BIG CHANGES TO SECOND LIFE : AND RELEASED ON STEAM SOON!

Before this post, if you have no idea what "Steam" is, check here and here ( wikipedia ). This post was put together from "New World Notes". Thanks to Aprille Shepherd who shared the link on my facebook, i read it and it sounded pretty interesting news i thought was worth sharing here.

Not this kind of steam! Please read the post to find out why. ( Krystall Pearl and Serenity. )

Second Life will soon be published on Valve's Steam distribution network, Linden Lab just announced, news that comes on the very same day that the company unveiled a plan to greatly improve SL's graphics quality and rendering performance, so visuals look like what you see in this video below.

The two moves are clearly related. By adding Second Life to Steam, the virtual world becomes accessible to the service's 40 million or so users, nearly all of whom are hardcore gamers almost by definition.



By improving the graphics, SL becomes much more appealing to them, and frankly, largely accessible at optimal levels only to folks like them. Second Life already has extremely heavy 3D graphics and broadband requirements, and the new graphics requirements will make them much more so. For most gamers, however, this is not a problem.

However, while Bloodlines and other roleplaying games in SL are popular, most users enjoy Second Life as a light 3D social chat experience. By moving SL to Steam and increasing the 3D graphics card requirements, Linden Lab is decisively moving away from this audience, in a bid to attract gamers who might enjoy a game like Bloodlines, and definitely enjoy Steam-powered games like DayZ. It will be interesting to see how this move changes SL's userbase.

Linden Lab's Official announcement....


As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so. 

Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well). 

What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal. 

We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!