Second Life MMOG Launches

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out a SFGate.com article about the official launch of MMO title Second Life, a "rapidly growing and constantly changing 3D online society, shaped entirely by its residents", which has its public unveiling today. We covered this interesting user-shaped virtual world a few weeks back, and it's now open for business, with a free Windows client download and monthly subscription fees. It's also one of the few MMO titles to have a DMCA complaints page for infringing user-created content, where complainants must fill out a form "identify[ing] in detail the location of the copyrighted work that you believe has been infringed upon. For example 'The copyrighted work I am referring to is located on the map area labeled 'Freelon, 104,30,56'.'"

I wonder if one these will succeed

[ScurvySeaDog]

I kinda hope one of these guys will succeed, but on the other hand, I'd like to see this sort of thing evolve on it's own.

5 years or so I remember there were a ton of these little virtual community type ventures using VRML.. nothing much really happened with them. Lately it seems that they're starting to crop up again. There.com, this thing, and there have a been a few others I've heard about.. activeworlds or something.

I don't think the open ended virtual community stuff (as opposed to something with a "purpose" like Everquest) is going to really take off until we can really "jack-in"

The idea has merit, and it WILL succeed one day, but I hope this isn't wholly sponsored by some commercial entity, but ends up being more like a 3d web (like vrml was supposed to do, right?).

Re:I wonder if one these will succeed

[maharito]

On the contrary, commercial sponsorship could be a good thing regarding this type of venture. Creating and maintaining software that people don't directly interact with is an extraordinarily daunting task and is very costly. For example, incredibly complex software that controls traffic signals for a downtown area may take hundreds of people, and millions of dollars to build, maintain, and operate. A MMORPG where tens of thousands of users are interacting with the environment and other players could take hundreds of times that effort and capital. And where does all the money come from? Well, without sponsorship of some type, it has to come from the players, in the form of purchase prices, monthly fees, and perhaps extra fees for premium game services. The answer to lowering or eliminating these costs could be corporate sponsorship. Of course, it would be ridiculous to have a McDonalds on every screen of the game, but a certain amount of conspicuous yet unobtrusive commercial endorsement could well subsidize the sometimes steep monthly fees associated with MMORPGs.

Re:I wonder if one these will succeed

[Mac Degger]

What this kind of thing needs to really kick off is kind of like exactly a next gen 3d, FPS-like frontend to IRC.

It has to be FPS-like to satisfy the market-penetration target; it has to be easy to use. It has to have IRC as a backbone so it's usefull (for chat, file transfers etc). OS so people can tinker with it (but in the same way that linux works, with one or a couple of master architects, so all 'kernels' work).

But to really kick in I imagine something which works with hubs (as in channels on an irc server). Anyone can create a hub, which could accomodate as many users as the hardware allows. These hubs would be seperate worlds (an analogy would be seperate habitat domes on the moon or something) which use 'portals' to connect to other hubs.

But what would make this really work is the ability to import and integrate 3d objects into this world, while the world is running. This would allow you to create a little shack to your own design, add a character or whatever. But you have to be able to add user content.
Of course, that means two things; broadband only and cpu's powerfull enough to do dynamic BSP calculations...but with peer-to-peer and distributed computing, I thinks those kinds of problems can be solved quite nicely.

If only I knew how to program :)