What was Second Life supposed to be in 2003?
Philip Rosedale started Linden Lab in San Francisco in 1999 to build virtual reality hardware: goggles, motion rigs, the whole kit. By 2000 the team had accepted that consumer bandwidth and consumer graphics cards could not carry it, and the hardware plan was shelved.
What replaced it was software. Linden Lab built a persistent three-dimensional world that ran on an ordinary desktop PC and released it as Second Life on June 23, 2003. That was a year before Gmail, two years before YouTube and three years before Twitter. There was no established category to put it in.
Linden Lab insisted it was not a game. There was no score, no levels and no way to win. Users were called Residents rather than players. They bought virtual land, built objects with in-world tools, and kept the intellectual property rights to whatever they made, which is the decision that turned a sandbox into a market.
Rosedale has been blunt about how early all of it was. "I started Second Life in 1999, a decade before cloud computing and two decades before AI," he said in Linden Lab's October 2024 announcement of his return to the company.
How big did the Second Life economy actually get?
Between 2006 and 2009, Second Life stopped being a curiosity and became a press event. Reuters opened a virtual news bureau inside the world in 2006 and staffed it with correspondent Adam Pasick, who filed under the avatar name Adam Reuters. IBM held meetings in-world. Toyota built showrooms, Coca-Cola ran promotions, and universities put up campuses.
The traffic was real without ever being enormous. Concurrent users inside Second Life peaked at 71,159 on September 27, 2008, a figure the platform has never matched since.
The money was the more startling part. VentureBeat reported that the Second Life economy grew 65 percent during 2009 to reach $567 million, which at the time was roughly 25 percent of the entire United States virtual goods market. Residents cashed out $55 million of real money that year. MySpace, still the social network everyone was writing about when that peak arrived, had nothing equivalent to the Linden dollar and no way for its users to earn from it.
Why did the corporations leave Second Life?
September 2008 was the month Second Life hit its concurrency peak and the month Lehman Brothers collapsed. Virtual land was an experimental marketing line item, and experimental marketing line items were the first thing cut.
Reuters is the clearest case. Its Second Life bureau stopped filing on September 30, 2008, and the closure was not announced publicly until March 2009. Most other brands wound down quietly rather than issue a statement at all.
Linden Lab felt it directly. In June 2010 the company laid off 30 percent of its staff and said it would rebuild Second Life around a browser instead of a downloaded client. Two weeks later chief executive Mark Kingdon resigned, and Rosedale, who had handed over the CEO job in March 2008, came back as interim chief executive.
What survived the cut was not the corporate build-out. It was the Residents who had already been there for the clubs, the roleplay, the fashion shops and the freelance building work, and who had never needed a Toyota showroom to justify logging in.
Who owns Second Life today?
Second Life is still operated by Linden Research, Inc., which trades as Linden Lab, and the company changed hands this decade. In July 2020 an investor group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager agreed to acquire Linden Research. The deal cleared regulatory review and closed in early 2021, after which Second Life was listed among the businesses in the Waterfield Network. Oberwager serves as executive chair.
Rosedale came back as well. He rejoined as a strategic advisor in January 2022, alongside an investment in Linden Lab from his own company, High Fidelity. In October 2024 he returned full time as chief technology officer and joined the board of directors.
The reason he gave for coming back was not nostalgia. "We were early, but the success of Second Life to this day shows that we were not wrong," Rosedale said in that same October 2024 announcement. The company he had left in 2010 spent the intervening decade proving that a virtual world could outlast the hype cycle that built it.
What does Second Life cost in 2026?
An account is free. Paying gets you land, a weekly stipend and account perks, and those prices moved twice in 2026, in both directions. On June 15, 2026 Linden Lab cut land prices and dropped the minimum fee for buying Linden dollars from $1.49 to $0.49. On July 8, 2026 membership pricing went the other way: an annual Premium subscription rose from $99.00 to $119.88.
The world is also easier to reach than it used to be. Linden Lab put the Second Life mobile app into public beta on iOS and Android in June 2024, opening it to Premium members first before widening access. After two decades as a desktop client, the world finally ran on a phone.
Population in 2026 sits in a narrow band. Daily concurrency has run in the mid-30,000s, with the year's high of 48,802 recorded in early March 2026. That is a fraction of 2008. It also makes Second Life one of the few worlds of its era still running its original service rather than a revival, a list that includes Habbo Hotel and not much else.
Did Second Life really invent the metaverse?
In October 2021 Facebook renamed itself Meta and committed billions of dollars to building a persistent virtual world with avatars, social spaces and a creator economy. Second Life had shipped all four of those in 2003.
The figures Linden Lab has published make the point without argument. In its twentieth-anniversary release in June 2023, the company said more than 73 million accounts had been created since 2003 and that around 750,000 people were using the world each month. In December 2024, Oberwager put the lifetime cost of building Second Life at $1.3 billion and the amount paid out to creators at $1.1 billion, against an economy running at roughly $650 million a year. Linden Lab keeps 10 percent of a transaction and the creator keeps the rest.
Meta's Horizon Worlds arrived with a corporate roadmap attached. Second Life arrived with almost nothing except tools and property rights, which is closer to how Neopets and the other long-lived online worlds actually held onto their users. The lesson is not that Linden Lab was smarter than Meta. It is that a world people build themselves is much harder to walk away from than a world handed to them finished.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Second Life still active in 2026?
Yes. Second Life is still operating in 2026, 23 years after Linden Lab launched it on June 23, 2003. Daily concurrency through 2026 has run in the mid-30,000s, and the high for the year was 48,802 people online at once in early March 2026.
Who owns Second Life now?
Second Life is owned and operated by Linden Research, Inc., which trades as Linden Lab. An investor group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager agreed to buy the company in July 2020 and closed the purchase in early 2021, with Oberwager as executive chair. Founder Philip Rosedale returned as chief technology officer in October 2024.
Can you still make real money in Second Life?
Yes. Second Life Residents still sell virtual goods and services for Linden dollars and convert them into US dollars through Linden Lab's exchange. Linden Lab said in December 2024 that it had paid $1.1 billion to Second Life creators since 2003, against an economy running at about $650 million a year, and that it keeps 10 percent of each transaction.