Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Microsoft Buying Second Life?!
norkus
Member Posts: 1
in Second Life
What will become of our six foot long penises?
http://www.techeye.net/internet/microsoft-to-buy-second-life
Comments
Even if they buy second life the Microsoft Execs will still be around. Don't worry about that.
So there are people with hundreds of thousands of dollars ( or more ) tied up into this game, and Linden Lab was just going to sneak out the door while the game went tits up while waiting for someone to buy it? Nice.
From the Emerald scandal and now this, anyone not dumping everything they can to get out of SL is going to find themselves regretting it, I think. Especially since Microsoft has had nothing but bad luck with any type of mmo.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Well played, sir!!
Haven't played SL in a couple years. Crap, gotta sell the million lindens i have sitting there before MS burns me. Was cool running a little business on there.
Archlinux ftw
If you read the comments you will see that the person who sent the tweet, Tizzers, is a known Second Life griefer. The Woodbury.edu group also appears to have been banned by Second Life.
But believe what you will.
It's not exactly a reputable site the OP posted.
I don't believe this particular link, but I believe it could happen knowing the crap LL pulls.
Like Trading Card Games? Click Here.
Slashdot and ZDnet are carrying articles on it now as well.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Why not just make their own mmo instead of ruining others?
Second Life is too old, slow and boring as it is and I can't see Microsoft breathing life into this old nag.
Yea microsoft may actually make it a good game. No more extreme lag no more porn everywhere.
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
I bet some silly little sod is having a big laugh that this got taken seriously.
I'll lay money MS wouldn't touch SL with a barge-pole.
Lindens will be replaced by Microsoft Points
it will be glorious
Porn really isn't everywhere, I hardly see it actually.... but I'm not looking for it either. It's absolutely not what the majority of people do in Second Life, either. But, if you take it out you would kill Second Life completely.
The thing about Second Life, is that there are no restrictions on what users can make. People have complete freedom to do and create whatever they want, just like the rest of the internet. If you start putting restrictions on the people in Second Life, you really start to kill the entire idea of the whole thing. There is no doubt Microsoft would put heavy restrictions on it and try to turn it into something like Habbo Hotel or Penguins, where it's completely family friendly. This is actually one of the reasons why Blue Mars doesn't have a larger following than it does, they put restrictions on what people can create.
It really goes back to Net Neutrality and that's what LL has tried to accomplish and that's part of what has made SL so popular. Those who abuse the privileges are taken care of, just as they are on the rest of the internet (hackers, spammers, etc).
Like it or not, Second Life is very important to the internet. It's probably the second most important 3D Environment out there now. Whether you like it or not, there are many who do and many people who have real world influence have spent or do spend time there. I don't know the exact numbers, but there are probably alot more people who spend time and spend money in SL than there are players in EVE. Just because EVE is talked about here more than SL, doesn't make EVE larger. (though it might be... I doubt it though)
Like Trading Card Games? Click Here.
Driveby injection of sanity:
1. Second Life isn't an MMO, nor a game. The only similarity to a game at all is the fact that its 3D content. Besides that, all functionality leans social networking and virtual commerce platform. The experience is programmable via scripting, so some simulators can be made game-like, but that's nothing out of the box.
2. The rumor wasn't strictly rooted in Tizzer, other credible persons who've broken news before claimed Linden staffers leaked the same news to them. Tateru Nino most reputably.
3. While it seems to be JUST a rumor, or rather, facts are solidifying that a deal was made but it probably wasn't Microsoft and it probably wasn't an offer substantial enough to take seriously, there's no reason to view acquisition offers from the likes of a Microsoft as if it was coming from the Games division. Companies like Microsoft in the form of Intel and IBM have long since seen value in virtual worlds outside of any 'gaming' potential. Google's even picked up a virtual currency company this year in an acquisition of its own. Rather than thinking Xbox, its much more keener to think Microsoft's DevDiv and the value of Second Life as an already established virtual world protocol that can reach thousands of simulators already.
Anyway, it doesn't look like anything will become of this rumor. It was on credible grounds though, just off the mark.
Yeah, the separation of adult content is not unlike MSN Chat, Yahoo Chat or all those other old things where you have to consciously choose encounter any porn if you want.
And there's no reason to believe Microsoft would censor Second Life. Lift the concept of a 'world', and Second Life is just a datacenter most web hosting companies keep that's servering vertices instead of html. The viewer is analog to a web browser, and I guarantee a majority of the world is still getting their porn through IE and whatever share of porn being piped through Windows Server installs or Windows Azure isn't being censored by Microsoft.
The first impression might be that this would go to Microsoft's games division, but Microsoft's games and entertainment division is built on Xbox, Zune, Windows Phone now and all that. The business model there is selling software and hardware by the box. Even Live isn't analagous because Second Life is subscription-free outside of the 10 bucks a month a minority of premium members pay, and that sub-fee isn't near where Linden Lab makes the most of its money. Linden Lab makes money by collecting tier, which is closer to what web hosters do for dedicated servers, and they sell classifieds and ad spaces for in-world businesses, which is what Bing and Google does. When everything is boiled down to how dollars are exchanged and the business is operated, Second Life is a closer fit for Microsoft's MSN/Online Services division or whichever division Windows Azure operates under.
And I agree, Second Life is very important. While this rumor is more than likely just a rumor, there's nothing new about Microsoft, Google and company being interested in the idea of a 3D web. Remember all that VRML mess? X3D? Google pushed O3D for awhile or whatever it was called, I think Lively was built on it; a virtual world platform that they cancelled last year or the year before. Now Google's pushing WebGL and has demo'd Quake 2 running on it. And like mentioned in the post above, Google's bought a virtual currency platform: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20013676-93.html and has been experimenting with virtual currency since OpenSocial.
Point is...its difficult to tell if the 3D web will be rooted in FaceBook's virtual currency and someone eventually establishing Second Life-ish worlds instead of Farmvilles, or Google's web facing Chromium stuff and WebGL via the HTML5 spec and people supporting that, or IBM or Intel or Microsoft or whomever pulling something else out of the bag, or Linden Lab managing to make Second Life to the 3D web what HTML is to the text web.
Who knows, but like Hatters' saying, its a serious thing and over a billion USD has been exchanged in Second Life resident-to-resident. 10-15 million USD a month is exchanged from resident to resident if one watches the raw economic stats that Linden Lab pumps out. Its very likely that Linden Lab will be acquired one day, or will be usurped by a competitor like Blue Mars (whom I wouldn't count out, they aren't big yet because they actually haven't launched, its still in beta.)