Best quote from Zuck: "We're clearly not a hardware company. We're not gonna try to make a profit off of the devices long term. We view this as a software and services thing, where if we can make it so that this becomes a network where people can be communicating and buying things and virtual goods, and there might be advertising in the world, but we need to figure that out down the line."
Is Second Life still a viable buy? Linden Labs seem pretty quite these days. Are they still growing?
They rarely get mentioned in the hallowed corridors of HN.
The last mention I could dig up was this, about 4 years back!!!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032309
CCP might make more sense, but they still don't really have technology for building these sorts of worlds. I deeply respect them, and think that they probably have more appropriate tech to offer than most, but I think that one of the most important parts of virtual worlds is Second Life's original killer feature - content creation, which is something they have little experience in.
The ability for anyone to create is powerful, as recent games like minecraft have shown. Second Life just never kept up with technology, and now the best ways to create content for it involve the use of modeling software with a high barrier to entry. (Of course, it's terrible in many other ways, but that's a separate discussion).
If someone can build a virtual world platform from the ground up, with tightly integrated content creation that is intuitive (maybe something like sketchup), and all in-world, it would be very powerful.
I've actually been wanting to build just such a platform for a long time, but learning 3d graphics isn't the easiest thing out there :)
As exciting as all this appears, you're looking at a 2016 release date a the absolute soonest; which essentially puts this project in the "vaporware until proven otherwise" category.
Could Carmack have been lured by an interest in being the guy who nails Second-Life-done-properly? That would be a pretty massive thing to put on your life CV if you got it right.
Best quote from Zuck: "We're clearly not a hardware company. We're not gonna try to make a profit off of the devices long term. We view this as a software and services thing, where if we can make it so that this becomes a network where people can be communicating and buying things and virtual goods, and there might be advertising in the world, but we need to figure that out down the line."