Check out the latest new interview with Ebbe Altberg CEO of Linden Lab talking about the future of Second Life and Sansar. Wagner James Au interviewed Ebbe Altberg for 45 minutes at Linden Lab HQ in San Francisco in March 2019.
They chatted about efforts to grow new user growth, land discounts, the upcoming mobile companion app, cloud deployment, improving performance and much more relating to Second Life. With Sansar they chatted about the low usage numbers since the beta launch, Sansar’s long download times and efforts to optimize Sansar.
It’s incredible to think Ebbe Altberg has now been with Linden Lab for over five years and he has achieved a great amount over the years from reducing land costs, the roll out of Mesh, Bento, Animesh, improved the communications with the community, improved the experience for premium members and much more.
Some highlights that I found most interesting,,,
- The new IOS mobile companion app is being worked on. It’s going to be focused on being connected with friends, chat, shopping, customer service and more. The lab are not considering it to be a viewer in the short term.
- New pricing options/discounts are coming soon (within next few months)
- Lot’s of new features (EEP) for Second Life (within weeks)
- Second Life is targeted to move completely to the Amazon cloud within the next 12 months (early – mid 2020)
- The premium subscriber base is growing
- The lab are focused on continuing revenue & user growth for Second Life.
- The lab are now interested in growing the concurrency levels and retention rates
- There are no plans to force migrate Second Life users to Sansar
- There are more people working on Second Life (130+) than Sansar (70+)
- There is work to continue to reduce Sansar long download times
- Sansar is still in beta and still in pre-launch mode
- The lab are shipping big updates every month
For more specific highlights from this interview see here.
Daniel Voyager 
“Move concurrency up instead of down. That’s our goal. That’s probably our toughest goal.” … “No one’s been able to solve it.”
I want to reach into the screen, grab Ebbe by the shoulders, and tell him SL’s biggest problems when it comes to retaining new users are:
* It looks ugly. There’s been improvements, sure, but overall, SL still makes a bad first impression.
* The complete lack of sound design. From the UI sounds to the lack of music or avatar SFX. There is literally nothing there for the most part.
* The lack of interactivity. The interactive elements of the SL new user experience are crude, and that’s being generous. SL needs an interactive new user experience that engages users. And the tools necessary to create that experience need to be available to the users, so we can all create engaging experiences.
*Poorly designed tools. I shouldn’t need to know anything about scripting to create a chair with custom animations, working doors, teleporters that people can walk into. Scripting should be there for those users who can take advantage of it but we also need an interface for creating basic content easily.
* It’s CONFUSING. We have user names and display names, three different kinds of rigged mesh, Don’t even get me started on mesh bodies and Jelly Dolls. Speaking of…
* It runs poorly! Even on a beast of a PC, SL stutters and freezes up constantly. I get that LL Doesn’t want to cause an uproar by forcing people to stop using the content they have now, but there are obvious ways for LL to slowly address this problem over time without causing the userbase to riot. Ways that might not fix the problem overnight, but will gradually.
It does feel like LL is finally making some smarter moves recently. But it also still feels like LL has some serious blind spots that leave them grasping at straws rather than taking what should be obvious solutions to simple and avoidable problems.
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The last few years SL has improved in many areas and hopefully 2019 many more improvements will be made.
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I don’t know why you didn’t get pinged, but I thank you for this article, which I shared.
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Thanks š
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