The virtual world, a strange cross between Burning Man and Neal Stephenson’s metaverse, marks its 20th anniversary with no true corporate competitor in sight.
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No competitor?
What about VRChat?
Yes it has a tenth the users, but it’s also designed around an expensive peripheral you strap to your face which prices out a lot of users.
VRChat is very different. Neos or Cluster are more like Second Life. VRChat doesn’t have inventory items or attachments or persistent worlds or in-world creation tools.
The problem with a successor to Second Life is that most companies now want to make completely sterile, family and advertiser friendly environments. Even Linden Lab has done this with their recent projects.
Linden Lab’s Sansar was their one attempt and it flopped so hard that they came back to desperately put their effort into SecondLife once more.
A substantial chunk of the reason why it flopped was because they banned sex. SL continues to thrive in good part due to its liberal embrace of sexual content. It would have died out years ago without that. Companies that want to make virtual worlds never learn that lesson.
As someone who makes an actual (meager) living off helping fuel SL’s continued sexual content, that’s one thing that every virtual world ever since has flopped on. They wanna be family and advertiser friendly. People don’t want to be though. Sex sells, better than anything else does.
Can I ask what you do to make that living? An ex of mine spent some time in SL a few years ago so I got to experience some of it mostly second hand. Such a fascinating place.
I make and sell… penises! Very advanced ones. Kinda sucks because sure not something you can slap on a resume.
… now I’m curious as to what an “advanced penis” is 😅
Very cool. I might have to go look up how that even works. Thanks for sharing!
That’s why Sansar not allowing it really surprised me. SL has a decent grip on moderating and working with sexual content, something most companies don’t have. The fear of sexual content and how to manage it shouldn’t be something Linden Lab grapples with. I guess they wanted to test whether their product was appealing without it and ultimately the answer was no.
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Missed the chance for the title “There will never be a second Second Life,” real shame.
It still exists? Weird. I played with it for like, a weekend, and that was plenty.
