An odd article has appeared in The Economic Times Of India : A Tumkur start-up VentureNext earns Rs 10 lakh a month by creating virtual creatures. The article is odd because it starts with a headline about how a startup has been selling virtual creatures in Second Life and making a living at it, diverts in the middle to a discussion about online gaming and ends by suggesting that Second Life is dwindling and that business people are turning to new ventures, such as Bitcoin.
The virtual creatures in question are Fennux, which are a breedable creature within Second Life. I’m not sure how popular these have been but they have been around for quite some time. Indeed I can recall that back in 2013 their adverts managed to find their way to the Second Life forum :
However Sathvik Vishwanath. the name behind Fennux is taking his company in a new direction , they are moving into bitcoin territory :
“I’m not able to constantly develop new things for Fennux because of my new startup. I’ll keep it running though, When one door shuts, others open, That’s just how the Internet is.”
According to the article, his new startup UnoCoin, raised $250,000 (Rs 1.5 crore) from Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. That’s an interesting change of direction.
In the middle of the article we see a quote from Alok Kejriwal, the CEO of online gaming company Games2Win :
“If you said Second Life, I’d say yawn.Who cares about Second Life anymore, it was Second Life, then came Zynga, Candy Crush and so on. Tides turn so fast in the online gaming world, If you spend the same amount of effort mining Bitcoins, you’d probably do better.“
Interesting that someone in the online gaming market doesn’t think much of Second Life as a relevant place for online gaming these days. However that’s one person’s viewpoint and from reading the article, Second Life isn’t that popular in India, although I’m not sure where they get their stats from :
Last month, about 4,000 users logged in from India, spending a total of more than 67 thousand hours in Second Life. Linden Lab said transactions worth over $3.2 billion (Rs 19,400 crore) were carried out among the nearly million monthly active users.
So I suppose it’s not that surprising that in a country where Second Life doesn’t exactly have a lot of traction, people view Second Life as a place that nobody cares about anymore. However the article also touches upon the announcement of Linden Lab’s new virtual world and here we can see that the impression that some people have taken from the announcement is that Second Life is on the rocky road to ruin :
However, Second Life’s popularity has been dwindling. In February, Linden Lab announced a next generation virtual world modelled on Second Life and fans are hoping for a revival.
Linden Lab were in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t, scenario over talk of their new world. People will read between lines that don’t exist but the reality is that Second Life is still impressively healthy for a platform that celebrated it’s eleventh birthday this year. Eleven years is a long time in technology circles and Second Life looks like it will be here for a few more years yet.