Price fixing in world?

Well yes, I agree in a lot of ways. Who really needs to buy (or even be given) a fire or lamp if they don't have the discomfort of darkness? -anyone can force a sunset- I think those isseus are the real isseus. There is no goal in SL but there is also a lack of common discomfort. ^_^

I agree with you that improvements to the platform would help build business for LL. SL would become more popular and people would spend more.

But I'm not seeing the validity of the argument that innovation is prevented by the system limits. Part of true creativity and innovation is doing what you can with what you've got.

(Also, isn't this a separate argument from the 'low product prices retard innovation' argument? We now seem to be off on a 'Linden Lab retards innovation by offering a poor platform' tangent.)

I see them as inextricably linked. As long as there are new entrants to the market the downward pressure on pricing never stops. At the same time the room left to innovate becomes smaller and smaller due to the range of consumer interest and the hard limits of the system. Of course that relationship effects different markets in different ways depending on how hampered they are by the platform. My point is that the innovation argument has its limits, because what's possible in SL has some severe limits.

And I don't see that.

Levi Strauss isn't going to come into SL to sell jeans, the L$ aren't worth it.

Levi Strauss isn't going to come into SL to give away jeans for PR, the impressions aren't worth it.

So what return is a RL corporation going to get from SL?

Many RL corporations have come and gone in SL already, there are probably even more in SL that I don't even realize are there.

I don't see that they have had a great impact on SL, thus far. Certainly not on my SL experience.

I think you are right - it's not likely to be real life companies at this stage. It's more likely to be RL creative professionals doing SL work to add to their portfolios for future employers.

They haven't, yet. It's a lot like the internet in the early 90's. Look at the dot com bubble. Few early entrants remain because the web hadn't yet hit a critical mass and there wasn't enough return on investment to sustain commercial interest. That changed as the web became more and more ubiquitous. SL, if it continues to grow, will likely follow a similar path of early adopters who rushed in to capitalize on the hype dropping out because they were simply too early, and later entrants finally gaining a solid foothold. LL wants SL to become as ubiquitous as the web. That may or may not ever happen, but if it does you can bet that real world large commercial interests will be back with a vengeance.

I have been known to spend a whole lot of quantity of hours to get certain
texture or thing just right for my high standards to share with others.
I do it because I enjoy the process but it does seem there does get point
where I have this much of resources, this amount of hassles and it gets
to point where to get ideal level of quality seems to be pointless when tons are
already established and well known, few will notice what I am doing either way.
It seems like it is almost to easy to spend literally spend thousands of dollars on keeping up with best equipment but still plagued with glitches, server crashes and failures while you cab invest tons on virtual land, advertising, consulting fees but at certain point it just seems like a waste to do all that.

Corporations make use of sub-cultures all the time. I guess they just have to find the right key. With internet cultures in general it might be intresting to push around their communitys towards software, services and information sources -what more. For example if Ati has a deal with Blizzard and they get their customers free trails of WOW. LL might feel they no longer gonna support the Ati graphic drivers that hard.
And if Torely gives nice examples of how to use some unSL related service...well thats clear. Even the inworld interface loads your pages in a setup browser and you need to have some applications of 3th parties to even enjoy SL fully.
So surely you been exposed.

We use SL as an advertising platform for our websites and since buying the Sims have seem a growth both in traffic and new members for our sites.

Its an ideal cheap way of advertising where we can interact with our new and potential members giving L$'s away in the form of money trees and events and various other methods. Where else can you get live, well almost advertising and meet your new clients in a 3D environment and have a great deal of fun, while getting all the tax reliefs as it is seen as part of our advertising budget.

I think that SL can handle lower prices and i envisage the future here where people come and create and sell cheap, because they can and not because they are driven to make loads of money, as they have a reasonable income outside of SL.

I think that to rely solely on SL for your total RL income is not a great idea as we all know how things can change here, but thats just my opinion. It just depends how you view SL and what it can do for you and thankfully everyone is different.

The equation is simple:

If you're here to make a profit, then set your prices high.

If you're here to have fun, dont give a shit about what people tell you your prices should be - set them as low as you feel like.

They're trying to make a buck in a world thats here for fun first and "serious business" second. Thats just how it goes.

Dont let them scare you.

I would like to profit.

But setting high prices makes me feel bad.

a good mix of prices in a store..
some 10L some way more...
ppl tend to buy more.

i sell 10L furniture
and 5L furniture... even dollarby and 0L furniture....
and 1000L and even 3000L furniture

i find ppl will come in .. and buy more...
i make the cheaper furniture as promotions, and the volume sold more than covers my time.

i dont spend less time on the cheaper furniture... sometimes i spend a little more effort.

but ppl come for the cheaper stuff and end up buying from the mid and even high end before they leave.

its just a marketing technique.. like any business in RL.

SL doesn't have an economy, because anyone can create more lindens at any time by buying them with R/L money.


I used to price my clothes "competitively" as in comparable to what I saw others selling the same types of outfits for....didnt' sell much. Dropped my prices to 99L and less per outfit/item, and wow! Things sell now.

i find it odd that the [size] came after you used enter, maybe the keyboard is sending abit more then it needs to

tried another keyboard or if wireless, 1 with a cord?

Figuring out how to set prices on products is a real challenge. Over time I've evolved a pricing policy for my store where certain product types get priced within a certain range so that the prices make sense overall when you look at all the stuff I sell. But picking the price ranges in the first place was something I agonised over quite a bit. With my "flagship line" of products (the quad cats) I debated whether to price them as highly as most other quad avatar makers were doing at the time, or to go lowlowlow the way Grendels do. I opted for a spot in between, because I don't have the high traffic that makes the low prices work well for Grendels, but I want to price my stuff low enough that they're accessable to a lot of folk, and I suspect that pricing them up in the L$thousands would put them out of reach for many who might otherwise be interested.

Another element I sometimes use when trying to figure out a price for something is "how low can I price it without feeling like I'm being shortchanged if I sell it at that price?" That's less of an issue in SL than in RL, but it's still a factor given how much work it takes to create a new avatar line from scratch. But something I've definitely noticed is that on occasions, setting the price on an item lower means that I make more profit overall than I would if I set it higher but got fewer sales.

I imagine in a service-type line of work price-setting would have a very different pattern - since what you're selling is your time, you don't have the "economy of scale" advantage that sellers of Stuff have - you can't just halve your prices and double the take, since the time you have available to provide the service doesn't scale accordingly. But if you're selling Stuff, it can sometimes be very worthwhile to sell it cheaply and in quantity... not the least because if all else is equal, the more examples of your work there are out there in SL being used by happy customers, the more folk will be exposed to your stuff and may become a new customer later on. My motto is "every happy customer is free advertising!" And it's true. I've had many many customers tell me that they found me via word of mouth or by seeing someone else using a product of mine and deciding that they "just had to have one".

Price setting is a black art at the best of times; but in SL things work very differently to RL, and using RL approaches to it without factoring in those differences are unlikely to get good results, I think.

Me too.
I'de like to know how many peeps posting pro-free market comments vote democrat. Remember Jimmy carter and 21% interest rates... coming again.

Dragging up a three month-old thread just to make a political point?

*slow clap*

Go you!

necrowned