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Microsoft Rumored To Buy Second Life
Jamie noticed a rumor making the rounds: Microsoft buying Second Life. Nobody is confirming or denying anything, much less announcing anything sounding like a price. Or a reason why this makes any sense to anyone.
No confirmation, no denials, no explanation, no reason to believe it at all... ...and this is news?
They need it to compete with the runaway critical and commercial success of Playstation Home.
Wouldn't that imply they had a first?
The only reason I can think of is they want to pick up any patents they own and sue people. Perhaps I'm bitter ... it seems that's the only reason companies get bought these days.
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...because Bill Gates wants to make his Linden dollar purchases for "Gorean" equipment deductible?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Maybe they're only buying it inside Second Life.
See this is what happens when you tell some guys with billions of dollars to "go get a life"..... I know it sounds like a crazy scheme but then they laughed at Microsoft Bob too... Uh, wait....
The code base for the viewer is GPL, but they have certain terms you must meet before the viewer can connect to the servers. Would MS change those terms to lock out Linux (or MacIntosh)?
Microsoft is purchasing this in anticipation of starting a virtual brothel in Xbox Live. Subscribers will be able to pay real money to participate in virtual (fake) sex acts with complete strangers.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I'm betting Microsoft is seeing the money they can make from furries.
I had an SL avatar, ran it into a furry hangout, oh look, a stripper pole. I get on it, leave to take care of something that needed urgent attention, come back and I've suddenly got the equivalent of $50USD.
I didn't do a damned thing and made $50. Furries are unusually un-thrifty with their money, it seems.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
two words:
Patent
Portfolio
They've been rumored to be active in one of the open-source secondlife clones for a while now, so it's not a matter of wanting the access. Secondlife has been thoroughly, totally mismanaged for years so it's not the expertise (besides, didn't they just lay off most of their employees?).
There's only one, single thing that they would gain from this purchase; and it's so obvious that I'm literally shocked no one has mentioned it yet.
They want the patent portfolio, so that they can shut down any competing open source clones and prevent anyone else from operating in that space.
Home has turned out to be a massive success for Sony. Microsoft has to do something because right now their online service is getting laughed at by gamers:
* Forced 50 dollar a year online fees
* Laggy P2P based networking for games
* Tiny online game sizes because of the horrible P2P networking tech
* Their creepy ripoff of Nintendo's Mii avatars
Compared to Sony's:
* Free online gaming for every single player
* Standard dedicated servers for all major games just like in PC gaming
* Gigantic player counts for online games thanks to the dedicated servers
* The massive Home online service
Home is absolutely packed with people at all hours of the day with almost every person spending money constantly on Home items for their characters and personal spaces. The amount of money Sony is making off of the Home service is huge when you add up just low estimates for what people are buying every month.
Sony has been working on Home since the early PS2 days. Combined with their long history of experience in MMORPG tech and development it is going to be basically impossible for Microsoft to take Second Life and turn it into anything that can compete with Home.
From what ive heard on the SecondLife Beta group this is laughable at best
Why would MicroSoft want to buy a company that
1 has massive LINUX installs (the SL grid farms)
2 is running about 3 minutes from being sued into a crater 85% of the time
3 has nothing that a company like MS needs or wants (the L$Mega types most likely HATE microsoft)
Now the whole Mesh beta thing is lots more interesting
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It's probably not such a bad idea really. Microsoft are seen as boring, stagnant, and not making any particularly exciting moves in terms of new ideas & new products. Second Life is terrible these days, boring, clunky, ugly and crap, but the fundamental idea is pretty incredible - if Microsoft could take what's there and build upon it/somethow breath some life into it, I reckon it could have some serious potential, a second life if you will. It'll be spare change for MS, so not such a bad gamble IMO.
Except that clippy will be replaced with a swarm of flying didoes.
Why would MicroSoft want to buy a company that
1 has massive LINUX installs (the SL grid farms)
2 is running about 3 minutes from being sued into a crater 85% of the time
3 has nothing that a company like MS needs or wants (the L$Mega types most likely HATE microsoft)
Hotmail.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
they got confused when they saw all of that embracing and extending going on in the virtual space of Second Life.
That was cruel, when you said that the Furries first came to mind, and then shortly after than visuals of the embracing and extending you mentioned...
Thanks a lot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can see a great new UI paradigm that couples Surface with 2nd Life, maybe. Maybe Microsoft (finally) has a new trick up their sleeve. Or they are simply illustrating yet again how cutting edge they are ten years ago. I dunno...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Home is massive. The amount of work Sony has put into it over the years is enormous. A full MMORPG style gaming engine. Media streaming tech and servers. Integration with games and the PS3 system software. Huge amounts of tools and processes for adding content from Sony themselves and vast numbers of third parties.
Microsoft would have to spend years coming up with anything remotely similar. I have a hard time imagining they are really going to try to come up with a copy of Sony's Home. There is burning anger from the humiliation the huge success Sony has had with Home both from the gigantic userbase and enormous support from third party gaming companies.
But everything at Microsoft points to them no longer really trying to compete with Sony and the PS3 and instead have given up and turned to trying to turn the old Xbox 360 hardware into a Wii type device. They have been closing down internal studios and other internal Xbox related teams for the past two years. They now only have about 3 first party studios. Suddenly ramping up the resources and personnel to try to create an answer to Sony's enormous Home online world just doesn't make sense. Whatever they come up with is going to be so late and rushed that it is going to just look like junk in comparison.
everyone knows that Microsoft doesn't like its current life and wants a new one. Unfortunately, second life only allows actual people to play, so for Microsoft to be able to play as a corporation, they would have to buy it first and change the rules. Isn't that obvious?
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
Am I the only one that read that as "flying dildos"?
I assumed it was a typo. Esp. since I have no idea what flying didoes are.
Or what's a stationary one for that matter.
Or do they burrow?
...
XBox.
XBox Live avatar world, like a virtual world with social networking built in. Sidestep gains from any other social network by making it unique (virtual environment) and exclusive (XBox Live).
Second Life still exists???
It's a reference to pranks like this on SL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv6tr3SvmIY
or more particularly, this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RedLyae4b2s
Yep, concurrency is about 10x what it was back in 2006. It's not super-huge, but it does have a core of dedicated users, and a small number of new people joining every day.
The eyetoy/eye predates the Wii, and Sony was working on that wand controller in the PS2 days, they even had prototypes. Didn't release it because the tech wasn't quite there yet. IIRC the limitation was the original eyetoy's resolution and the PS2 wasn't quite powerful enough to do what they wanted with it AND put out pretty graphics while processing the video.
Assuming that this indeed is true, my guess is that they want the technology to develop their own MMO or use Linden's expertise for their cloud based offerings.
Buying the tech and expertise is cheaper than developping your own after all.
~Syberz
Guess they didn't catch them all yet.
I'm in the tech industry, I play video games, I have a PS3, four Macs and three PCs, I'm 40 and have teenaged children...I'm no recluse, yet I've NEVER seen Second Life except in an episode of The Office. I've also never seen The Sims. I'm beginning to think there's some sort of ratings conspiracy to hype up products that don't really exist.