Latest trends in SL economy (shopping)

A lot of people seem to be describing what is, IMHO, the single biggest problem with Second Life, which is that it isn't an orchestrated experience. As others have mentioned, from an economic point of view what we would most like for new people coming in, is that:

a) They are able to get, and do, enough to ensure they are motivated to stay around;
BUT
b) They are held back just enough from getting all they want, to make them want to buy (or earn) L$ in order to get it.

Second Life has two problems delivering this. First of all, there is no one person or entity who can control the entire experience. Linden Labs provides the Prelude but that is really just a tutorial, and after that the world is built by individuals, who all have tier to pay. There is no way for any particular person or group to take hold of the steering wheel of the overall experience. So you can get issues of there being far too many freebies, or the contrary issue of newbies finding nothing but demands for money, and nobody can determine exactly how much of each is the right balance.

The second problem as I mentioned above is the lack of a sense of progress - you can buy L$ for some land and a prefab and have your own house but that is all, it doesn't develop beyond that. You can't buy a house and then do something in-world to earn a bigger house. If you want a bigger house you just have to buy more land and a larger prefab, but you could have bought that all along. Or likewise you will not progress from having a small house to being able to build your own house - if you want to learn to build your own house you can try to do so in the sandbox without spending any money at all, but it's possible that you just don't have that talent. This same problem occurs in a lot of MMO games, it's well known that many players of MMO games quit when they reach the highest level because there is nowhere further to go; WoW's success has been attributed to the fact that it actually becomes a deep team-based strategy game at the highest level, which keeps people interested, but older MMOs tended to have jokes such as "the aim of Everquest is to reach level 50 so you can hang out with your friends" made about them. SL puts them in that position almost right away.

There's also as always a lot of resistance to spending real money for virtual, which is actually amplified in SL because quite a few new people seem to have the attitude "all the successful people earn L$ in-world, therefore buying L$ is something only unsuccessful people, ie losers, do". This isn't at all true (neither part is true!), but it persists.

Here is one smart person make them a linden! Really this is true remark. Can you blame them? Because LLAbs has promoted this game as a money maker.

Who says a store owner has to own an entire island to give away some freebies in their own store? Or a group of store owners could create a freebie island where they can display some freeie items along with landmarks to their store? Personally, I don't know who owns those places and don't know if they own any stores where they actually sell their items. To me they are wasting a perfectly good asset, think of the $L they could earn by just charging 1$L per item. And the $200-$300 tier fee is money paid to LL, which doesn't exactly translate into $L put into the SL economy. I'm not saying freebies are wrong, but too many of them will undermine an econmy.

And as far as the socializing part goes... I was meaning more about the mindless camping. Camping is fine and all but I think all of SL would be better off if they were giving something more interactive to do. One idea might be for a group of merchants to get together and provide a tour or some sorts. Take a group of newbies around to their stores and various other cool places, drop a few $L's on them, and give them freebie items from their stores. The campers would be doing more than just sitting there, they'd be made aware of where your store was, and a few clubs or other entertainment spots might be happy to pay a little to have the tour group be brought by their place.

I believe that the saturation of the market with goods created by people who come into SL to "make something" has resulted in the freebie economy. Nowadays, because there is no easy money in-world, people are much more careful what they spend their money on.

Yes, you can get some good starting stuff for free. But if you want to be one step above others, you need to spend money. And you go to the really talented few that can really build good-quality items using reasonable amounts of prims.

So I think that it has become impossible for average builders to build product that people are willing to shell out cash for. The big players have quality products and people are still spending money with them. The bar has been raised.

People comment about how expensive high quality stuff is - well, if it didn't sell, then the makers wouldn't be able to charge those prices for them, would they? Items are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them. And they are not willing to pay for the average quality stuff any more.

Yes, and it's kind of an interesting model in a few ways. Several of the current huge freebies islands are set up to drive traffic to survey sites. The commissions to the island owners and the little rewards to the survey takers are being paid by off-world sources. Even if some of those residents take that money and run, it's not coming out of the SL economy. And of course at least some of that outside money will be spent in world for a net gain.

It is kind of amusing that there are enough people willing to sell their personal information to support multiple regions, while at the same time others are worried about the privacy implications of the SL verification system.


Sort of related to that, these are good places to spot floundering newbs and point them to the more interesting parts of the world.

I make and give away things for free because who is going to pay for them?
But truthfully I do it because I want to share what I make and its easier to give select few free items who might enjoy those items then spend tons trying to advertise to sell only a few.

James Linden take note.....you're current relevancies in new ALL SEARCH are screwing Shopping Malls to high heaven.!! You should have had 2 working groups tagged onto your project - a Vendor Group and a Customer Group, both feeding into and testing the output, to produce a fairer system for Vendors whilst being user friendly to the Customer. Another missed opportunity!!!

That being said, I've always felt we had far too many Shopping Malls and particularly badly managed ones. So it might not be a bad thing seeing a whole bunch of them fall by the wayside, especially the BIAB type malls.....leaving the well run Malls surviving the fall out.

Without tampering too much to my strategy, what i have noticed over the last 5 weeks is that my Main shop sales are increasing.......whilst the sales from Malls (and even the ones i've historically always been profitable at) nose diving dramatically. No coincidence that this started to happen around the time when the new ALL SEARCH was being introduced.

Other points about the economy

- various sectors have reached saturation point, just too many content creators, partcularly Ladies conventional fashion, skins & shoes.
- grid has gotten too big, even when lots of it are unused or barren. Hard too concentrate people to particular locations of interest or value.
-Business-in-box , texture theft & copying has been the ultimate cancer of the economy.
- Gambling ban, we can see the clear effects of it now
- Lack of regulations or recourse to Land sales. Too many horror stories of people losing money having been ripped-off , which leads to lack of confidence in ownership or renting land.
- Ginko scandal plus other banks. More money lost by SL players

there are many other little reasons that can be tagged on..... with the cummulative effects showing that the current SL economy is royally screwed. I don't see it recovering anytime soon.

The way new search is working at the moment.....lots of Shopping Malls and small businesses will be closing down, with even more land flooding the market.

Yes make people explore for their freebies, not just live in a freebie warehous sim for their second life.
And hell charge them $1, $5 or $10, make them get off their bums if they want something to earn it, no challenge in getting everything for free and easy.

I like where this topic has gone to, but reading it all has made me sad. Things have a feel to them for me; right now what I feel is a virtual world in a recession as far as content creation. From what I hear, land prices are rising. There are a few things that seem to have killed the economy; some have been mentioned already: banning of gambling, age verification, bad press, rocky platform, hype has delfated etc.

I have had nothing but bad experiences trying to bring RL friends into SL. I like the term someone mentioned earlier about 'coming out of the SL closet', lol. While the term is amusing and true, it's sad that 'playing' on SL has to be a shameful thing. One friend, just the other day on the phone, said, "you play that game half life right? I saw that place on the news; I heard they were exchaning child pornography on there." omfg... no I said, it's just like anywhere on the net where bad people can go to abuse a system. Another friend looked at me and said, "what in the world do you buy in a virtual world?" She looked at me as though I were paying someone for the oxygen in the air. lol Since computer related activities are what I am studying in school, I can use SL to learn about scripting languages and technical aspects of programs.

I'm all for freebie items. A friend and I have made this sort of sport where we 'capture' newbies and give them all sorts of freebie things and advice (landmarks etc) Although my friend seems to like making them beautiful so he can entice them into his prim bed. The thing about freebies is they are great for newbie presents. I like to make people feel welcome by giving them things and showing them that there are friendly people here. Most people really appreciate that, and eventually they evolve and start buying things in remote areas most people have not heard of to give themselves a unique image. That's another thing about freebies; even good quality ones lose their value based on the fact that they are free; most people want to be unique.

Two women we have taken under our care have gone on to buy land and put lots of money into SL. One just opened up a club of her own. On the other hand, I met a newbie last week from outside of the USA. He was trapped on orientation island which I saved him from. He seemed to be under the impression that SL was some kind of goldmine to harvest lots of money out of. I don't know what the commercials for SL are like, but I have the feeling they are giving the wrong impression.

I have a few ideas for SL to jumpstart its popularity again.

(1) Make the in-world search more Google-ish. They seem to be on the right track, looks wise so far.
(2) Offer free email services like Yahoo does. (my friend says that a virtual world mailbox would be cool, and I agree!)
(3) Create a Second Life search engine for the web, but please, don't make it work like the one in world, lol.
(4) Market Second Life more as a 3D chatroom plus shopping. This would encourage more people to join and give people a purpose rather than wandering about wondering...what are we supposed to do here? or how do we play this game? Once the people come flocking the total number of residents can truthfully be boasted about and corporate entitites will want to use SL more to advertise by buying sims.

and that concludes my gigantic post which was inspired by boredom waiting for my ISP to restore the tower so I can get back in world...grr dial-up back up ISP

Well, I stopped spending money, dropped my Premium after 3 years and some change and only buy from a very few select Content creators these days because I finally wised up. Screw you guys. I'm not tossing real money at your fake shite any more. You want to make a buck? Get a real job. to any of you noobs out there, bite me, oldbies? Same, Lindens? Shove a cork in it. Hows that for a trend?

Some stores' sales model doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me:

* there are a bunch of stores that do a "freebie of the day" stunt where a regular item will become a freebie for 24 hours. On the one hand it keeps me from wanting to buy anything there because it could become tomorrow's freebie and on the other hand if there is something there I want, I can simply wait it out and get it for free some day

* recurring sales dump: there are some stores that dump most of their inventory every three or four months and slash prices from L$100-400 to the L$50-100 range. Again that doesn't make me very inclined to buy anything there since all I have to do is wait a few months and I can buy whatever I want for half to 1/6th the price

* releasing retired inventory as a freebie: last december I bought a jewelry set for L$500 that was retired the same month and now it's suddenly available again as a freebie. That's a tactic that will just make want me want to spend my L$ somewhere else

Maybe stores are getting desperate for sales, but a lot of the tactics aimed at attracting new customers have the side-effect of making (some) existing customers go elsewhere.

Gaybot made some good points.

LLABS PR staff ( if you cal them a staff) Have been marketing to everyone that can speak even dogs and cats.
Ok that might be true there is money for those that to sit in money making devices, pick money trees( from those with good hearts to put money trees on their land)

But when LLABS stops ******* on its content providers and those that promoto the game in a positive manner. Well have more and more newbies ( mostly under 1 believing one can make money without doing a ****** thing.

Freebies items are very where so why would anyone put money in to the game.

so what happened?
how was it you wizened up?

/me thinks someone needs to be thrown a deer carcass or something.

But when SL-Economy is getting worse these days... maybe anyone can tell me where this money is going to:

US$ Spent Last 24h: 1,375,996

Tier

/me sets out boxes with Tier in them "cheap tier, low prims"

........................ Try Cashouts!

I liked Gaybot's post. I am also not quite ready to admit that I spent a great deal of time in-world

I started out picking up lots of newbie stuff but have now gotten a taste for shopping for some of the finer items. I think that's just inevitable. I have had many many hours of super fun kicking around with my friend for far less than the price of a RL dinner-and-a-movie. It's all just entertainment dollars spent. I also ended up renting a tiny place for a good price so we can go some place private to unpack boxes and get changed etc.
So I'm not against spending money, but I don't need a private island with a yacht, either.

The most fun we have is getting away from the ad-farms and shops to explore areas such as Svarga which don't seem to expect people to throw money at them. The Greenies place is just adorable.

The saddest part of all is that underwear shops and freebie places are crammed with people to the point of unbearable lag while beautifully well thought-out places that deserve careful exploration are utterly deserted. In fact, we found a great place where I was disappointed that I could not even find a donation box!

There is more to SL than economy.

If you hate it so much why don't you leave?

This is exactly what I was saying earlier. Non-SL'ers seem to think that all we do here is kill/maim/screw each other. Why is this the general opinion? Why hasn't LL hired a spin doctor to put a positive light on SL, rather than just sitting back and letting the public skewer us on their idea of a Dolcett rotisserie?

Entertainment is entertainment is entertainment. We pay $ to see movies, watch ball games, go to Disneyworld... none of it is tactile or can be taken home. It's all mental entertainment, same as SL. THIS is what needs to be said to the general public, not "come and make mega-bucks!!!!"

Yes, the artistic aspect is what is lost here - SL is a place of creativity, but tier forces us to commercialize it to make the game feasible to play - once you pass a certain level, and depending on your disposable income.

It's sad that there seems to be endless shopping malls and clubs, carrying many of the same items - the saturation in the female clothing market and skins has made it such that few people really stand out.

I am also curious about the 10L thing from you know who. She wanted to crash the markets by putting stuff out for cheap... has it had any real effect? I feel that it is irresponsible of her considering that people have to pay tier... especially to those people who rent from her on Dreamland. Has anyone seen a proliferation of that stuff or is she just burning her money paying people to make it?

"Challenge" is exactly the problem though... there's no challenge in just taking out a credit card.

The last PR guy was Dan Linden, look how he fared. I can give my insight from the standpoint of being someone who never spent more than an hour a day on her computer at home and viewed most adult gamers as wierd basement dwelling shutins. Going to ballgames, movies in a theatre, Disneyworld etc, at least require you to get up and go out of the house, have actual human contact. and no matter how good Virtual worlds are, at least right now, most people prefer the genuine article. I may enjoy visiting Virtual pris, but I'm still going to want to see the real thing. Of course the various hysterical media fests don't help, but I think most people haven't seen them, I never saw any reference to SL in any external media, I generally don't read tech blogs or watch things tech related on TV. I stumbled on SL by accident, and decidied to try it. SL really doesn't appeal to the gaming demograpic, who really only want to kill and maim it seems, and they haven't really done much to attract the non silicon head crowd, except by hyping profit making. Perhaps someone should re release Snowcrash? *On Second Thought, maybe not such a good idea. *

I'm not really sure where she's going or trying to go with that. I've seen some of it and it's high-prim-count junk. The money you save on the furniture you'll have to put towards land and tier, just to rez the stuff. It's all no-mod too, and everything's linked. Think, 3 piece livingroom set consisting of as many as 100 prims, and all three pieces linked together so you can't reposition the sofa in relation to the chair or loveseat.

The only thing I can think of is she's hoping people will buy all that cheap furniture and then need to rent lots and lots of her land in order to rez it.

-Atashi