Why some virtual worlds succeeded and survived for many years while more recent ones failed miserably

Just a few months ago, it came in the news: "The Metaverse is dead."

Of course, "the Metaverse" referred to Horizons, the ill-fated virtual worlds that had Facebook, the corporation anyway, rename itself Meta. While Mark Zuckerberg might have learned the hard way that he can't exclusively and all-encompassingly trademark a term that already appears in Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, media and people kept calling his project "the Metaverse". However, it never managed to live up to the artificial hype created around it, and it never looked like the tens of billions of dollars that Meta had pumped into it.

And just this month, it came in the news: "Second Life celebrates its 20th birthday." Like, what now?

Second Life: not so dead after all

It must have been quite a revelation for those who are old enough already to remember the hype around Linden Labs' virtual world that occurred in 2006 and 2007. Real-life companies joined it to show their presence, to advertise and often even to try and sell virtual re-creations of their real-life products. News companies followed to always get the hottest stories from Second Life and write about them for real-life readers.

When the almost constant stream of mainstream news from Second Life died down in 2008, when mass media didn't report from Second Life anymore, many assumed that Second Life had been shut down. And they did so until Second Life announced its 20th anniversary which logically implied that it was actually alive and well.

The reality back then was somewhat different, of course. Those real-life companies tried to bring real-life culture and real-life products into Second Life. However, Second Life already had its own culture, and it had its own products, all made by its own residents. Second Life's "building materials" were much more limited back then than they are today. Attempts at making sufficiently detailed virtual representations of real-life products with these materials were bound to fail. In the meantime, creative Second Life residents had designed their products around these materials and along their limitations. Nobody wanted to buy virtual Nike sneakers; local products made by amateurs were actually better in practice.

Advertising real-life brands and real-life products in Second Life was bound to fail, too. Companies rented billboards and had their advertising textures placed on them. And Second Life residents not only ignored, but out-right de-rendered them. Besides, why advertise in a virtual world for something that isn't available in that same virtual world? When the real-life companies realised that their Second Life branches ran at a loss, they withdrew from Second Life entirely.

Media quickly followed suit. Without big companies to write about, there was nothing at all for them to write about. Well, there was still Second Life-specific news and gossip. But for one, people who weren't in Second Life weren't interested in it anyway. And besides, this was already covered by Second Life bloggers. And so, mass media withdrew from Second Life, too.

Nonetheless, Second Life carried on until today. In fact, it has changed a lot. It doesn't look anything like those crummy videos preserved from the hype years. If you look at the official website or the many Second Life pictures on Flickr (caution, some are not exactly safe for work), it's probably hard to believe that this is still the same world as back in 2007.

Causes for failure

But how come Second Life, created by a basically unknown company in 2003, became such a success while Horizons failed on an epic scale in spite of an eleven-digit budget, and none of the more recent virtual worlds has taken off yet?

That's because the recent virtual worlds all made the same mistake. They were all designed for making money first and foremost. Of course, especially if they're commercial worlds, they have to break even at least. But Horizons, just as well as those many crypto-based worlds, was conceived as a money printer with almost no regards to anything else. The business plan was to build virtual worlds, tell mass media about them and watch people flock into them by many millions.

The crypto-based worlds were often even worse offenders. They were only made for three purposes: for selling expensive land, for selling NFTs and for watching your own crypto money increase in value. Some at least had some celebrity's mansion or some corporation's headquarters as unique selling points; others didn't have any in-world images at all, making them seem like crypto banks with attached metaverses that might or might not work. The crypto crash actually forced some of them to shut down because they had all their financial assets stored in a cryptocurrency that other people were gambling with.

To get back to Meta: They relied too much on their own market power. Horizons was to become the Facebook or Instagram of virtual worlds. In fact, just like Facebook was to become the new Internet, Horizons was to become the new Internet, too. Meta placed high bets on virtual reality replacing the World-Wide Web or, to be more specific, Horizons replacing the World-Wide Web.

In fact, they thought they could get away with making Horizons exclusive to their own expensive brand of virtual reality headsets. People would have to buy them anyway sooner or later in order not to end up out of the loop. But Horizons being available neither on other brands of VR goggles nor on the desktop nor on mobile devices, instead requiring costly special hardware, wasn't the only reason why it failed.

Certainly, the lack-lustre, cartoonish avatars contributed to its demise. I'm pretty sure that some people actually took it upon themselves to compare them directly with contemporary Second Life avatars, even after Zuckerberg had announced the visuals upgrade that didn't really change that much. On top of that, the total lack of a lower body and legs, while actually halfway justified, made Horizons the laughing stock not only of the virtual worlds scene, but of the digital world in general.

Recipe for success

But neither Meta's market power nor its massive advertising nor Horizons' constant mass media presence managed to create what's actually essential for a virtual world to thrive. And that's an incentive for people to join it, especially if that requires overcoming an obstacle which, in this case, was acquiring a Meta VR headset and getting used to virtual reality. Even if Meta had given each Facebook or Instagram user a Horizons avatar, that wouldn't have meant that everyone had actually used it even once. Not even nearly everyone.

But what's even more important than people joining is people coming back. It's one thing to have lots of people try out your virtual world. It's another thing to have them return instead of visiting once and then never again. The number of registered users is not as good for bragging about as the number of active users.

It's one thing to make a virtual world interesting at first glance. It's another thing to keep it from getting old and boring eventually.

Apparently, there are virtual worlds which manage to do the latter and have sometimes managed to do so for more than a decade. But what is it that makes virtual worlds long-term successes?

There are three key elements for this. The first one is community. Visiting virtual worlds alone is not as interesting in the long run as meeting other avatars in them. This is also why virtual worlds grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic: If you can't meet people in real life, you may be able to meet them in a virtual world. Turned out you could.

The second one is the world itself and its content. This is important for attracting users. And in order not to lose them again, they have to be able to discover new things all the time. The world must never go stale, and visitors must never ask themselves what they're even supposed to do there because there's nothing much to do in the first place. Seeing some celebrity's mansion on a multi-million-dollar patch of land gets old quickly, especially if you can't even enter the land, much less the building because it's private property.

The third one is user creativity in-world. A world in which everything is made by the owners of the world plus maybe a few hired professionals, a world in which all other avatars can only consume and communicate, such a world will soon become boring for many. In fact, this is important for the second element: If users can fairly easily create in-world, if they can help shape the world, they can make it change, and they can keep it constantly interesting for others. The world owners don't have to take care of that.

Example for success: Second Life

Second Life managed to take off and become a huge success within three years, all that although it was ahead of its time, for in 2003, PC hardware had only just got capable of rendering 3-D virtual worlds, and the necessary broadband connections weren't available nearly everywhere. And it managed to do that because it quickly had all three elements down pat.

I guess one contributing factor was that Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, had actually read Snow Crash. It actually inspired him to create Second Life. Of course, he didn't want to re-create Snow Crash's Metaverse which not only is as deeply dystopian as its real life, but also a vision of the future Internet from a point of view when the Internet was mostly walled gardens operated by AOL, CompuServe and the like. Remember Snow Crash was published in 1991, two years even before the Eternal September and three years before the launch of the World-Wide Web. For comparison, Ready Player One is 20 years newer; it was published when Google and Facebook were already big data giants.

Nonetheless, Snow Crash gave Rosedale an idea of what a virtual world would need.

Few virtual worlds offer in-world creativity to their users on levels similar to Second Life. Still today, almost everything in-world was made by residents. Interestingly, this was already the case when Second Life was opened to the general public in 2003. Before that happened, 3-D designers were invited as the first residents, and their task was to decorate the otherwise almost empty world. They really had to start from scratch, but capable as they were, they managed to pull it off, including making their own textures. That way, the Second Life grid already looked nice when it was opened.

Right away, there was enough to see for the first new residents and to get them going. But they were also given the opportunity to acquire land and build on it themselves, making the grid grow in the process and change constantly. Another incentive to come back was to finish the own builds. All this helped create and maintain communities.

Well, and of course, on top of it all came the novelty of having a public 3-D virtual world. Second Life wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the first to be covered by mainstream media and thus the first that was noticed by the general public.

Granted, it's only fair to mention that not everyone who tries out Second Life gets hooked for a lifetime. It was once revealed that four out of five people who create an avatar in Second Life only log in once and then never again. One reason may be false expectations. People may expect Second Life to be an MMO like, for example, World of Warcraft. But Second Life turns out not to be a game after all; it doesn't have a goal, and most importantly, it doesn't have quests that it tries to push you onto. Not being told what to do after logging in for the first time and having to find something to do oneself is what irritates many. But nonetheless, Second Life continues to have an average of over 50,000 monthly users.

Lastly, I dare say that Second Life is not popular although it isn't virtual reality of the kind that requires a headset. It is popular because it isn't that. It's popular because it's a "pancake" that runs on your PC or your laptop with a run-of-the-mill 2-D display, largely regardless of operating system even, that doesn't require you to shell out money for a set of goggles first, and that's accessible to people who can't use VR headsets for whichever reasons. And soon it'll come to phones.

Example for success: OpenSimulator

Another example is OpenSimulator which is not a virtual world per se. It's rather a free, open-source re-implementation of Second Life's technology built around its viewer API and available as a cross-platform server application. Still, its name is used as an umbrella term for the many worlds or, as they're actually called, grids that run on it.

OpenSim came out in January 2007, and in July, the first public grid was launched, OSgrid. While it has always been a testbed for OpenSim's development, OSgrid is not only the oldest grid, celebrating its 16th birthday this year, but also the biggest in user numbers and the largest in land area which is almost on par with Second Life.

OpenSim's big advantage was that it was entirely in the hands of its own community from the very beginning and never owned or operated by a for-profit corporation. Second Life had meanwhile switched from its early pay-to-use model to land rentals as its main source of income. OpenSim grids offered land for rent, too, but the rental fees only had to cover the server costs and not pay employees and a leading board, much less investors. And so OpenSim managed to have much cheaper land than Second Life. It still has today which explains why all OpenSim grids put together surpass Second Life's land area by the factor of four.

From the beginning, OpenSim had two main target audiences: Second Life residents, especially those who wanted to escape Second Life's increasingly rampant capitalism, and people who were interested in Second Life but unwilling or unable to invest real money in it. Cheap land, even the possibility of running your own grid, and not having to pay for anything else was the main incentive to join. Ironically, most word-of-mouth advertisement for OpenSim happened in Second Life.

However, it didn't start with a bunch of invited 3-D designers going around and decorating the new world so the first residents have something to behold and explore. OSgrid didn't, its official sims had to be built by and by as the grid was already open, and neither did any of the other grids. Typically, OpenSim grids start with nothing more than the grid owners deem necessary; this usually doesn't go beyond a welcome/landing sim.

So OpenSim managed to start with a community before having interesting worlds to visit. But this community was there primarily to build. For building, OpenSim is actually better than Second Life because land isn't nearly as expensive, and the limits of what can be placed on the land are much, much higher. Many came to OpenSim to build big, on a scale that Second Life would have made either outrageously expensive or completely impossible. At least early OpenSim was all about building. The result was impressive builds which lured more people over from Second Life where they couldn't possibly behold anything even similar.

2008 gave OpenSim a big push. This was the year when the Hypergrid was introduced. OpenSim had been decentralised from the very beginning, but each grid was its own walled garden. The Hypergrid introduced federation between grids because it made it possible for an avatar registered on one grid to travel to other grids, appearance, inventory and all. No longer was it necessary to create and maintain one avatar on each grid that you were interested in. Instead, you only needed one avatar to visit at least all grids connected to the Hypergrid. Only a small minority of grids stayed out of it. The others saw the formation of friendships and communities across grid borders.

This was also the year that freebie stores started taking off. Early on, most OpenSim users had the typical Second Life mindset of sharing their creations either for money with restricted permissions, which wasn't even possible because OpenSim didn't have a currency like the Linden Dollar, or not at all. They were afraid of people stealing their creations. So whatever you needed, were it objects for your sim or clothes for your avatar, you had to make them all yourself. But in 2008, full-perm freebies for everyone started emerging.

A key factor in this was when Linda Kellie, recently mobbed out of Second Life for offering full-perm freebies in direct competition with commercial creators, opened her Linda Kellie Designs sim which not only offered freebies for almost all purposes, but on which everything could be copied and shared with full permissions. It was technically impossible to steal from her because she had put everything she had made under Creative Commons CC0 which equals the public domain. As others didn't want her to have a monopoly on all these things, they followed suit and started offering their own creations for free, often even full-perm.

It was then that OpenSim also really had a check mark on content.

Still today, OpenSim is mostly targetted at Second Life converts which gets to the point that some users can't believe that anyone in OpenSim hasn't been in Second Life before. And so, it keeps up a monthly average of over 30,000 users, a steady long-term growth of this number and its enormous landmass even with little to no on-boarding assistance for new users.

Examples from the games area

When the word spread that Horizons is, in fact, not "the Metaverse", and that "metaverse" can be a general term for virtual worlds, many existing platforms jumped upon the bandwagon, or at least their communities did. Pretty much only OpenSim didn't have to because the OpenSim community has been using that term in relation to either OpenSim as a whole, the Hypergrid or single OpenSim grids since at least 2010, probably even longer. This is why the OpenSim community was so irked when Mark Zuckerberg wanted to brand his virtual world "The Metaverse".

But recently, even Second Life officially started to refer to itself as a "metaverse".

Even out-right games joined in. One example is Minecraft, the closest thing Microsoft has to an already functional metaverse. One of several descendants in spirit of the original voxel mining game, Infiniminer, while it's an open sandbox, it's a game all right, and it has introduced more and more elements of a game over the years. But while it can be run as a single-player game on a computer at home, it can also be played online.

Like all voxel miners, Minecraft takes care of staying interesting to its users at its very core. Of course, it's all about not only mining, but building. Each world is shaped by its users. But even before this building happens, Minecraft worlds are always interesting and exciting to explore because Minecraft generates them procedurally, another voxel miner standard. No staff, no admin, no developer is required to build all those landscapes with forests and meadows and deserts and even villages. What would take humans decades to build is automatically generated within seconds, chunk by chunk as the map is being explored, but still, and it's always generated differently.

And these worlds are huge. They stretch dozens upon dozens of kilometres across without being split into square regions like in Second Life or OpenSim. It takes weeks to explore them in full, even without ever mining or building. This enormous size also provides for enough space for thousands upon thousands of players on the same map.

Now, notice the plural: "worlds". Minecraft is actually decentralised which is unusual for a corporate product; anyone can create and run an online map, it just requires a machine with Minecraft on it that's online 24/7 and a sufficiently fast Internet connection. Remember that Minecraft was bought out by Microsoft, not created by Microsoft, and Mojang didn't have the means to host countless online maps for millions of users. I guess these sheer numbers alone might have Microsoft think twice about any plans of centralising Minecraft and only allowing multi-player maps on their own servers.

So if the map you're on bores you, you can always join another map. Or you can go back to single-player to return online later. Yes, there's still a single-player mode.

However, the best example of successful virtual worlds has to be Roblox with constantly way over 150 million monthly users. Like those various voxel miners, it's a game. And one with a long history. It can be traced back to a 2-D physics engine, and it started out itself as a 3-D physics engine as that had become feasible by 2004. Even that was only possible with rather blocky objects. This is why Roblox was being referred to as "virtual LEGO", especially as some creators went with the blocky style and added "studs" to the textures on top surfaces. Creators of avatar accessories drove this even further by making player avatars look as close to LEGO minifigs as they could get away with.

Of course, it couldn't be likened to LEGO without user creativity which has always been a big part of Roblox. However, it's here where Roblox really shows that it isn't a virtual world and not really a bunch of virtual worlds in the traditional sense either. For the worlds that can be created in Roblox, called "experiences", are mostly games. This gave it its own appeal, especially amongst children under 13, which didn't come from building, exploring or socialising, but from playing. There used to be a time when twice as many kids in the USA had a Roblox account than not.

Interestingly and unusually, while Roblox advanced technologically, it also matured along with its young target audience to keep its appeal as its users' preferences changed and generally appeal to an older audience. In 2015, it replaced its old block-based physics engine with one that could use free-form objects, a step in shedding the LEGO aesthetics. The scripting engine was enhanced to allow for even more complex games which were increasingly written for a teen or young adult audience. Avatars became more detailed within what Roblox still allowed, getting users to invest more in-world currency into customising their avatars.

Users from earlier times sometimes criticise Roblox for having turned from LEGO meets Minecraft with physics into LEGO Friends meets Second Life with physics that can be neglected in the second half of the 2010s. Also, the experiences have increasingly become either a few professionally developed games, non-professional lack-lustre games, the beloved games from way back which no longer worked or not even games at all. Still, Roblox had its huge user base, it kept gaining new young users, and at least some long-term users welcomed the offerings for older audiences.

Conclusion

If you look at these and other successful virtual worlds, you'll notice a few patterns. One of them is that all of them had something to offer their users pretty much right away.

When Second Life was opened to the general public, it was nicely decorated already, and it gave its residents an assortment of in-world tools to decorate it further with. Oh, and it already had a bunch of residents when it opened.

OpenSim recruits most of its target audience from Second Life with which it shares most of the UI/UX and the in-world building tools. However, it adds on top more and much cheaper land, hardly ever having to pay for anything else, no central rulers and the almost complete absence of commercialism.

Voxel miners like Minecraft managed to turn creativity into a challenge, often making construction on public servers a community effort, and they avoid empty barren land by having procedurally-generated, fully decorated landscapes.

Early Roblox made creativity playful by being a physics simulator which turned into minigame development and eventually into a huge gaming platform. Also, it was one of the first few virtual world platforms suitable for and popular with kids who at the same time were excluded from the on-going Second Life hype.

Horizons had nothing even remotely like this, and neither had any of these blockchain/crypto/NFT-based startups that tried to ride the hype train. They put their focus entirely on making money. The crypto worlds did because that was their very concept. And Horizons did because it was doomed so, being a project of a huge gigacorporation and still financed through venture capital. Investors and shareholders expected Horizons to generate revenue and pay back the investment plus ROI ASAP, so there was little else that could be taken care of.

Another pattern that isn't so obvious is the platform. All the successful examples were designed for run-of-the-mill desktop or laptop computers which people already had anyway. Many of the new virtual worlds from the 2020s, in contrast, at least those that were actually launched, went VR only and required a VR headset with no 2-D desktop frontend available. Horizons managed to top that by forcing aspiring users to buy an expensive Meta headset because Horizons wouldn't run on anything else.

Lastly, "the Metaverse" could have been a greater success, hadn't all who were involved in launching new virtual worlds since 2020 completely re-invented the wheel and acted as if wheels hadn't existed before the COVID-19 pandemic. Had they taken a look at Second Life, they would have seen what makes Second Life so popular, and they would have avoided the mistakes Second Life had made in the past.

Instead, younger project managers and developers had never even heard of Second Life. And those who were old enough that they should have remembered it had all but forgotten about it as they took it for dead and gone since 2008 or 2009. Even historical records wouldn't have been considered investigating because what had been in the 2000s would have been taken for hopelessly outdated by 2020's or 2021's standards and not worth looking at.

One can only hope that the remaining new metaverse projects have caught wind of Second Life's 20th birthday, that they learned through it that Second Life is alive and well, that it has evolved tremendously since 2007, that it is indeed worth studying, and that neither Second Life's experiences nor its history are copyrighted IP by Linden Labs, never to be used by anyone else.

In the meantime, the various "open metaverse" endeavours that want to create a decentralised, Fediverse-style network of interconnected virtual worlds are all doomed to make the same mistakes as OpenSim and not see what it has done right, simply because they've never even heard of it, and they probably never will.