Pedro Meya Marty

Vor ein paar Tagen fand in Chicago (US) die Second Life Community Convention 2007 (SLCC) statt. Anlässlich dieses Veranstaltung hat Reuters mit Philip Rosedale, seinerseits CEO von Linden Labs, der Herstellerin von Second Life ein Interview gemacht, das die Strategie von Second Life zeigt. Hier ein paar relevante Aussagen:

Reuters: Is Linden profitable?

Philip Rosedale: Linden is roughly profitable. We’re right at the point of profitability, which for a company of about 200 people is pretty impressive.

The business model is actually pretty simple. The engine of growth in Second Life is a lot of small-scale entrepreneurship. We have a thousand people making more than US$1000 a month. That engine is what enables some of that economic activity to be paid to us as the operators of the simulators who provide the service.

Reuters: What are Linden’s real sources of income? You’ve got a small spread on the Lindex, land sales, tier fees.

Philip Rosedale: By far the largest source of income to Linden Lab is the sales and the tier fees.

The core of our business is a hosting business.

Linden Labs is seit kurzem profitabel und verdient sein Geld hautpsächlich mit dem Hosting, also dem Land-/Inselverkauf und den monatlichen Gebühren. Interessant ist auch die Aussage, dass das System von ein paar Tausende “Kunden”, die wiederum als Wirtschaftsmotoren tätig sind, abhängig ist, während über 0.5 Mio User regelmässig sich in Second Life aufhalten. Die Währung Linden Dollar ist also nicht die Haupteinahmequelle, sondern das Schmieröl der SL-Wirtschaft.

Reuters: You’ve mentioned you want to make a move towards open source servers. If land is the bread and butter of your business, and you’re open sourcing that, how will that work in the future?

Philip Rosedale: If you’re an entrepreneur, wanting to enter the virtual world and sell stuff to people, you’re going to want to find the largest possible audience. So you’ll be strongly drawn to set up your shop on the system with the largest number of people using it. There will be a tremendous desire by people to link those servers together and be on our network so they can have access to the largest base of people.

Reuters: So Linden will charge an access fee?

Philip Rosedale: Right.

Now you wouldn’t have to, obviously, under the open source model. Not every application would demand one to connect to Second Life. But the entrepreneur who comes in will want to come towards where the largest market is.

We believe we can reasonably make money — barely make money — by just charging access to the system.

We also provide a whole bunch of global services. The uniqueness of your name, your inventory, the ability to unique mark things — this person built that object.

Aktuell ist der Client (Viewer) bereits als Open Source vorhanden. Bald folgt der Server als Open Source. Dann kann jeder seinen eigenen SL Server zuhause haben. Das Business Modell mit den Gebühren für den Anschluss an Second Life Netz ist ausgezeichnet.

Dieser Ansatz löst mehrere Probleme:

• Sinkende Abhängigkeit von Linden Labs. Interessant für Unternehmen.
• Firmen wollen und können so lokal Ihre eigene Sub Second Life hosten
• Second Life kann sich so zum de facto Standard für Virtuelle Welten entwickeln, da jeder seine eigene Welt aufbauen kann und gleichzeitig auf die Masse der gesamten Virtuellen Welt zurückgreifen kann.
• Durch die Bereitstellung der Serversoftware als Open Source wird sich die technologische Entwicklung beschleunigen

Reuters: You talked a lot this morning about reliability. What are your performance benchmarks? What is a reasonable goal for Linden to accomplish?

Philip Rosedale: We need to increase service availability. It’s not as high as it could be or as high as we’d like it to be for a commercial large-scale operating service. We’re going to publish the running data of how we’re doing. So everyone will be able to see us hopefully improving it and gauge and discuss whether we’re improving it quickly enough.

We need to get to the place where Second Life is as reliable running on your PC or a Mac as an Internet browser.

Ich erwarte im September die 10 Mio. Registrierung. Rosedale hat an der SLCC angekündigt den Schwerpunkt der Entwicklung auf Qualität des Systems zu legen, d.h mehr Stabilität, mehr Zuverlässigkeit, mehr Verfügbarkeit und damit bessere User Experience ev. sogar bessere Usability (Benutzerführung). Second Life wird könnte so erwachsen werden.

Reuters: Is there a problem where German laws are more restrictive than American laws on ageplay? And likewise, American laws may be more restrictive than European laws on gambling. Are we moving to the lowest common denominator?

Philip Rosedale: No.

The lowest common denominator is just not what you want to do. It’s not going to happen on the Internet, and it’s not going to happen here. We’re doing what we can as a platform to try to make that the case.

If you want to apply a local jurisdictional law to people, we’re going to make it so you apply that to people who are individual avatars trying to go to one place. That’s what we’re doing with age verification. We’re making that a feature that’s tied to land and people, not a feature that’s tied to the whole system. When we’re confronted with a legal or regulatory matter where we need for legal reasons to enable a certain type of restriction on behavior, we do that as locally as possible and not have a lowest common denominator.

Reuters: So there may be code in the future where your avatar is tied to your real-life nationality and then based on that nationality certain restrictions may or may not come into play?

Philip Rosedale: Right.

If the local restrictions that countries for example are making on avatars, if those restrictions are well-published and transparent and in the public light, I think we’re going to get to a good overall set of choices. Countries will make the right choices about how they want to restrict people’s use in Second Life if they can see what other countries are doing rather than us being the sole decider of what’s right locally.

Lokales Recht in Second Life. d.h. Schweizer Avatare werden gemäss Schweizer Recht gehandhabt werden. Amerikanische Avatare gemäss amerikanischen Recht. Linden Labs hat bereits am Testen eines Identitäts Verifikations Systems. So wird es möglich, das auf bestimmte Inseln nur noch Erwachsene Zugriff haben oder das Chinesische User nur noch auf zensurierte Chinesische Sims Zugriff haben.

Fazit
Second Life bereitet sich vor, die Rolle des 3D Internets zu übernehmen. Es sieht vielversprechend aus. Mal sehen, ob es klappt

Ich bleibe dran

Pedro