Real life Corporations in SL

Hello, today I logged in and I was absolutely socked when I saw that the top 2 ads in the classifieds had real life corporation names on it. At first I was like “maybe some dude didn’t read the TOS and is using trademarks”. After teleporting to those sims I almost had a heart attack when I found out those Sims were founded by real life corporations.

Lindens, maybe I’m not remembering this right but I remember Phillip Rosedale clearly stating that he'd keep out corporations from SL. Am I mistaken?

All this time I felt safe in my virtual world knowing that none of those corp giants was going to come here and own the place.

What the heck is going on? It sems they can do what ever they want with the rules because they know we “have” to accept them to log in.

Lindens what are you thinking? I thought you were against this?.

I believe this is the end of SL merchants as we know it.

I will give you the most likely scenario. This is what is going to happen in the next months if You don’t ban corporations from SL:

More and more Corporations will start to realize the potential for advertisement in virtual worlds and since the L$ is so cheap they can afford a lot of advertisement.

Realize that big companies will use SL as a way to promote their Real life products or services, besides of course some of them may want to make money selling stuff inworld.

People one day you’ll wake up and realize that SL has been completely taken by corporations. You will see nothing but ads of these companies and the small merchants or business people that once were big in SL will disappear.

I’ll put it this way:

Would SL casinos survive if GoldenPalace enters SL and buys 300 sims and fills them with slots?

Would Anshe Chung survive if one day she wakes up and all the land auctions were won by Century21?

Would any cloth designer survive if dolce & gabana, Levi, Armani, etc. start giving inworld clothes away forf ree? Because what they win is the advertisement they don’t even have to charge for the clothes.

Would SLexchange survive if Ebay does what they do?

C'mon! These corporations can hire hundreds of people in India and have an army of designers, scripters and promoters for their products.

I know that there will always be creative ideas and new ways to make money and creative products, but the thing is that the existing ones will be totally owned when more giants join SL.

This is not sci-fi it is happening right now. There are dozens of sims owned by Nissan already. The Islands price was raised, because corporations can afford that kind of money.

Soon islands will be so expensive that even a good business person won’t be able to afford it. Classified ads will be totally out of reach, look it has already reached 90,000 lindens.

SL won’t die, because for every SL resident with business ideas, creativity, knowledge of scripting or designing, there are 1000 more residents that are just consumers, they log in just to chat, dance have fun and spend money.

Lindens what's going on?

Hi, Kyron. Philip posted the Mission of Linden Lab on the blog recently. Give it a read. Philip addresses your question, What's going on?

The Classifieds are open to all Second Life residents to advertise inworld products and experiences tied to a Second Life location.