Hungry Hungry Hippos

This game already exists. Its called Katamari Damacy.

Sure, but Enabran's original point was that making more money would let people spend more time working on it. That's true - but only if it takes them across the hobby/part-time margin, which is pretty huge. Apart from the relatively small amount of time lost setting up in a sandbox, the difference above isn't huge - and Betty's spending time setting up that house or putting up that permanent build, which may not directly contribute to sales. In fact, Anne is more likely to spend more time building than Betty, because hopefully she'll still work to establish herself, whereas Betty is "sorted" for the moment and may just go around shopping and enjoying herself.

More Kirby, I would have said.

Well, not quite. From my newbie days I can assure you that L$50 tends to take you from "can't afford anything" to "still can't afford anything".



Well, not quite. What I'm basing things on is the fact that money flow in SL appears to be less scattered than it is in RL. In RL, for example, even Microsoft needs to spend money on CD duplication, and the duplicators then buy blank CDs, so the money flows back down to smaller companies. In SL, a creator has only two things to do with that money: pay tier, and buy luxuries. L$ cashed out for tier flow to people who are - again, from observation, most commonly either a) pure consumers who fund SL by buying L$, or b) people investing to start businesses. But they're going to be spending the rest on luxuries.

This is compounded by the fact that the set of skills saleable on SL are relatively small and relatively generic: once someone can build well, they can build many different things well. So chances are, when they decide to buy something, it'll be from someone who's a better builder than them (after all, otherwise they could do a better job themselves), and therefore is probably richer than them too. So all the money not cashed out tends to either come to a halt (being saved) or flow upwards (when they buy luxuries) where the same happens again.

The problem with this strong upward flow is that it does lower the effectiveness of stipend at growing the economy. Suppose it's done with real world currency: if you give ten million people one cent each, it doesn't make any real difference to them, nor to people they buy from. If someone can somehow get money indirectly from all ten million people, then they can get ten million cents or $100000 - but if they're able to get money indirectly from all ten million people, due to that fact they're probably very rich already and even $100000 doesn't make that much difference to them.



This ignores talent, competition, and diminishing returns. These enforce scarcity even if nothing deliberate in SL does.

Oh, it does apply in part to SL - only not with regard to production costs. Making more money in SL means more money to spend on advertisment and marketing (and I don't mean just the 50L$ classifieds), more money to spend on tier / bigger land parcel rental / mall rentals, more money to outsource parts of projects to more competent people (scripting, graphic design, whatever), more money to spend on stuff like shop interior design, props, textures, plus all the little expenses like find places and uploads. And that in turn hopefully increases sales lather, rinse, repeat.

(To give you an arbitrary data point: I reinvest more than 20% of the L$ generated by my lil business, and I don't even count L$ spent on props for product snaps, or the rent for my workshop - if I did, it would be closer to 50%.)

You continue to miss the point. The initial distribution is irrelevant. The point is that new currency continues to be introduced. A lot of it. The fact that it's widely distributed doesn't matter, since in aggregate, it still means that there's always new currency to be had.



Uh, no. Intellectual property (and creativity in general) is not commoditized and not generic. Just because I can build doesn't mean I can think of the infinite possibilities of building or execute them all perfectly. I urge you to escape the wildly theoretical realm that traps you in each and every one of your discussions here and actually live Second Life. Simple experience immediately disproves these fallacies. Just because I can build a gadget doesn't mean I can build a house or a helicopter or a gazebo. Many people do these things better than me and thus earn my business quite handily.

That assertion is as ridiculous as saying "Enabran, you know how to write sentences; you will never give business to book publishers. You know how to cook; you're never going to patronize restaurants. You minored in film; you're never going to watch movies. You'll just do this stuff yourself."



No, they don't enforce scarcity of anything at all. They moderate demand.

(nod) But of these, the outsourcing is the only one that really benefits anyone other than you. Even though it might generate more sales, all those people could have bought the product anyway. Advertisement/marketing doesn't add any value for the buyers of the products (they still get the same product in the end) but arguably hurts others by making it that much harder for anyone else to get noticed.

In fact, this - existing successful businesses putting up the cost for anyone new to do business - could make the economy become zero-sum because the gain in stipend is cancelled out by the rising business costs. The top classified just keeps getting higher, and that money's being burned every week..

OMG SL IS TERRIBLE WE'RE ALL DOOMED TO FAILURE LET'S CANCEL OUR ACCOUNTS

(sigh)

/me resumes updating his spreadsheets

The initial distribution isn't irrelevant, though. The initial distribution is so widespread that, although extra currency is added, it doesn't add much extra value. Yes, in aggregate it becomes worthwhile, but if you're in a position to benefit from the aggregation - to actually get L$ from all those different people - then just the fact of being in that position will mean you probably are rich anyway, and therefore even the higher aggregate amount won't have much value to you.



Ok, ok, I'll acknowledge that this stuff isn't universal. But, equally, there are at least reasonable numbers of creators I've talked to who do this. Typically they're people who're also "role-playing", so anything related to their role they can make themselves and anything that's not related they usually aren't that interested in.

But, I'm not quite saying what you say above. What I'm saying is "You know how to cook; therefore, you're never going to spend money to go to a restaurant where their chief isn't as good as you."



They enforce scarcity too, or have the ability to. As an example, suppose there were several builders with the same kind of talent that Starax has. They start competing with each other and as a result their prices start to fall. (Especially bad given that the "no production costs, no loss for hoarding L$" situation makes predatory pricing or outright dumping very easy.) Sooner or later this leads to a situation where anyone who hasn't got that talent level can't make anything of value - and since only so many people can have that level of talent, and those people only have so much time, scarcity is being enforced. Equally diminishing returns limits the income available in each market.

I don't see why you keep representing me as saying this.

I don't think SL is terrible or that everyone's doomed to failure. But I would like to see a bit more, honest acceptance of the fact that the climate of SL is changing and it's getting harder and harder for people to find a way in, almost no matter what they want to do. I wouldn't say "too hard"; I'm actually trying, but because it is harder now, it takes time.

The fundamental, lowest-level simple observation I have regarding the stipend thing is this: despite all the extra stipend money moving around the economy, it's still getting harder - not easier - to succeed. Now, that must be explainable somehow.

I dub thee Gloomy Murakami, render of dreams. Your remarks are a disinspiration to us all!

And my point is that this is just the same in real life. Most hobby-level work never crosses that margin.

So is Anne. Except she's got to do it every time she goes to work. Betty can pop right in. Anne has to spend time learning photoshop to make her textures. Betty buys them.

In seriousness, though, if you ever did anything BESIDES advance the impossibilities of this miserable, difficult place, your observations might carry some weight. But you've turned yourself into an absurd caricature of Eeyore and that's just obnoxious.

No pony for you; you do not win at the forums (but NO ONE EVER WINS ANYTHING OMG SO THAT'S TO BE EXPECTED I GUESS.)

Well, I do post other things as well, you know, and I do try and do stuff in-world including stuff that (I hope) makes things a bit easier for people.

But to say I'm a "render of dreams" when I'm only reporting observations seems a little harsh. If what I say is about "rending dreams" it's only because my dreams were rent.



I do get to laugh at Eeyore wanting a pony, though.

See, I find this very ironic coming directly after Enabran criticising me for saying how hard things were for people starting up.

Well, the ad space I buy benefits the people that sell it (the vast majority of my ad budget goes to other residents, not LL), the rentals benefit the rental barons (which is arguably just a middleman between LL and me), the props, interior design & textures benefits other content creators. I guess you could lump the last category into "outsourcing" - I personally don't, as I'm buying ready-made items, and not hiring someone for building them. I haven't broken my expenses down into "goes to other residents" / "goes to LL" but from glancing over the numbers, I'd say LL gets about 10% of my expenses.

As for the sales generation - of course everyone could have bought the stuff - but I doubt they actually would have, and "could have bought it, but didn't" sales don't generate much L$, otherwise I'd be really, really rich



Advertisement / marketing builds image, desirability, it adds a whole new semantic layer to the product (which often has little to do with the product itself, but that's not the point here). Look at luxury brands: functionally, a Dior bag is just another bag, and yet people spend oodleplexes on money on it, when they could get about 10-20 regular no-brand bags for that price. They are paying for the image, they are buying points in a complex game of social interaction and status. Many people don't play that game, but for those who do, it is obviously worth the money. Of course, in SL, I am far from being able to say that I play the brand game with any style or elegance - but some of the "big content creators" do it, and quite well.

(Caveat - I am not involved with marketing at all in RL, take my ideas with a grain of salt. But SL is just so much more fun as an economic simulation than say, Age of Empires, that it has me observing the RL a lot more under economic aspects).

As for the hurting others - I don't see that. Each and every advertising channel I am using is open to the general population of SL - there are no entry level requirements, no secret handshakes. I don't even have a background in graphics design that would help me design nifty ads - so I sat down and worked my way through a few gimp tutorials to get half a clue. Doesn't help much with the design part, but at least with the graphics part. Also, I started the biz thing a mere 3 months ago, in a sector were the competition is big and well-established, without a big name backing me. Still, I didn't find it singularly hard or impossible to get a foothold. It was just a matter of patience and perseverance (and I guess a good product doesn't hurt ).

Well, all I can really say to this is buck up and change your attitude. If you're going to let events dictate your miserable attitude, you've got a dreadful life ahead of you (Second and otherwise). My attitude in life told me I can and will win. So far I have won a lot. I am more than certain there's a correlation.

There may be a correlation but it may not be such a good one.

What happen when the next guy who wants to build robots comes along, and has the same attitude - but not your building/texturing skill or business acumen?

Poor guy. He's obviously going to fail, because Enabran sprung from the head of Zeus fully formed and skilled and didn't have any sort of learning curve whatsoever. Enabran was perfect from day one and so no one else will ever get a chance!

Please. What utter nonsense. If someone wants to compete, they will work to learn all of those things. You honestly think I'm the first one to sell a robot in Second Life? I knew nothing when I began. By your reasoning I should still be a sniveling, miserable wretch compalining no one ever gave him a chance because other people were making robots before me.

Is it easy for my new competitor? Nope. And it sure as hell wasn't easy for me.

Welcome to life.

What about HHHUnleashed?

You can't work to learn talent - that's the whole point of talent.

And you would have "sprung up" with the talent, you just needed to practice to be able to realise it.



No, but it's harder for your new competitor, because of you.

Chip Midnight is extremely talented.

Chip Midnight makes skins and clothes - some with uncanny and creepy realism.

Ergo - there is no market for skins and clothes in Second Life.....

Everyone else - your skins and clothes don't exist - give up.

Having established competition can have positive aspects. For instance, the new competitor knows, thanks to Enabran and other robot builders, that there actually is a market for robots in SL. He knows how much (or how little) people are prepared to pay for a robot, and what kind of features they have grown to expect for that price - and will be able to price and position his product accordingly, for example as the new budget robot, now only 50L$ and with even less features! By checking out his competitor's point of sales, he can get an estimated lower bound for the revenue generated by that kind of businesses (under the assumption that his competitors cover their tier / rental fees). By watching for competitor ads, he can get a feel for what his audience could be, and how to reach them - maybe even, by a bit of clever social engineering, get to know the opinion leaders in the field of robotics and give them a free demo of his new robot. All that is a lot of valuable information for a start-up. He is not the first, but being a new player on an established field isn't necessarily a disadvantage, if one is willing to observe, and learn

This is why there is a lack of clothing/skin/hair/shoe/house designers in SL?

OMG BUT THAT WOULD BE HARD JACKAL EVERYTHING SHOULD BE EASY


Beautiful point. I can't have said it better.