Second SonyLife???

So often we see small businesses grow only to sell out to larger corporate entities once they start to maintain a level of growth and profit. With 100000 members and all this growth momentum perhaps its merely a matter of 1 to 2 years before a corporate giant such as SONY online entertainment buys Linden Lab and all the rights to SL.

How would SL change under that kind of corporate ownership? I think SL would no longer be the "hands off" virtual environment that LL would prefer it to be, and instead would become a controlled world.

Is it likely that LL will sell out, when, and how will that affect our SL world?

I for one welcome our new Sony overlords.

For practical matters, such as getting work done, Second Life doesn't seem to be in a competitive position compared to many existing services that allow video chat, audio conversation that can reach people who aren't members, maintaining permanent records of chat, convenient multi-party chat, trading word processing files, spreadsheets, etc., real-time collaborative spreadsheets, documents, etc.

As a game engine SL seems pretty weak, it is very slow, bug ridden, can't reliably display all the avatars in a group, shows gray textures hundreds or thousands of times a day to someone who uses it for several hours and goes exploring, is written in such a fashion that when it gets crowded even the text chat gets laggy just in typing. etc.

What SL is good at is simple innaccurate interactive 3D modeling and scripting for personal use but not in applications that need to work reliably.

There may not be enough people who want to play 3D house and virtual legos mindstorms to interest mainstream game companies.

Hey at least under fascist regimes the trains purportedly run on time. I don't know that the Luna train runs at all.

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

Ralph, have you been eating your crayons again? Those are for coloring, not for eating! (moves both crayons and hot cocoa/coffee maker slooowly away from Eggy)

I think SL is too far out of Sony's formula for them to be interested in it. They have a very narrow interest in games, and since they make their profit by bundling them, they want something that will appeal to their proven market - hence their acquisition of the lame duck that is Matrix Online.

With the recent release of the XBox 360, all one would need to do is spread the rumour that SL was being considered by Sony. Microsoft would immediately buy up the system in a fit of 'competitiveness'.

Would only be a matter of time before we're all driving dune buggies and shooting space priates on 'Halo III -> the SL grid'.


- Newfie

I would think porting SL to run on the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles would be a great way to get up to that 1,000,000 mark by year-end. However, I think console gamers expect a higher degree of polish than SL currently offers. Right now, the framerate is too low, the draw distance is too low (unless you want a slideshow - and even the max draw distance of 512 meters is paltry compared to other MMOs), scripts and physics are subject to all kinds of slowdowns, vehicles go into the twilight zone when you go over a sim border, the sound engine has had serious bugs for over a year and a half, and so on.

Maybe this will be the year that LL gets a handle on all that. I've got a feeling that we're in for some spectacular improvements in 2006.

Halo is not about space pirates. Halo is about defending Earth and her colonies from a vicious and unrelenting alliance of alien lifeforms that seeks to end humanity as we know it.

/me huffs with fanboy annoyance

I think Nintendo might be a better fit, especially with the potentially immervise quality of the new Revolution controller. But I wonder if other companies wouldn't prefer to start from the ground up, rather than inherit SL's problems and limitations. Personally I hope something along the lines of SL shows up on the 360. There's an awful lot of people out there buying ringtones.

Yeah, space pirates are Metroid - a far superior game to Halo.

Speaking of Nintendo stuff, what we really need is Nintendo to buy SL so we can use it with the revolution controller.

You people are forgetting that huge numbers of older folks play SL, more than any other online game. SL appeals to people who were brought up on the future of the 1970's, not the kids who play Halo and all the latest Sony games. If there is a company that services the over 50 market, *that* is the one that might buy out SL.

That would be Nintendo then. (Assuming their new strategy works.)

Yeah, you and me, Dianne, we'll take over. I've got threepence in my piggy bank.

3 cheers for corporate greed!!!!!

Attention SL residents, your tier cost just doubled and there are no more free accounts!

On the plus side, they would probably toss enough money at it to fix all of the technological issues we face. Would you may more for no lag is the question. If LL continues its success, it is a mater of time till someone gives them a check large enough to buy em out.

AARP SL?

I can see it now:

"If you're aged 50 to 80 and thought it would be difficult to afford teir..."

no it would only be a very short time before SL is closed or even buggier then it is now. You think support for Mac would continue if SL is bought by M$? Linux support would never happen. SL would be moved to Direct x so it only works in windows and soon after it would be closed because there would be no more updates and security holes would persist forever.

Now see I disagree, I think ther is a HUGE market of people who want to play 3d house and virtual legos. This is the most untapped market in gaming. For me the problem is that these are not looked on as strengths in SL, but pooh-poohed as silliness.

The potential applications in shopping alone are astounding. But it would take some focus to untap this potential. I know it seems silly, but more people play spidder solitair on thier comupters than play half-life, and we live in a nation that bought pet rocks and spends $250 bucks on jeans. Its not lack of market, but lack of marketing that holds SL back in many ways.

wow yes the new controler (3D movement for those unfamiliar)..

wow imagine using it to cast for fish...

or slash in dark life

or to move a cursor on screen for building

or use it for *blush..

NO NO NONO NO BADD BAAAAAD IDEA

For a major corporation like Sony, 100,000 is hardly a lot of members. I think they would be more likely to build their own platform from scratch

True, but I think Sl will be spun off on the million user mark. And why develop from scratch what is developed for you. Sony, and anyone else could wait and watch.

Sony Online Entertainment:

Good: Havoc 3, advanced graphics etc.
Bad: No access to company officials and nerf anything that makes money.

Your response seems a bit chaotic.

Your are right about people playing solitaire. They would ignore playing house and legos in Second Life and play solitaire instead. I'm not familiar with spider solitaire, I am talking about the same old type of solitaire that one played on DOS machines.

As for shopping, the cruddiness of shopping for SL goods in-world made a market place for slexchange.com, slboutique.net, and secondserver.net, because people don't want to go through the tedium of being in a pretend store that doesn't even have any directional signs must less a search function that directs you to the right aisle and spot on the virtual aisle to find what you are looking for. This market niche will probably vanish when LL makes uses of their OpenGLification of the Mozilla code and creates a decent in-world shopping system and skims off a tiny piece of the action. Then the stores and malls, for the most part, will serve no function.

The playing house part currently has the hideous neighbor problem to deal with, that needs to get solved before playing house will be mass market. As for building, well, there are only so many people who will slide the cursor perpendicular to the direction they want to move or copy something to get to the ruler so the snap to ruler function actually functions every time they want to make user the ruler snap. People get tired of doing things so stupidly counter-intuitive and repetitive.

if any company was fitting to buy out SL and to keep the core values in place while expanding the market and helping to stabilize the software, i imagine it would be.. Google.

those crazy Google guys are apparently planning on whipping up a computer that would sell at places like Wal-Mart and would also feature a non-Windows OS.. something new, something.. Google-esque.

do i think this will happen? probably not.. at least not anytime soon. if SL were ever going to be bought out, it would have the pre-requisite of Philip getting completely burnt out on his baby first. not to mention, all the other oldbie Lindens would have to want to throw in the towel.. or switch allegiances to the new masters.

if it does happen, it would probably not be for another 5 years or more.. SL would have to get out of what feels like an extensive Beta stage first.

i also imagine that any potential buy-outs would have to be by a company that would carry on a similar torch as Philip and the gang, otherwise the sale would never be approved. not to mention, they would have all of us to deal with.. lol.