First off as a Second Life PAID user I can say this with experince on the subject.
People have made millions from it and not just Linden Labs, first off a real estate tycoon made over a Million selling virtual real estate on the game, however its not as easy as you think and I'm not backing up Second Life.
First off in my opinion and experince with the game is that its MySpace virtualized, thats the best explanation possible.
We all know MySpace sucks because there users can't comprehend the basic design skills required to make MySpace as successful as say FaceBook does by doing things in a much cleaner way.
This is exactly 2000% true with Second Life no one there knows how to design shit, but thats not exactly there main issue, things would be a lot better but unfortunately Second Life is extremely laggy and slow loading.
Reasons for this are because they are trying to render damn near everything in real time with little caching going on, second is because the users are not using web based images as you would on a fast loading website.
This again falls into the category of the MySpace user base not knowing how to do shit properly.
Why is Second Life successful or better said why is Microsoft, IBM, and other large corporations spending a few million investing in it.
The answer is because the idea is very powerful and has huge potential for success but this doesn't at all mean they will become successful.
Just like Entropia, Second Life has a very good idea but in my own mind and many many others its being poorly implimented.
What would work a lot better is if the ideas like Second Life and Entrpoia Universe would do things more along the lines of World Of Warcraft and the new upcoming Spore Game.
Why world of warcraft? Well first WOW is entertaining and there are goals, in Second Life and Entropia there are no real goals its just you show up chat with some people, watch the lag, get board, maybe try to make some money (Very little amounts based upon there systems) and then leave.
So why Spore? Well once again because Spore has a goal, that goal is to rule the universe but before I compare spore in-depth I want to explain the WOW thing a bit better.
See WOW isn't laggy, it can be with tons and tons and tons of users in one spot and that is because you really don't have to try and render the entire system with every login, see 9 GB (Yes 9) is actually stored on your computer, the graphics are pre-determined which means no need to render everything everytime.
Second Life would be better off doing something like that but unfortunately they cannot because that would restrict the user base too much however this is where Spore and presudral programming come more into play.
See with Spore there is a little bit of set things when creating say a creature you have certain parts of the creature but its your choice to create that creature in any way you want and then to have it interact very nicely within the game dynamics this can be done with presedural programming.
Its hard to get my final point across in all this and I can go on forever but the #1 major mistake these companies are making with oppurtunities like this is that they are first putting the money ahead of the actual game play.
They need to take a lesson from the game community and place the game play experince first then when the user is happy they can rake in the huge sums of money.
By this I mean Second Life would be perfect if when your first starting out you have a little game quest to do, treat it like a game where you build up your house, business ect...
Try to give the users some better interaction and excitement other then just telling them its a real world economy and letting them destroy the thing.
I'm stopping this long ass rant because its late, I'm tired, and I will never get my point across but trust me all this makes sense in my head, maybe I'll do a follow up if someone wants more explanation done with what I've said.
