"Despite the chaos in the world's economies, lead indicators for the Second Life economy remain strong" said John Zdanowski, financial director of Linden Lab, which set up Second Life in 2003.
"Second Life as a whole has been so far unaffected by the recent turmoil in real world markets," he added in a written response to AFP.
Linden Lab is trying to spin this for sure--why would SL be immune to the largest financial crisis in modern history? Come on, this is virtual reality without logging inworld. While the Linden Dollar has been stable, there is huge pressure on the SL economy. There is pressure coming down on Linden Lab in the form of new competitors. Maybe the impact hasn't hit the grid yet, but like the travel industry, the financial crisis will pull down the SL economy latter this year.
LL is in the bunker (and residents trapped in there with them). They think they can spin and dodge, when really they should be engaging the core users to work on the future of SL. Zdanowski is probably to busy taking LL profits (rumor is $US hundreds of thousands per week) to the bank these days to realize just how tenuous the SL economy really is (sounds like comments from bank execs before their banks went out of business?) But amazing to see that LL is not learning any lessons from the Global Financial Crisis. Over-inflated land prices? People holding land assets that have fractional value that they think they were worth? Expanded supply of merchandise, but flat demand and downward price?
Maybe the point Zdanowski is making is that Linden Lab is unaffected by the crisis even though the SL users will be?
Big issue is that Linden Lab is not sharing meaningful data about SL economy, users or land growth--so where is the transparency?
from Hamlet at New World Notes:
If I'm right, however, growth in Second Life user numbers won't be significant until the world is beautiful and robust and relatively lag-free and crashes are rare. Or as Vig puts it, "I just can’t see how SL can meaningfully grow until that infrastructure catches up with user demand for satisfying group experiences."
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