The creator of Second Life, one of the longest-running virtual worlds, which enjoyed great popularity in the first decade of the century, has decided to return to his roots and get to work in the metaverse.
Second Life will develop a metaverse based on a paid subscription model
Philip Rosedale, who founded the company in 1999, will rejoin the company as a strategic advisor Rosedale had left Second Life in 2013 to create High Fidelity, a virtual reality company. Now this company has taken over Linden Lab, the company that develops Second Life software. The deal includes the investment of an unspecified amount of money, a number of patents and the integration of some members of High Fidelity into Linden Lab’s development team.
Rosedale’s intention is to leverage its expertise in creating virtual worlds to enter the booming metaverse sector. Now that Facebook has changed its name to Meta, in order to focus its efforts on this new technology, and Apple is also planning its leap into the virtual world, Second Life does not want to be left behind in the race to conquer this new universe.
At the presentation of this new agreement, Rosedale boasted that “no one has ever come as close to building a virtual world as Second Life.”. He also wanted to make it clear that his metaverse project is very different from the one being developed by Meta, Apple, Tinder and other Big Tech companies.
In Rosedale’s words, these companies are building a metaverse based exclusively on generating advertising support and aimed at modifying the behavior of its users. Rosedale defends that Second Life intends to create “a positive and enriching experience for its residents”. He also said that the Second Life metaverse will only be accessible by paying a subscription, although he did not detail how much it would cost.
Over the past few years, Rosedale has become one of the most critical voices within the technology sector. The founder of Second Life has criticized the advertising policies of large companies and the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.
