3D Virtual Worlds Are In Decline

Catching up with the news on 3D Virtual Worlds, has been getting a little depressing lately.  Bottom line: they are all down in traffic.

Lets start with some news on the LL/SL front:  Linden Lab announced two weeks ago that they bought an interactive fiction company called LittleTextPeople. The small company develops 2D interactive fiction for play on mobile phones from what I can tell.  The group will develop new products under the Linden Lab roof, but they will not be associated with Second Life.  In other words, Linden Lab is finally diversifying its gaming line up.  This is what happens when you hire a game developer as your CEO, you start to develop new games.  Not reported anywhere is that one of the 3 developers at LittleTextPeople is Richard Evans, lead AI programmer for The Sims 3 who no doubt worked with LL CEO Rod Humble when he was in charge at EA/Maxis.  The other two are Emily Short, writer/programmer of text adventure Galatea, and Andrew Stern co-creator of a really cool experimental 3D interactive game called Façade.  Both are available for free.

So from the sounds of it, Linden Lab is looking to get into the mobile app market with interactive fiction.  Based on my minimal level of research, the project(s) that LittleTextPeople are working on are pseudo menu driven graphic interactive fiction. (since typing things on a phone/tablet is an annoyance to begin with).  Looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

But that is not all from the Linden Lab front. It seems LL has stopped publication of statistics for Second Life. The unanimous consensus is that the reason for no publication is that the numbers are way down.

Lets put these two items into perspective.  Linden Lab is diversifying their product line towards mobile apps, while Second Life is dropping in traffic, land sales, etc.  Linden Lab is looking to a future without its signature product.  I said before that I believe SL will close its doors when it stops being profitable, and we seem to be close to that point it sounds like.

I decided to take a look at other 3DVWs and see how they are doing.  IMVU is seeing lower numbers these days too.  There Inc is not seeing the huge influx of returning customers it was hoping for when it reopened its doors. It seems that maybe the age of the 3DVW is about up.

Some of the smaller ones are doing OK: NuVera is finally out of beta, and it seems a lot more stable. Avination says they fixed the sim crossing problem for vehicles in OpenSim.  InWorldz is now big enough to start holding a conference in Las Vegas. Onverse is still expanding with new lands and content. Despite some small time success, I am not hearing about any new ones lately, not even new OS grids.

What’s driving people away from the big 3D Virtual Worlds? Probably boredom, social networking, and the influx of “free to play” MMORPGs which are learning to incorporate the social aspects that used to be exclusive to 3DVWs.

I’m not expecting a lot of closures though, just the usual 3 or 4 a year. These things have long tails, and can get by for quite a while with loyal fan bases.  But the “golden age” is behind us.

 

Avination is the Fastest Growing Grid… WHY?

Avination
Website: http://www.avination.net/
Registration URL: http://www.avination.com/join.html
Login URI: http://login.avination.net/

In my ongoing effort to check out various Open Sim Grids (which started with this post), I try to watch the trends to see what is popular.  In the past two months one grid has virtually tripled in size.  That grid is Avination.

Avination has from its inception been about “role play” and combat.  Every region is equipped with the CCS combat system for pretend battles anywhere. Region owners can turn it off however.  This is a cool concept, but this is not why Avination has suddenly taken off in popularity.

The reason that Avination has taken off in popularity is because the grid runners advertised their grid. According to a post at Hypergrid Business:

Raising prices and advertising on the radio might sound like unusual marketing strategies for an OpenSim grid, but they certainly worked for Avination.

Avination tripled in size since mid-January, growing from 324 regions to 925 over the past month. The number of users also grew nearly three-fold, from 3,083 to 11,977.

According to grid owner Melanie Thielker, an OpenSim core developer and CEO of OpenSim hosting company 3D Hosting, the grid held a number of promotional campaigns, including running radio commercials in Oregon and on the west coast. The commercials also aired on Web radio and in-world radio stations in Second Life, she added.

Marketing is everything in success it seems.  My visit to Avination proved how popular this place is;  I do not think I have ever seen 30 people on an open sim region before:

And yet despite the popularity, there are dark clouds.  Avination has policies in place that favor the merchants far more than the players.  As a result it is getting a lot of hate posts over at sluniverse.  Also it seems (Illegal) Gambling seems to be everywhere,  and connections between the operators of Avination and the now closed but still infamous Legend City Grid are making a lot of people wary.  Grid owner Melanie Thielker has responded to these criticisms in a well worded post.  I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, she seems to know what she is doing.

As it currently stands, all of the Open Sim grids are experimental in nature.  Avination is experimenting with an economic model that is more structured than most other grids.  I’ll go out on a limb and say it is not going to work, but I have been known to be wrong on these kinds of things.  Open grids vs. walled off grids, to allow Hypergrid links or not to Hypergrid, toy currency or no toy currency,  sell server space exclusively or let ad hoc servers into your grid: These are a few of the issues currently being discussed and debated and experimented with in the Open Sim community.  I say let it play out and see where it goes.

Second Life Given Back to the Role Players

So I spent a  fair amount of posts devoted to what seems to be a battle of “visions” going on in Second Life.  A string of posts starting with this one I wrote a year ago.  I have written so many I just decided to create a new sl visions tag. Click to see all the related posts.

So here is the story in a paragraph.  There have been three competing “visions” of what SL should be: The role-player vision, the merchant vision, and the 3D Facebook vision.  Since the resignation of the last CEO Mark Kingdon, the temporary CEO Philip Rosedale has systematically disassembled the 3D Facebook vision, largely because it is unworkable (as I predicted).  Because of the resources spent, changes requested by the merchants have not only not happened, but actually they are worse now.  Merchants continue to quit with profits way down.  That leaves us role players basically in charge, and if you have seen the latest re-design of the main Second Life page, you will see, that SL has recognized it as well.  We are back to “Your World, Your Imagination” again (though not in those exact words).

Now a lot has happened under the brief Rosedale administration:

• Second Life Enterprise Grid – Gone
• Basic account support – Gone
• Premium support – once 24 hours, now limited hours
• Non-Profit/Educational Sim discounts – Gone (or soon will be)
• Avatars United – Gone
• X-Street, soon to be integrated into game, currency exchange Gone
• Teen Grid – Gone (or soon will be)
• Community Gateways – Gone

Now many of these I am sad to see are disappearing, while others I say good riddance.  What they are doing is simplifying the whole thing.  Simplifying, always a good thing.  The general philosophy is now a “hands off” policy, meaning they are giving us players more autonomy.

Meanwhile, check out where their current development efforts are focused:

• Mesh
• Display Names
• Voice Morphing
• Wearable Avatar Physics
• Havok 7 support

Here is what they all have in common:  They are all good for us role players.  If you are in SL because you enjoy pretending you are someone else, whether that is a formal role player in a community, or an informal role player pretending to be someone you are not, then SL seems to be catering to you again, after a couple of years where they weren’t.

Here’s the cloud to go along with that silver lining.  Philip Rosedale has stepped down, and Linden Lab is once again looking for a new CEO.  Furthermore, there is good evidence that the remaining employees don’t really seem to “get” the whole RP vision thing.  Here is hoping they hire someone who does.  Unfortunately, I am not that hopeful.

Wither the Merchant Vision

So there are now two different visions left about what Second Life is, or should be. What vision you are apart of is largely based on what motivates you to play. I call these visions “role play” and “merchant” as a short hand way of understanding them.

There are builders who build for fun, they are part of the role play vision. There are builders who build for profit, they are part of the merchant vision. There is a lot of mixing and gray area obviously.

We can all see that SL has plateaued, and will likely decline soon. This is very bad for the Merchants. It is possible that Mesh could revitalize the market, but I am leaning to the idea that it will radically change the market so much that it is unlikely to help the current merchants.

Most of us Role Players have accounts in other places, especially many open sim grids. When SL closes, we’ll probably spend a little time mourning, then we’ll be elsewhere.  Us non-merchant types will likely move on to Open Sim and start building there. Heck, a lot of them already are. Similarly the various role play communities would move and rebuild as well.

The Merchants don’t have many other places to go.  With no currency, no theft protection, no one to file a DMCA complaint to, the merchants have no desire to move to Open Sim, even if there were no SL.  The market place in SL is one of a kind, the closest is IMVU, and it is about a tenth of the size of SL.

The RPers may have built SL, but it is the merchants that made SL popular, they provide most of the content we RPers enjoy.  We non-merchant RPers are better off with the merchants around, which means we are better off with SL around.

I believe that when SL eventually closes, there will be a new virtual goods market somewhere, innovation abhors a vacuum.  Maybe not of the same nature as SL, but I see other virtual good markets, like Renderosity and various app markets, succeeding in other similar venues, so it is only a matter of time before there is another virtual goods market where creative people can make a few bucks.  This is another topic I have already written about.

A 30% Layoff is NEVER a Good Thing!

I had a post ready trying to explain why some of Second Life’s recent changes is a risky venture, but ultimately may prove a good thing.  Then Linden Labs announces 30% staff layoffs.  No matter how they try to spin it, this is a bad thing.

A few essays ago I explained that there seems to be a battle for Second Life on three fronts: The role-players that want more freedom, the merchants that want more security, and Linden Labs, that wants a 3D version of Facebook.  I have written fairy extensively on the first two, so I thought I’d spend some time on the Linden Lab perspective.

I came up with this basic outline:

1.) Second Life is trying to become a more mainstream Virtual World
2.) The search tools in Viewer 2.0 are crap, the conspiracy theory is that the changes were done on purpose to encourage use of XStreet. Linden Labs makes more money off XStreet sales than they do in world sales.
3.) Plans are already in the works to merge XStreet and Search.
4.) Changes to XStreet and Search heavily favor already successful businesses, and hurt small businesses and new players looking to make money.
5.) The SL free housing project and recent marketing campaign is discouraging “making money” in favor of residency and avatar design. Its like they are purposely discouraging user generated content.
6.) As a result of 2,3,4 and 5, there is a mass exodus of small merchants in SL going on right now. Stores and malls are closing, to XStreet only or closing for good.
7.) As a result of 6, it is a bad time to be a land baron right now, especially on the mainland.  Lots and lots of empty lots.
8.) SL usage is noticeably down, a lot of the older users are cutting way back on land and tier, or are just dropping to free accounts.
9.) SL made their changes knowing full well that 8 would happen. They hope to make up the difference with new more “social” players.
10.) Replacing old players with more new players, is going to require a lot of marketing cash, with no guarantee that it will even work.

Bottom Line: Second Life is trying to push away players interested in making money, in favor of players interested in socializing. They are pushing “buy the coolest stuff” instead of “make your own stuff”. This is an extremely risky move on SL’s part. This is Second Life could be dead in a year risky, or it could be the greatest thing ever.

So how does this 30% staff layoff factor in.  Second Life has been heavily marketing themselves for a couple of months now.  I’d say that the layoff is a credible sign that it is not working.  We will know more when they release the Q2 numbers.  I would ignore the economic numbers, there are lots of close out sales going on which is keeping the economic numbers looking good.  The numbers to watch are active players. This is calculated by Linden Labs as the number of people who have logged in for at least the second time in a given month.  Last quarter’s numbers:

Monthly Unique Users with Repeat Logins Reaches 826,214 in March,  User Hours Reached 116 Million in Q1 201,  Peak Concurrent Users Hit 81,156 in Q1 2010

Lest we forget, the new terms of service everyone agreed to last April had provisions to not hold Linden Labs libel for any losses due to the sudden closure of Second Life.  Even though Second Life remains profitable currently, if things start to go south, services like SL tend to not just stay open until the money dries up. If profits start sliding with little hope of going back up, it would be prudent to quit while you are still ahead.

I do not know what will happen in the future, nor do I have any inside knowledge of what Linden Labs has planned.  All I do know is that the press release sent out by Linden Labs reads an awful like the press release sent out by There Inc. when they were in trouble back in 2004.  There Inc. was eventually able to bounce back and have a few successful years before closing their doors earlier this year.

The announcements do not mean the end of Second Life, nor do they necessarily mark the beginning of the end of Second Life.  They do however prove with absolute certainty, that Second Life will have an ending.  That is to me the most important thing to take out of all of this.

The Problem of a Multi Grid Economy

My last post was about the slowly being developed 3D Internet, which I am guessing is likely to be built on the Open Simulator platform. There are other open source platforms in the competition, Open Cobalt is one I mentioned, while Open Wonderland is one mentioned in the comments. For completeness sake, I should also mention Sirikata, another open source platform.

Don’t expect a battle royale between these different open source platforms.  It is possible that in the end, they all might work together.  The IEEE (a major engineering organization that develops standards for web protocols) has put together a workgroup called VWRAP (Virtual World Region Agent Protocol).  The group’s first easy to read paper on the topic can be found here in PDF form, if you are more technically inclined, you can read their preliminary drafts here.

From a Second Life perspective, a 3D Internet presents many challenges.  The biggest one on the minds of most people is “How do I make money?”  Because of the open nature of a 3D internet, any rules regarding permissions and copying simply cannot be enforced.  The Second Life economic model will not work.  There will be money making opportunities on the 3D internet, but the buying and selling of 3D goods for virtual cash can only be done in a closed off system like Second Life or an individual Open Sim grid.  The 3D internet will involve multiple grids and possibly multiple platforms.  Moving stuff from grid to grid, platform to platform, and avatar to avatar makes the SL economic system worthless.

Second Life’s Flawed Intellectual Property Policy

Before discussing what a multigrid economy might look like, lets take a look at the biggest weakness with the Second Life economic model.

Second Life is the first ever to try creating a virtual economy where people retain ownership of their creations. When Second Life decided that was what they wanted to do, a lot of people said it was unprecedented and would never work.

Guess what? It doesn’t work!

There are two court cases right now, one I mentioned here, and another detailed here.  Both take issue with SL’s Intellectual Property policy from two different perspectives.  While neither case has been tried yet, these cases are the apparent cause of  Second Life’s recent rather draconian Terms of Service changes.

The problem with making an unprecedented policy is that the legal ramifications are unclear, and it may cost quite a bit of legal fees to hammer out clarity in the courts, a price I am not sure LL is willing to pay.  Eventually, Linden Labs is going to have to change to one of these two proven models:

1. The There/IMVU/Facebook/MySpace model where “We own everything you upload, so you can’t sue us if your stuff is copied, or if we remove your stuff, because we own it, not you”.

2. The Internet Host/OSGrid/Google model where “We just sell the server space and index stuff for search, so solve your own damn Intellectual Property issues.”

SL Beta member Oz Spade made a good response to this:

I think LL intended to do #2, but wasn’t doing it fast enough or in the right ways. I recall when they first announced this whole IP thing and people were asking questions like this and the answer was “well eventually we want to be like an ISP or Linux distributor or website hoster, we host, provide access to content, and support and you do everything else.” Which is fine, and would work if they really were going for that model and not sitting on their ass trying to sweep up the cash. The problem they’re having is relinquishing control because, well, they’re a company, and not a non-profit.

The other problem with that model is, in the example of the ISP/hoster you still have to respond to take down requests and “violations.” The difference between LL and the other models is, with the other models your content can go with you, i.e. you can have all the html files on your computer and take them to another hoster. However with SL, your content, if you play by the rules, can only be accessed via SL grid. So in reality they aren’t really providing only a hosting service, which is what fucks them and is completely their mistake / stupid-attempt-to-keep-out-competition-that-might-use-their-software-features. It’s like if to host a website on a hoster you had to write your website in a special language that could only be written and hosted on that hoster and you couldn’t convert it to html without hacking around.

So basically they made a legal decision before they had worked out all the kinks in the technology that uses it. Or had made a legal decision without wanting to fully commit due to money/selfishness/whateverdouchery.

The first thing they should have done when saying “you own the IP” is make sure that you can take that IP with you, that you actually DO own it. And this is what people have been screaming for since they announced it and why we have things that people freak out about like “copybot” and other ways to “illegally” copy objects/etc. If LL had ignored the douches freaking out about “holy shit people will steal shit!” and actually implemented backup features properly that allowed content to travel with the creators, we would be avoiding a majority of this bullshit.

Seems spot on to me.

And another problem I have not even mentioned is the conversion of dollars to lindens and vice versa.  Linden Labs has insisted that the “Linden” currency has no real value outside of the game, and yet nobody believes that.  Lots of virtual worlds, both 2D and 3D, have virtual currencies exchangeable for money.  If a court were to rule that these virtual currencies should be treated like real money, it opens a whole new can of worms legally speaking.

Linden Labs is not going to be able to straddle the line between IP freedom and IP protectionism for long.

Eventually these legal difficulties could eventually follow over to other grids, or other grids could take this as a precautionary lesson and try something else.

A Possible Open Grid Economic Model

The SL economic model can only possibly work in SL, because there is one entity that controls all the asset servers.

In an Open Grid model with cross grid travel and communication there will be hundreds of asset servers controlled by hundreds of independent companies, just like the 2D internet is controlled by hundreds of web hosts. In the case of avatars, everyone may possibly host their own avatar outside the grids, so we could be talking thousands of asset servers.

An OpenSim grid is going to have to toss the whole SL paradigm out completely. Forget about inventory, selling individual units, and permissions, it won’t work in an open grid.

The open grid must work as a true 3D internet, with the internet as a paradigm.
Region = website
grid = webhost
inventory = stuff you store on your computer or via “cloud”

Think of the way the internet works now. If I have a website, or blog, or facebook account, etc. I can easily copy pictures, text, scripts, music embeds, etc, from other websites and post them on my web site. Its my responsibility to make sure I have the rights to what I post, but of course, most people don’t check the rights of everything they post. Since most sites are non-commercial, and visited by very few people, nobody gives a damn mostly.

On the other hand, if a site gets popular, and designed to make money, or has a big company behind it, then that website will be required to have the rights to all content on that site, or find itself with a cease and desist notice, or the web host might get a take-down notice and suddenly your site is gone.

This is the way an open grid has to work as well: everything is full perm, but copyrights are still in play.

What is needed are sites similar to Renderosity for open sim grids. Nothing on Renderosity is ever copy protected, because it makes it unusable. Buying a file is not what is important, it is buying a license, which is why most things are overpriced at Renderosity, but if you are using Renderosity objects for a commercial project, you damn well better have a receipt.

That has to be the model for open grid as well.  For example I make a couch object that in SL could sell for maybe 100L. For Open Sim I sell a commercial license for $10 or about 25 times the SL sales price, which I sell on a specialized website.  If someone buys it, they get a full perm object that they can edit, or copy, or give away, but can’t legally sell.  Most Open Sim grids have no in world currency so I can’t sell there anyways. I could try to post it for sale on a specialized website, but if the website is a legitimate one, they could investigate the origin of the items on sale on their site and prevent resales.

Because the object in world is copyable, why would anyone buy a copy when they could just grab a copy in world? Well that is where the “Internet” paradigm takes over. You could just grab a copy and post it on your region, but if the region is commercial in any way, you damn well have a commercial license for the object or be potentially subjected to litigation or grid take down.

The big money in Open Sim is going to be in the building of commercial regions for clients. Professional region builders who want to use your couch will definitely pay the $10 for the license to use it, just as the region builder expects to be paid for use of his region model for anyone that uses it.

I have proposed this idea to many, the primary objection is that it will limit the people that make money to only the best creators.  I’m sure that other methods of making money on the 3D internet would emerge that we have not thought of yet.  My primary point is that the SL economic model is not one we can (or should) consider.

“New Era” of Second Life: Role Play Getting Screwed!

It seems every few months, I write yet another post about how SL is going in the wrong direction.  Here I am again.

In the last few weeks, Linden Labs has released a new “SL 2.0″ viewer,  has introduced new welcome centers, new starter avatars, a new 3rd party viewer policy that essentially has killed all third party viewer development, and new terms of service designed to protect LL liability from merchants that use the service.

I’m generally OK with the changes making SL easier to use, especially for new players (it’s about time!).  The client changes are a mixed bag, the new client looks better, but many useful tools are buried deep in the menus and are hard to find.  There are serious bugs that still need to be addressed as well.

The other changes I am not OK with. Yes, Linden Labs has the right to allow or disallow third party viewers as it sees fit, and has the right to change the rules of use as it sees fit.  That does not mean it should.

I will not go into details about these changes, plenty has been written about them elsewhere.  My concern is with the overall pattern of change.  They are not changing the technology in any way to protect merchants from theft, meaning theft will continue, by those who do not care about the rules.  Instead, they are making it more difficult for us rule abiding players from doing what we want to do with the service.

I see what is going on as a conflict of three visions:

1. The Merchant Vision: “We want SL to have strict submission rules and built in protection for our merchandise.”

2. The Linden Vision: “We want SL to be a 3D Facebook with tens of millions players.”

3. The Artisan/Role Play Vision: “We want Our World, Our Imagination back, we want a place to play and have fun the way we want.”

I’m one of the people in the third category.

On the Merchant Vision: Rules that go in place to protect merchants from thieves also restrict those of us that are not thieves from doing what we want.  Among the artisan/role player class, there is a general “liberal” share and share alike, take what you need and do what you will attitude.  We are artists who create for fun, not profit.  We want an environment to play in and we are willing to pay for it or create it ourselves, but worrying about the origin of textures, who created what prim etc, and what permissions are in place just distracts from the fun.  Its all an unnecessary burden on the players.

On the Linden Vision: As Linden Labs reaches out to the more “mainstream” audience that come in from places like Facebook, the more trouble they will cause all the goreans, furbies, nekos, age players, gender benders, cos players, and everyone else the mainstream doesn’t “get”.  Misunderstanding leads to unnecessary drama.

Role Players built Second Life.  Yet, every change LL has made in the last two or three years has had at least a small negative effect on the RP community.

I still love Second Life, but I no longer see a future for me there.  The “cutting edginess” has dulled.  It is still a gold mine of virtual places, that I will continue to explore, but my metaverse interests are moving elsewhere.

That elsewhere is OpenSim, a small but growing community on the frontiers of the metaverse that welcomes the “liberal” artisan/role players.

And, that is the topic of my next few posts…  (to be continued)

Metaverse Reactions to There Closing

Many of the smaller 3D Virtual Worlds are trying to lure in There.com members.

Twinity wants to attract There.com developers by exchanging some Therebucks for Twinity Globals.

Active Worlds is offering 6 months free to former There players.

Frenzoo is offering free lifetime VIP status to There members.

Moove has a special sign up area for There members.

Kaneva has a There Channel available.

Blue Mars has a new region called Pavonis, designed by a member of There, with the same tropical archipelago theme of There.

Utherverse, makers of adult oriented virtual worlds like Red Light Center have created therenewworld.com Not sure how that will go over with the teenage crowd that dominated There.

Second Life created a special greetings area just for There members who join SL

A blogger at Second Life left a stirring farewell:

This week brought the sad announcement that the online world There.com would  be closing its doors come March 9. We were sorry to hear the news;  There provided a valuable service to its users, and is one of a very few  pioneers in what is generally know nas the “social virtual worlds” space. There  helped prove that 3D online worlds could be more than just chat rooms  with moving pictures. They provided a wonderful space for their vibrant  communities who gathered to hang out and have fun — even before the  paintballs became free.

Though Second Life has to an extent  served a different audience, we do hope that those who care to (and who  are 18 or over) can find as much enjoyment in Second Life as they did in  There.com. Our two platforms have developed along very different paths,  but each offers the opportunity to interact with other people in ways  that can’t be found anywhere else online — the opportunity for  unparalleled expression in an environment that offers experiences that  are every bit as meaningful as those that take place in the physical  world.

Many of us at Linden Lab know — or are –  There.com members. Others — myself included — have friends who work at  There. It’s safe to say that all of us are sorry to see the end of a  truly innovative company and product, but I’m confident that the people  involved with it, whether as employees or as members, will keep on  creating and exploring the most social and expressive technologies  available today and in years to come.

The end of any community  platform is an unhappy moment, and we certainly feel for the community.  Although it may not be the same as the world you know and love, we hope  you will come and explore another online world of possibility and  engaging experiences. We are working on creating some new places for  you, so look for news of those in a future post. We’ll look for you inworld.

What would Second Life be without There.com?  Both have as their original source material, the “metaverse” of Snow Crash, though their interpretation varied. Both opened their beta in 2003.  Approximately half of SL beta members were also There beta members. Because at the time There had more stuff to do, while SL was a pure build it yourself world, a lot of the early SL builds were inspired by There.com.

Many prominent SL pioneers came from There. Yadni, of Yadni’s Junkyard, the first great “freebie mall”, was from There. As was Starley Thereian of Celestial Studios, the first great high end fashion boutique, Desmond Shang who owns and operates Caledon, the largest privately owned themed continent (50 regions), Cristiano who runs sluniverse.com the largest independent forum dedicated to Second Life (and named after a once popular, now non existent independent forum called there universe dot com), to name a few.

Thanks to competition from There, SL gave us freebie basic accounts, auctions, classifieds, camera controls and voice capabilities.  Former There software engineer Jeff Ventrella joined Second Life for a while and gave us flexi prims, and improved avatars.

Second Life would be a very different place, and probably a lot smaller place, without There.com.

There.com Coming to a Close

There.com was the second 3D Virtual World I joined and from June 2003 to May 2004, it was my only virtual home.  I was a Beta and a regular, well known throughout the early days of There.

On Tuesday May 9th my former virtual home will close for good.  My former residence at the Ebony Rock Funzone will disappear in the virtual ether.

The announcement comes as a surprise to everyone, including some of the employees of Makena.  This thread at sothereforums.com is where a lot of former Thereans as well as former employees are going to talk about the closure as the official forums have closed completely.

From a technical standpoint, There was above everybody.  The biggest wants of Second Life players today is copy protection, smooth transition from region to region, better ways to market products, and better vehicles.  There had these things from day 1.  Avatars in There have capabilities still not seen in any other game.  Planet There was the largest avatar navigable 3D object, just slightly smaller than planet Earth.  Actual land mass is about 650 sq km, about 1/3 the size of Second Life.

If I were to design a new “ultimate” 3D Virtual World, I would start with There, radically improve the graphics, the avatars, and steal IMVU’s awesome interface, steal Second Life’s system of building, add scripting capabilities, and animation import.  At the heart of it though, it would still be There.

So long There, I will miss you.

Latest Anti-Copy Tool May Violate TOS

Skillz Hax, creator and owner of Insilico and one of a team of developers of the Emerald Viewer, have released what they say is the ultimate anti-copy tool for merchants.  But before you anti-copy people get too excited, there is good evidence that this tool violates Linden Labs Terms of Service as well as many international laws regarding electronic privacy.

The device in question is the “Gemini Cybernetics Client Detection System CDS Ban Relay“.  It works by creating a giant 256x256x1000m megaprim over your land so it can detect every single person in the region via llVolumeDetect collision. It then uses obscure methods to detect exactly what client you are using.  The methods are complex and can see through “spoofing” (clients pretending to be other clients).  The developers refuse to divulge what methods they use, and that is a major problem.

Here is the story in a nutshell.  It is very easy to copy stuff in Second Life. It always has been easy.  A few years ago Linden Labs itself released a tool in open source called copybot to assist people to back up their in word creations. As designed by LL, you could only copy and back up 1) stuff you created yourself, and 2) full perm items that are allowed to be modded, copied and transferred.  The problem was by making the tool open source, it was easy for people to find the three lines in the source code that could be erased allowing copying without the permissions check.  Even so, the tool is hard to use as it uses a command line interface.

Enter the hackers, who added copybot functionality to their own 3rd party SL clients giving a simple point and click functionality to copybot instead of the complex command line interface.  Suddenly copybot was available to the masses just by downloading one of several different 3rd party SL clients, which I will not name here.  At first it was easy to detect users of these with a script, but client writers figured out how to make their clients look like other clients to avoid detection.

What the CDS Ban Relay does is use other “secret” methods to detect what client people are really using.  If it detects one of the banned clients the user is put on a list and banned from ANY stores that use the CDS Ban Relay.  It bans them even if they come back online with the official client or a legitimate 3rd party client.  According to the sales pitch, false positives are impossible “100% guaranteed”.

This 100% guarantee immediately put the tool under tons of scrutiny.  How can the makers be sure? Especially since being permanently banned by potentially hundreds of places is a rather severe punishment not for actual copybot use, but for merely possessing a client capable of copybot activity.

Then Skills Hax made a potentially fatal mistake in defending the system saying:
It collects data about the pc that can be used later even if there are no tells any more. (emphasis mine)

Ouch! Collecting data about someone’s PC without consent is illegal in many countries, including Canada, Australia and most of Europe.  Now we all gave consent to Linden Labs when we agreed to the terms of service for Second Life.  This data is being collected by a 3rd party company without consent, and is being stored on private servers not associated with Linden Labs. Unless this system asks for permission from every person that enters any property using this system, it is likely illegal!

Furthermore it looks to be against the Linden Labs Terms of Service:

Section 4.1 paragraph 3: In addition to abiding at all times by the Community Standards, you agree that you shall not: [...] (v) take any actions or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content that contains any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any system, data or personal information;

The automatic bans for life could be considered a form of harassment, a violation of the Terms of Service. Its use of region wide megaprims could also violate Terms of Service, especially if used on the mainland servers as megaprims will no doubt cross property lines.  That’s a violation of community standards.

Linden Labs needs to seriously look at this tool and determine if its use is a violation of TOS.

UPDATE: A few people have tested this things limitations. What we know now is that it does not collect info on your computer, only your avatar name and UUID.  We also know that its ability to detect bad clients is far from perfect, that server lag can hamper its functions, and that the device itself can cause a fair amount of lag on busy servers.

While the evidence is coming in that the device is not “illegal” per se, its use on mainland servers can cause serious trouble for its use of megaprims that cross boundaries, its teleporting home without warning, and its use as a griefing tool.  If you want to use it to protect a mainland store, think again!  Estate owners have more lee way on these matters, and should not run into problems with LL by using it.  However, there are a few people who are avoiding estates known to use this program, even if they never use copybot enabled clients.  Putting a system like this in place could drive away customers at best, and could make you a target of copybot hackers at worst.

Signs of the Economy in Virtual Worlds

I predicted a year ago how economic troubling times would affect virtual worlds: Those profitable ones are likely to be even more profitable as people seek out cheap entertainment.  Those relying heavily on VC money will likely be hurting as VC money dries up.

The economy is apparently good enough in Entropia for someone to pay over $300,000 of real currency for a virtual night club in world.  Another night club made headlines a few years ago for selling for over $100,000.

Its not so good for Metaplace, the 2D virtual world preferred by the SL crowd for its flexibility in building.  Metaplace closed its doors to the public on Jan 1.

Also problematic is life over at Forterra, a platform provider that gets most of its money from military contracts.  They recently laid off more than half of the staff and are probably looking for someone to buy them out.  Their principle product, OLIVE, is a nice flexible 3D platform with text, voice, and video capabilities that runs on inexpensive computers.  Their lack of success lately is probably due to stiff competition in the platform market: Unity, Torque, Multiverse, and Open Sim are all available for cheap or even free.

Meanwhile, Blue Mars is slowly adding user created content and additional features.  Recently the makers of the steampunk region Caledonia in SL have built a city in Blue Mars.  I wonder if anyone has done a “Mirror World” of a virtual world before?  (I’m pretty sure it has been done, just sounds funny)

I foresee the next year doing the same thing.  Profitable Virtual Worlds will remain so, maybe even becoming more profitable.  Meanwhile I would not be surprised to see another 3 to 5 virtual worlds shut down operations.