Business Models and Second Life?

Going to throw an idea in here. I guess 1.2 triggered this, but it's been on my mind for a while.

I love SL, and would like to do it full-time. To what extent can we build a Business Model that would support this?

Quick estimate: if a sub-game was created which 100 people signed up, paying, say, 5USD a month via Paypal, then that's 500USD a month. Not very much really. But enough to survive if you do nothing else except SL

Obviously if we chuck in a graphics artist or two and maybe a PR person, then we'd need to triple or quadruple either the number of players or the price. Presumably, the number of players.

Anyone have any comments on this? Is there anyone who would like to contribute to, or organize, such a project?

Azelda

I wouldnt mind working full-time for SL if I got a realistic amount of money from it. But I would really hate to see the world get all commercialized like that :\

Hmm... I think you're leaving out the costs of doing business here, and that's dangerous! How much land are you going to need, and how much will that cost your main account per month? How many other accounts will you need for support staff, etc. How many of those will need to own parcels of land and therefore cost additoinal $ in a month?

I think there ARE business models to come, but a pay-for-play inworld subgame doesn't seem viable to me at this point. DarkLife is great, and I might pay $5 a month to SUPPORT it, but I wouldn't pay $5 a month to play it. (Does that make sense to anyone but me?)

Bhodi

> How much land are you going to need, and how much will that cost your main account per month?

I'm quite happy to invest USD2000 to play SL full-time for a years If we are getting enough people where Support is becoming a major problem then this is a good sign

I think the main points to consider are:
- legal position on charging USD for sub-games in SL?
- can we get enough players?

As far as clients, it's obvious that if the target audience is uniquely people already in SL, we are not going to get the numbers in. We will need to market the sub-game in the Real-World too (so there'd definitely need to be a Business/marketing type person onboard). Players would obviously need to pay also the 10USD subscription for SL itself so we'd have to make a product that people are willing to spend USD15 a month on....

Tough but not impossible.

For info, the main venture I am considering is creating a proprietrary locked-down version of the MMORPG Toolkit. We would either licence this out to the GMs or have players buy a licence from us to play any of the available games, or a combo.

Risks:

- Linden Labs builds the MMORPG Toolkit into SL itself in 1.3. Actions to limit risk? None, but hey, if they do this it's a Good Thing!

Unique Selling Point:

- allows anyone to create an MMORPG
- cf eq, where you can't modify the world very much
- cf sl out-of-the-box where there's a lot of groundwork to put in before getting to the game-building bit

Question: would I personally be prepared to pay USD15 to use such a product?

Answer: yes, I think, if it was done well, and there was a sufficient variety of base monster types, object types and textures that I could easily build the game of my choosing with in a few hours by just dragging and clicking.