Linden Lab, the maker of popular virtual world Second Life, said today that it’s laying off 30 percent of its staff.
The big workforce reduction seems to undercut all the good news that the San Francisco company has been trumpeting — Linden Lab said that from January to March, virtual good transactions were up 30 percent compared to the same period last year, and that in March, the number of unique monthly users was up 13 percent. At the same time, it’s clear that companies were having trouble finding users for their virtual worlds or making those worlds work as a business, with the closure of There.com, Vivaty, and Metaplace.
