Chicago Closing :)

my favorite romp through the Chicago project was the night that aliens landed.. too bad though even that night sim attendance was sadly low.

I wonder how much a month dotted with people unable to login and numerous updates and other glitches might have effected it's visitor stats.

Well, cheers though to a neat world created!

there is also information on this project on our webs at:

Faded Reality.org
and sister site
Reality Faded.org

thank you so much for the kind words folks you will be seeing more from us in the furture. Even tho this project was meant to run a full year and we are sad to see that the numbers did not sustain its existance. we will be bringing our other ideas to life in its place.

Mar aka Catherine

Thanks everyone, for the very kind words. This was my first big project (ok, I admit, any project) in SL, and I learned a lot from it. Special thanks to Mar for all she's taught me, and for letting me be a part of it.

As she said, we're not done .... and without doubt, the best is yet to come.

-Claire

Well... There WAS a murder mystery going on at the same time. Everyone was there, I think...

It was up for ONLY a month?

I think and feel its to short time.. we al have a RL to (I hope)

I did know some about it as I read forum.. and I meet a girl that was lost in some way i landed at my Island in Dreamland.. dressed as she shoud be into some old kind of party (nice dress)... she told about a game in Chicago.... hmmm

But I am sure with more info (cant tell how to do that in SL sadly).. and more time up - more people had visited..

A month are short.. to short for us that are fighting a RL to...


Pls next project.. more info.. longer stay.. pls...

Good work.. .now when i see it at your own home page(s)

I think you need to be a bit careful pulling something so quickly, it seems a little trigger-happy to be honest. For instance, yesterday (or the day before) I saw a post saying that places were now available for rent in Chicago and here you are a day or so later and it's been pulled, a few hours after an announcement that it was suddenly going to be pulled.

Things take time to get a ground swell of interest in them. You'll go through highs and lows - we've seen a couple of peaks and troughs with Numbakulla. That's been up now for just over a month and will be up until the end of June, which was the end date I'd always stipulated for the competition.

I guess, at the end however, it depends on what you're doing it for. If you want something to be sustainable monetarily (which, reading between the lines, your post seems to suggest - if I'm wrong, then I apologise) then that's really difficult, and I think you're going to end up pulling the next attraction quickly as well. Numbakulla's been a great success but is it sustainable? No, not at all. Not by a long way. By the end of June the island will have cost me nearly US$1200 over the 6 months the team have had it and I reckon I'll see about US$100 back, if that. But that wasn't important to me when I offered the island to a group to develop it - I went into this knowing that the chances of making something like this sustainable were practically nil. I wanted something immersive, something free, something entertaining, not something that would have to be forced to pay for itself.

What I guess I'm saying is that making immersive attractions, that aren't all about selling things or renting land, is never going to allow you to break even in all but very rare examples. So maybe you need to re-appraise what you're doing or why you're doing it? Just a thought.

Moopf,

You're right, I mixed up Darklife and Numbakulla.

Numbakulla is also about riddles and quests and a fantastic landscape.

I'm thinking the "story" element for that project isn't as clear with RL references as Chicago and just attracts a different demographics. Surely there's room for all kinds of demographics.

What you're saying about the tremendous costs and low ROI of this sort of project is sobering.

What we can hope is that a group of philanthropists and lovers of the arts, of the kind who backed broadway shows in the old days or funded starving artists, will appear to fill the need for backing in this niche. After all, you don't need to be a really rich philanthropist with millions for a Broadway show, you could still provide a fascinating immersive entertainment for a fraction of the cost. I hope that niche of philanthropy and patrons of the arts develops before big business like a Sony or a Coca Cola comes into it and makes more ersatz or mass entertainment that isn't as of high quality.

Hey Moopf

I bought redear sim for this project originaly due to child agents, griefers and lookie loos I decided it would be best to place the project on its own island. So thats two sims right there in US$. The project took 3 months to build a couple of those months I paid the tier fees for the two sims. So speaking of $ it was a big investment on my part yes. We purchased the furnature and a lot of the content that was used in this project bringing my personal grand total to over 3k us. Not to mention the money that Clair also invested in this project and the time of other team members who helped build Chicago, all of which were compensated.

We opened Chicago and the first day was the only day that the sim was open that the dwell was decent. We did a little experimenting this past week with Faded Reality and Reality Faded her sister island to the south not yet visable on the map. Our experiment concluded that Faded Reality's dwell for the day was a mere 200 points higher than her sister sim. Depressing to say the least.

We tried as much as we could to get the world out without spaming the events or the forums. We walk away from Chicago knowing that we did everything we could to make it a sucess, and in our minds it was just not the popular attraction that we had hoped for.

As for our main goal. That is very simple, we just want ppl to enjoy our builds, if we break even that would be fantastic and we will expand our island. If we don't then we still enjoy our experience in SL.

I beleive Neverland and Chinatown were not up as long as Chicago. So I think we gave it a fair amount of time

If more ppl had taken the time to see it, it would still be up. I don't know what more we could of done, we are very open to any and all suggestions to help us in the future. Thanks to everyone in advance for any input you can give us on this subject

Mar and Clair

I agree that there's room for all kinds of demographics, although maybe there isn't the volume of those demographics to make things work either free or paid-for yet. What I mean by that is you have a couple of choices when coming up with a plan for an attraction:

1. Make it free, in which case the only return you will get is via. any associated off-shoot "merchandising" sales or in traffic.
2. Make people have to pay.

Number 1 is the way I structured the Numbakulla project, knowing full well that traffic is not a source of income to make an attraction sustainable. Number 1 undoubtebly gets you a higher number of people coming to play.

Number 2 tries to offset some costs through making people pay (like Darklife, for instance). The problem here is that I would predict that your overall through-put of people would be less - people are less inclined to pay, it's one of those "fact of life" kind of things.

Neither of these, in my opinion, would create a sustainable income at present because there isn't the critical mass of each demographic for all but the most ubiquitous of attractions, who's appeal crosses many different interests. Darklife may be breaking even, but that's conjecture, and I simply suggest that because it appears to require quite a lot of L$ to play (but I may be wrong there!)

The philanthropists angle is where I came from. I had an island, I couldn't use it for five or six months because of RL, so decided to let another group do it free from any costs. There were stipulations for the project entries, of course, but these were geared towards ensuring that what was created was free to enjoy.

If I was in the same position again I'd certainly do the same thing again, without a doubt. It's been great fun and the team have created something very worthwhile, in my opinion. So I can't help but think it's been a success.

Damn shame. In the RPG I'm trying to get off the ground, we had discussed different places to "hold" meetings in and Chicago had come up as a possiblity. Still, sims ain't cheap, I can certainly understand.

Hi Mar,

It is an expensive business, there's no doubt about that. I must admit I'm on the forums a lot and apart from some initial screen-grabs (something about a murder?) I can't really say I can remember reading something that it was opening, as such. I also can't remember reading much else about it here. I know forums account for only a small % of the population, but the knock-on can be great in helping to get the word out. I guess really, until today, I didn't even realise that there were riddles and things there - otherwise I would of made more of an effort to come. To be honest, I'd kind of had the impression it was a shopping sim, or rental sim, made to look like Chicago. That may be my misunderstanding, but I wonder how many others weren't clear on what was actually there and so didn't know that it was of interest to them?

Marketing is difficult, and I'm no expert, believe me. I had the advantage of running the competition to pick a team to develop the island, so people already knew that something was coming, even though at the time it was months away. It got the sim name out there. People remembered when it came round to launch. We pestered the Lindens as well to try and get some press at launch but, apart from a single picture on the web site and a small piece in a newsletter (that doesn't go out to those that are already subscribed) we didn't really get much help there. It was worth a try, though.

Your next attraction might benefit from the fact that people are now more aware of who your group is, what the sims are called etc.

It's interesting that you should pick up on Chinatown and Neverland. Both of these had enormous help from the Lindens in terms of publicity (and Neverland had the land funded as well). Their impact, and so their through-put was high from day one because they'd been pushed so much by the Lindens. They probably, in virtual terms, could be considered as having run for longer because they had so much higher throughput and so more people saw them in a compressed time frame.



It's kind of difficult to say that without appearing chirlish, but I know what you mean. But, in the end, you can't blame people for not having taken the time, many just probably didn't have the time or didn't place it high on their to-do lists as they thought it would be around for a while. I know I'm in that list. The sudden announcement that it was going was harsh - I didn't quite understand why it wasn't said 'It's going in a week, so see it whilst you can!' I bet you would of gotten some good traffic for that week, and it would knock on in terms of awareness for the next project. People are really conscious of how quickly most things change, and a little consistency in action does go along way in getting people to trust that it's worth them making the effort to come along and get involved. When I ran the competition I had a lot of people telling me that there were no guarantees that I'd actually go through with what I was promising, because people have done that many times before. Making the post about renting spots then two days later pulling the plug is something I'd think hard about before you did again, if I were you. People don't like that. It's best to have a timeframe and stick to it (I think your year idea was too long, though as an initial timeframe) - it works in your favour in terms of trust and doesn't give the impression that you'll change on a whim.

I hope none of that offends you, I'm just trying to give you information from my point of view, my experiences and what I've come to realise.

I wish you luck with your future projects.

I enjoyed Faded Reality, and want to thank everyone associated with it.

It is true that at the mo' we have difficulty knowing what's going on - I read the forum because of information here I can't get elsewhere, but many people don't, and even those who do don't read every bit of it. I have a friend who doesn't read the forum, and she's constantly surprised when she says "Let's go to X," and I say, "X is gone." Snapzilla is another source of information. We certainly need an in-game information tool - perhaps a headline page - one line news flashes like, "Chicago is now open!" "Last week for Chinatown," and so on. I know I've missed things - but I also know I haven't missed anywhere near as much as casual SL-ers who wonder, "What is there to do here?"

Please, visit our websites at www.fadedreality.org or www.realityfaded.org. There are about 100 photos of the builds, a copy of our newspaper (including photos), all of the character stories, and a section about the team members.

No offence taken Moopf Chicago didn't work out, so now we go onto our next project. Thanks for the input on what we can do differently to the furture. The other project were just mentioned as in their time frame. Nothing more

Mar

I realy like that Osprey a way around abusing the system would perhaps to be submit in detail someone at LL 2 weeks in advance. More so a it would have to meet certain standards that are set by LL.

Mar

Well I loved the chicago project, whatever the accuracy of the history. I mean you can always llok up facts in a book, the SL expereince was wonderful. I applaud the creators.
I wish it had had more advertising, so that everyone would have had a chance to see it. Personally I think that someone should have put a bunch of fire scripts in the city and we could have had a party in chicago during the fire!

Oh well I look forward to the next Faded Reality build.

OMG FIC

Like when William Randolph hearst Funded a musical so his mistress could have a job? Not all patrons of the arts were philanthopists with good intentions towards starving artists! One must becareful of allowing art to be free and not tied to commercial motives. Coke supports independent filmmaking, but then uses those same filmakers to hawk coke in movie theatres. In some ways it works out, but in others its just commercial gain.


One of the reasons the Nich exists is it allows for self experession. Some builds work out, some don't but Sl does not allow a build to be left in place, as that would take resources from the next project. Yes I wish More people had seen chicago, but I don't think it a failure.


Ingrid, we all know you are FIC already! I bet you support all sorts of starving artists as part of your grand plot to oust Aimee as leadre of the FIC! *winks and ducks before he gets hit with a prim shoe with a homing script*

Don't even joke about that. You're going to get me killed.

***Base to sparrow, aquire target and wait for my command***

haha!


10 bucks says "sparrow" is Phillip.

LOL Aimee and Ingrid!! Ok.. You two gave me the best laugh of the day. Thanks!! *hugs*

Please do not derail this thread for your own personal agenda

Thanks Mar

Jake, I'm aware that philanthropists do things for selfish motives, but that's life in the big city, let them place their mistresses in starring roles as long as the mistresses are good actresses LOL. And a company like Coke just wants the brand recognition. This is reality. Soviet-style socialism to fund arts like ballet and painting doesn't work because they introduce too much censorship and restriction and patronage when the funding is viewed as a scarce and non-renewable resource and when the "good of the state" begins to intrude on the art.

I find it disturbing when Linden Lab has to fund the tier or the sim cost or provide free programming. Not only does it make for a patronage system, it opens up the problem of lack of separation of powers in the "federal government". I'd rather they juts make the software and lay out the servers for people to essentially rent and do their thing on under a fairly loose and equally-enforced TOS.

Moopf, I'm quite aware that dwell doesn't cut it. I realize admissions simply don't work. I often hold events and "charge admissions" and every one just ignores it LOL. There's no efficient way to get people to pay even $5 admission and you cannot survive on the kindness of dwell and strangers.

So if you sponsor a project like this it would just be in conjunction with some other business that did generate the revenue, I guess. Maybe a formula with a business that had sales and profit, and some of it could be ploughed into the arts or a project like this that would give branding recognition and have a venue for placement of some of the products.

As I think about how Chicago introduced themselves, with the murder mystery and the 30s slang and the teaser ads, they may have flown over the heads of quite a few people. Not everyone would pick up the references, especially non-Americans, people under 30, etc. etc. You'd have to have watched a lot of old movies from the 40s or else just be old enough to actually recall the era of the gun molls and zoot suits and whatnot. I found their teaser ad campaign quite compelling and intriguing but other people may have just not been able to focus on it. And I suppose I'd typical that as much as I admired the whole thing from the start, and loved it when I visited it, that didn't compell me to go and generate dwellnor and make myself a dwell magnet for friends. One friend said he spent an entire day there just roaming through every single thing. He must have told me 6 times to come there and I didn't, and I'm kicking myself.

I guess I'm hoping Martin and Claire next time won't be shy about being aggressive with their advertising and being at least as frequent as Tringo on the Events list. Also I think they could have put a lot more for sale in their store and generated more revenue than they did. I found half the stuff I clicked in there wasn't a sale item.

Sorry Mar, I guess I should have just clammed up after complimenting Chicago. No room here for anything else I guess. A few lines of fun aren't permitted. Noted. "Agenda" squashed.