Linden Lab's Lack of Vision Is Killing Its Own Metaverse

There’s a lot of chatter about the article that posted the Decentraland DAU numbers and claims that the metaverse is a failure already but I think we’re all ignoring the obvious.

In an article titled “It’s lonely in the metaverse” according to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time.

Despite low user metrics, Decentraland and The Sandbox have high valuations. According to data from Messari, Decentraland and The Sandbox both have market caps of around $1.3 billion each.

Let’s break it down a little more.

In the first five months of 2022 more than $120bn has been pumped into the industry, the market size is projected to reach $825bn by 2030 by one report, and $5trn according to McKinsey.

The idea of the metaverse isn’t a failure but I’ll tell you what is — Linden Lab’s ability to capitalize on the renewed interest in it with Second Life.

Second Life has reported around 64.7 million active users on its platform. It has a real virtual economy with an annual gross domestic product of $650 million. It processes 345 million transactions a year for virtual goods, real estate, and services. More than two billion user-generated assets exist inside Second Life with 8 million unique items sold on its marketplace.

For all intents and purposes, SL is very much alive and kicking nearly 20 years after launch. But realistically, what has Linden done to improve the platform at the same pace as technology has moved? Has it done anything in the current cycle to market itself as the place to be? I mean, even MindArk’s Entropia Universe, which has existed for roughly the same amount of time, is now moving across to using Unreal Engine 5 to keep up with current trends around fidelity and infrastructure, while SL limps along on a creaking architecture.

And it doesn’t deserve to.

It’s not all about the visuals, after all, the social aspect of the metaverse is about people and interaction (something brands need to wake up to) but SL is vastly superior even now, 20 years later, to Decentraland, The Sandbox, and other platforms that have sprung up recently. Its avatar system allows for all manner of self-expression and its marketplace is full of more options. It’s used for educational purposes as well as social and recreation. It allows users and brands to create almost without limit.

Yet, its signal is non-existent among the noise because it’s trading on its own nostalgia, not the future.

Linden is guilty of failing its users, its employees, and the platform itself. If Web3 companies like Forte can reap investment figures of $800m for a game/ NFT economy platform, then Second Life deserves the same levels of investment to future-proof the technology and infrastructure, and leapfrog beyond everything on the market today in the process.

Someone posted a video clip of a nightclub in VRChat as an example of how things have moved forward socially, Second Life has hosted one called Vortex for 15 years and it’s still going. The video here was for a “celebration of light” event that took place in September.

It’s a kind of magic…

Linden should have either open-sourced its tech and allowed a vibrant community to continue to develop features or licensed the core platform for the same reason but ensure that interoperability was a determining factor. We'd have had multiple platforms that all interconnect by now, and cross-medium capabilities with AR, VR, and a browser.

I suspect SL will still be with us even for the next metaverse cycle but unless there’s a significant change in strategy and investment we might be having this conversation in another 20 years and lamenting what could have been.

Again.

Also published here.