Are We Sure About This Virtual World Thing? EA Land Hits Deadpool.

Almost a year and a half ago, Colbert Low posted here on Profy that the future of the Web would be 3D applications, or virtual worlds, with Second Life leading the pack. It's amazing to me that so much could have changed in such a short amount of time.

Today it was announced EA Land, which was formerly called The Sims Online and rebranded only a short time ago, will be shuttering before the end of summer. The Sims Online was launched back in 2002 as a paid subscription service that allowed you to take the addictive game play of the popular game franchise into a MMOG. Back in February, the site was relaunched as a free service similar to Second Life, with one of the reasons given that subscribers pointed out that the in-game economy was populated by a few haves and many have-nots. EA Land was supposed to stabilize the in-world economy, allow some of the popular off-line facets like user-generated content, and bring in a larger audience. A mere two months later, it's obvious that the gamble didn't pay off.

In a message to the community, EA Senior VP Luc Barthelet notes that "the virtual worlds are still in their infancy" and, unfortunately, it seems that they are in an infancy with a very high mortality rate. Second Life has had its own issues, first with gambling, then with "virtual crime" and while users have complained about frequent site outages as well as issues with the app hogging resources, they are at least attempting to make the site more functional. Reuters still has its embedded reporter in-world (breaking the news that Linden Lab had started searching for a new CEO), and IBM has not only begun using Second Life for company meetings, training, and recruitment secured behind a firewall, but is looking for ways to add Second Life "opportunities" to its revenue stream.

Of course, that isn't stopping new players from entering the virtual world realm. You have Vivaty offering small-scale virtual environments rather than MMOGs which may work around the issues EA Land and Second Life have had with economies as well as system issues. And you also have the one place that these virtual worlds probably should have started their infancy: children's sites. They may still be 2-D for the most part, but who better to figure out what works and what doesn't than children? Judging by watching my kids on sites like Webkinz World, children are quicker at adapting to online worlds, and are probably better equipped to determine what virtual worlds should be like.

For most of us, even those younger than I am, we are still trying to shoehorn real life into the online world. The generation coming up behind will have grown up with social media as part of their lives for as long as they can remember. Who better to figure out the next logical step of a virtual world? It might just be time for the grown-ups to take a step back and wait for the right developers and visionaries to come along and do it right. It will only take a few years.