Just How Bad is the SL Economy

If they do... you'll have received the full price of the product for each one they sold, and if they're buying multiple copy/mod outfits of the same type (since they'd need to buy one for each transferrable one they sell) you'll notice it.

Once Again, issues with mod/trans are a storm in a tea cup, hurt nobody and can be easily mitigated.

Why would I want to buy a pair of solid-black bikini underwear with absolutely no shading? I don't know if there's something special about bikinis or panties, but my "black" briefs are very dark grey with darker (almost black) wrinkles, not solid black.

If the buyer wants to make it look strange, that's their choice.

So even for that extreme case, I'm not convinced. For other cases, well, if I can't adjust the looseness and flare of trousers or sleeves to make them cover the fur on my arms and legs... I'm not going to buy them.

For my prefab sales, I sell more mod/trans singles than copy versions. But I don't mind managing two sets of houses, because I prefer to give people what they want. And if someone messes up a house, I'll replace it upon exchange, no big deal.

It depends on how we view it. The person who sells stuff this way sells me a pack. Two copies of the same pair of jeans each permed differently. Yes I can keep the Copy pair forever if I want and give the Transfer pair away. Or I can give the Transfer away and delete the Copy pair. Or I can just delete them both if I dont want them anymore. My choice ya. The seller takes this into consideration when they set the price.

Is same as when I buy a top in a pack that has two copies of the top in it. One each for the shirt and undershirt layers. If they are both Transfer I can keep one and give the other one away If I want. Something also that the seller has considered when pricing this top.

Some sellers treat each layer, or perm set, of the same piece of clothing as seperate items and sell them on that basis. Others bundle and sell on that basis. As they also do with color packs and so on.

Just because they are perms doesnt make these attributes any more special in themselves than colors or layers when items are bundled and sold as packs.

Some sellers are uncomfortable with bundling anything and thats fine. Others bundle everything like crazy. The fatter the pack the better as far as theyre concerned. And thats fine as well.

I just know what I prefer to buy and when I find sellers who make stuff I like and cater to my preferences then I buy from them, again and again and again.

Actually Belle, you explained my position perfectly and not so long winded as my posts! I'll send my message copies to you in future...and you can edit them before i release them onto forums! lol


Just to re-iterate, i don't think my overall business has been harmed by Freebies....as yet.! That's only to say my sales have held up during that period. It could be that without the freebie culture my sales might have grown even.......but that's just pure speculation on my part.

Yes, my prime concern is where is this SL economy heading with the "freebie" culture deeply rooted into the game. Something must give! What if by next year the quality of products which become freebies are of similar quality to what i sell now?
Why should people even buy my products when you can get them free? If that were to happen, sure my businesses will eventually collapse one by one.

Some would say you'll need to raise the bar!.......but there is only so far you can raise it before you hit the ceiling. The SL platform has its own limitations to what can be done or can be created. You're still governed by the same polygon meshing and PSD templates to create clothing and skins or body shapes. You can't make more than a 9.8 sec sound file whichever way you look at it......so if you want a music file 1.5 - 2mins long, you're still force to cut a number of wav. files and use a loop script. No one has come up with a better method...because that for now is the SL technological ceiling regarding music files.
Of course creators are being innovative all the time, but there will come a time that you'll reach the game's ceiling.

So yes, my concern is for the bigger picture in say a year's time and not so much how I am doing right now.

I understand where you are coming from. You have tried both ways and seen that your business can only survive using freebies as bait!

That highlights what i have been saying, the mentality of the consumers has changed....a vast number of players are effectively freebie and dollabie hunters
and spend a lot of their SL lives looking for such items.

The lack of SL marketing alternatives (who can or wants to spend 200 k on classifieds to get noticed?) forces you to use this model, even though deep down you had your own reservations.

Now multiply that by 100's or 1000's of shops that made similar evaluations, you can see where this is heading to.

I'll ask you now those same questions? Where do you think the SL economy is heading long term? Do you foresee the bubble bursting.....if you do....then when?

(Note* The Land economy bubble has long since burst, it's very hard to make meaningful income from Land unless you're a well established or large estate e.g Caledon estates or Fairchang.....even Ahnse Chung is selling off SIMs in a hurry and she use to be the biggest Estate owner outside LL)

Why I sell No transfer.


THIEVES. No other reason.

I would love to be able to let people transfer my items amongst their accounts, but the huge influx of "bad apples" have spoiled this.

As long as my items are no transfer, people know I am the only one who sells them. Anyone else handing them out, or selling copies, has used an illegal method to gain posession of my work.

With no transfer items, I know who has bought my items and therefore who has the "right" to be in posession of them.

Getting several IMs a week notifiying me of stolen content, no transfer just makes things easier to spot and makes it that much more hard for someone else to buy one of my items and transfer it into a thieves account so he or she can rip it.

it may be a small % however how can you stop someone from reusing a prim that is mod/transfer?

I was giving extreme examples, and even a dark, with darker wrinkles if it is in the black shades would have no use being mod (as I said extreme examples)

again I repeat, my problem is not with making items mod.... understand?

been giving this soime thought and... what if the item consisted of say 10 or 12 pieces, if the creator has to take the time to make copies and set perms (not hard to do, but time consuming on clothing) and charge extra for that time, would ppl still want to buy that pack?

just a thought I had

exactly you will find a seller willing to cater to your needs, however how do us sellers that are willing to cater to someone's need, get that known?

(I am willing to set a variety of perms on items (except of course copy and transfer on the same item) however I can not justify the prims it would take to place all the different options out for sale

so again.. how do we let folks know we are happy to oblige.. (I will be putting out a sign)

good point, makes me wish I had put all my stuff as no transfer from the beginning

however I have not seen any of my transfer stuff being resold (or being told it is being resold) not sure if that is good, or bad LOL

(good they like it enough to keep it, or bad they think it is too crappy to sell)

heh

Why should it matter to? What would they reuse it for exactly? They could reuse mod/copy prim too - they can even rez it for all to see.

If you are concerned about them using it to misrepresent you deliberately in some way, who would believe them knowing your stuff is mod? Only if you never ever release any prims with mod can you be sure this will not happen. That includes mod/copy.

They cannot subvert any scripts in that reused prim - if they add some then they give themselves up as the perp.

A reused prim without scripts has very little potential for causing anyone any problems.

Given that I have never heard of any vendors who have suffered actually real problems from this I beleive this type of argument is a red herring.
The closest issue that is related is reusing notecards and that is done both knowingly and unknowingly. It is done because it is easy to do in both cases.
Mostly people reuse notecards because they are conveniently there in their inventory and many new people do not know how to make a new one. Griefers use them because you can write all sorts of things as if the original person wrote them. It is not the same with prims. They don't rez a prim from their inventory as a starting point for making something. Griefers cannot really do much with a few of your prims without adding scripts.
Everybody who distributes notecards should definitely be making their notecards no mod - there is no reason to need them mod permed.

If people are going to try to misrepresent you, there are more convincing ways to do it.

To address the "I would put out both options but it needs more prims" line that often gets trotted out. You can easily buy/make a vendor that will offer both options using no more prims. Sure it uses the Pay options but many people have to use Pay anyway for the gift cards systems or because their products are using networked vendors. In those cases it should be possible to offer any number of options you like with extra prims being used.
If a vendor really wants to offer both permission options there is really no barrier to that.
Hell I make a one-prim multi-item vendor, if any vendor wants to offer two permission options but does not know where to get or does not want to pay for a vendor that can offer both. I will gladly give away one of my vendors to them free of charge.

Since the thread has been derailed by long, I will put in my few cents. The OP has been answered anyway

My furniture is all mod/trans. No copyable items among them. And most furniture makers do it that way.
If someone wants one chair, they pay for one chair, and not for 8-10 chairs (like a copyable chair would cost). It is the best system for most users, as they pay for what they get, and not have to pay for what they might use.
For some items I have created sets (for example 1 table/4 chairs) that have a reduced price.

Why mod? Because most of my stuff is scripted, and people have to be able to modify the note cards inside (configuration). Plus after buying it is their item, so they should be able to do as they want with it.
Why transfer? Because in my opinion, anything not copyable should be transferable. I like for people to be able to resell their couch on a yard sale if they do not use it anymore.

Multiple permissions I did try. Both copy versions and transfer versions I offered. A lot of extra work, and virtually no sales from the copy vendors. So I quit with that system. Incidentally I have people needing many copies (recently a club used my furniture for example), and they simply ask me what I can do for them. Which is way easier then making everything in 2 versions

Just wanted to echo this as another one of the mod/trans group. I hate throwing away an outfit when I don't want it/need it/use it anymore and someone else might enjoy it.

I don't understand your point here.

There's no reason why the perp can't buy your stuff with an alt.

There's no reason why the perp would use their main account for uploads of their ripped textures. In fact that would seem to be rather sloppy... disposable alts are so easy to get.

I think you're worrying yourself over nothing.

A lot of my stuff has been sold full perm for three years now.

I suspect that you've got full perm prims of mine in your inventory. Most people seem to.

I've yet to have a problem with someone re-using a prim.

For as long as I've been in SL, there has always been a clear culture of users who play SL as a game where the goal is to get as much as they can from the world for free. It's understandable, and in fact around 2003-2004 when SL was first starting, you _couldn't_ pay for L$ and that game perception was the intended and correct view of SL. Since then, it's continued with the more "game-focused" users or the ones who are cheap and don't want to spend money, but the thing is, it's infectious to other users too.

This is for two reasons. First of all, nobody wants to spend money and then find that someone else got something better, or even just as good, for free. I understand fully the reason to keep your freebies in your store but with freebies being so widely distributed, there is a strong feeling that anything you want is out there as a freebie somewhere that you haven't found yet, and so the moment when you decide to buy L$ is put off indefinately. Having a single big freebie directory would help with that but would likely not be in the interests of the providers of the items.

Secondly, users who are successful at this tend to have nice "progressive achievement" stories ("I found this as a freebie, then I camped for this, then I won a contest in a club and used the money to buy this skin, then I got a job dancing and bought other things with that money, then other people kept asking me about what I wore so I started a fashion blog", etc). Those are extremely appealing to people, because that sense of progressive achievement is something that's missing from the lives of many adults, that they miss from childhood. Plus it also creates problem that people figure that there's no point paying for things because if they had the ability and social networks to succeed, they'd be getting them for free. This is a real problem with a lot of creative support materials and is part of the classic reason why programs like Photoshop, Flash, Cubase, etc have to have strong copy protection. Certainly I have met a fair number of content creators or platform people who will say that they were given land free early on because people liked their work, or liked them and wanted to have them around - well, what does that seem to imply about anybody who didn't get free land, and what does that implication further imply about the value they'll get from buying land of their own?

Certainly in 2005 or so, when freebies were lower quality, it was much more common to see people creating their own simple items or pinching photographs from the web - I even remember "photosourcing tutorials" for people who wanted to do this. The quality scale seemed to matter less back then though, as the 'never pay' subculture was good at insulating itself from the rest of SL - if you admitted paying US$ for L$, you would be considered a dork no matter how great you looked, and thus quality perceptions tended to adjust for this. (That trend continues on some micropayments-based games now, too.) That seems to be much less so now, mind you.

I've found that even very dark grey "black" clothes look quite different with pure red or purple tints.

My problem is that whether the item is copy or transfer, it MUST be mod if I'm going to buy it. I've turned my nose up at avatars that I would otherwise have been happy to spend L$3000 apiece on, sometimes multiple versions, if key components were no mod. And I'll steer people to stores where they can buy mod items... whether they are interested in transfer or copy versions.

I personally prefer copy, but I'll buy no copy, but I almost consider no-mod products (whether transfer or copy) an insult. I bought it, who the heck are you to tell me what I can or can't do with it?

I think you are right. I sell prefabs and my builds are all over SL. Many of them have been butchered by my good intentioned customers and look terrible. I would never consider that it has affected the growth of my business though. In my opinion, if you’re flying around and see something that looks cool you check out who the creator is, maybe visit their store, and maybe buy a product. On the other hand if you fly around and see something that looks rubbish you think “that looks rubbish" and then get on with your life. You don’t check the creator of the rubbish item so you can mentally black list them from your future shopping trips. You just ignore it.

So very good items that customers rez in world = good publicity
Very good good items that have been rezzed in world and ruined by customers = irrelevant.

So many points to ponder!

My vision is to provide quality product at reasonable prices. In keeping with that vision, I can't ever see me taking the additional time to put both perms in one box (especially when I already provide multiple layers etc). It isn't worth the time involved (which might not seem like much from the outside but would be considerable). I don't want to raise my prices to cover that extra time. It didn't take me long to realize that packaging items up separately for my gift vendor wasn't worth the time involved, and I stopped doing that.

While I am not one to wait for the cheese to come back, some changes are just not worth it for me in the long run. I would rather provide a nice, wearable product for a reasonable price, with consistent permissions. At this point, that policy is paying my membership, my tier (which is not excessive I don't think), a few mall rentals, and other 'business' type expenses. It also put L's in my pocket for shopping (yay!), tips, and other fun SL things which sometimes cost. And that is good enough for me

Nice post Yumi.

I agree that the quality of freebies has gotten so much better since when i first joined 2006, hence why i only collected freebies for like the first 3 weeks of my SL life ....after that i pretty much bought everything which coinicided with buying my 1st plot of land.

If the quality of freebies keeps on improving, not to mention the flood of BIAB full perms stolen content...i can see a tough future for many store owners. If you average small store owner packs up.....the SL world will be a sadder place for it with less innovations, less choices. less diversity...eventually it will be the same content circulating or you have to go to one of the big (or brand) companies for your fix.


Isn't that what has happened in RL too but mostly price related. The UK was always known as a "nation of shopkeepers"...gradually a large percentage of the niche and small outlets were forced to close up and down the country as the big Walmart type supermarkets moved in (even in small towns). They could not compete price wise nor the range of products. Same with boutiques and tailors were gradually replaced by chain-stores even in the most sleepiest of towns.
So choices have become smaller


Here in SL its not so much prices as that can vary from one extreme to another......but more the flood of freebies and quality ones at that.

I think that the more saturated the market becomes with freebies; the more people will be willing to pay for new unique designs in order to have something different. It's impossible to beat all the thieves and freebies in SL. However it is possible to compete and make a good living in SL. You need to know your market inside out, know what your top competitors are making and know what is available in the freebie markets. Then go out and make something new and innovative and unavailable anywhere else in world. Sure, your new design will get ripped off eventually, literally stolen by the thieves and generally copied by your less talented competitors. But by the time your great new design has been stolen and is in wide circulation by others, you have already released your next 1 or 2 designs, enabling you to stay ahead of the game.

I think the current over saturated markets in SL are starting to separate the men from the boys! The average designer who bangs out generic uninspired designs are falling by the wayside or failing to make good profit, despite their efforts to game the search systems.

With the vastly improved freebies that are available nowadays people need to raise their game, stop relying on old items selling and keep churning out a continuous line of new exciting unique looking items. You also need to accept the fact those items will be ripped off and widely circulated within a month or 2. Once you accept that and work out a way to combat it then there is still good money to be made here.

I've noticed that. There have been some really good freebie avatars for a while now (Wingless Emoto's deer, horses, and wolves, and now Uchi's ringtail) and what looked like really nice avatars before they were turned into freebies now elicit the response "another freebie wolf ho hum".