Brainstorming ideas thread: What do replace the Developers Incentive with?

Yay! We can compete now.. oh wait.. what are we competing against?

You don't compete against. You compete for the money from the consumer. The consumer should decide how to spend the money, not the government.

But the government should hand it to us free so we can spend it?

AFAIK, Anshe's classes taught a skill which could then be used to make money pretty much directly. So the money was more like an investment than a charge for an entertainment event.

then will subisidies need to continue indefinitely? is there ever a time when subsidies should end?

Lowering taxes and raising stipends put more Lindens and fewer US dollars into the economy. This reduces the value of the Linden against the US Dollar.

I make a lot more from spending the same amount of time playing the "business game" in RL, so it's WAY more cost-effective for me to spend my "business time" on this side of the screen and buy Lindens with US$.

If this was about me, I'd be 100% behind you, because inflation would let me buy more Lindens with my dollars, and get me more bling for my buck. If course, you'd get fewer US$ for the Lindens paid on rent on your land, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

This tread seems to have been created with one assumption in place. That assumption is that DI *would* be replaced. So, while "do nothing" is always an option in any situation, I think the thread author intended that we not debate that option here. She seems to be saying "If it *must* be replaced with a new system, what should that new system be." So lets "stay on target."

*looks over his shoulder for that Anikin kid in a TIE Intercepter*

Norinn

Replace it with nothing. It was useful to encourage growth, but it hasn't served that purpose for well over a year now. It's no longer needed.

- Newfie

Unfortunately, I can't think of any model that doesn't require Linden oversight. And honestly, I don't see why LL can't hire one or two people to spend all their time exploring and finding cool sites.

If SL were a mmorpg, LL would have hired a bunch of content developers and paid them very well to develop content. You can hire a couple of people to evaluate good content for much less. LL would have to define what good content consists of, and as always there would be shrieks of favoritism.. but nothing that you can implement is going to please everyone.

Many content creators would do large quality builds simply for the payoff of getting their sim fees covered. Compelling, interactive content is what will get the casual player to come. An incentive that rewards quality over quantity content will get your creators to stay.

OK.. I'm out of ideas.

Mmm, where do I apply? Seriously though, they already pay one 'embedded journalist' to report on issues in SecondLife (Does Hamlet do anything else? I don't know.), this doesn't seem a far stretch. Although it really looks like they're not intending to replace the DI with anything that has monetary supplements.

When I did my peice for the Messenger, everyone I spoke with stated that the loss of the monetary supplements will not impact them. However, looking back over my own work I see that I didn't get a fair sampleing of data. Two of my sources were perfectly willing to operate at a loss, financial gain is not their objective. The third was Anshe. Between the the "economy of scale" her operations give her and her general bussiness skill I doubt loseing any single revenue stream would be a major concern to her. I think that in truth, most people that recieved the DIs *will* miss them, and will scale back or close without them. Therefor, I have been operating under the assumption that any system replaceing the DI would have to be monitary to fill the void created.

However, Karsten's posts does open up a new line of thought on the topic. If the "new DI" is not cash, then what could it be? The only option I see would be some sort of free publicity for the winners. Perhaps that is what the Directory Robin mentioned will be. If that is the intent, I think it is vital that once something "wins" a spot it becomes ineligable to win again, for a period of several months at least. This prevents you from haveing a "success breeds success" situation. This month's winners would have a huge head start in the race to be next month's winners, simply becouse they have the benifit of the extra publicity winning gives them.

So really we have two seperate debates here. "How should it be given?" and "What should be given?" Everyone please fire away with your thoughts on both.

Norinn Richard

Not even pie?

But if we can't have pitchforks or pie, I'm with the nothing crowd too. I can't think of a single system that'll work and I'm not sure we actually need one any more.

I was going to say 'Perhaps you've not seen this yet...' but it appears there's good reason you haven't. The Developer's Directory that Robin talked about was launched with the new website a day or so ago, there was a link to it under the Developers heading, but it seems to have been removed, probably temporarily until they get more applicants, but a direct link to see it is:

http://secondlife.com/developers/directory.php

Basically, yes, publicity. A few of the high-profile developers are on the list already and have been since the website launched, so either there was prior notice given or LL just picked some big ones to slap on there to begin with. Don't know.