Linden Lab’s board of directors is now graced by legendary game-designer, Will Wright. An interesting development, since we so rarely see any changes on the Lab’s board of directors. Whether this actually signals or heralds any change in corporate direction at Linden Lab is uncertain at the present time.
A lot depends on what the company’s current direction is (which continues to be an unknown), and how much involvement the board has in major decision-making for the company (which is another unknown).
Linden Lab was not immediately available for comment, but I’m expecting to hear back from the company with some sort of comment or statement.
[Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this today]
Update: Linden Lab has responded with an official statement:
We are thrilled to have a leader and pioneer of creative gaming and user-generated content join the Board of Linden Lab. His experience and insight will be incredibly valuable as we look to make the creativity that makes Second Life special today more easily and widely available.
Yes, it’s generic, and I understand that you are likely disappointed by the response, but my take is that the Lab doesn’t want to discuss this any further.
Tags: Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc, Maxis, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds, Will Wright
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Holy. That’s huge. No real idea what it means, but even if all it amounts to is that Will Wright sees a good future in Second Life that does wonders for Second Life’s image.
If the pay is good enough it shouldn’t be too hard to find big names to stand on the bridge as the ship goes down. They always pop up somewhere else where they hear the cash register.
Doesn’t Linden Lab have a habit of attracting staff from Maxis/EA ?
Well, that whole section of Maxis/EA has been shutting down, so that did rather leave some staff open for hiring.
/me refers to Robin
I want to keymash excitedly at this development, but I can’t bring myself to do so yet. I home Mr. Wright can spur some changes and introduce some of the things I love about Maxis games into SL. I think Second Life is a really great vein for Will Wright to be in. If LL knows what’s good for them, they’ll give him a real voice in the future of SL.
[...] Just how involved Wright will be in Linden Lab’s development and direction is far from clear, as Tateru Nino notes in commenting on his arrival. [...]
Was Will Wright not asked before? If it was an option, I can’t believe he didn’t join once it became obvious that Sims Online was not going to be the success the single-player versions were. In fact, my first question about Second Life (several years ago before I joined), was why was Second Life flourishing and Sims Online was dying (and according to one rumor I heard, being overrun by virtual mafia gangs)? It wasn’t just the free-vs-fee differential. Yes, I’d been in the Sims Online beta and decided against paying monthly to be there. But I also remembered that changes made very late in the beta to make Sims Online more goal-oriented as opposed to the original plan of letting people just come in and hang out made it much less fun. So Will Wright did have Second Life, in a way, however briefly.
He’s been listed since at least the end of August, it will be interesting to see if he has much influence or design ideas.
I’ll take a generic statement over the usual Linden foot-bullet.
There’s nothing here that says Will Wright will have anything to do with SecondLife.
Cast your mind back to Rod Humble talking about a new tablet product … that wasn’t SecondLife on tablets.
Throw in a dollop of all the recent SL Marketplace and profile website social network things.
Mix in a dash of Rod describing a new game oriented welcome area for SecondLife.
You can see the evolution of LL from SecondLife to a next generation product offer happening before your eyes.
And, why not use the existing SL platform of battle-scarred many-times-beaten down users who still stay for some reason as a testbed for piloting some of the things that will go into this new mobile/tablet/post-PC expansion that will likely eventually consume most of LL.
What does that mean for SecondLife? Well – as long as its making a profit – not much beyond the incremental iteration you see now, until it declines enough to spin it off or put it into a death spiral.
Currently, its a good platform for LL to figure out scaled out service platform needed for the backend “cloud” that will power whatever the new mobile/tablet/post-PC push will be.
So, we get our post-hype 3D porn world carcass as long as we don’t bother the LL’s too much (as evidenced by their concierge only approach to support and recent change to discourage Lindens from actually talking to residents inworld any more than they have to, even long term friends)… until LL finishes its testing and cherrypicked its next gen platform technologies out and repurposes the existing server farms and DCs to scale out its new offer.
Updated with a statement from Linden Lab that came in while I was sleeping.
On the plus side…
Maybe having a few people at board level who have been successful in dealing with things such as “user-generated content” will stir up the back office: Your-Deity-of-Choice, they need some ass-kicking.
On the minus side…
Might not be Second Life that gets the attention.
Thing is LL is a private company. And I don’t know how the stock is distributed. But it’s pretty obvious that some of the Board is there to represent the people with the money. Some are more active management positions. This guy could hold some stock, but he’s got the experience to apply to the management of the company. It does look like it could be a shift of the balance. Maybe he’s Rod Humble’s hit-man.
There have been times when I would recommend he use hand grenades.
The usual arrangement is that each board member is chosen by a block of shareholders (the kind that own voting stock) to represent their interests. The average board has a meeting four times each year where that representation happens.
Yep, and the board is full of obvious reps of the financial interests–venture capital companies for instance. Will Wright looks to be an exception. Has somebody decided they need a board member who has some understanding of the actual business of online games. If there’s talk of some new game, parallel to Second Life, that makes a lot of sense. I see that his Stupid Fun Club is described as a games think tank.
Nut we humans are programmed to see patterns in everything…
[...] I had to have a bit of a smile when I saw Tateru Nino’s story on The Sims creator Will Wright joining the Linden Lab [...]
Very interesting and with accounting for the awful QA for Sims 3, it’s funny that both did join LL. I love playing Sims 3 but that game is really screwed up. Especially because of its sloppy coding. The only way to avoid game file corruptions, is to use fan made mods. However, that could be the proper backup for Humble, or his hit-man, like Wolf did put it. Funny. Maybe both had very bad experiences with EA. Spore for example is a beautiful game but canceled. Anyway, I really hope they want to renew the platform and Humble is not just a sideshow, like Kingdon. Btw. I think Kingdon did exactly what he was supposed to do. Take a look at his vita. At the end, the Rosedale era wasn’t that bright either. So, this could be the most exiting news since years, but I’ve to admit, I’m a Maxis fangirl since the original release of Sim City. I’m seeing through an avatar, darkly =)
Well, Maxis was terminated in 2004, though the Maxis brand-name got kept on to apply to other works by other developers.
I’m not sure how much influence Wright might have being one voice out of six, in four meetings each year.
Whatever the situation is, Linden Lab doesn’t seem to want it to be a talking point.
Ouch, really? Then maybe Maxis in mind, like I still enjoy speaking of Psygnosis, what is now known as Studio Liverpool, though heavily reconstructed by Sony
. Nevertheless, Will Wright was still the lead designer of Spore, released somewhat around 2008.
If I’m not completely wrong, the board of directors is ejected by the shareholders. I can imagine, such a take over is not subject for public debates. What concerns me a little is that I can’t see the future value in SL. Just being honest. I’ve seen such promising development before. Think about Amiga Inc. Otherwise one could argue, that people still buy and use Amiga computers. No kidding! xD