Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.
Two mentions of the "spirit of Second Life". As you would expect from references to the deceased.
The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start.
The next generation virtual world will be BETTER than Second Life. Has any company EVER kept an inferior/obsolete product in circulation for long?
That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over,
Your rudimentary building or scripting skills, perhaps? Certainly not your inventory, name or rapidly depreciating in price land!
just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience
As opposed to a bog-standard average platform, which is what Second Life has become
and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.
Yes, they're cutting the cord.
Does this mean we’re giving up on Second Life?
Yes. But don't panic the naive masses just yet:
Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity.
We'll keep the servers running until it makes financial sense to switch them off but make no mistake, Second Life will be the poor man's version of Virtual World MkII
It’s still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we’ll share as much as we can.
Will that be BEFORE or AFTER everybody purchases an Oculus Rift to experience the lag in 20-20 vision?
If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited!
Get saving up, this won't be free
Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.
Truly fulfill the promise - ie: we know Second Life has failed to do so. We won't cease our rolling restarts every now and then, but remember - we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life