Second Life is going strong after 21 years.
Second Life is going strong after 21 years.
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Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators (updated)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Linden Lab has spent $1.3 billion building the Second Life virtual world, which debuted back in 2003 in the first era of the metaverse.

And Second Life is still around today. Philip Rosedale, founder and former CEO of Linden Lab, and Brad Oberwager, executive chair of Linden Lab, spoke with me about the magnitude of the investment that has gone into the Second Life platform and the revenue paid out to creators. In fact, Linden Lab has paid out $1.1 billion to creators since 2003.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.