Frustrated virtual agencies look beyond Second Life
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, April 11 (Reuters) - The fledgling virtual agencies and service companies who made it big during the boom years of Second Life are looking toward greener pastures, weary of unmet promises from Linden Lab and drawn by competing virtual worlds.
Second Life’s growth over the last several years spawned an entirely new industry, sometimes called metaverse development companies (MDCs), to shepherd multinational brands into the virtual world. Companies like the Electric Sheep Company and Millions of Us built up rosters full of blue-chip clients who wanted to access Second Life’s demographically attractive audience, and drew investment from real-world media companies and venture capital firms.
But with new virtual world platforms coming online and Second Life noticeably lacking in buzz for consumer-facing brands in the real world, some of the most well-known MDCs are publicly criticizing Linden Lab for shortcomings in technology and usability.
“In 2006, Second Life seemed like the place we could get the most immersion,” said Electric Sheep chief operating officer Giff Constable in a telephone interview. “Linden hasn’t been able to realize the potential of the platform or to make it easy.”
Electric Sheep has produced some of Second Life’s most visible corporate projects, including a tie-in with CSI:NY, and Reuters Island. In December the company laid off about one-third of its staff, mostly from its Second Life-heavy Events Group.
The change of view, as Constable describes it, stems from a series of unfulfilled promises by Linden to improve both the usability of its software, and to implement developer tools that would allow MDCs to customize the Second Life experience for its corporate customers.
He specifically cited difficulties with the CSI:NY project, a cross-promotional event where Second Life played a prominent role in the television show’s plot line and the audience was encouraged to create a Second Life account through a CBS.com gateway. A lack of native programming support made it difficult to bring new avatars into Second Life already wearing themed clothes, nor was it possible to auto-enroll viewers in a CSI-themed group without special assistance from Linden Lab not generally available to developers.
“Second Life is just not at production level,” Constable said. “You want to things to be bulletproof when you’re working with a global brand … I don’t know if we’d do it in Second Life the next time.”
Glenn Fisher of Linden Lab conceded that introducing planned improvements to the Registration API, the program used by companies to bring customers into their Second Life sims, had proved “more difficult than we anticipated.” Improving the registration links between the Second Life Grid and partnered companies remains a high priority for Linden, Fisher said.
Fisher added that brands in Second Life had achieved a return on investment comparable or superior to other Internet-based campaigns. He pointed to the ongoing commitment of cosmetics company L’Oréal as an example of successful marketing on Linden’s grid.
But he said that Second Life isn’t for every company.
“Marketing is easier in a virtual world where the marketer has direct control over the communication in that world. We’ve always taken a decentralized approach,” Fisher said.
Linden Lab enjoys strong fundamentals, including growing demand for hosting virtual land on its servers, its core business. Company founder Philip Rosedale has repeatedly said Linden operates in the black. But as MDCs steer marketing projects towards Linden’s rivals, the company could suffer from a dearth of new users and diminished industry buzz.
Other virtual worlds consultants were more circumspect in their criticism, while acknowledging the trend against working within Second Life.
“Second Life, despite its much publicized travails, has a lot of very loyal users there. We wouldn’t hesitate to go into Second Life again,” said Mat Small of Millions of Us which has worked on Second Life projects with Toyota, Intel and Cisco. “That being said, we recognize that a lot of the growth right now is in youth-centric worlds like Habbo and Gaia.”
Peter Haik, CEO of Metaversatility, said his company is “platform-agnostic.” But while Metaversatility is doing ongoing maintenance and enhancements for existing Second Life clients, the firm has no new Second Life builds scheduled.
“If a client wants to reach an existing community, we’d tend to go towards There.com,” Haik said. While he wouldn’t shy from doing a Second Life build for a client that was “not so conservative,” Haik echoed Constable’s concerns about the ease of using Second Life’s software for both developers and end-users. “You’re likely to hit a wall when building in Second Life,” he said.
Haik sees the larger trend as not so much away from Second Life specifically, but away from the idea of bringing brands into pre-existing communities. He anticipates building purpose-built virtual worlds around specific brands using the Multiverse platform.
“We have a lot of people that want a stand-alone experience,” Haik said. “The client might have a very specific demographic in mind that’s not the Second Life demographic.”
Constable agreed with Haik the industry is trending towards more modest virtual experiences, and tempered his criticism with praise for Linden’s past cooperation. “I’m bullish on virtual worlds,” Constable said. “I’ll keep on rooting for Linden Lab to make progress on their platform, and maybe we’ll be back in Second Life in a significant way down the road.”
