San Francisco, CA based Linden Lab has announced the arrival of the new CEO, former EA Play label executive Rod Humble.
“Rod is a great new leader for Linden Lab,” said Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life. “Second Life has become a consistently large and profitable business with a thriving virtual economy built together with its passionate Resident community. This has always been a big, long-term vision, it is still early and there is enormous opportunity for growth. With Rod’s fresh insights and deep experience in creating and leading the development of fun, intuitive, immersive entertainment experiences that have attracted massive audiences of loyal users, he’s the right leader to understand what makes us special and bring the next level of growth to Second Life.”
Humble comes to Second Life with over 20 years of industry experience under his belt. He’s worked on more than 200 games, and most recently headed up the EA Play label. If the Play business unit sounds vaguely familiar, you’ll remember that EA’s best-selling PC franchise game of all time, The Sims was borne from this group. That’s not to say, however, that Humble has experience solely in the realm of life sims, as Humble was also the VP of Product Development with SOE under the EverQuest banner. And if these two accomplishments alone weren’t enough, Humble was also ranked #2 in 2009 on Edge’s “Hot 100 Game Developers.”
“Joining Linden Lab is a very exciting opportunity,” said Humble. “I have a long standing interest in the how the boundaries of society and economics change as communications evolve in new ways. Second Life is unique: it sits at the intersection of virtual worlds, avatars, and human contact. The Residents and developers of Second Life have built something very special, I am honored to join the talented team at Linden Lab to help expand this new frontier.”
An interesting move by Humble, as Second Life has surely taken a few beatings over the past few years. With his Sims experience, and a dash of EverQuest here and there, your humble author truly believes that Humble might have some interesting surprises in store for the virtual world that started it all.
New up at Outspark is Niranjan Nagar. Mr. Nagar brings over 15 years of experience to the table, particularly via his role as VP of The Sims Internet Group at EA. In this role, he was the man responsible for growing online revenue and player community worldwide for both The Sims 2, and perhaps more importantly, in respect to Outspark’s business model (microtransactions as revenue generators), The Sims 3. Prior to EA Nagar was co-founder of SingShot Media, a song sharing platform 
