Second Life magazine In the Grid has post a two-part interview [1,2] with Sibley Verbeck, CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, an interactive creation agency for metaversal experiences. The firm has expanded to about 25 employees, which is bigger than many interactive design houses I've encountered over the years. I can't imagine how a group that size is sustainable on virtual world development alone, but The Electric Sheep Company has done some work for major clients lately, such as MTV/Viacom, Starwood, LEGO, and Major League Baseball.

I've picked out a few notes and quotes from Verbeck's interview below:

"[W]e are building interactive, 3D virtual experiences for real-world companies. That's sometimes about marketing, but just as often about other aspects of a company's goals...A lot of the consulting we do is just trying to help businesses understand what would be useful for them to do in Second Life or other virtual worlds."

"[N]o real-world businesses have yet made much money by using Second Life... Companies are seeing so much press now that they are feeling like 'we need to figure out how to use SL;' and then they call us or Linden Lab or someone else... Many companies feel 'we missed the boat on the web; let's not miss the boat on virtual worlds.'"

"[Interest in Second Life developers] is growing very rapidly. And there's a lot of work, from small projects an individual could do to larger projects... But it's hard to say how that will keep up once the 'we're so cool because we're the first company of type X to do Y' story is over."

The Electric Sheep Company is beta-testing the Multiverse MMO platform. "It's an open-source platform for game or virtual-world development. It has the potential to really change the economics of the MMO industry... Frankly, we're just playing around at this point. We have to wait for it to get a bit further before we plunge in with a larger project. So we'll see... I do think it has a lot of potential, for anyone who really wants to create their own separate or custom virtual world. I think that especially applies to MMO-style games."