Ciaran Laval

March 10, 2014

Linden Lab Followed The Rule Rather Than The Exception With Versu

Although many of us are disappointed with Linden Lab’s refusal to sell the IP and codebase of Versu to Emily Short it should be pointed out that Linden Lab are following a well trodden path. When titles shut down there is often a clamour for it to be saved or for the code to be made Open Source but this does not happen very often. There is no Open Source version of Cloud Party for example, it just vanished without much of a trace.

When City Of Heroes closed down there were campaigns to keep it alive and calls for it to be open sourced, but alas those calls fell on deaf ears. However Open Sourcing a project isn’t as straight forward as some may think, as Shava Suntzu points out in the comments of a previous post of mine about Versu :

There are lots of reasons applications can’t be open sourced. They may include proprietary libraries, or work by people who won’t release rights.

On top of this Linden Lab most definitely spent money on Versu, as Emily herself explained :

To be clear, Versu benefitted a lot from Linden’s early support, and I’m grateful for that. Without external support, what we would have now is not a well-developed open source project; what we would have is nothing in particular, because I would have needed to get a job doing something else.

Emily was of course a paid employee of Linden Lab so it’s not as if Linden Lab have taken her work away without recompense. In situations like this it’s all too easy to paint the company as the baddie … much too easy and whereas it does seem silly to spend money on a project and then shelve it when others are willing to take it off a company’s hands, this is generally the norm, rather than the exception.

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March 8, 2014

Report Compares Second Life, World Of Warcraft And Eve-Online To Real Life

GamesBeat have published a very intersting article : Comparing the virtual worlds of Warcraft, Second Life, and Eve Online to our own yields some surprising stats. The article itself links to a funky report by digital marketing agency Epiphany with a blurb of :

The online world is very different to our own, with new rules, new races, and new ways of living. There are, however, some similarities – take a look at our breakdown of the internet’s biggest virtual worlds to find out how they measure up against real life.

This isn’t the most detailed report in the world but the site does provide some interesting stats. Introducing Second Life they say:

Second Life is seen as an online marketplace as well as a game, and many players have been able to earn serious cash thanks to the easy way in-game currency can be sold for real-world money. More casual players use the game to build, customise and create, developing a literal second life in which their character can live out the player’s desires and fantasies – whether that’s a mansion and a helipad or the romance of a lifetime!

The website has a series of icons which lead to other little gems of information when clicked, I’m not going to cover them all but I’ll mention a few. In terms of Second Life they point out that English is the most popular language with 54% of users speaking that language, which compares to 18% in the real world.

In terms of user growth we’re told :

Between 2006 and 2011, global internet usage doubled in growth – in the same timeframe, Second Life saw a 4000% increase in users.

That’s rather impressive. Another interesting point is made with regards to financial institutions and economies, although I’m not sure things happened exactly as they seem to suggest :

In 2007, Second Life saw a huge financial incident which mirrored the bank crises we’ve seen in the real world since the start of the recession. When the developers announced that gambling in-game would be officially banned, thousands of users rushed to Ginko Financial, an in-game bank offering astronomical interest rates, to retrieve and sell the currency from their accounts. This caused a run on the bank which eventually resulted in a complete shut-down – wiping out around $750,000 (£457,736) in real world money. The incident has since been used by financial experts across the web as an example of what happens when banks fail to self-regulate.

The part where I disagree with them is regarding the rush of people to Ginko. I don’t remember that happening, I do remember the Ginko scandal but I don’t recall a rush due to the gambling ban. I can recall arguing with people that if real life banks faced a close down in the manner that Second Life banks did that there would be a rush on the banks that they wouldn’t be able to handle.

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March 8, 2014

Linden Lab TOS Issues Should Be Rectified Sooner Rather Than Later In Light Of Versu Decision

First of all there are some key differences between The Second Life TOS change and what has happened to Versu. The most glaringly obvious apparently being that Linden Lab are not asking Second Life content creators to give up their intellectual property rights and they are not asking for an exclusive license.

Emily Short who was a main developer of Versu was employed by Linden Lab and would have known the details of providing her content to Linden Lab. Emily appears to have lost control of her own content in the process but that is not something untoward if the terms of the contract stated this was the case.

Terms are important and this is why Second Life content creators are not happy about the TOS change by Linden Lab. One particular cause of concern for Second Life content creators has been :

Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same.

Whereas Second Life content creators do not give up their intellectual property rights, they give up a hell of a lot more than they previously had to in other areas. The old TOS for this part read :

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers, Websites, or other areas of the Service, you hereby automatically grant Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the Service.

That’s a far more friendly reading TOS than the new one. There has been some speculation that the reason for the TOS change was due to SL Go from Onlive. The arguments goes that Linden Lab need to allow Onlive to use Second Life content and therefore the TOS had to be changed to allow this service to run.

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March 8, 2014

Linden Lab Say No To Sale Of IP And Codebase For Versu

Inara Pey has reported that Lab says “no” to an independent future for Versu. Inara’s blog post links to a blog post from Emily Short, who had been trying to negotiate a deal to buy the IP and codebase for Versu after Linden Lab announced they would no longer be supporting the project :

After careful consideration, Linden Lab has decided to cease development and support for dio, Versu, and Creatorverse. We’re grateful for those who took the time to experiment with these products in their early days, but ultimately we have determined that due to a number of factors, we and our customers will be best served by focusing our efforts on continuing to provide exceptional service and compelling new experiences for the users of our other products.

So Linden Lab don’t see a future for the project, but like the boy with the ball, they’ve decided to take their ball home instead of letting someone else play with it. Emily had previously tried to convince Linden Lab to Open Source the project, which Linden Lab refused to do.

Then Emily tried to negotiate a deal to buy the IP and codebase, which as Emily announced on her blog, ended up with a no :

So for those who were curious, Linden has now given me a definite no about selling me the codebase and IP.

However there is another pain point in all of this for Emily. Blood and Laurels, which had just been completed has obviously now been shelved, but as Emily explains in the comments, Linden Lab own the text :

Blood and Laurels can’t meaningfully be rewritten — they own all the text and images as well as the engine it runs on. I was working on that story concept, on and off, for nearly 15 years, so having finally finished it and been really excited about it, only to have it vanish into ether, makes me sad. Still, on a total scale of possible bad things to have happen to one, it’s not very far along the bad thing spectrum. So we go on to the next.

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March 8, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 9 – SL Go

Not surprisingly, the latest edition of The Drax Files Radio Hour is mostly about OnLive SL Go. The show opens with Draxtor trying to order coffee…. it’s $2.50 and then Drax orders breakfast, after getting Marissa in the cafe or coffee shop to introduce the show. Marissa has never heard of Second Life but she does know about virtual worlds.

Now you may be feeling jaded by all the SL Go talk but I highly recommend you listen to this because Draxtor interviews Nate Barsetti. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to whom Nate was and listening to him I thought “This guy has done his homework, he knows what he’s talking about regarding Second Life“. Then I was made aware of the fact that Nate was once also known as Scout Linden.

Actually I need to pause here because the problem of a podcast is that people pronounce words funny. For example route should sound like root, it shouldn’t sound like rout! Then there’s beta, which should sound like beeta, rather than bayta! Fortunately nobody mentioned anything about a buoy, which should sound like boy. Ok where was I? Oh yes, Nate! The Nate interview is really interesting, he talks from, as I said, a viewpoint of someone who knows Second Life.

The thing is that because Nate knows Second Life, he knows about latency, he therefore knows that the way SL Go works will get away with a little bit of latency. The feedback on latency for SL Go has been good, people have reported scenes rez faster than they do on their own machine, it did for me. So you know, in this sense, the product is on to something.

Nate is also a Second Life resident and involved in some sort of roleplaying according to the interview, the bottom line is he knows his onions. I really enjoyed this part of show.

Drax follows this with an interview with Dennis Harper, a senior product manager at Onlive. Dennis has a long history of the gaming industry and has previously worked at companies such as Turbine, however he explains that he wasn’t familiar with Second Life when the project landed. However Dennis read a book, the title of which I can’t quite catch in the podcast. Dennis explored Second Life, as a beautiful female avatar … and found that people would give him free stuff!

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