from Red Herring online:
Playing God
In LindenWorld, you are the creator.
By Justin Hibbard
October 17, 2002
Staring at your computer screen, you see green 3D hills that stretch for miles into a sienna sunset. With a few mouse clicks, you start building a chateau on the nearest hillside. The construction will cost you some play money--and several hours of real time. If people visit your chateau often, you'll recoup the cash. But your reward for the hours spent building is simply your own entertainment.
Is that your idea of fun? Linden Lab is betting it is--for the 10 million people the company considers to be potential players of its game, LindenWorld. Founders of the three-year-old startup believe consumers will pay a monthly subscription fee (fees for similar games are around $10) to undertake something usually left to professional developers: creating characters and settings. Other startups, including There and PersistentWorldz, are making the same wager.
Ever since the text-based fantasy games of the early '80s, virtual worlds have fascinated computer gamers. But, as business ventures, most of them have failed. In the mid-'90s, the online-world startups Electric Communities and The Palace burned through a combined $75 million before folding.
Technology and consumer behavior have come a long way since then. The spread of broadband Internet connections and PCs with graphics chips has enabled a realism that earlier online worlds lacked. And as people spend more time on the Internet, they are increasingly living fantasy lives online.
Those advances spurred Philip Rosedale to start Linden Lab in 1999, after he resigned as chief technical officer of the streaming-media software maker RealNetworks. His notions inspired Linden investor Mitch Kapor, a RealNetworks board member and founder of Lotus Development. "There's something about Philip's idea of being able to live another life or live in another universe that just personally struck a chord," says Mr. Kapor, who, along with Catamount Ventures, provided an undisclosed amount of seed funding to Linden Lab.
The idea has struck a chord with major game publishers, too. By year-end, Electronic Arts will introduce an online version of its best-selling PC game, The Sims, which lets players create a neighborhood of simulated people. Mr. Rosedale says the 2D game will whet people's appetites for the 3D graphics of LindenWorld.
Another highly anticipated release is Star Wars Galaxies. Players will explore a world created and continuously updated by Sony Online Entertainment. Mr. Rosedale says LindenWorld's advantage over such games is its user-created content, which frees Linden Lab from ongoing development costs. "We can't get into the content rat race," he says.
But will players prefer their own content to professionals'? Linden Lab designed LindenWorld's economic system to encourage high-quality creations. Players earn play money for creating popular characters and buildings, and they pay taxes on the land that their structures occupy.
Still, the number of people who enjoy creating content is limited. "If you're talking mass market, I don't think your average user would want to do that kind of thing," says Mike Wallace, a video game analyst at UBS Warburg. Online-world enthusiasts will surely flock to LindenWorld. Getting mainstream consumers to follow will be a tougher game to master.
Posted by jane at October 21, 2002 03:57 PM