The Sweatshop, the Witch and the 10L$ Wardrobe

lol@ Her trying to be the grid god.

I'm not a content creator but I've known many of them. Content creators deserve every linden they get for their marvelous work. I am envious of their ability but I'm not motivated enough to master Photoshop and other skills necessary to put out a quality product.

If this 10 Linden scheme comes to full fruition, I do not forsee good things for Second Life. If it doesn't go down in flames, it will drive all but the financially strongest content creators out of business. This is assuming, of course, that the 10 linden goods are of quality at all. Put me down as opposed to this.

Isablan has an excellent point. Freebie items are either free or 1L, and there are billions of them. If someone is more concerned with price than anything else, then they can get anything they want for free or close to it, and that includes furniture or whatever else AC wants to build. They just have to be willing to search around a little and not get exactly what they want. The market for content creators really is for both quality and uniqueness. If freebies haven't hurt the market, then this isn't likely to either. Selling stuff for 100L that costs 300L+ elsewhere would actually do more damage, since the people looking for freebies would go elsewhere and the people willing to pay might consider the products if they were of comparable quality and design to the more expensive content.

So if the purpose of this isn't to drop prices across the board and run independent designers out of business, what is it? Wrecking the real estate market doesn't help AC. Any idea if she's been liquidating (or attempting to) her real estate holdings? Maybe she wants to crash the currency? I don't see this working, but even a slight valuation change in the Linden makes a huge difference to her because of the size of the trades she's capable of. Of course, a huge trade from here would also screw things up because the market isn't big enough to support that.

Interesting. I wonder what the real motive here is.

World domination, I can see no other explanation for it. Monopolies are never good.

Isablan, I am right there with you. There is decent free content everywhere, getting stuff is not a barrier to new residents. And so few make it to SLX anyway that this is not going to impact inworld economics at all.

The only possible motive I can see here relates to SLX itself - is this is a move to displace content sales from SLX? Perhaps AC would like SLX to get rid of the marketplace and focus on being a currency and land exchange? Perhaps that would create a better venue for her own interests there? Dunno.

Side note: I think content providers on this thread are overreacting. Only a very small percentage of active residents are in SL to create a business -- we work in RL, don't need to here. Nearly everyone in SL is there to play, and if we stay around awhile, we simply move money in on a regular basis. The $50/month pays for a 4K plot and a lot of toys, we have favorite businesses that we buy from, we will continue to do so. $50 is the cost of one good dinner out in an urban area, so no big deal. However, you are right in that this may ultimately make it harder for residents to break through and start a new business. I'm not sure how much LL cares about that ... slowly losing premium fee revenue (<20% of their revenue stream now) is not an immense issue.

Basically, it's a kiddie product, totally different audience. Growing fast because it is far less complex to learn and teenagers can join. Why ACS thinks that cheaper content is the key to growing SL is rather puzzling to me....

Interesting observations, and I agree with Isablan too that there must be a profit motive in there somewhere, or something else is afoot.

Maybe it's just me but I have come across plenty of people who are unwilling to put any money into this game at all. Why do you think camping has evolved the way it has? I know of one place that pays ridiculous money to campers and it more than pays for the light bill. With the prospect of earning something to offset the cost of being here, it's very important to many people to earn their second living. Look at all the malls out there. They are full of shops. People are trying their hand and making and selling their wares, and it's not all the same people.

The other thing that makes me curious is the type of content being created for the $10L empire. Why furniture. Makes no sense. If the goal is to increase participation and expand the platform, the content you want to be creating are the staples desired by all newbies: clothing, skins, hair and AO's. That is what makes a difference to a new sign up, the initial rush of playing dress up. And even then, how quickly does a new account realize that they are wearing the exact same hair that the other 3 newbies they just met up with are wearing? Having a unique look drives half the commerce in SL. The playing house part tends to come later after an account has already decided to spend some money.

It just isn't logical.

Perhaps furniture first because it's easiest to make, and her staff is still in training? Clothes and hair later?

Furniture counts as prims in Dreamland? (I know: nobody who can afford Dreamland rents is in the market for L$10 furniture.)

Wild speculation ungrounded in any fact: The L$10 furniture is just quick knock-offs of stuff she's already selling in IMVU. Geometry is geometry. Clothing comes after somebody figures out how to distort the textures to match a different avatar UV map. Scripted stuff after somebody writes an interpreter from IMVU scripts (if there are such things) to Mono CLI.

Now that I think about it, it's pretty interesting that they messed up the perms on the animations. A common enough "first try" mistake, but not one that could be made by anybody with SL furniture experience. So we know whoever is running this show for her wasn't "native" to this SL business. How much more could it have cost her to get at least one person who knew what they were doing?

Why furniture? Because you buy furniture to go in your house. And what do you need to have a house? And what does "Mrs. C" sell? A-ha! Essentially, I wouldn't be surprised if she's essentially "value-adding" her sims, but _all_ landlords do that.

Having said that, my general perception is that the way most people want things to work is that you create something that you like for yourself, and if it's good enough it sells, and then the money allows and incentivises you to create more, and it's all good. But that can't last - business inevitably becomes a science in itself, as it's starting to do now. The fact that SL has zero production cost doesn't prevent that, it just means it becomes a different science to the RL one, and as we're seeing major widespread marketing is part of it (and it's universally accepted that it _will_ be part of it in any micropayments system, which is what SL is). If you charge only L$1 for your products, they're practically free, but if you could sell just one to every resident who signed up you'd be making L$20000 a day. Of course selling one to every single resident will be nearly impossible given that some are alts and some quit before leaving Orientation Island because the pixels aren't shiny and there's no orcs to slay - but you see the point.

IMVU doesn't support scripting.

I dunno, Yumi, I just don't buy the logic that a $10L couch inspires someone to rush on out and set up housekeeping in Dreamland. There is too much free and nearly free content already. If I wasn't going to buy land for a house for my freebie couch, why would I do so for a $10L couch?

Have we heard from any of the land owning residents in the Northern Grid yet???

Thems are expensive panties are they at least colour changing?

A gentleman never tells...

... but a gentleman sells?

Gentleman or not, he better give a cut to Brenda, she has an expensive shoe habit.


And he better not have stole any of the ones with my lipstick on them.

Since these people are being paid real wages to churn this stuff out, you wouldnt expect them to remain at the freebe level of quality long.

The entire Quality / cost concept goes out the window if someone is getting paid real life wages to churn out designs for a fixed cost.

Assuming she keeps at this ...

The quality will steadily improve into the range of todays full priced products, but still cost only 10-15L.

I think the quality is already there, it certainly looked like it in the pictures. But bland. It doesn't matter how high the quality is. The highest quality couch in SL being sold for $10L isn't going to help expand the customer base, which is her stated goal. If she wanted to expand the customer base she should hire some programmers and rewrite the whole back end of SL, or come up with a whole new orientation that makes SL as easy to figure out as IMVU. High cost content isn't the barrier to growth here....

Hmm, interesting. But its "high" cost content she decided to target.

I disagree with her reasoning as well. She cites the fact that SL has grown for a reasont he prices should go down. But realisiticly the money spent in world has not grown at an even pace with the number of content creators / number of new residents.

While some content creators probably saw a significant rise in sales. Others of us have had flat sales, even people with a name and rep in whatever niche they are.

Meaning, I hardly think sales have been linear enough to make a blanket statement to the effect of *With all this growth prices should have come down by a huge degree"*. Which Anshe seems to be arguing.

If shes simply come out with all this stuff and came in 25% below market it would have just looked like healthy agressive competion.

Thing is if this stuff becomes as good as items costing 10x as much people will notice ...

But the range of content in SL is all over the map. You can find great quality clothes for $50L, PixelDolls even has stuff for $100L now. You can find good quality of everything at cheaper prices - with the noted exceptions of skins and animations. I don't see her dropping land prices at Dreamland because prices in SL should have come down now that there are more people. If content prices are too high, then so are her land prices.

You can't have it both ways.

Well, of course they are. But land prices are less controlable - since the monthly fee is decided by LL, so is an island purchase price. And auctions of course.

The concept I suppose behinf 10L content is it doesnt cost you anything to produce.

If my sales quantities would go up by a factor of 10 I could drop my prices by a factor of 10, in theory.

But again this is something that isnt linear, and demand isnt unlimited.

I could drop my prices by a factor of 10 and not even double my sales. At which point id be massively losing money.

But if breaking even isnt your goal .. you can do whatever you want with prices ..

It costs time to produce. I have upwards of 80 working hours into some of my houses. Photoshop isn't cheap. Neither is Maya or Poser. Skill to use those programs takes hundreds of hours of practice.

It still logically makes no sense. If you go with the theory that content in SL is far too expensive, ok, say the pricing all drops down to less than $100L for everything available (except land, because you know we believe allowing market demand to set pricing.) I just fail to see how that sparks the next great renaissance of SL as people flock to the login servers clamoring for cheap stuff.

I never said it did lol - I was just trying to see what she/they are thinking.

I dont like this idea at all. I wish shed just sell stuff at a competitive price to recoup her losses for having people on staff - but thats not the game plan, I guess.