How SL can win the metaverse

[Coffee Pancake]

SL works because it parallels early internet design principals, it's very easy to see how at launch, this was perceived as the next stepping stone for the wider internet .. 18 years ahead of it's time.

We can expect to see all the new metaverse hype to repeat all the same mistakes made by Sansar and the other sterile worlds that have come and gone before, although due to platform leverage, they will all be bigger than SL.

Sansar wasn't an upgrade, it was a do over with the lessons learnt from SL applied to modern game platform design. Sansar was intended to be SL 2.0, the design goals were such that it was predicted SL could conceivably be created inside Sansar .. yet it turned out to be yet another dead sterile world nobody cared to invest time in, that ended up almost tanking the company and taking a lot of very senior staff with it.

There is a very real risk we will end up crushed by an upstart colossal failure from FB etc. By their scales, a world with a population a hundred times the size of SL will still be a massive failure. Such a platform however will suck out a lot of the oxygen  and we can only stand to lose a certain percentage before the scales tip and we face irrelevance.

It's with this in mind that I propose what I see as the only viable long term solution.

Ubiquity. 

LL need to pivot from operating a walled garden to being the metaverse's broker. Open source the server code, let people run it on anything, and for a fee, allow it to become part of the SL grid with access to it's currency, markets, assets and DRM.

SL as a platform doesn't need to be the best, or the biggest, it simply needs to be everywhere.

Open source growth of the platform will kick back into advancement of the platform. So long as a 3rd party simulator operates by the required grid & client connectivity protocols, there is no reason why it can't be radically different from the fixed offering we have today and that raising tide will lift all ships. Run the LL server, opensim or roll your own to your own needs and specifications.

Other companies could and should be encouraged to offer their own brokerage services, their own asset libraries, grids and currencies. Simulators could connect to multiple grid services and offer combined services to end users. LL backed by Tilia enter the field with a massive head start and home field advantage. A far cry from the impending messaverse we're about to witness.

We can not depend on FB's (etc) inevitable flubs, failures, scandals and miss steps to leave us unscathed. Yes it's going to be a trash fire and we can poke fun from the peanut gallery, but to not take the changing landscape as an existential threat would be a fatal blunder.

There is of course a couple of big elephants in the room to address, that being concerns over DRM, piracy and scalability.

Piracy as a behavior is inevitable, it happens inside SL already, and would naturally increase should the walls come down. However, as with all forms of media piracy observed to date, the overall impact can be limited by strong controls over access to the grid infrastructure. Profitability demands legitimacy and accountability and that will put pressure simulator operators to keep their houses in order lest they find themselves out in the cold. Platform growth will also do much to limit the overall impact. It's also important to note we're not powerless and unable to push back.

Scalability is a key issue and bigger concern in this plan, as we are all painfully aware certain parts of the SL platform do not uniformly scale (group chat being a notable example we're all familiar with, there are others). All parts of the LL service as broker must scale in the same way the wider internet scales, and again, LL have the advantage over competing grids in that they already know all the pinch points and have almost 2 decades experience.

 

We win by becoming Apache, or nginx, or MySQL or email. Built on a set of open standards accessible to all. 

And by Win, I mean survive.

[Arielle Popstar]

What do you propose that Secondlife do that Opensimulator has not already been doing?

[Alwin Alcott]

16 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

What do you propose that Secondlife do that Opensimulator has not already been doing?

in my opinion SL and OS been seperated for to long to even speak about a comparision, it are two totally different products after years of development, with a partly shared ancester ... a bit like humans and gorilla's .

[Maryanne Solo]

I'm all for SL2!
Keep SL going for those who aren't interested in keeping up with the Jones's hardware wise.
I've been saying this for years: but if SL2 has time stamp synch music/dance synchronisation
all the other worlds will be left for dead.
and this for years also: Inbuilt 3d mesh tools such as good old Hexagon or more modern.
There are enough 3d mesh start-ups out there that one would surely team up with LL metinx.

And have the focus on tech/geeky learning and social media kinds of things. Like W3 schools or summit.

[Arielle Popstar]

48 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

in my opinion SL and OS been seperated for to long to even speak about a comparision, it are two totally different products after years of development, with a partly shared ancester ... a bit like humans and gorilla's .

The viewers are the same for both and from a server perspective, the start of a simulator generates an empty green field 256 by 256 meters. The content that can be placed on that field is pretty much the same for both. And that is because opensimulator has kept up compatibility with second life since it's inception. The only difference is the code language that it is written with. But then it would be like saying that a literary work is different in English than it is from Dutch. 

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Maryanne Solo said:

I'm all for SL2!
Keep SL going for those who aren't interested in keeping up with the Jones's hardware wise.
I've been saying this for years: but if SL2 has time stamp synch music/dance synchronisation
all the other worlds will be left for dead.
and this for years also: Inbuilt 3d mesh tools such as good old Hexagon or more modern.
There are enough 3d mesh start-ups out there that one would surely team up with LL metinx.

And have the focus on tech/geeky learning and social media kinds of things. Like W3 schools or summit.

i'v seen this process with a total different program ..add this .. add that.. moved from a broad userbase to only specialists are able to use it at full, had to raise the price dramaticly and left with less than 25% of their best days .. many give it a year or at most two, and it will be gone. Changing SL to much and allianate the older userbase, will have consequences the fast youth has a lot less in their wallet to spend and are faster gone than a leave in the wind when they get bored.

[Theresa Tennyson]

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

LL need to pivot from operating a walled garden to being the metaverse's broker. Open source the server code, let people run it on anything, and for a fee, allow it to become part of the SL grid with access to it's currency, markets, assets and DRM.

SL as a platform doesn't need to be the best, or the biggest, it simply needs to be everywhere.

 

Why do you think that Second Life's structure is good enough that other companies would want to do that?

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

What do you propose that Secondlife do that Opensimulator has not already been doing?

Expand the developer/resources/new-features workforce  by a significant amount.

People who haven't spent some time recently in the Opensimulator worlds might not realise how advanced Opensimulator has become. It has some things tht SL doesln't, such as variable-sized regions. But, from my perspective, there are only a few things that Opensimulator has that aren't directly traceable to SecondLife innovations. By and large, when LL introduce something new the OpenSimulator Devs get to work replicating it. I don't see much evidence of a reverse-direction flow. Varregions could be back-ported into SL, as could the ability to write text directly to a prim face, but there isn't much else I have found there that makes me think "SL needs this now"

LL developers do seem to do the ground-breaking work that then seems to inspire Opensimulator devs, and Coffee's proposals, which I agree with, would bring a new development phase into the two worlds.

[Syo Emerald]

I don't even know why anyone would need any metaverse anyway.

SL turned out to be niche product and isn't completely used in the way it once was envisioned.

[Mr Amore]

Does LL have a product worth selling?

SL is aging technology, at this stage it's like promoting adoption of 3G, when then world is transitioning to 5G.

AAA game developers are turning to the mobile market, it's where consumers are gaming/socializing today and consequently it's more profitable than desktop. Meanwhile LL have pulled the plug on their mobile viewer. Trying to sell a non-Mobile, non-VR metaverse is a proposition from the 1990s.

Then there's the SL viewer, another relic from a bygone era. Efforts by @animats are showing it's possible to build a modern viewer for existing content. Even if LL were to step up today and begin work on a modern viewer, it'll take until 2025 to replace the existing client.

The real winners of SL are the content creators, the residents who learned to build and profited from their stores. I know a fair few who had this latent, creative talent they hadn't tapped into until SL. And now they make incredible things. I myself learned to script and mesh from SL, the content I'd like to release is drastically limited by the dimensions and features we're given. At one time I questioned why certain gaming systems didn't exist in SL, and now I can list every obstacle I've personally encountered.

I like SL, I really do, but the stagnation in development leaves me bitter. Until LL make a substantial commitment to invest and upgrade the platform, it's going nowhere.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Mr Amore

[Katherine Heartsong]

I suspect that the key here to what the "metaverse" actually is, as Coffee has eluded to, is some form of open/inter-operable set of "worlds".

The common standards need to be only a few ... how to connect/enter an individual world, how to fundamentally navigate/move through that space, what a physical object is, and what defines the representation of you (an avatar) in these worlds. The idea of being a broker of these sorts of things might fall to LL (hopefully not FB), but I see a lot of possibilities for many different entities to offer pieces of this reality that stay within the overall open guidelines, without any one company having to be the overall "owner".

You might get dozens of firms offering avatars and their animations. Clothing much like today where certain companies make outfits for certain of these brands. World building companies offering pre-made or customized world spaces of varying size and scale, that could have attributes assigned to them (things like gravity/physics, maturity rating, direct links to partner or similar spaces, to sheer size/landscaping etc) depending on their resources. These worlds could be as crowded as clubs and concerts and malls, to just your small little home (or home"s", since maybe your dragon avatar and human male persona don't share the same sort of decorating ideas :)) You'd have everything from large 3D open worlds with the quality of AAA video games, down to small cottages in a hidden glen.

My vision is that all of these things could interact with one another based on a set of open-source rules that, much like the core set of HTML, for example, everyone buys into. So whatever my avatar was could move from space to space seamlessly, much like TPing from one sim to another.

Now how you get a "directory" of all the worlds, not sure. Maybe it's simply web search? Basically, the metaverse is a "you" that you define in the moment exploring whatever worlds in 3D that you want.

But this walled garden idea where I can't move my SL "me" around to other experiences? These aren't metaverses, they are small isolated instances of closed spaces that are not a meta anything.

PS. And as much as I love SL, my goodness, the three-decade designer in me recognizes how stagnant efforts are with it. It's creaking along. Trying to hold onto this antiquated code is going to be the death-knell one day. It's like there are no real innovative ideas and just building additional scaffolding to keep the house from falling down. You're going to have to tear the bandage off at some point and cause some pain, or remain just what we are. A backwater of 50,000 concurrent users when there are existing platforms with 10x that amount.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Katherine Heartsong

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Expand the developer/resources/new-features workforce  by a significant amount.

People who haven't spent some time recently in the Opensimulator worlds might not realise how advanced Opensimulator has become. It has some things tht SL doesln't, such as variable-sized regions. But, from my perspective, there are only a few things that Opensimulator has that aren't directly traceable to SecondLife innovations. By and large, when LL introduce something new the OpenSimulator Devs get to work replicating it. I don't see much evidence of a reverse-direction flow. Varregions could be back-ported into SL, as could the ability to write text directly to a prim face, but there isn't much else I have found there that makes me think "SL needs this now"

LL developers do seem to do the ground-breaking work that then seems to inspire Opensimulator devs, and Coffee's proposals, which I agree with, would bring a new development phase into the two worlds.

Varregions, NPC's, Text on prims etc are small details of the feature sets. In the context of this thread I would point to Opensim's server architecture options along with its hypergrid capability, which as you know allows greatly expanded capability by allowing teleports between independent, standalone grids, so much so that in theory it could allow 7.5 billion people interconnectedness in virtual 3d worlds. Not all in one place at the same time but at least allows for the visiting between hypergrid capable grids and standalones running on even old laptops etc.

As far as continuing development of features is concerned, I would just say that there are certain developers suffering from prima donna-ism in only being willing to include their own code and design in the software and I don't think Secondlife is exempt from that either. Whether either development team can break out of that is doubtful in my mind but i do hope to be proved wrong. 

  

[Istelathis]

2 hours ago, Syo Emerald said:

I don't even know why anyone would need any metaverse anyway.

SL turned out to be niche product and isn't completely used in the way it once was envisioned.

We really don't need one, but people may eventually want one while browsing stores or various "sites" online.  I imagine at some point, when technology has advanced far enough that we can easily slip into a VR world and it feels as though we are there, it will be more desirable by others.  At this point, I don't think it offers most people very much, it is a novelty and entertaining for some of us - but it is much easier for most people just to browse a web site than to put on some clunky goggles, and try to find what they are looking for in a 3d world.  

At this point, my understanding of a multiverse is more akin to a centralized service that handles all of your information in a 3d environment.  I think Facebook wants in on that, and feels we are approaching a point in our history where they get to be put in that position.  If this is their intent, I really hope they flop.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Istelathis

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

39 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

As far as continuing development of features is concerned, I would just say that there are certain developers suffering from prima donna-ism in only being willing to include their own code and design in the software and I don't think Secondlife is exempt from that either.

This is where I think LL would win out over the OpenSimulator devs. Pima-donna technical tantrums are usually quelled by somebody in command wielding the big "business case" stick. Companies do this because their prime objective is for company survival (via profitability/adherence to regulatory conditions...), and technical preferences have to bow to this. There is no such set of controls in the free-for-all of the Openssimulator world.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

5 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

We really don't need one, (a metaverse)

We didn't need SecondLife before it arrived. We didn't need mobile phones for years, we got along fine with maps before there were sat-navs, many things became desirable against the pundit's pronouncements at the time of their genesis. What people want is one of these elusive quantities that every business strives to answer, and half the puzzle is that we often don't know what e want until somebody plonks it on a plate in front of us.

[Syo Emerald]

1 minute ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

We didn't need SecondLife before it arrived.

And we still don't "need" it. Its a niche entertainment program, not a fundamental change to the world, in that its either completly new, re-invents the wheel or solves a problem in a significantly better way.

3 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

We didn't need mobile phones for years, we got along fine with maps before there were sat-navs

But those inventions provide something significant. Of course you can manage to do things without them, but it makes a process a lot easier and provides things that weren't possible before. This isn't about inventing something and artificially creating a need for it. People always wanted better navigation and more acessable information and communication. I'm still waiting for facebook and co. to explain what their metaverse idea is supposed to do. What problem does it solve? What solution does it improve?

[Marigold Devin]

9 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL works because it parallels early internet design principals, it's very easy to see how at launch, this was perceived as the next stepping stone for the wider internet .. 18 years ahead of it's time.

We can expect to see all the new metaverse hype to repeat all the same mistakes made by Sansar and the other sterile worlds that have come and gone before, although due to platform leverage, they will all be bigger than SL.

Sansar wasn't an upgrade, it was a do over with the lessons learnt from SL applied to modern game platform design. Sansar was intended to be SL 2.0, the design goals were such that it was predicted SL could conceivably be created inside Sansar .. yet it turned out to be yet another dead sterile world nobody cared to invest time in, that ended up almost tanking the company and taking a lot of very senior staff with it.

There is a very real risk we will end up crushed by an upstart colossal failure from FB etc. By their scales, a world with a population a hundred times the size of SL will still be a massive failure. Such a platform however will suck out a lot of the oxygen  and we can only stand to lose a certain percentage before the scales tip and we face irrelevance.

It's with this in mind that I propose what I see as the only viable long term solution.

Ubiquity. 

LL need to pivot from operating a walled garden to being the metaverse's broker. Open source the server code, let people run it on anything, and for a fee, allow it to become part of the SL grid with access to it's currency, markets, assets and DRM.

SL as a platform doesn't need to be the best, or the biggest, it simply needs to be everywhere.

Open source growth of the platform will kick back into advancement of the platform. So long as a 3rd party simulator operates by the required grid & client connectivity protocols, there is no reason why it can't be radically different from the fixed offering we have today and that raising tide will lift all ships. Run the LL server, opensim or roll your own to your own needs and specifications.

Other companies could and should be encouraged to offer their own brokerage services, their own asset libraries, grids and currencies. Simulators could connect to multiple grid services and offer combined services to end users. LL backed by Tilia enter the field with a massive head start and home field advantage. A far cry from the impending messaverse we're about to witness.

We can not depend on FB's (etc) inevitable flubs, failures, scandals and miss steps to leave us unscathed. Yes it's going to be a trash fire and we can poke fun from the peanut gallery, but to not take the changing landscape as an existential threat would be a fatal blunder.

There is of course a couple of big elephants in the room to address, that being concerns over DRM, piracy and scalability.

Piracy as a behavior is inevitable, it happens inside SL already, and would naturally increase should the walls come down. However, as with all forms of media piracy observed to date, the overall impact can be limited by strong controls over access to the grid infrastructure. Profitability demands legitimacy and accountability and that will put pressure simulator operators to keep their houses in order lest they find themselves out in the cold. Platform growth will also do much to limit the overall impact. It's also important to note we're not powerless and unable to push back.

Scalability is a key issue and bigger concern in this plan, as we are all painfully aware certain parts of the SL platform do not uniformly scale (group chat being a notable example we're all familiar with, there are others). All parts of the LL service as broker must scale in the same way the wider internet scales, and again, LL have the advantage over competing grids in that they already know all the pinch points and have almost 2 decades experience.

 

We win by becoming Apache, or nginx, or MySQL or email. Built on a set of open standards accessible to all. 

And by Win, I mean survive.

I'm not at all concerned about FB going Meta. While Second Life already did a long time ago what it seems FB are planning to do in the near future, knowing what a niche market Second Life is can only mean a heck of a lot of people will be even more alienated from FB than they are now, and Zuckerberg doesn't realise how many of FB's users are already only hanging by the most tenuous of threads. 

It's going to be a rollercoaster of a ride to be on or just to watch from the sidelines. I plan on doing both! Zuckerberg's ambition has reignited my love for my Second Life, and as big as he thinks he is, the further he has got to fall and crash and burn he will. 

I have no technical words or terms to use. I'm still so noob. (Laughs out loud.)

[bigmoe Whitfield]

LL would need to have the central asset system and the code be proprietary 100%,  meaning,  everything from that end, sending and reciving encrypted with LL only having the keys, stored off system type deal.   otherwise, this will never work.

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

What do you propose that Secondlife do that Opensimulator has not already been doing?

Opensim != SL Infrastructure in the same way Gimp != Photoshop.

As it stands, Opensim is a backwater for people who have been banned from SL for *that* or who wish to participate in *that* without a ban.

If it was even half the things you claim it to be, it would be bigger and more active than SL. It's never come close.

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Why do you think that Second Life's structure is good enough that other companies would want to do that?

Modern SL grid infrastructure has come on a long way since the dark days of string, sticky tape and the asset server being down.

The SL grid infrastructure also has all of us attached to it.

2 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

SL is aging technology, at this stage it's like promoting adoption of 3G, when then world is transitioning to 5G.

Web pages are aging technology.

The internet's history is littered with the corpses of excellent technologies that failed to achieve ubiquity.

2 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

AAA game developers are turning to the mobile market, it's where consumers are gaming/socializing today and consequently it's more profitable than desktop. Meanwhile LL have pulled the plug on their mobile viewer. Trying to sell a non-Mobile, non-VR metaverse is a proposition from the 1990s.

Mostly due to the lure of microtransactions .. which we've had since day one.

Much of the problems SL presents getting into the mobile space are asset management based, the mobile platform just doesn't have the horsepower to do all the on-the-fly collection and assembly the standard desktop viewer spends all its time doing. This is something that needs to be solved server side. An open access grid based on standards defined by LL would present a blank slate for mobile development and allow for that problem to be solved independent of LL.

A simple example would a mobile proxy region that assembles and bakes content from a regular region into something tailored specifically to the limitations presented by a mobile device. This would of course come with some serious limitations to SL functionality from accessing devices, however is anyone on a cell phone really going to creating content.

2 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

Then there's the SL viewer, another relic from a bygone era. Efforts by @animats are showing it's possible to build a modern viewer for existing content. Even if LL were to step up today and begin work on a modern viewer, it'll take until 2025 to replace the existing client.

The SL viewer presents itself as a relic, it's very easy to look at how little the UI has advanced and assume that's the viewer.

If Animats puts the stock Linden UI over the top of his vulkan render pipeline, it's going to be in the same boat. It might run better, but that alone isn't sufficient to for it to be perceived as a major advancement by non technical end users.

2 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

but the stagnation in development leaves me bitter. Until LL make a substantial commitment to invest and upgrade the platform, it's going nowhere.

That's a perceptual misconception. The SL grid has undergone significant platform advancement over the years.

But from an end users perspective that's like putting a better database on a website, no one see's the database.

As someone who's been here since the early days, SL is night and day different, It now does just work. The grid isn't down, content delivery problems have gone away, outages are rare, it's faster and smoother than it's ever been. But it still looks like SL and is used like SL ... which is more of an us problem than LL.

It's really time for us to be more specific about what platform advancement should actually look like from an end users perspective.

A good example would the rumblings of PBR on the horizon. PBR would be a major step forward for content creators and 3D production workflows. Will average bob see a huge difference in world .. probably not. 

[Coffee Pancake]

59 minutes ago, Marigold Devin said:

I'm not at all concerned about FB going Meta. While Second Life already did a long time ago what it seems FB are planning to do in the near future, knowing what a niche market Second Life is can only mean a heck of a lot of people will be even more alienated from FB than they are now, and Zuckerberg doesn't realise how many of FB's users are already only hanging by the most tenuous of threads. 

It's going to be a rollercoaster of a ride to be on or just to watch from the sidelines. I plan on doing both! Zuckerberg's ambition has reignited my love for my Second Life, and as big as he thinks he is, the further he has got to fall and crash and burn he will. 

I have no technical words or terms to use. I'm still so noob. (Laughs out loud.)

The worry is that he creates a monster that rolls over and crushes us while sleep walking to failure.

The size of the market FB can present is such that it if only syphons off 15% of our most active creators and users, we're left fighting for our lives trying to keep the lights on.

I really can't stress enough just how little movement it can take to hollow out a community in SL and leave it with no hope of ever coming back. We have already seen this happen with some staple SL communities that have been stable since the start only to evaporate almost overnight. 

It's not going to matter if the monster crashes and burns taking FB with it, that's going to be a very bitter dose of schadenfreude.

[Nick0678]

I hope the "Metaverse" nonsense that the big social/gaming Enterprises are dreaming of in order to make more money isn't going to be some of the same old sh*t that we have already experienced with Second Life, OpenSim, Imvu etc.

We need fresh innovative ideas, not old crap refurbished and rebranded.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Nick0678

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Anything that LL could have done to adapt to this future should have been started 5+ years ago while they were navel-gazing with Sansar. They should have seen the writing on the wall when Facebook bought Oculus. 

As it stands, I highly doubt they will be able to adapt quickly enough before FB or an upstart "Crypto-verse" eats their lunch. Unless there is some major project going on in the background that I am unaware of.

Short-term FB could do some damage, regardless of how successful that proves to be. But long-term, I think the bigger threat is some form of "cryptoverse" coming along and exploding out of nowhere. There is a lot of development and money in that space right now.

Edited November 10, 2021 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[animats]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The SL viewer presents itself as a relic, it's very easy to look at how little the UI has advanced and assume that's the viewer.

If Animats puts the stock Linden UI over the top of his vulkan render pipeline, it's going to be in the same boat. It might run better, but that alone isn't sufficient to for it to be perceived as a major advancement by non technical end users.

Agreed.  Nor do I have any major plans in that direction. I'm just addressing the performance issues.

Mobile is tough. SL on the small screen is just too small. The amount of compute and network bandwidth required is high. You'd need a really high end data plan and a high end phone. SL with cloud rendering is quite feasible now, but you'd be paying maybe $30 a month for server time. And the UI is totally unsuited to mobile.

VR is tough. SL movement in VR would make people nauseous. This is a generic problem with VR in big worlds. VR works best in a very constrained space, like VRChat or Beat Saber.

[Persephone Emerald]

I wonder what would happen if Facebook/Meta bought Sansar or Fortnite to use as a base for it's 3D Metaverse concept? Horizons seems horrible, so I doubt people will want to use it. Sansar and Fortnite have nice graphics and have both been used as virtual music venues that drew in substantial crowds and media attention. If a platform such as those could be used to house 3D stores for RL products, would a real capitalist metaverse be able to take off? Think of "The Street" in Snow Crash or the Oasis in Ready Player One. Both utilized selling products and services that could be used in physical reality as well as in virtual reality. Facebook has shown it can market it's userbase to companies that are willing to pay for the privilege of using the FB platform. If they can make a visually attractive and interesting 3D platform, will people want to spend enough time there to make it an equally appealing platform for these same companies? 

I don't think Second Life can win the Metaverse. It's too much of a niche market and doesn't have the capitol to expand to the extent that Meta could. I agree that their only hope for being a noteworthy player in the future Metaverse would be as a broker of platforms and products to other companies, such as it hoped to do with Sansar and now hopes to do with Tillia.

[Vanity Fair]

12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Sansar wasn't an upgrade, it was a do over with the lessons learnt from SL applied to modern game platform design. Sansar was intended to be SL 2.0, the design goals were such that it was predicted SL could conceivably be created inside Sansar .. yet it turned out to be yet another dead sterile world nobody cared to invest time in, that ended up almost tanking the company and taking a lot of very senior staff with it.

I was part of Sansar since I was invited into the closed beta in 2016/2017, and I was there for the whole crazy ride. Sansar is now on life support (the company that bought it from Linden Lab, called Wookey, furloughed all of its staff recently, and I believe that they could shut down at any moment without warning). Being there from beginning to end, I still marvel at how Linden Lab thought they could build a new virtual world/social VR platform and just put it out there, and expect it to sell itself in this competitive marketplace for metaverse platforms. "Build it and they will come" might have worked for SL in 2003 but it sure ain't gonna work nowadays. You have to PROMOTE yourself to get noticed.

Also, Linden Lab could have done a lot of things to try and entice SL users to a) visit Sansar and b) make them want to stay, build worlds, create content, and form a new community. Instead, what happened is that Second Life folks (rightly or wrongly) saw Sansar as something which distracted LL from its work on SL, and as a result most SL folks hated Sansar and refused to have anything to do with it, hastening its downfall in my opinion. It also didn't help that Linden Lab made a bet that many people would be owning high-end VR headsets tethered to high-end PCs with good graphics cards, and instead the Oculus Quest wireless headset took off.

I still shake my head and wonder "what if?". Say a prayer for Sansar, it needs it. 

 

 

Edited November 10, 2021 by Vanity Fair