Second Life Scores $11 Million 59
News.com reports that Second Life, the virtual world run by Linden Labs, has netted $11 Million in venture capital funding from the Globespan Capital Partners group. From the article: "The company makes its money by charging players use fees for land they buy and build on. For now, the company isn't profitable, and it's not clear when it will be, said Catherine Smith, Linden Lab's director of marketing. However, she told CNET News.com that Linden Lab plans to use its new funding for aggressive international expansion, as well as for hiring intended to boost its infrastructure. "
Fun (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fun (Score:1, Informative)
Before I answer that question, answer this one: (Score:1, Insightful)
People generally expect different things out of a glorified chat room than they expect out of, say, Halo 3. But that doesn't mean the people using the glorified chat room spend any less time there, or that they enjoy it any les.
Re:Fun (Score:1)
Re:Fun (Score:2)
If you can find some intelligent people to hang out with, it can be a blast. You just have to steer clear of the billions of shop
It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:2)
Now THAT is a successful business model. Charge people $15 per month, which doesn't feel like a lot so they pay it happily. Thus far, it's successful to the tune of about $1 billion per year in revenues.
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's how that one works out. Movie + popcorn is roughly $15 for 2 hours of entertainment, which is $7.50 per hour. I'm figuring on 10 hours a week for an MMO. That's an hour a day on weekdays and 2 and a half hours on weekends, which is probably overly conservative. So that's 40 hours a month, which works out to roughly $0.37 per hour. Obviously that equation gets better if you play more, and vice versa.
You may not go out to movies eather, I don't much do it myself, but I do find that looking at the MMO fees in that way can provide perspective.
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:2)
A Tale In The Desert cost me an average of 3 hours per day weekdays, and 5-6 on weekends. call it an average of 3.5, since I didn't always play both days on weekends.
3.5*365=1227.5 hours a year, which comes out to a little over 7 weeks, or almost 2 months.
Some people say time is money,but I think time's worth a lot more. That's time I could've spent with my family, or drumming, writing songs, remodeling the bathroom, etc.
Once I started to look at it that way, "grinding" started to
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:1)
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:2)
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:2)
I felt it was safe to assume that the majority of the slashdot crowd owned a computer.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:1)
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:1)
I've coded up a few casino and lottery type games, and sold them or run them myself. I joined the game a little over a month ago, and have gone from COMPLETE newb to a profit of over $80 USD.
I'm not going to retire off of it, but I've had a lot of fun coding up objects and testing them (I'm a programmer "in real life", by the way). And to get paid for h
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:1)
Or is your point that you have been able to
Re:It just seems like such a stupid idea to me (Score:4, Informative)
Free accounts are just that, free. They last forever, and they earn L$50 a week if you log in during that week at all. They don't expire, you can continue using the free account for as long as you like. The limitations include lower limits on the currency trading system and the inability to own land outright, although there are many people in SL who will gladly rent you land.
Premium accounts earn L$500/week weather you log in or not. They cost $10/month. You also get 512m^2 of land ownership (tier). This means you can own 512m^2 of land (after you buy it). If it's your first account, you can buy "first land" which costs L$1/m^2. If you want to own a larger plot of land, you have to tier up, which basically means paying more to LL each month to own more land. Eventually you can get to the point where you own an entire server's worth of land, but it'll run you an extra $200/month. Tier is the primary way LL makes money on SL.
There are other limitations. The complexity of the objects you can build permanently on the land is limited by how much land you own. All objects in SL are built out of simple geometric shapes called primitives (prims). There is a limit of a bit over 100 prims per 512m^2. While you can make some fairly interesting things with only 100ish prims, most of the really impressive stuff in the game uses thousands of prims.
SL is less of a game and more of a toy. If you love building stuff out of blocks, this is seriously the game for you. It's like getting to play with legos and then showing it to the whole world. One thing I should point out before anybody gets the wrong idea: You can distort a prim quite a bit, making it far more interesting to play around with than simple static blocks.
Making money in Second Life. (Score:1)
It's like deja vu all over again (Score:2)
Did I miss something? Is it 1995 again? Is money falling from the sky for any unprofitable business which is somehow related to the Internet? Will Ion Storm be opening its doors again?
Re:It's like deja vu all over again (Score:1)
Yes.
Didn't you see the "John Romero is going to make you his bitch... 4 realz dis time yo" advertizing campaign for Daikatana 2?
Re:It's like deja vu all over again (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if SL has profit potential or not, but
Re:It's like deja vu all over again (Score:1)
Well one thing to consider is the business model and goals behind a business. Yes in the late 90s, if you had a
Linden labs is trying to bring more business into the SL world. For about 1 yr now, some schools have used private game sessions to teach physics. I know of one college that used SL
why pay someone... (Score:5, Funny)
Linden's Money Tree (Score:3, Interesting)
SL is very much an idealist playground. Even without external forces calling for profitability, there will be many challenges to maintaining a thriving community.
However, whether SL ultimately becomes profitable without losing appeal - or whether it sinks, the lessons learned will be worth it.
Re:Linden's Money Tree (Score:2)
Second Life's main grid (adults only) is already turning a profit, but LindenLab isn't profitable as a whole (yet ?).
Re:Linden's Money Tree (Score:2)
There was nothing for me to do except explore, which I did for about 10-15 minutes before I got bored. What do I "do"? Do I need to get a job? By which m
Re:Linden's Money Tree (Score:2)
It's not an MMORPG in any sense of the world. It's basically just a virtual environment, that provides tools and a world to use them in. The only 'goals' are the ones the users feel like setting themselves.
You don't NEED to own land to build, as there are public areas provided to do so, but in order to keep items in-world o
That's some nice funding there... (Score:2, Funny)
From the Money-Down-The-Rathole dept. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:From the Money-Down-The-Rathole dept. (Score:1)
That link was worth reading, if only for:
Somebody thought this was worth dropping $11 million on?!?!?Mod parent offtopic (Score:1)
Web 2.hole (Score:2)
"Right now we're losing money on every user, since we don't charge most users for access and and our operation is EXTREMELY bandwidth and server-side intensive. But, not to worry. We're going to fix this by attracting more users."
-Eric
Re:From the Money-Down-The-Rathole dept. (Score:2)
You seem to be mushing (har har) all virtual world games into one with your comment. Alphaville for example has nothing to do with Second Life. Alphaville is in the Sims Online - which is not Second Life.
There IS an economy in Second Life, and it's based on "Linden Dollars". Players have to pay REAL dollars to Linden Labs for an account, but only if they choose to own land.
You might want to read up on Second Life's economic system
Cool (Score:1, Insightful)
Hopefully this new cash inflow will be used to bring Second Life toward it
Re:Cool (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Cool (Score:1)
There are definitely more bugs than an issue with the mute list. The physics engine in the game is implemented terribly. They've been saying the upgrade to Havok 2 is just around the corner since I started logging in, which was a while ago.
Look at the issue resolution voting area. People vote and vote and nothing gets done. Well,
Re: (Score:1)
I tried Second Life and found it almost unplayable (Score:2, Interesting)
Oblivion runs fine on my machine with medium settings so there's no excuse for a game as ugly as Second Life to run so poorly.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:I tried Second Life and found it almost unplaya (Score:1)
(Not a flame, just curious).
Re:I tried Second Life and found it almost unplaya (Score:2)
So, odds are, it's not your system that's the problem--it's either your bandwidth or Linden
Re:I tried Second Life and found it almost unplaya (Score:2)
It's not many games that have to pre-cache every single sound, texture, and object in the game (and there are literally millions of these, since players can create their own designs in SL, unlike in most MMORPG's). It pretty much ensures that SL will NEVER perform anywhere near as good as a conventional game, no matter what system you're playing it on.
-Eric
yes it fun (Score:2, Informative)
The entire SL universe is the result of player creativity. Everything there (except the land itself) consists of creations by players.
Second Life is kinda neat. (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of the neatest avatars can be found in Luskwood, for instance. I saw a very finely detailed, beautifully animated dragon there just a couple days ago. Sure, the environment has limitations, but it's pretty astounding what folks have come up with despite those limits!
-Z (Zorin Frobozz in SL)
Linux client? (Score:1)
Re:Linux client? (Score:2)