Today’s Phoenix Firestorm question and answer session regarding the future of Second Life has been filmed and is on youTube. I will also in traditional style embed the video at the end of the post. I will point out that if you’re looking for a chat log, this blog will not include the droids you’re looking for. However the lovely Inara Pey may well provide a transcript in the near future.
The session was hosted by Jessica Lyon who was assisted by Lette Ponnier and featured guests Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Linden Lab’s Director Of Global Communications Peter Gray) and Oz Linden, Director Of Open development at Linden Lab and chief Second Life man now that some of Linden Lab are working on the new virtual world space. I will hereby label Oz “The Man Behind The Curtain“, because he is bloody important now in terms of Second Life, not that he wasn’t important before of course, but now he is really really important. Oz is the man behind the scenes, pulling levers, pressing buttons and keeping the magic in Second Life and things will stay this way as long as people believe in Second Life. Oz points out in the discussion that this was a position he really wanted, which is very positive indeed.
Anyway on to the discussion, it runs for almost an hour but if you don’t have that sort of patience you only need to watch the first few minutes to hear Peter Gray reiterate that Second Life is not closing down, Linden Lab have no plans to close Second Life down, investment and development will continue. Rumour has it that if you play this part of the video backwards at the correct speed you will also hear the phrase “The Tier is too damn high” uttered”, but I haven’t been able to confirm that!
Oz makes an early point that is one I’ve long agreed with, people criticise Second Life because they care about Second Life. Oz also talks about the challenges of working with a smaller team and admits that in some ways this is helpful because it helps the team to focus on the important issues. Oz also confirms that whereas the team working on Second Life are smaller than they previously were, it’s still a significant number of people. Oz also adds that the numbers in the team may be dynamic, some people working on the new platform will at times be called upon to work on Second Life and vice versa.
Oz talked of the new experience keys beta, the fact that Linden Lab really are working on improving group chat including hardware upgrades for servers. However there is no quick fix here, it’s going to take a while but they really are working on this. Another part of the team are working on improving the web framework in the viewer where they are moving from webkit to the chromium embedded framework.
There’s also news that they are working on improvements to texture and mesh loading speeds as part of the HTTP Project. Inara Pey touched upon this in her Server Updates blog post.
The discussion wasn’t just between Jessica, Oz and Pete. Lette took questions from the audience and was very firm about no questions on the new platform, which impressed me. The number one question was, to paraphrase “What the bloody hell are you going to do about tier pricing?“, the answer was, Pete admitted, one that was probably going to disappoint, The Tier will remain too damn high for now. Just to clarify, Pete did not utter the words “The Tier Is Too Damn High!“, however he did confirm that there’s currently no planned change to tier pricing, some people in local chat booed at this point.
There was a question about texture memory errors, particularly ATI cards and Oz said that they are working on improvements to make graphics cards perform better and be recognised so that Second Life doesn’t by default decide newer and faster graphics cards are not up to scratch.
Another old favourite came up, will there be more than 42 groups? The answer was rather interesting, the number of groups people are in apparently has a performance impact on group chat lag. There are therefore no current plans to change the number of groups people can belong to. I personally still think the issue lies within all groups being the same and that should be addressed, for example some groups do not require group chat functionality. However that would be a major change and I can’t see that happening.
Another question asked was with regards to virtual landmarks. The idea behind virtual landmarks is that if you change your store or home location in Second Life, your landmark will follow you, so you don’t need to issue new landmarks to everyone. Oz said that this is being looked at and pretty much everyone thinks it’s a good idea.
Another old favourite came up, inworld search! There are no big projects planned for this but there are likely to be a number of smaller projects that may well come together to form a larger solution … or something like that!
Other issues were raised, last names, no plans to change that yet. Governance was raised in terms of griefing etc. This really isn’t Pete and Oz’s area but Oz pointed out that they do work on plugging flaws that allow griefers to prosper and they will continue to do so.
Concern was raised as to whether server and viewer releases would be slowed down, Oz wasn’t really able to answer this but reiterated they would focus on important matters.
A last question was asked about whether Linden Lab had any plans to open source the server code, the answer was a firm no, not at this time. I will have missed things during the session, if you have a spare hour and are interested in the future of Second Life it is well worth finding the time to listen.
An interesting observation from watching this video is that you can follow local chat, some people suggested that since the announcement that Linden Lab are working on another world, businesses have been closing, people have been leaving and sims have been closing down. At times like this it’s best to go to a reliable source, so I went to Tyche Shepherd’s weekly report where Tyche informed us :
Here is yesterday’s report. A net gain of 46 regions this week with Private Estates gaining 7 and Linden Owned up by 39
Total number of Main Grid regions is now 26120 ( 19080 private estates & 7040 Linden owned)
82 new regions were added and 47 returned to the grid, with 81 regions removed (26 were renamed and 1 came and went since last report)As I mentioned on thursday, much of this weeks growth is explained by the 40 ONDW Linden Regions which came online (still closed to the public) along with the return of RFL regions.
I’m not seeing signs of this mass exodus of users, on the other hand the reasons for the rise are mysterious in some ways, but this week looks like it would have been a week of negligible change without those ODNW regions appearing. I suspect these regions are related to the experience tools beta.
Overall this discussion was interesting, well managed and most importantly a sure sign that Linden Lab are not abandoning Second Life, are still investing in Second Life and are still developing Second Life. The most important part of Second Life is of course its users, there are no indications that they should be preparing to man the lifeboats, the future of Second Life looks bright.
The operative word in Gray’s statement Ciaran was ‘plans’. They have no immediate plans to shut SL down. This is in direct contradiction to what Ebbe said on the SLF. And at the after talk Jessica had to admit that the decision to shut it down would be made on the basis of cost benefit analysis and the profit margin, not if it remained profitable.
I’m not sure where you’re seeing a contradiction, on both SLF and SLU Ebbe said they have no plans to shut Second Life down. Pete said the same.
Obviously they can’t make a promise that they will never have to plan for Second Life’s closure.
“SL will keep on tickin until only the new one makes sense to operate…”
Ebbe on 06-23-2014 09:15 PM
That was on page 20 of the thread on SLF. Ebbe and Peter Gray have then spent the last week or more trying to cover up for that slip. There are reports by others as well that they saw Ebbe say that SL would remain only while profitable.
Make no mistake, shutting SL down is part of Ebbe’s plan as that was the first thing out of his mouth.
Of course, once SL is sold, then that changes everything doesn’t it? Plans made by a previous company really don’t apply to what a new company will do.
I wonder why Jessica didn’t ask if LL was actively looking to sell SL?
Curious.
Personally, I don’t know what to believe right now even after the assurances given by Oz and Pete. I am loathed to trust Linden Lab anyway but I recall my father complaining how he and fellow workers where promised work on a new contract if the current one was completed on time. They stayed on and, rather than seek new work, they finished the job on time. There was no new contract and they all got laid off which cost them some time unemployed.
Linden Lab is a business so it’s not really surprising that the Lindens are saying they have no plans to close SL because it would be financial suicide to say otherwise. Ebbe Altberg just hasn’t been choosing his words very well but there is enough in what he has said to suspect they are keeping the “antique” SL1 afloat while its high pricing model continues to finance the development of SL2 and their other product developments.
Business is business all the world over and there would be no point in keeping SL1 going once SL2 is operating and stable. Some residents will move anyway I’m sure but don’t be surprised if the Lab decides to close SL1 in order to shift the asses of the diehard remnant that try to hang on.
BTW, Ciaran, I’m sorry but just quoting one week from Tyche’s metric reports above doesn’t really prove anything. The facts are that SL has lost thousands of sims in the last few years and concurrency is way down and still falling.
Linden Lab will absolutely follow the business line here, they won’t have time for sentimentality, the future of Second Life is dependent upon its users spending money, as it always has been.
Some products last past their sell by date because people still buy them, take the floppy disk as an example or even the VHS. Old tech but the market was still there but it’s unlikely to be there forever.
Yes you’re right about one week of Tyche’s reports but if you look at the trend the losses were slowing down under Rod Humble and have continued to slow down, but they are still losing sims. They are down 201 private sims this year, that’s lower than the previous two years for sure.
All I would like to know is if the Lab is still working on retention numbers and attracting new users for Sl?
I would imagine they will be yes, they aren’t going to let it disappear without a fight.