Comment by Animats

Yes. The scaling problem with Second Life is that it scales in size, but not in density. The number of regions you can have is limited only by the available funding for servers. But the number of players per region is limited by how much work the single thread that does most of the sim work can do. Right now, this is 20 to 60 per region. The architecture could probably get to 100-500 per region if multi-threaded, a bug in the dispatcher for the Mono engine used for scripting was fixed, and the viewer was modernized to avoid choking when displaying that many avatars. Beyond that, a different architecture would be needed.

Improvement means more CPU cores per region, though, which increases cost. Especially since Linden Lab moved the sim servers to AWS, where you pay by CPU. Server cost is a big problem with this approach. Server cost scales with land area, not usage. Second Life land costs about US$175 per month for a 256 x 256 meter square.

I thought Improbable was going to crack this, but after the first three Spatial OS games shut down due to high hosting costs at Google, it looks like that's not it. Sominium Space is on Spatial OS, but their world isn't very big. If it was big, the NFT land scheme, which depends on scarcity, wouldn't work.

I want to see a Metaverse that looks like an AAA title. This is probably possible now but may not yet be cost-effective to operate. Linden Lab lacks the will, the staff, the management, the money, and enough understanding of their legacy code base. The really good people who built the thing all left years ago.

Linden Lab has a job opening for a VP of Engineering. The old one retired. If someone competent wants to go over there and kick them into forward motion, please go for it. Really. There's probably someone reading this who's qualified for the job.

Starting a new world of user-created content is hard because it takes years to acquire the creator base and for the culture to settle. So far, Roblox, Minecraft, and Second Life have achieved that. In each case it took over a decade. That's the hard problem. Upgrading the technology is easier than the decade of building a world.

(I'm looking at this from the outside, not as a Linden Lab employee. The Second Life client is open source, and after a few months of writing a replacement client in Rust, I have a reasonably good idea of what's required. There's a third party replacement for the server code, written in C#, so that's relatively well understood by others. The C++ code Linden Lab uses for their servers is still proprietary, but the protocols are not. Nor are the bug reports.)