SL no fun for creator/builders?

I think you have to really enjoy what you are doing, otherwise you would give up.

I agree very much with Nina's post at #15, and Conifer has summed up the success factors most concisely - but the enjoyment has to be the main driver IMO.

How you measure success is very much an individual thing and if your goal is to make a real life living, then, yes - you must work as hard as you would in a real life business. If your definition of success is to cover your expenses, then that is a much more realistic possibility.

Whatever your goal - if you are enjoying what you are doing, then that can be success enough and anything more is a bonus.

I think if you start out saying I want to build to make money you might not find what you are looking for.. there are only a select few who can honestly say they break even on SL.
Besides 25.00 a month I wish I only had to dish out.

What 25 $ per month btw? Even a month-by-month premium account is only 9.95 and you can get by beautifully without spending one single cent in SL. That's my main fun aspect.

$25?
Politics?
Am I on the wrong grid?

Thousands. Not sure that's how i'd define a select few. Look at the stats pages

Thousands in a world of millions..

Yes but lets discount the ones who join, wander around for an hour aimlessly trying to find the purpose of the game they have arrived in.

Look at the concurrency stats, i'll bet that many of them are the same people over and over so maybe 200k regular people?

500k tops? I'd still call 60k out of 500k not exactly a select few.

Anyone got better guesstimates of active users?

Yes, a lot of people would define that as success. I don't. In fact I think it's damned stupid.

How long would it take you to earn US$25 in RL? If you live in the USA you could do that in half a shift in a single day working at McDonalds.

Want four hours pay? Frickin' work four hours.

You have to work much, much harder than that, because most other people doing it are doing it for peanuts.



Even that will likely require sub-sub-minimum wage effort.

Forget about the possibility of earning a profit. The amount of money you're talking about is essentially zero. If you wouldn't do the work for free then you probably shouldn't do it at all.



And before you let the possibility of maybe being able to earn some money sitting in your underwear in front of your computer cloud your judgment, consider if there's a better payoff for your time in RL. Yeah, you might get some non-financial reward from working SL wages, but if people's vague stories of success weren't in the picture, would you really judge your SL time so rewarding? Are there things in RL you could do that'd be rewarding?

There's so much I want to do in RL that I feel really stupid for ever having spent so much time in SL. I hope in the next three years I adopt a more healthy balance of time usage, because in the last three years I could have learned a language, or read hundreds of books, or earned tens of thousands of real dollars and given in to charity, or...

Ouch! Stop that!

I'm with you - think about that all the time, and working on it. But....I wouldn't have learned another language. Would have pissed the time away at happy hours in RL hearing the same stories from the same people. In SL....I met people from all over the world....and learned a ton of stuff about different countries, different cultures.

Probably wouldn't have read hundreds of books, either....although they are sitting on my book shelf. Every adventure in SL was a book in itself. And I got to be a character in it. Much more impressive than living through someone else's characters.

The money? Learned in the last year....that money means nothing.

On charities....I think it was actually hearing some people's stories in SL...that will stick with me on the importance of that. But also learned in RL this year....that offering time is just as effective....if you don't have the money.....maybe more effective. Offering money, and you don't get into the heart of it...just mail a check....done.

I look at everything as "Everything happens for a reason." Something prompted me to stick around.....there is a reason.

I hope you can look at your time that way. But yes...you do have to be very careful about the time spent....so that it is healthy....and you have no regrets. I do have some regrets about a particular week, that should have been spent totally in RL....but had no way of knowing that, at the time, and I might have pissed it away in RL, as well. Can only remember that week every time I log in....and place that value on when to log off....in a healthy fashion, that would cause no regrets. But you have to remember that when logging into RL, too....and that was the lesson. There are lessons, here.

Sad to say, but I think you are right.

LL is now into attracting the BIG corporate types.

Can you expand on this, Qie (if this wouldn't put you at risk of finding a horse's head in your bed, of course)? Do you mean scripting for particular closed APIs?

There is that, but there's a fair amount of other cliqueishness in scripting too, such as:

- Scripting for particular client mods;
- Knowledge of particular exploits used for weapons;
- Scripting pretty much any local gadget (since there are a small number of scripters who are very well known for these and are "made" financially, they can add anything you make to their product as a free update and force you out).

Yes, you can't become famous overnight for your scripting and you have to make everything from scratch to make money on it. Just like in the real world. I can't make my own soft-drink and immediately compete with coca-cola or pepsi.

In general, I absolutely agree with you that looking at SL as a way to make RL money is misguided and foolish. In fact, when new folks ask how to get L, I strongly advise them just to buy some, because there are few ways for new folks to make money in SL that are worth the time and drudgery they require.

Having said that, it's also true that playing in SL at making content is a lot more fun (for some people) than working at McDonalds. So it's not such a terrible or irrational thing for someone's goal to be that their playing time is self-supporting.

My own example: I put my own money into SL, money I make at my real job. I consider it part of my entertainment budget, and if I didn't think it was worth it, believe me, I wouldn't do it. I'm not spending more than I can afford, and if I wasn't spending it on SL I might very well be spending it on something else equally transient and frivolous (by whatever measure you like).

So even if I don't make back a cent on it, I've gotten my money's worth for my entertainment dollar. At the same time, if I can make back enough by *doing the things I enjoy in SL* to offset some of that expense, so much the better. The key is that I'm doing things I enjoy doing. Once it stops being entertainment, the equation changes completely.

No, but equally, in the real world, when you make your new soft-drink, Coca-Cola don't make their own drink that tastes just the same and give it away for free because they are already making all the money they need from Coke.

Actually, the same thing has happened in the real software industry - in the monopoly lawsuits it was found that Microsoft had threatened smaller developers that they'd create an equivalent to their software and bundle it with Windows, wiping out most of their demand.

This is a good point of view, if your aim is to make money efficiently. In fact, I recommend it to newbies (who almost invariably ask me how to "get $L".

But if your aim is enjoyment, and you enjoy creating, and/or playing the sales game, then the amount of profit is a secondary issue. Nice, but not the main reason for doing it.

you mean every new feature that they've been advertising in win7 ? most of which have been around YEARS as separate apps... nah, that couldn't be...

I make stuff for fun, then sell it or post it as freebies or just give it away.

I make no effort at marketing, which I find boring. Fortunately, sex sells itself in SL.

Works for me!

This discussion reminded me of a quote from Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the world-wide web:

False. I'm most successful, and do show my face. I don't count my success in Lindens, though. If I counted it in $US, I'd be even-steven: none in, none out.

Then there are a number of misguided and foolish people laughing their way to the bank.

I think it's misguided and foolish only if you think it's easy and requires no talent.

Or find something where you can earn lindens while doing something you enjoy, in which case it's not drudgery.

Carter, I think you're just overstating your case. If what you mean to say is that earning money takes substantially more time and effort in SL than RL, I'd agree: this is true for the vast majority of people. On the other hand, SL offers opportunities that one just doesn't find in RL, such as a very low-cost, low-effort way to start a small business. (Relative to RL, that is -- but the rewards are usually smaller as well.)

Here's how it breaks down:
top 0.5% make > US$5000 / month
top 1% make > US$2000 / month
top 2% make > US$1000 / month
top 3% make > US$500 / month
top 7% make > US$200 / month
top 11% make > US$100 / month
top 16% make > US$50 / month
top 45% make > US$10 / month

That's of about 67,000 users with PMLF (whatever that is).

So, you need to be in the top 10% to make enough to dine out a couple times a month on your profits.

I am beginning to wonder about that. The last few weeks, very few people have attanded my Sex Ed class...except for last week, when we got a griefer and about four of his alts to fill up some of the empty seats.

It was so nice to have bodies in the classroom that I put up with his/their antics for about twenty minutes before I ejected them.

What's up with that? Does everyone already all about the virtual Birds and Bees? Or are people losing interest? Downloading Porn Video On Demand instead of hopping poseballs? Did the government up the saltpeter in processed food again?

LOL. I think there are just fast days and slow days.

But, in order to do anything, someone must assume that it is easy enough for them and requires only talents they have...

Easy enough for them, yes, but requiring only talents they have? I've had to develop talents to make things in SL. Maybe this is just a semantic argument and you mean "innate abilities" whereas I mean "developed skills". If so, then you're right, and it doesn't contradict what I said.

To make much of a profit in SL, it takes time, effort, and ability -- just as it does in RL. In most cases, you can make much more per hour in RL, so if profit is the bottom line, don't look for it in SL unless you're very unusual.

But if you're doing it for fun and profit is secondary, then you can't lose.