Virtual Worlds – Page 162

February 10, 2014

Introducing New Users To Land Beyond Linden Homes

Mr Altberg is apparently late getting to the office today, so I’ll wish him luck with his delayed flight and hope that he doesn’t have to work too late to make up for it. There has been a lot of commentary, advice, queries and so forth for the new Linden Lab CEO. Amidst all the talk, hope and good will a comment about Linden Homes and premium membership struck me:

Maybe I missed something when I signed up for Premium in May 2013, but I don’t recall ever being offered the option of 512 OR a Linden Home. It was more like “welcome to Premium membership, here is your Linden home, pick the one you want.”

Linden homes work well, they have really good occupancy rates and people are obviously ok with the process of finding and selecting one. Indeed I can recall posts about there not being enough availability of Linden Homes.

One bonus of a Linden Home is the extra space and prim allowance you get because of the way they don’t actually sit on the parcel your prims do. Another bonus is that there is no cost for a Linden Home parcel inworld.

However where matters get a little foggy is that people don’t seem to understand there is another option, that of acquiring a blank mainland 512 and using that instead of a Linden Home.

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February 8, 2014

One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists

On the 10th October 2007 the Reuters news agency in Second Life published a news story : IBM, Linden Lab seek open borders for virtual worlds.

IBM and Linden Lab said on Tuesday they will work on ways to let people use a single online persona in different online services.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.

The idea was that you’d be able to create an avatar in one virtual world and take that avatar to other virtual worlds. This was an extremely interesting development. There’s a quote in that article from then Vice President of business at Linden Lab, Ginsu Yoon:

“When you talk about avatars going in and out of virtual worlds, we truly believe that expands the market …..It’s not a situation where there is a fixed pie and everyone is fighting for slices. It’s really key to making the market bigger.”

So Linden Lab were interested and within a year, further exciting developments would be unveiled. On the 8th July 2008 … I think .. American dates are arse about face, yes I’m sure they mean 8th July 2008, anyway on this date, Hamilton Linden revealed that a major breakthrough had been achieved in Virtual Worlds :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we’ve done — and what still lies ahead.

There was even a video, directed by Torley. The existence of the video of course led to accusations that the whole thing was faked, that the OpenSim grid landing never really happened and people pointed out that a flag was waving when it should not have been as there is no air in the OpenSim atmosphere. Others suggested that there should have been a crater or at least some imprints from the landing from one distant virtual world to another. However I disagree with the conspiracy theorists, this really happened and here’s the video to prove it:

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February 7, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour – Episode 5

The fifth episode of The Drax Files Radio hour, presented by Draxtor Despres and Jo Yardley is yet another excellent listen. Naturally the show discussed Ebbe Altberg’s arrival as CEO and has input from Strawberry Singh, Vic Mornington and Robin Harper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unfortunately Robin didn’t surprise me and turn up as CEO but it was really nice to hear Robin talk. Vic raises some excellent points about Linden Lab embracing the community, because that has been lacking for a number of years and a perfect person for the community would be Robin Harper!

The show is critical of Mitch Wagner’s information week article about High Fidelity, which I’ve covered here recently. The reason for the criticism is that Drax took umbrage at Mitch saying of Second Life : “it’s mostly forgotten”

Personally, I disagree with Drax’s assessment, not because I agree with Mitch’s comment, but because I feel Drax may have taken it a little bit out of context, the full comment was :

“Second Life proved bewitching for many people. I was one of them. But most people sneered. It’s still around, and it got a lot right, but it’s mostly forgotten.”

When you consider that many articles about Second Life have comments along the lines of “Second Life, is that still around?” it’s refreshing to see a journalist say that it is still around. However more to the point, Mitch Wagner’s Second Life experience was not fly by night, he put a lot of time and effort into his Second Life ventures and although he sounds a bit jaded by it all these days, he was most definitely an enthusiast at one point and knows a lot about Second Life. Maybe they could invite Mitch onto the show?

Moving on, this week’s episode has a wonderful interview with Mike Mikula, a former teen grid resident who talks of how he surprised his parents with his Second Life income and how the old teen grid worked and why teens really wanted to be on the main grid. Mike also talks of what he’s doing now as well as talking of other former teen grid residents, one of whom is employed by Disney these days.

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February 7, 2014

Why The Tier Model Isn’t Dead Yet

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Linden Lab decided to ditch the subscription model and introduce a free to play model, this was all the way back in 2006. Some people still, to this day, feel this was a bad idea. However the numbers tell a somewhat different story.

Second Life was way ahead of the curve in moving away from the subscription model. However coming on for eight years later after that brave change, Second Life is in many ways at a new crossroads and it may well be getting close to the time for plan c.

There’s an argument that if Linden Lab were to half tier prices, there would be an explosion in demand for land that would make up for those lower prices. I don’t buy this argument, but beyond that, I think it would be a crazy gamble for Linden Lab, at this time. However I do firmly believe that Linden Lab need to move away from tier being such a major backbone of their income model.

I’ll link to the same article about how going free to play saved Star Wars The Old Republic as I did in my last post, however this time I’ll quote a different point:

Many of the positive changes were made while players were still leaving, but the impact would not be felt until much later. The group finder was introduced in the third update, and BioWare began the process of free character transfers and server merges. (Yes, he called them server merges.) Ohlen told the audience, “One of the major things you want in an MMORPG is the feeling that there are lots of players playing with you and an easy way of finding friends to adventure with.” These two key additions helped make the next major change that much more successful.

This of course applies to SWTOR, not Second Life but the idea of being able to find people, socialise and have fun are important concepts for Second Life and people in Second Life do like to adventure, some as Orcs as I’ve discussed before but also in all sorts of other forms. However Second Life isn’t really in the position to merge servers, this would cause chaos on the mainland, although in terms of private regions it is unfortunately happening naturally.

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February 7, 2014

Why Subscription Models Aren’t Dead Yet

There’s a discussion on The Elder Scrolls Online forum regarding the forthcoming game’s pricing model. Before we go further, I should point out that the game is known as TESO, which is way too close to Tesco for my liking, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll call it TESO. Anyway, the discussion is largely supportive of the pricing model and on the face of it, the pricing model looks historically like other MMO’s, with an upfront price for the digital edition of USD$59.99 or GBP£49.99 and after the first 30 days a recurring monthly cost of USD$14.99 or GBP£8.99.

However here’s the thing, that pricing model is largely out of date. Games launch this way and then within a year or two, they go to free play. That’s often how it works these days. I went through this with Star Wars : The Old Republic, it was a very similar model and it didn’t end well in terms of being a subscription model, however going free to play saved the galaxy, as reported in Massively at the end of March last year : GDC 2013: James Ohlen on how F2P saved SWTOR:

According to Ohlen, SWTOR was designed to be a subscription-based game, so any F2P option needed to still effectively support the service the way a sub game would. The most successful compensation came in the form of Cartel Packs. In the style of trading card games, these packs would give players random items that they could use in game. And just as in any good TCG, the items in the Cartel Packs could be traded with other players — this time on in-game auction house, the galactic trade network.

There’s part of the key to changing your model and it’s one Linden Lab should pay heed to but I’m not going to talk much about Second Life or Linden Lab in this post, I’ll save that for another post. There will be a little bit more about SL and LL but this post is mostly about TESO.

So with all the evidence staring TESO in the face about the lack of longevity of subscription based MMO’s, why are they going ahead with it? Well if anything, SWTOR leads the way. Initially there will be a big buzz and a lot of people engaging with the game, the cash will flow in and that’s a business model that is hard to ignore.

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