LINDEN RESEARCH, INC. TO BE ACQUIRED

[elise Voxel]

22 hours ago, anuk2939mk2 said:

yes. I hope Second Life would have Marketing in Malaysia and Thailand in southeast Asia! due to having more investors! and i suggest Linden Lab to create the office in Bangkok Thailand. That's very great move! Linden Research!

I'd love to see more south east asians around!

[Drayke Newall]

14 hours ago, wesleytron said:

SL is a dead horse which has been beaten one too many times but these new investors will just put it on life support?

So SL is damned either way!

Ah yes, it has been beaten. There is a reason why LL had minimal staff working on it whilst everyone else was working on Sansar. SL has always been the money cow of LL and that is why whenever they, since around 2010, have ventured into another program like blocksworld, sansar etc, SL development goes dormant. That is the pure definition of been beaten like a dead horse. SL been put on life support wouldn't necessary mean no new features, just that we wouldn't see any form of increase in the speed of development.

If this investment group indeed does mean good for Second Life it should equate to a shift in thinking of how to bring SL into the future which would mean quicker development and moving SL forward with some things that may grate against the existing userbase such as another viewer change or features like better land creation tools or prim to mesh tools or backend updating of the code to Vulcan. Only time will tell and as others have mentioned, if there are more layoffs that is then a big hint of a time to jump ship.

11 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Sansar was born under Rod Humble's tutelage. Ebbe "inherited" it and ran with it.

I know that but that doesnt mean it was Rod's fault. He started it for the time and any good CEO should look at the future and read the market to see if that product will be beneficial still. Therefore as I mentioned Ebbe is to blame. Rather than listening to the tone of the market as well as the enormous amount of people saying it wouldn't work and SL2.0 (New or updated to allow for VR with the possibility to transfer assets from old to new SL versions) should be done instead, he continued with it and spending more on it. He could have stopped it after Rod Left but didn't so no, he takes the blame that's how business works.

__________________

Nice to see Brett Linden posting in the thread to alleviate concern, however it is really just a more fleshed out version of Grumpity's post. Until we see actual posts or statements about what the future holds for Second Life independently and not Linden Lab or Tillia then the sky will continue to fall.

Edited July 11, 2020 by Drayke Newall

[Elisaisabel Munro]

On 7/9/2020 at 9:02 PM, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

At least it wasn't acquired by FB. That would've been horrible.

FB is working in another metaverse, with legless avatars

[Elisaisabel Munro]

On 7/9/2020 at 9:05 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

My third thought was: why the emphasis on Tilia, money. licensing etc when it's supposed to be about virtual content creation? Or maybe those are the same thing, essentially.

Instead of wondering in a user created world, most people shop for their digital dolls.  Too much money for digital stuff are charged, and people love to spend 20 dollars in a head, for example (or more than one)

money money money

[animats]

1 hour ago, Elisaisabel Munro said:

FB is working in another metaverse, with legless avatars

Facebook seems to have given up. Facebook Spaces was shut down, and Facebook Horizons was never opened. The Facebook page for Facebook Horizons hasn't been updated since September 2019.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Drayke Newall said:

I know that but that doesnt mean it was Rod's fault. He started it for the time and any good CEO should look at the future and read the market to see if that product will be beneficial still. Therefore as I mentioned Ebbe is to blame. Rather than listening to the tone of the market as well as the enormous amount of people saying it wouldn't work and SL2.0 (New or updated to allow for VR with the possibility to transfer assets from old to new SL versions) should be done instead, he continued with it and spending more on it. He could have stopped it after Rod Left but didn't so no, he takes the blame that's how business works.

I don't see where I said Ebbe doesn't get the blame for running with it?

I believe my exact words were, "Ebbe 'inherited' it and ran with it."

How can that be misconstrued to mean he wasn't to blame with continuing with it aka running/ran with it? 

Sheesh. All I said was Rod started it and Ebbe ran with it.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Anna Amore]

SL is alive and very well for now

It only dies if they remove the adult content  

[Amanda Dallin]

8 hours ago, Rathgrith027 said:

Please, put a prim in it, we don't need infighting.

Good advice.  You should take it. 

This is  suppose to be a forum for discussion.   I was discussing the topic.  You are just attacking. 

Doom and gloom is unwarranted at this point.  People who care should keep an eye out on what's going on at the Lab but that's always been true.  There is no reason to think these investors are any more likely to close SL than the venture capitalist who have owned the Lab until now.  I'm surprised they haven't taken their profits before now and they had to sell their interest in order to take profits from their investment.  Now is the natural time to sell since SL is on a high point due to RL issues.  It's also the natural time for long term investors to buy.  

[Suzanna Soyinka]

I'd probably feel better about this if there was some indication that the Lab intended to contract in more development and engineering staff on the back of it.

I'll hold any further negative apprehensions on the issue til I've seen more of whats planned, if anything.

Try not to muff this up, this is 15 years of my life and work.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

4 hours ago, Eirynne Sieyes said:

Want to get rid of these ads? Quit using Chrome and anything Google. Try Firefox with a script and ad blocker and search with DuckDuck Go. Running SuperAntiSpyware also helps.  And never, ever sign into anything with a Google or FB or anything account. In fact, quit FB. (Sorry Marketing!)

Like a family member got a new comp and loaded Chrome on it. It had her info on it already.  Told her to nuke Chrome and use Firefox. I trust Chrome as far I can throw a classic Fender Bassman amp and a Linden.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Anna Vanilla said:

SL is alive and very well for now

It only dies if they remove the adult content  

Yup. It's not that SL is all about Adult content, but it's a necessary part of the mix. One hopes the new investors understand both "necessary" and "not sufficient" because the market for a 100% wholesome, family-oriented virtual world is about the same size as that for one that's 100% pr0n. Both have been tried and both have "struggled for relevance."

[Conifer Dada]

As I said earlier, if Linden Research continues as a largely autonomous subsidiary of the new owner, I'm not too worried. I'd have been more worried if Linden Research had sold off Second Life to a new owner. I think the main worry I have now is that if the new owner goes bust at some time in the future, SL could go down with it.

Near where I live in real life, there was a successful company that got taken over by a big group.  After a year or two that big group went bust with huge debts caused by borrowing lots of money to buy up smaller companies.  If the original local company hadn't been taken over it might still be in business.

Edited July 11, 2020 by Conifer Dada

[Love Zhaoying]

8 hours ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

“Pupcorn” being produced in accordance with Euler rotation.

 

Drama Doggo eating Pupcorn:

[rasterscan]

Bradford Oberwager - Bare Snacks (acquired by PepsiCo), Acumins/more.com (acquired by HealthCentral), and Blue Tiger/Open Webs (acquired by CarParts).

Buy to sell merchant.

Philip Rosedale -  "I’ve known Brad [Oberwager] for 14 years personally and professionally"

Interesting

[Nick0678]

On 7/10/2020 at 6:50 AM, Farthington Whetmore said:

I have been in SL since 2006.  There were millions of subscribers with hundreds of thousand of people logged in at any given time back then.  Today SL is lucky to see 35K login at any given time. The in world economy sucks and sims are too expensive!  Might be a good time to leave...

Well it had it's rise for many years but the last 5-6 years SL is actually degrading regarding new subscribers.

Everybody knows that and it's normal it's been around since 2003. (WindowsXP era)

It's popularity to younger ages is almost non existent so they rarely care about joining/playing, they prefer other games/platforms and the majority of old subscribers that you talk about won't come back.That doesn't mean it's ending tomorrow of course but don't expect to ever see again the activity/popularity it had back in 2009-2011.

Still has a large number of users for business owners&the labs to have some satisfactory profit with the proper marketing strategies but realistically speaking the majority of accounts are alts&bots so if you do the calculations you get the idea of whats really going on..

It's OK though Second Life is a product and personally i consider it to have been very successful for what it offered, it had a great rise then stagnation for a while and after that it was time for slow degradation and some day it will expire. Thats the law of the market. There are millions of other products that failed instantly.

Edited July 11, 2020 by Nick0678

[rasterscan]

Ain't keen on the alternative, are you ? The avatars are awful ...

 

 Lego Worlds is a fantastical building behemoth...

 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Conifer Dada said:

As I said earlier, if Linden Research continues as a largely autonomous subsidiary of the new owner, I'm not too worried.

I'm sorry, I missed it earlier. Thank you for repeating yourself.

[Livio Korobase]

But, at the end, what change if Linden Lab and as consequence Second Life are owned by Joseph instead George or Arthur, from user point of view? And is true that next CEO would be Rosedale?

Edited July 11, 2020 by Livio Korobase

[Ceka Cianci]

52 minutes ago, Livio Korobase said:

But, at the end, what change if Linden Lab and as consequence Second Life are owned by Joseph instead George, from user point of view? And is true that next CEO would be Rosedale?

OMG, I would love that!! \o/

 

 

[LyricalBookworm]

I'm feeling somewhat reassured after reading all the responses from @Brett Linden. Thank you for clarifications and feedback. Change can be a scary thing at times. Especially as of late so feedback is always appreciated!

I hope this change will turn out to be a positive move for everyone.

[Rob Huntsman]

Surprised someone bought Second life, the game itself needs so much work done to it. Such as LSL probably needing to be replaced by javascript, and something needs to be done to make this game run better on modern computers.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Haselden said:

Surprised someone bought Second life, the game itself needs so much work done to it. Such as LSL probably needing to be replaced by javascript, and something needs to be done to make this game run better on modern computers.

Please don't distract the new guys and tempt them to waste opportunity cost on porting the scripting library to the popular language binding of the moment. The scripting language simply makes no difference to anybody who has scripted for any length of time. The real challenges of the SL script engine are determining what is safe to expose as library functions, managing the computing resources available to scripts, and reducing the massive overhead of thousands of scripts per simulator doing nothing each simulation frame.

[Bent Luik]

19 hours ago, Brett Linden said:

A few folks are speculating that this is the end of SL and nothing could be further than the truth.

You know Columbus (or at least Goofy Columbus) was 100 % sure that the earth is round but...

P. S. I hope you were in god mode when you posted this. gods have never been wrong

Edited July 11, 2020 by Bent Luik

[ItHadToComeToThis]

6 hours ago, Anna Vanilla said:

SL is alive and very well for now

It only dies if they remove the adult content  

It won't ever happen but I would like to see them try. Can you imagine the investment company trying to purge the grid of adult content. You would have to literally purge inventories, the asset server, ban accounts, remove thousands upon thousands of marketplace listings, images, sounds, animation. I really don't think, in reality, it could actually be done because as quickly as they removed a thousand items, a further 5000 would be uploaded in its place xD.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

11 minutes ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

It won't ever happen but I would like to see them try. Can you imagine the investment company trying to purge the grid of adult content. You would have to literally purge inventories, the asset server, ban accounts, remove thousands upon thousands of marketplace listings, images, sounds, animation. I really don't think, in reality, it could actually be done because as quickly as they removed a thousand items, a further 5000 would be uploaded in its place xD.

U fortunately, It could be done in a "from now" on kind of sense, a bit like how cars with poor emission ratings are gradually phased out.

"From today, this type of content is not acceptable on the MP anymore, you also may be abuse reported for selling it in-world"