As the end of 2017 draws closer, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on just a few of the major beats that made this another great one for Second Life. From technical improvements to new features, to community happenings, the virtual world’s 14th year was a busy and fun one!

Baby Got Backend Enhancements

We rolled out a number of upgrades to SL’s backend and build systems. This behind-the-scenes effort helps to improve stability and performance, and also is part of the future-proofing and prep work needed for the “Brave New World” project - i.e. moving SL to the cloud.

Tons of Fun Inworld

We launched our first-ever grid-wide game experience: Tyrah & the Curse of the Magical Glytches! Thousands have already enjoyed playing so far, and there’s even more to come.

This year also saw the introduction of a brand new group of starter avatars, and some awesome events inworld, including great shopping events like the one going on now, our annual Linden-vs-Resident snowball fight, the Halloween creepy-crawl, and some massive celebrations for SL14B - our 14th anniversary!

We hope you had as much fun in SL this year as we did. Next year is SL’s 15th birthday and we’re planning an absolute blow-out to celebrate. Stay tuned for more on that soon - we’re talking way more than one month’s worth of parties...

More Primo Premiums

In addition to regularly rolling out fresh gifts exclusively for subscribers, we added new benefits to Premium membership to make it even more, well, premium! We launched Premium Access to full regions, and extended the L$ transaction history for Premium subscribers up to 90 days.

We’re very pleased to share that as a result, we did see some growth in Premium account membership this year. Happy as we are, we think we can do even better, so look forward to new initiatives in 2018 aimed at making the benefits of going Premium even more valuable.

But Wait There’s More!

This year, we introduced a whole of new features and capabilities as well. For example, Animesh (which you can now test on Aditi using our Project Viewer) allows independent objects to use rigged mesh and animations, just like mesh avatars, and Residents have already used this feature in impressively creative ways.

We also rolled out more land features - Estate owners have more control over their land, we improved region capacity, and introduced Place Pages to help make your favourite SL places much more discoverable on the web.

Along those same lines, we brought back an improved version of the Community Gateway Program (and RegAPI), enabling communities to grow their ranks (and SL’s user-base) by registering and onboarding new users.

Last, but not least, we revamped our Support Portal and Community Forums to make it easier for Residents to get help when they need it and connect, discuss, and share with other users on the web.

Onward to 2018!

Not only does SL celebrate our 15th birthday next year, but we’re also working on some exciting new initiatives and enhancements we can’t wait to share with the community. As we announced earlier this year, we’re investing many millions in SL and 2018 is going to be a big one.

See you inworld!