The news comes down today from the company itself that British-based Rezzable plans to shut down or transfer most of its operations in Second Life and move to its OpenSim-based platform, Heritage Key. From their blog:
…We have decided to close down all our sims on the Second Life grid except for Greenies Home. We will drop Crimson Shadow, Tunnel of Light and Carnival of Doom mid-July. Greenies Lawn is already gone. The Hobo Island is being transferred over to Thinkerer Melville. Black Swan will be deleted from the SL Grid after the Swan Song fashion event closes in mid-August. We will be focusing our efforts on Heritage Key, where we invite you to GoVirtual (VX) with King Tut. We will re-open the Rezzable Grid for people to help us test/improve OpenSim as well as showcase things that work there. We will continue to operate http://rezzable.com and cover metaverse topics and our virtual locations directory….
It’s good to know that Greenies Home, which I’ve visited along with many other avatars, will be continuing (at least for the short term); but the loss of a first-water content creator, whether an individual or company, is never a good thing. It’ll be a shame to lose Rezzable, whose artistry and creativity is well known, from the Greenies to the King Tut exhibit.
But does this, as the doomsayers claim in their bromides, prove that Second Life is dying? I wouldn’t believe it. Second Life is far and away the preserve of the small businessperson; and there are still large companies yet, such as IBM, who see uses for SL as well. The fallout of RL companies from the Grid is similar to some of what happened in the Nineties on the Web, when the dot-com bubble burst. The ones who will stay are the ones who can figure out how to put this exciting new medium to use most effectively for their purposes. IBM uses it as advertising, and as meeting space; the RL U. S. Guvment uses it as well, particularly the military! Second Life is far from dead, and I don’t even see it as morbid or moribund.
To the naysayers: your output is derived from your input. If you don’t put anything into SL, you’ll never get anything out of it — unlike the thousands of us who do, and are.
Thanks for kind words. Dunno about IBM really, seems like SL is more of a toy for them. It would be really interesting to see if they are doing something at a big scale. As far as small business goes, it seems like even though people can make some money, when they factor in their expenses and divide the rest by manhours needed there isn’t so much of a return for many people. Like a casino, people like to believe that they can be the big winner, but I no real evidence that anyone cleans-up other than the “comfortably profitable” Linden Lab. I actually hope that I am wrong on that as a lot of people put a lot of effort into making some amazing things in SL and I really hope it is actually worthwhile these days. Certainly it has not been our recent experience.
It is a sad day to see any talent move away from a platform that is growing. But what I ma sure of the Rezzable group well be keeping a eye on Second Life. And when thy change the way thy see things the things thy see well change.