Economic Philosophy Question

Pretend you have a virtual grid.


The grid has:

- tens of thousands of money-spending fans
- multimillion dollar investors
- artists, dreamers, inventors, writers


You have:

- starry-eyed vision
- lots of friends
- pie


The question is this:

Would you REALLY ever let your grid economy completely implode?



Sure it might get a bit sketchy, but it's not like we are going to run out of oil or have a famine here. Competition? They are as likely to have the same RL expenses, goofy corporate boondoggles and raving forum prophets that you have.

That's the big meta-question for the day.

Thank you.

Most of the "imploding economy" hypotheses have assumed that there is some policy that is the central cause of the devaluation (e.g. too much/little land, too much/few L$, etc.).

I think a more parsimonious explanation is that SL has reached saturation.

Someone else, somewhere else in this forum performed an analysis that showed reasonably well that there is a hardcore playerbase of around 10k despite the published numbers that claim much higher. For example, the recent published statistics used the measure of unique logins per month which is somewhat obfuscatory. A more useful number would be number of "converted" logins, that is, people who have decided that SL is worth US$10/month as entertainment. By their own definition the number residents is "the number of accounts that are capable of logging in today". Given how many free accounts or one time basic accounts there are, combined with the recent media attention ensures that the big number (~190k) will keep increasing. How many of those failed to even get started? How many sign-ups didn't have a machine that could successfully run SL?

So an established modal player has likely already:

1. purchased the land they need for the nonce
   
2. purchased much of their wardrobe
   
3. purchased most of the gadgets they can reasonably use

Sure, there are some new players coming in game; I'm not saying there are none. It would be really interesting be to see a tabulation of premium customers by "age". My guess is that SL has an aging population and is shifting from "wired" to "tired" on someone's trend-o-meter.

Given the recent, recurrent stability issues, my belief is that this trend will continue. Former ActiveWorlds players can probably relate what happens when the playerbase ages. The US is experiencing a similar phenonenon with an aging population and so things like demand for new housing are low relative to, say 1950.

I don't have the data to speculate, although Introvert's thesis makes a certain amount of sense.

One thing that might change that of course is lots of "new shiny" - and what are we seeing..? A focus that the established players by and large feel is too heavily on new shiny than fixing existing bugs. Now that's a judgement call of course, and quite a lot of us like the new shiny too (I'm *still* blown away by ripply water and that came totally out of left field, if I ever get into the preview grid for long enough to do more than crash I suspect I'm going to enjoy flexi prims and I know I like the new lights) - so I'm not hoping LL fails to advance whilst fixing bugs, but I wish it would spend a bit more time and effort on the bugs and a bit less on the new stuff.

Another thing that might fix it is a process that makes new sign-ups convert to regular users - however we choose to define that. What do we see..? Help Island, again no hard data on it's success, but WOM suggests that folks that go through HI are more likely to stay and convert than folks that don't.

It kind of looks like SL's changing it's market in terms of users, and trying to change it's processes to cope with that - nothing to do with the economy directly although that will doubtless have a big impact too - there do seem, to my eye, a lot more people coming though who think they have a right to make a RL living in SL, rather than an opporunity if they work hard - and in my first few months there was really only one of those around.

Since you didn't include "clue" in the list of things you have... yes. You might. Companies do the equivalent all the time.
Yep, nobody's ever gonna be able to compete with Netscape... Lycos... Commodore... Compuserve... who?

How would that factor in mainland and private sim renters who buy all their lindens? How many basic accounts out there are as or more involved in the economy than premium accounts but do all their business through other players?