The 20-year-old multiplayer social MMO Second Life is finally coming to mobile. Fighting back against the ongoing ‘metaverse’ trend, Second Life Mobile aims to give the popular virtual world a second lease on life. Take that, Meta.
Revealed in a new post on the game’s community forum, Second Life will be escaping its PC exclusivity for the first time. Second Life Mobile marks the first time the game has come to a new platform in two decades.
The social platform’s developer Linden Lab released a video describing the new mobile port. In the video, it’s revealed that the game will launch in beta this year, but there’s no release date for a full launch.
Second Life Mobile will be built in the Unity Game Engine. This will allow the mobile version to render the game’s high quality character models and be easily ported to other platforms in the future.
Second Life Mobile has been a highly requested port for years. Over the past decade, multiple fans have created ways to access the game on Android called Viewers. However, these have been poor ways to actually play the online MMO.
On the game’s official subreddit, fans noted that they’re still using old Second Life viewers on Android. While some noted that this new app will help to bring in new players, many are worried it will still have massive performance issues, especially since the game still runs poorly on high-end PCs.
Since its release in 2003, Second Life has been one of the largest video game social platforms ever. While its popularity has waned in recent years, the game still has a highly dedicated community that has kept the platform alive. With thousands of concurrent players, Linden Labs’ social platform is still a popular virtual world.
With the recent Metaverse trend, there was a worry that Second Life would fall behind as companies such as Meta worked on their own virtual worlds. As other Metaverse projects fall like flies, Second Life still remains one of the most popular virtual worlds around.