics relating to technology, science, art and philosophy are discussed and debated.
And this Sunday’s topic seems, well, particularly pertinent, given all the recent travails that High Fidelity has been going through:
A few weeks ago, the topic was: Why are you still here?
Is it possible that you are here because of cult-ish leanings? What makes a cult, and what would cause YOU to be part of a cult?
IN ADDITION: This discussion can touch a bit on confirmation bias, as in: I made a choice to be a member of High Fidelity, and to admit that it is a losing proposition would mean that I am wrong about my choice.
So, am I holding on because I believe in HOLY HiFi, or maybe, I don’t want to admit that I put my hopes and dreams on the wrong virtual world? Or, is it the wrong virtual world?
The salon takes place on Sunday, October 20th, at 2:00 p.m. High Fidelity time/Pacific time, at Franny. (Unfortunately, I have a real-life event happening at the same time, so I cannot join the discussion.)
Franny — the site of Dr. Fran’s weekly salon
By the way, when I popped in-world to take this picture, I was one of a grand total of six avatars in High Fidelity on this Saturday afternoon, according to the GoTo section of their user interface tablet. Now, there might be a few more who are in unpublished domains, but you have to admit, that’s a pretty depressing figure.
There’s a good reason for that. I still love Second Life, and I still find lots to bring me back, time and again. For all the bells and whistles of the newer social VR platforms, I find myself coming back to SL for more.
In fact, I am going to make the argument that Second Life, at sixteen years old, is the perfect model of a mature, fully-evolved virtual world. Whether through design, luck, or accident (and really, it’s a combination of all three), founding CEO Philip Rosedale and his team at Linden Lab created something that hundreds of thousands of users still use regularly, despite Second Life routinely being ignored or derided by the mainstream media.
Looking right now at the live Steam concurrency stats, if Second Life were listed there it would be in the top 10 games, between Rocket League and TF2. And we’ve been at that concurrency level for more than 10 years.
Much credit lies both with Philip Rosedale for his original, pioneering vision of what a virtual world could be (and some very smart early decisions, such as allowing people to create and sell their own content to other users). Much credit must also go to the current CEO of Linden Lab, Ebbe Altberg, who has capably and competently led his team through many changes in recent years, building on Philip’s foundation. (There were a few CEOs in between, too, but we don’t talk about those. 😉 )
We can take a look at where Second Life is now, today, for a glimpse at the future of social VR/AR/XR platforms and virtual worlds.
What lessons can we take from SL? I can list four off the top of my head.
First, having a well functioning in-world economy is CRITICAL. Once people realized that they could actually make money in Second Life by creating and selling content to other users, SL took off like a rocket. And you can bet that the newer platforms like Sansar, High Fidelity, Sinespace, Decentraland, and Somnium Space have all been busily taking notes based on that early success. Even VRChat, which lacks an in-world economy, effectively proves this point, by having a booming off-world economy centered around the making and selling of custom avatars. The lesson here is simple: either build a marketplace and an economy into your virtual world, or your users will build one around it anyway, in spite of you!
We can expect that newer social VR/AR/XR platforms will develop highly detailed working economies and marketplaces for user-generated content (including comprehensive item permissions systems), whether or not they embrace blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Second Life proved that this is a key, vital ingredient to virtual world success.
Second, it’s ALL ABOUT THE PEOPLE. One of the reasons that Second Life has had such extraordinary longevity and success is that people have made an investment in the communities that they belong to. Whatever you are—a Gorean, medieval, steampunk, or science fiction roleplayer; a furry, a tiny, a Na’vi or a Bloodlines vampire—you have likely already found your tribe in Second Life! And that community is what brings people back, time and time again.
Also, Second Life has proven that people will spend a significant amount of time and money on customizing their avatars to their liking. There’s a whole industry built up around avatar customization, as even a brief glance at the SL Marketplace, with its hundreds of thousands of items for sale, will attest.
One of the reasons that OpenSim-based virtual worlds have struggled so much (with so many grids closing unexpectedly, like the rather sad InWorldz saga) is that they attract so few people compared to Second Life. You don’t make too many return visits to a grid when you can’t find anybody else to interact with. And this is where the network effect comes in: the more people who use a platform, the more people it draws in, and the more valuable that network becomes. Often (but not always), these successful growing networks were earlier entrants into a particular marketplace, like Second Life was.
And obviously, Facebook hopes that they can leverage their massive existing social network to give their upcoming social VR platform Horizon an advantage over competitors. If Facebook can get even a tiny percentage of their Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users to move to Facebook Horizon and use it regularly, they will be more successful than any other social VR platform to date (even VRChat). Facebook has the resources to dominate markets and crush competitors, and they will not hesitate to use every tool and tactic at their disposal. However, as I have said before, innovative social VR platforms will still be able to survive, if they can offer something that Facebook Horizon cannot.
Third: The early adopters of the various social VR/virtual worlds are the best ambassadors and promoters of the platforms. Engaged, raving fans are a virtual world’s best and most effective advertisement! Savvy metaverse companies court these early adopters with varying levels of success.
And you alienate those raving fans at your peril! High Fidelity is unfortunately learning this lesson the hard way. The current level of ill-will surrounding the project, spread by former users who are highly critical of the various mistakes and failings of the company, is an additional hurdle that the company will have to surmount in order to succeed.
Fourth, don’t be too quick to judge or dismiss a platform based on early impressions! I love to share the following video with people who just assumed that Second Life started off as an instant success. It dates from 2001, two years before SL opened to the public, and before it was even called Second Life (back then, it was called Linden World):
It took Philip Rosedale and his team at Linden Lab years and years and YEARS of hard work to get to the point where it finally took off (around 2006-2007).
And likewise, don’t be too quick to dismiss newer platforms that still might be a bit rough around the edges. (And yes, I am as guilty of this as the next person.) Some platforms might not look like much right now, but they will likely also take several years of concerted effort (by the companies behind them and their early users), before they reach a point where they become successful, profitable products.
I have noticed in covering the social VR/virtual world marketplace on my blog that here is such intense pressure on metaverse-building companies to become “the next Second Life”. Platforms are often judged harshly if they do not immediately get high concurrent users figures right out of the starting gate. That is completely unrealistic. The smarter companies are playing the long game here: building a quality social VR/virtual world slowly and methodically over time, and slowly but steadily attracting an audience. That’s what happened with Second Life!
A perfect example of this strategy at work is NeosVR, which is doing some insanely creative things, like this most recent example: an actual working portal gun! I mean, just how freaking cool is that?
NeosVR is still not on a lot of people’s radar yet, but they are attracting more and more users who are very impressed by what they can achieve on this platform. In many cases, these are features that other social VR platforms are not even close to matching! That’s why I believe that NeosVR will have a bright future. As Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently said, build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
So these are just a few thoughts. Examine Second Life carefully, and you too will gain valuable clues into what the mature, fully-evolved social VR/AR/XR platforms of the future will look like. You can count on it!
