SLOG: Sitting On A Goldmine

Yes. But it seems we're having a problem with the definition of "platform". When the term "platform" is invoked it is usually with reference to aspects of the SL economy. The example you describe above completely sidesteps that. Linden Labs could give everyone an infinite number of L$, instantly obliterating the entire economic and business aspect of the game, and the above model for a "platform" would still work - you'd even still make money, because you're selling your CD's outside of SL.

Whatever definition of a "platform" Linden, and others, are working to, it's one that's based around the in-game economy and community, not just around novel applications of the game engine. If you think that the ultimate case of a "platform" would be the above, then fine, but then we should have no more citations of "platform" in arguments about Linden intervening or not intervening in in-game business, etc, because in-game business is irrelevant for things like the above.

Well, actually, more likely somebody'd just code an alternative, like Minerva gold, but it's a highly contrived example anyway



If for some reason you wouldn't rather just license the engine. Or license a better engine. Again, if the only aim of SL as a platform is to show off the game engine, why worry about the economy? Why have prim limits when they only have the effect of stopping people redlining the engine? Just build your 1000 prim robot avatar, walk around a bit, so that folks say "what a great game engine!"

Jeffery, I agree completely. I'm also stymied by limitations of the system, and frustrated that it takes so long for those limitations to be addressed. I don't really fault LL since they're only human and can only do so many things at once. SL the platform, as it exists now, isn't yet fully capable of supporting SL the concept, so we're stuck in a nebulous middle ground where SL is both a game and a platform. In many ways it needs to be a sort of game in its early stages to bring people in while the content side gets up to speed, but that also comes at the cost of hampering content from developing as fast as it could (and perhaps needs) to.

Do you honestly see SL becoming a serious gaming platform, or a serious web/informational/commerce platform in the near future? I don't.

It will never equal other online gaming systems graphically or in terms of speed and playability. It just isn't built that way. And it's far easier and faster to shoot over to a product or informational website to learn and purchase than it would be to log in-world and fly to some lag-ridden shop in a distant sim.

I think it is, and will remain for quite a long time, a primarily social entertainment platform because the entire architecture is not suited for anything else. And so to sustain growth and retain users, LL must cater to the majority population that "just want to have fun".

Well, define serious gaming paltform. I don't see it becoming what you probably mean by that. I never did. I do see it becoming more than it is... being more flexible and allowing for more creativity with fewer technical limitations. Will there ever be stuff of WoW quality within SL? Not bloodly likely, but I've always thought such utopian ideas were ill conceived and highly unlikely to begin with. I'm speaking only about my own experiences selling skins.

How is it that almost two years after custom full body skins have become the norm people still can't apply their own tattoos? Why has a feature that was promised at least a year ago still not been added? It puts me and others in a position of not knowing what's going to happen. Do I put a couple of hundred hours into developing my business to work around that limitation knowing it's entirely possible that the moment I finish it LL will turn around and finally add the feature they've been promising, rendering all my work a waste of time? I'm fine with SL having limitations. It always has and it always will. Some of us old timers are getting jaded because everything we all thought was so bloody cool about SL back in the day is still bloody cool, but that doesn't change the fact that any serious content developer for SL is likely to come up against a similar roadblock that makes intelligent planning impossible. That's fine, and even understandable, for a while. Eventually even the most stalwart will get sick of banging their heads against the same wall over and over and over. I'm not ready to throw in the towel yet. I'm still forgiving because I think the last year has been spent dealing with serious scaling issues.

That being said, no one's patience is infinite, and since SL is designed to depend on user created content to compell new users to become paying members, at some point the focus needs to turn back to adding features to better enable content creation and collaboration. The problem at the moment is that the underlying base technology isn't stable enough as it is, without a single new feature being added. SL is trying to be two different things to two different groups of people and it's still serving both crowds in a rather half assed way. Eventually it will need to shit or get off the pot. I just try and remind myself that to new users it's all every bit as cool, unique, and inspiring as it was to us old timers two years ago.

Part of the problem with that is that even the Premium stipend is relatively small compared to the average income levels that shops seem to be designed for.

That pretty obviously hurts recruitment. "Ok, so I have Not Enough now, but I could pay $9.99 a month and have More But Still Not Enough, so why bother? If I'm going to have to spend my 'SL-able leisure time' doing whatever it takes to get money either way, why pay real money too?"

The same thing makes Lindex a bad deal. "Why should I pay $20 to buy Linden, when an artist (even a relatively weak and unknown one) can do work with no more than a $20 real world value and get an indefinite income from it?"

And although I don't have positive evidence, I'm sure that at least some of the "quitters" are at least part motivated to quit because they know that, done en masse, it'll kick the stool out from under people they are envious of.

yes, these are typically the same people that can rationalize bittorrent and spew out 100 different excuses as to why it's not stealing

you [a general "you" ... not necessarily you, yumi, lol] don't want to buy it, don't buy it. you don't want to make it, don't make it. but the "it's not fair" crap is just so annoying to listen to. It's not fair that I don't have a Mercedes either, but I manage just fine.



again, infantile logic. That's like, I should commit suicide and then everyone will feel really really sorry that they didn't love me more. They're not kicking the stool out from anyone.

Content creators in SL right now make peanuts for the time invested.

Sorry, Yumi, I thought I was adapting to your definition of "platform", with your talk about xboxes etc. It certainly isn't my definition, or the Lindens. If it isn't yours either then this bit of the conversation is up a blind alley

I'm throwing my hat into the ring!!!

My Blog: http://sleconomyblog.blogspot.com/

This rings totally true. Even here, now, I have numerous great projects I have got working for myself, to my own satisfaction, but only one I took through to production and sale. Certainly with sophisticated scripts, that final polish to make it user friendly, reliable, saleable, can take as long as the original development, with little of the satisfaction.

If I needed cash more, you'd have seen a lot more stuff of mine for sale. If no-one could make money, you'd see quite a lot less.

If you want to make money by selling them L$, then you need to appeal to them. You can stand and argue with their logic if you like, but they don't need to listen.



Sure they are. People leaving = no customers = no money made. Enough people leave = no customers = no money made = no tier repayment = no land = no tier = no LL = no SL.

Again, if you want to keep them in-game, and maybe have them upgrade to Premium, arguing with their logic won't help you, even if their logic is in fact wrong.

My understanding was that SL itself, including the community and society aspects, was supposed to be the platform - not just the game engine driving SL.

The problem isn't with people who can create stuff and not sell it. The problem is with people who either can't create stuff or don't find it entertaining to do so.

Not everyone is going to enjoy making stuff. Do we want to penalise them by saying they can't enjoy anything else in SL either?

I was thinking about that this morning and I was wondering how LL is focusing their advertising. I would think that they would like to bundle their software (somehow) with PS or PSP or even Maya (3D experience is 3D experience). Go after the creative people.

I have seen some of you talking about a new class of SL residents in a more 'lower class' economic bracket.

I have been here since late September. The stipend bonuses quit shortly after I joined.
Using a combination of 2 business models, Gambling and Retailing (books), I have been able to make enough L$ to get by. I have not been able to make enough L$ to do what I want, when I want. I am just trying to make things better for myself. Nothing would make me happier than being able to just sell my books, but there isnt enough interest.

The way I see it, from my perspective is that there are 2 problems which hold me back.

1. Primitive useage on land is restrictive to new account holders, whos RL jobs cannot support them if they decide to tier up for more prims, which severly limits the ammount of items I can resell, or even develop on my own property, and I prefer privacy, so I wont be doing any development at the sandbox anytime soon.

2. (The one that gets back to the big picture at hand). There are, in my opinion, not enough users in SL to support the economy. If there were, say, a massive influx of new SL users, more people would be interested in trying everything they can within a short ammount of time, which means that not only the large business owners will make more money, but smaller business owners should also see an increase in incoming funds. At the moment, it seems like long-term residents have their preferred retailer spots, and seem to spend less time finding new ones, which of course, widens the gap between the rich and the poor.

Now, I dont have a solution to the first problem, but I may have a solution to the second problem. I think that LL should start advertising on something that hits their target audience (and not the Internet). My suggestion is that LL gives away X number of free month accounts (X being somewhere in the thousands) on soda bottles (mt dew for example). I realise that the costs of such an endevour would be enormous, but if even 5% of those accounts are kept, LL should make their money back and then some. Of course there are downsides to this idea as well, as I do not think that the current version of SL can handle an influx of several thousand residents in a short time window.

Now, there may be other solutions to this problem, but here is what it comes down to. The wealth must be redistributed, in some way. I see people complaining about this all the time, and this is one way to solve it. Im sure there are others. I dont want to bankrupt any of the rich players, but I do want to see more L$ flowing through to the other countless skilled entrepreneurs who arent getting the traffic they deserve because they cant afford the money chairs.

I see that my thinking is not alone on this at all =)

Hi, Khashai! I think what you're describing is an aspect of it, but I think the problem isn't so much a shortage of new Residents as the fact that those new Residents have little money to spend. You've mentioned that, even though you're running a business inside SL, you don't have enough L$ to "get what you want when you want it". And many new folks aren't going to be very keen on that - when they spend their leisure time on something, they want it to deliver something they want right away, instead of having to work on having to get it. They might find ways to enjoy themselves without L$, but they won't if they're made to feel like "business failures", or told they're "unwilling to do the necessary work" as a result of doing so.



I'm not so sure about that, you know. Most of the long-term folks I know basically have everything they want already, and just seek out new things because, well, they're new.



There aren't any "free month" accounts, remember: there's a single free lifetime Basic account per card#. If an account is "kept", LL doesn't necessarily make any money. And unfortunately, that creates a horrible situation where a newbie who makes a big success of themselves can wind up actually hurting LL since they'll never need to pay them any money.

Now, I happen to believe it would be a good thing for Linden to move over to a MMORPG style "everyone subscribes monthly" model simply because it would force them to consider the general experiences of players more: I think there's something wrong when SL residents laud SL's freedom and creativity over "going out and killing rats for their tails" but somehow can't explain why people will pay a $30 buy-in AND a monthly subscription for rat tails and yet won't stump up anything for SL. And the kind of person who won't pay $9.99 for a lifetime Basic is probably also the kind of person who won't pay anything for Lindex L$; they'll just go do something else because they have no investment in SL. I mean, I presume I'm wrong about this in some way because LL are not stupid, but I'd love to know how I'm wrong.



Be careful of saying things like "traffic they deserve" on these forums. I know quite a few folks who'd bite your head off for that.

The issue of money chairs propagating the "rich get richer" trend is an interesting one, but there's always going to be ways richer businesses can attract traffic that poorer ones can't. The bigger issue is why, if SL is such a "virtual world of opportunity", so many people are choosing to sit in money chairs as opposed to doing something more entertaining.

Its funny, I was working on some research for a similar topic to Ingrid that I've just posted. I did some research on one of these sims where traffic counts are approaching 100,000 - yes, they have the dreaded chairs of which Ingrid writes - and tried to find some answers. I failed miserably at finding any answers, which spoke volumes in and of itself... because everyone was AFK or BUSY in the sim, save for a few, who weren't interested in answering my questions.

Regards,

-Flip

They might as well abolish the development bonus right now. This has turned into nothing but gaming the system (yet again). What a fricken joke. Too bad its not funny. I have a hard time believing that LL is going to pay this ppl one red cent much less 4k US per month for this crap. Here is an idea LL why don't you take the money your obviously wasting on developement bonuses and use it to hire someone to figure out lag.

pfft.

I think you miss the point. Camping chairs aren't "gaming the system". It's not like people are magically forced to attend locations where there are camping chairs. People choose to. If people choose to do that, then of course other locations that want to remain popular will have to install them too.

As has been posted here before, Ice Dragon island has a huge amount of other stuff on it other than the camping chairs. Ok, the popular bits are 24/7 arena games but again how is it their fault that that's popular? If it's entertainment for non-monied players it's all good. When I went there, it had a far bigger alive/dead ratio than most areas with chairs. There are some sadder examples: Ice Dragon also runs Four Seasons Park, which is a good build of a fantastic idea (although the creator seems to have disappeared somewhere, which is a pain as I've been trying to contact her - the idea of being a magician's assistant in SL is just sooo cool ), and yet that's had to have chairs installed to and they're the only place people visit. I once left one of their swings running for about 2 weeks because after I started it and left, nobody went by to stop it again. But I don't think that's a case of "let's install chairs to force our build to make money". It's a case of "other builds have chairs so we need them too to compete, and if they wind up taking all the traffic, oh well, we had to have them".

What we need is someone to fly around campsites and survey campers to find out why they are choosing to spend time statically stuck in chairs as opposed to doing something else, or making something else for everyone to do.

Agreed.

That's precisely what I was trying to do - unfortunately, with all the (Away) and (Busy) I found, no one was quite forthcoming with an honest answer.

I'll keep looking, however!

Regards,

-Flip

Well, I actually tried it myself.

But I screwed up :blush:

I offered L$50 for filling out the notecard and sending it in. Unfortunately, in order to prevent people duping the notecard and passing it around to get more and more money, I set it no copy. Not realising, that this would also prevent them from reading the dang thing..

Addressing both points:

1. By the time a person figures out how to effectively sell product on 512m (via temp-on-rez, 1 prim vendors, SLExchange &c) they are usually no longer new.

What worked for me was this - someone with lots of land believed I had potential, and allowed me to set up shop on her land - well over 1000 prims to work with.

I offered a small percentage of my sales for a fixed time in exchange, feeling quite guilty insofar as I felt I was getting by far the better end of the deal. I'd mention her name but I'm not sure it would be fair to have potential small businesses constantly IM'ing her with 'opportunities'.

Within a month I was able to purchase 8192m of my own and cover tier as well - and I'm happy to say that I'll more than cover the cost of her initial tier investment before it's done. And, out of the blue her patch of land appeared in the print edition of Newsweek - which (oddly?) didn't really make a blip in sales, but did make the whole experience kind of fun.

Point being: find an investor, it's a huge leg up.



2. The current player base has lots of money - and is more than willing to spend it if you have something they want.

Many folk think nothing of dropping 200 or 500 USD on SL... why not? It's their second life. Perhaps I'm in a unique position to see this due to the nature of what I sell.

If you sell 'discount', or $L 1 items you'll attract a certain kind of customer; if you sell things that sim owners want you'll attract another sort.

Just thoughts.

My personal reason for using a money chair, yes I used one once - only once (sounds like im using an illegal substance - Yes, I used the Money Chair, but I didn't inhale), was this, I need money, in a hurry, lets see how much money a money chair can generate. Ill just sit in one, and go watch a movie, and of course keep myself from logging out by opening an edit window.

Now, I didnt make that much money for it (I think about 175 L$ in 2-3 hours). But I think new players especially, look at it like this: Im new, and I have no marketable skills, or Im new, and I dont know anyone yet, so Im going to use these money chairs to produce income for myself, and I can just go watch a movie or go to sleep or something and come back to a much larger ammound of income than I could possibly make myself in the same ammount of time.

Personally, I think that money chairs hurt my business potential because new players will sit in a money chair to make money, and attract more people to the business because they raise that business's popularity rating. People, especially new people, and as mentioned before, some old people (but I think most of the people posting in this post have that desire to see new things), will only go to the popular areas, because that is "where it's happening". What is "it"? From what I have seen, Tringo, Slingo, Money Chairs, Bling, Shopping, and Lag. Nothing that appeals to me, personally, but then that may be my personality kicking in. Needless to say, there are alot of people out there who's personalities demand that they be in the areas where alot of people are. I hope there are others (especially in my position as a new business owner) who feel the same was as I do on this.

Money Chairs arent going to go away. I think as they begin to stagnate the economy more, that you will see less locations that have them. Perhapse, even, some new players might aviod the locations that will still have them in the future just because of the high levels of lag these places are accustomed to. That having been said, money chairs are a problem. A problem which I am certain there is a solution to. The rich will continue to get richer, SL is based on real-world economics (how could it be based on something else, which no one knows anything about?), so if you have money to spend, it really dosent matter how good the idea is, because you can always buy everyone out.

The real trick here is to find a solution to the problem, not to gripe about it. Unfortunatly, I cannot figure out on my own what that solution exactly would be.

And as for the post about LL not offering free month accounts, it seems to me that they do (did?) offer free trial premium subscriptions. It shouldn't be impossible for LL to change that to meet special circumstances (eg, Large promotional contests).

I do think that SL should not have free accounts. period. (but trials are ok, not to contradict myself) I know that this is not fair to those who cannot pay for SL, but it will get rid of a good portion of the negative element in the community. Also, I feel that those who posess premium accounts feel more of a drive to succeed.

But, to finish on my point again, money chairs will begin to stagnate the economy to some degree. The rich will continue to get richer, which will force the poorer businesses to move away from the money chairs. That, and they wont be able to afford the payouts eventually. Or, businesses will advertise that they have money chairs when they dont, thus keeping people from visiting businesses with money chairs.

Of course, there is the possibility that someone will create a job object (ala TSO) which will be fun to use, not cost anything, and have about the same payout as a money chair, while being somewhat of a challenge. Oh, and also free to setup. Something to consider, you scripters!

I think Im going to end this post now, because that ink well in me brain has just run dry.

You've exactly hit the nail on the head. Getting an investor of that type is great, but for SL's society to depend on it as a method for newbies to break in isn't reasonable - it just isn't sustainable. We don't really want every newbie to have to go through the sifting net of investment, especially when it's not guaranteed to be 100% objective when it comes to measuring quality.



Not everyone can build things as well as you do. By all means, let's reward you and let you cash out, but let's make sure that at the same time, even the worst ones don't drop off the map entirely and decide to spend their SL days getting paid peanuts for staring into space.

This actually makes an EXCELLENT point: money chairs are one of the few items that can be placed in a high traffic area without being devalued by lag, because people sitting in a money chair don't do anything and therefore don't care about the lag!



Oh, quite easily. But I think it'd hack off an awful lot of people.



Umm, if you've seen the kind of people you get paying subscription MMOs you'd know it doesn't have that effect automatically.



That won't work, is the problem, because people couldn't leave their accounts working at the "job object" for long periods of time while they left their PC unattended. Nobody wants to just give away free money, the only reason to do it is for dwell and if money chairs are more effective then there's little point developing another version.