Slashdot Mirror
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?
[
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.
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
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?