Second Life Animesh Baby Review

Most days I scan through the Second Life™ blogosphere to see what is going on. I’m generally interested in the tech stuff and what people are doing along with how they do it in Second Life. I come across things I find interesting in the scan. That stuff ends up in my weekly news, out on Tuesdays, or in a ‘bits’ post or article like this.

SL Families

This ‘families’ stuff seems to be a thing in SL. The Lab published Start Your Own Virtual Family in Second Life Monday, May 13, 2019. From that article, we see a newer feature of SL, animesh, is in use to make babies. Zooby, Suki BabiesK-Mae and Funsies are the popular brands of animesh babies.

But why is caring for a pixel baby a thing? There is no single answer other than perhaps it is some natural aspect of humans that exhibits in certain scenarios. How you attribute that aspect and its nature depends on your philosophy. The secularist/atheistic and spiritual/religious philosophies take people down different thought trails to various conclusions. We know as a fact this behavior is present and observable. The how’s and why’s are a speculative opinion.

Where there is a need there is someone to fill it, at least in a free market. With the new tech, animesh, people can make something more like what people want. So, we now have babies that behave in ways not possible before. Much more realistic and entertaining. The video shows how interactive the animesh babies are.

Zooby on Facebook

For a business this appears to be a good money maker. There is a baby and all the stuff one needs for it; baby rooms and accessories, clothing, care products, and baby toys. Then as it grows child avatars and all the stuff for them is needed.

A Zooby baby costs L$4,000. This price will supposedly jump to L$5,000 sometime after the initial release period. The Zooby merchant store (URL) is here. Zooby Baby Group (SLURL) is this. The website is useless unless you know the special URLs needed (like this) and have a log in ID and password. They mostly use Facebook for promotion. Zooby’s provides a free Zooby Child Avatar Blender Dev Kit for those that want to make baby clothes. Dev File Download. You will need a free coupon code to get the kit for free. You can find that in the promo text of any Zooby baby listed in the SL Marketplace. A dev tutorial made by Medhue is here Zooby Dev Kit. There are a number of other Zooby videos on YouTube showing you how to be an affiliate, care for the Zooby baby, and other stuff.

Babies are HUD controlled and there are various different timers in the accessories. Timers in the HUD and accessories determine when the baby poops, gets hungry, needs love, a bath, or rest.

A Suki baby costs L$4,500. The SL Marketplace for Suki is here. The Suki Baby has a more useful website where they provide much of their promotional information. They are on Facebook Suki but, really weak there. Tumbler Suki Babies is here. Suki Baby Blog is nice. The in-world store for Suki Baby is here.

I can’t find much on Suki Babies or how they work. Zooby has way more information and tutorial stuff out there. Their presentence in the SL Forum is minimal. Basically, their marketing people suck.

Suki Babies on Facebook

A K-Mae baby costs L$1,750 until May 20. Regular price is L$3,250. The SL Marketplace for K-Mae’s store is here. There is a DEMO version of the baby. I haven’t seen a demo for the previous two. The promo and tutorial video is on YouTube for K-Mae (10-minute 2019).  The website for K-Mae Babies is here, which is another useless website. They obviously have no idea how to build an Internet presence. The in-world store for K-Mae (Map URL) is here. It is big and has lots of stuff.

I take it that K-Mae did prim babies before animesh. To me, it seems the prim influence is still a heavy influence on the current products.

K-May Young-ins

A Funsies baby costs L$3,950. The SL Marketplace for Funsies Babies is here. The website for Funsies Babies is here. Lots of information yadda, yadda. The in-world Funsies SL Store (Map URL) is here. Their Funsies YouTube channel is here. Funsies at Facebook is here.

A unique aspect of these babies is the RL version of the babies as RL dolls. So, you can have your baby in SL and RL too. I think the animesh in world version is likely more fun. But, I was never much into RL dolls. I wore out my Tig-er.

Funsies Babies on Facebook

Summary

My quick and cursory trip through baby land reveals there are the 4 major brands of animesh babies. All are very different and have different features you may or may not want or like. I suspected there would be comparison threads on the SL Forum. There sorta are.

Which do you prefer Zooby baby or Funsie? Is a thread started October 5, 2018. BUT… this thread is not what I expected. They spent the first couple of months talking about eating babies. Well… it was a dragon that brought up the thought. Still, that is Pro-Choice beyond even the Democrat’s plans. The thread never provides any useful information for decisions… or dragon recipes.

Animesh was released November of 2018. By mid-December people were looking for fun animesh things. See the thread OK, Animesh is here. What’s good? People do mention animesh babies in the thread. Still, there is no information there to help one decide between brands.

At this point in time, animesh is just 6 months old. I know Medhue, an SL modeler and animator, was working on the Zooby animesh babies prior to release. Still, this is not long for a complex feature to be figured out and put to use. My take is the entire animesh baby market… sounds like we are trafficking children… is new and lacking polish. A year from now things will be far more polished and sophisticated. Though Zooby is pretty well done.

My rather shallow take is Zooby and Funsies are the top two brands.

Juicybomb is a sweet blogger that loves pastel images and clothes. Ten years ago, she had a Zooby baby. (Don’t read too much into the ‘had’.) Seeing the new animesh versions she wrote about them, Zooby Animesh Baby (May 2019). She wrote a good review of the Zooby babies. This will give you some information for making a decision.

Ryan Schultz is another blogger that has looked at Zooby Babies. His review is here, Zooby Releases Animesh Babies in Second Life (May 2019).

I can’t find anything similar to these two for the other brands. If it is out there Google and I aren’t finding it. If you have found some recent articles, let me know and I’ll link to them.

At some future time, someone will likely make a review of the animesh babies. Until then we are on our own.

7 thoughts on “Second Life Animesh Baby Review

  1. I believe that K-Mae and Zooby are the only two in your article that are animesh, the rest are prim babies, I have a funsies baby and going by an announcement in their group a while back, they have no plans to create an animesh baby.

  2. I do believe this article is more of a biased and inaccurate opinion piece.

    K-Mae My Youngin’ Animesh Babies were the first onto the scene, launched January 2019, as a finished product, with Zooby following with their half-baked (not working correctly AT ALL) launch around May 2019, all the while stating hers was first, regardless of her trips to the K-Mae store where she surely spotted the Animesh babies for sale there.

    As for the K-Mae website, since animesh is new tech in Second Life, and the creator is busy creating and does virtually ALL the item creation himself (models, textures, scripting, product packaging, etc), it leaves little time for playing around with websites and making tons of promotional youtube vids. He really puts his heart and soul into his work and it shows. The K-Mae Animesh Babies are waaaaay more interactive than any other animesh baby brand in Second Life. The creator could take a year off and still no other brands could catch up to what the Youngins can do.
    As for funsies and Suki..Suki was developing an animesh baby and it looks decent, but not so sure about funsies, since they’re not really skilled at actual content creation, but instead rely on mostly freebie and/or full perm kits off marketplace for their items, with a root prim made by the brand owner, of course. Also funsies is resting on their laurels and telling people animesh isn’t right for prim babies. An obvious lie of course, as zooby and kmae have proven that animesh is really nice tech for prim babies, aimed at covering her own laziness and unwillingness to actually learn a new skill and step up to the plate to embrace the new technology. Perhaps if she did maybe she could get those baby eyes level? Lopsided eyes on prim babies just drives me nuts. JS 🙂

  3. The only current animesh is Zooby and K-Mae.. The latter is a very active brand and they put out lots of items for both their prim and animesh baby.
    The reason Funsies have not bothered with animesh is because they focus on realistic care which also in their eyes (and the eyes of many) involves growth.
    Animesh babies can not grow. They stay the same size.
    So while they look amazing, both KMae and Zooby, they may not appeal to those who want a more interactive bit or family rp realism.

      • And now Funsies does have a fully functioning Animesh baby that you can actually size up by sending your child to the ‘doctor’ for growth up to 2 yrs old. Suki also now has an animesh and they are probably the easiest to care for with lots of items. The Suki bonus is that unlike Zooby, K-mae or Funsies, the existing furniture for Suki prim babies works with their new Animesh as well. I wish Suki would get their shop advertised more though to get word out because they are a wonderful option.

    • I had Zoobie Babies and Funsies loved them — but I am no longer in sl have moved to Kitely in the Open sim and no animesh babies are to be found.. I miss my children so much. Is it possible that maybe some day Kitely will get animesh babies. I would gladly open a store to sponsor them. We need babies over on this side of the grid

      Liria SpiritWolf @Kitely.com:8002/Kitely

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