As someone who went to both IPO lunches, it was a wild time. Throw Renren, and several other companies from that time period into the mix. 2012 was almost 5 years ago. Unbelievable. Well, at least tech companies actually did go public.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/second-life-lessons-what-linden...
Seriously, though, they could have a renaissance with the next AR/VR round.
And even if you manage to build yourself a nice efficient well designed island other people will show up with avatars wearing massively over-detailed jeweler with 4k textures on every surface and with a few buggy CPU-killing addons that fight each other to try and fix a few of Second Life's design problems, and suddenly your server is on it's knees begging for more CPU cycles while your grapics card is busy choking every time their avatar is near.
The short version is when people can build anything you'll get some amazing works but you'll also get a lot of poor quality, performance killing crap. I don't see VR changing that, but there is a place for a Second-Life life competitor that limits what people can do to hit a nice balance of performance vs. freedom.
Interesting.
I kind of see how Snapchat is positioning itself against Facebook in this arena.