In January of 2009, Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) bought up a popular and really wonderful 3rd party web based market company called OnRez. OnRez allowed users to sell and purchase goods made in game. OneRez was clean, well organized, worked well, and even came with a vendor system that worked in game to simplify things for sellers. At the same time they also acquired Second Life Exchange, similar to OnRez but by far not as nice, although it had been around longer and thus had more sellers and sales. Linden Labs said they would create their own market system using these two systems. For some reason they chose to close OnRez, by far the better of the two, and use Second Life Exchange as the jumping off point. Probably because Second Life Exchange had better numbers.
Over a year later, they just released the Beta version of these improvements and hardly any of the features are even usable. In the meantime, they have continued to run Second Life Exchange as usual which successfully secured them a huge percentage of the people making purchases in this form. Why would they do that? Because they can charge the seller a percentage of the price of the item as a fee for the service.
Linden Labs doesn't make a lot of money from people actually playing the game. Most users have a free account. Last I heard less than 10% of users had paid accounts and for those that do, the monthly fee is only $10. They also earn money through fees for owning land and things like uploading images to the system. Adding fees for the huge amount of people purchasing through an online marketing system gives their income a boost. Is it any wonder Linden Labs has been pushing a large portion of their advertising towards "buy more stuff" ? Just look at the Second Life main page and see what I mean.
In June of this year Linden Labs laid off 30% of their staff in order to "optimize" their company. As someone who listens to this business jargon all the time, I know "optimize" probably means something like "find ways to make more money without improving anything and using less staff". Since then there have been reports the company has continued to lay off staff and may have reached closed to a 60% reduction in staff.
And yet, they still found the manpower to muscle out Emerald Viewer.
Allow me to explain. A few months ago Linden Labs released a fancy new viewer called 2.0. It added some much needed features, such as a tattoo layer and the ability to create "outfits" without rearranging one's inventory. I tried it and it was laggy and lacked my favorite features which were only present in Emerald Viewer. For those of you not in the know, Emerald Viewer is a 3rd party viewer for Second Life, previously supported by Linden Labs as one of several approved 3rd party viewers. I assume that Linden Labs though their new viewer would attract a lot of their player base, but after waiting a around 6 months they saw that was not the case.
Emerald Viewer still held 50% of the user base. Apparently the Lindens didn't like this, because according to the Emerald Viewer blog here and here, they essentially forced the development team to close the project by demanding they let go of key members of their team (among many other demands Emerald Viewer claims were not enforced on other 3rd party viewers). Also according to Emerald Viewer they were flat out told "we want your numbers" meaning log in numbers.
Today, Linden Lab has shut off all log ins for Emerald Viewer. For some reason I just can't bring myself to download 2.0 again. Maybe it was the momentous lag, the many features I used that are now sorely missing, or maybe it's my loss of respect for Linden Labs and my lack of faith in their ability to understand what I as a long time user want from them over what they want for numbers. For a while now I've notice LL pushing harder for people to spend money on in game goods as opposed to improving service. There are still a lot of problems with bugs, lag, downtime, and glaringly obvious features that should exist but don't. I'm curious how they plan to improve the stability of the game when they have so severely reduced staff, force out anyone who does it better than them, can't seem to keep a CEO, and generally don't seem to give a damn about solving the stability issues that have existed since I've been playing (since 2003).
What amazes me is how Linden Lab treats what has to be one of the most dedicated user bases of all games on the planet. Sure, we gripe about the lag or when we crash or get kicked off because a server goes down. But we always log back in. We're always waiting for it to get better, and that day just hasn't come because LL hasn't bothered. All they really have to do is keep it running well and throw us some features here and there. Let the development teams make us viewers that we love. Steal the features they give if you want us back but don't force them out and leave us featureless because you want your users back but don't want to expend the manpower to make them happy.
I'm not sure what else I can say without starting to sound like Anakin in Attack of the Clones (aka like a winy 12 year old) so I'll just end this here. But suffice to say, I don't think I will be logging on tonight.
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