My Verdict on #Secondlife
17/07/09 04:34
Well I’ve been an active participant in the online world known as secondlife for just shy of three years now and I’ve reached a few conclusions. I thought I would share them with you so that maybe those of you who are new to SL or thinking about starting a Secondlife business can get an idea of what might work in Secondlife. I hope this helps. Let me say something up front. IF you make a lot of money and you can easily afford to buy yourself land and play and that’s all you need to have happen that’s cool go for it. it’s fun! What I write here is for people who are looking for some sort of income from their Secondlife experience. This is, like most other posts on this blog, my opinion, and is based on my experiences.
1) Don’t spend any money in Secondlife. In other words don’t ever spend real money to buy Lindens (secondlife currency) or rent land unless you absolutely have to. If you make products for secondlife like hair, clothing, dances/ animations or scripted items you can sell them online on SL Exchange.com. This is a much better way to test what will sell or what won’t and you won’t pay a dime for land rentals or tier fees. For those of you who don’t know tier fees are like property taxes. Renting land is expensive and owning land is like a noose around your neck that creates a situation where if you don’t make money you lose money. Land ownership is a surefire way to put yourself in a situation where you’re throwing good money after bad. Don’t ever spend money in Secondlife that you’re not willing to lose, because I’m telling you right now, it’s gone!
2) Whatever you do in Secondlife always try to limit the complexity of it. Secondlife is extremely buggy. If your business plan requires Secondlife to work perfectly most of the time it’s time for a new business plan. One of the few business models that seems to work on a regular basis is giving away product to get someone to look at or be aware of something. This is assuming that creating awareness of a product outside of Secondlife is worthwhile and part of a business plan that makes money elsewhere so you can use Secondlife as a write off. If you’re looking for a place to lose money Secondlife is a literally a virtual gold-mine!
3) Don’t open a club. They don’t make money. Never did, never will. Not only that they are a pain in that ass to run and maintain. Ditto Art galleries. In order to run a live music venue you must own an entire simulator of 65535 square meters. This will cost you between $200 and $300 Us dollars per month. If you own any less than a full sim you will be limited to 40 people in your venue. So you’re $300 bucks in the hole before you even begin, now you have to pay DJ’s or Musicians or whatever. I’ve heard live music venue owners have spent $1000 plus a month on their venue and I’ve seldom heard any of them say they broke even on a given month let alone made any money.
4) Secondlife is great place for social networking and making people aware of your internet-based content. The opportunities to interact with people from all over the world are many. You can hook up with people who have the same interests or engage in the same sort of business as you do. It’s also great place for film-makers to make visual storyboards. I’ve seen quite a few print ads that use Secondlife avatars and scenery.
I don’t mean to sound negative but don’t ever put all your eggs in the Secondlife basket and then complain that there aren’t any eggs to eat to stay alive!
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#Seondlife - Living on borrowed time?
11/05/09 12:11
I haven’t been around in Secondlife as long as some people, but I’ve been around long enough to see that things have been on a steady decline for quite some time. Land values continue to plummet and it wouldn’t surprise me to find that more land is being abandoned across the entire grid at this time than at any other time in the history of Secondlife. The removal of in-world casinos was the first blow to what had been a thriving economy and the grid never recovered. Philip Linden’s stepping down as CEO of Linden Labs seems to have heralded an even more lack-luster enforcement of the rules regarding avatar conduct and protection issues for content creators. Add to all of this the removal of the First Land program and the weekly stipends, and it seems like Linden Labs has been systematically trying to destroy the in world economy!
For those of you who are unfamiliar or new to Secondlife, all premium members used to receive a weekly stipend, mine was 400L as I recall. These stipends were of great benefit to the online economy as it enabled people to purchase items for their avatars without having to purchase lindens or find an in-world job. This was a tremendous benefit to the thousands of merchants in secondlife, the very people that create everything you see on every sim. Killing the stipends has created a society of scavengers who don’t buy anything in the game. This is because there are so many sims now that merchants have resorted to camping and freebies to bring people to their land. The hope here is that by giving items away for free the traffic rating of their land will go up and attract paying customers. This is seldom effective. It is a desperate move by merchants to try and continue to do business. If this is obvious to me it should be obvious to those who created Secondlife. However, rather than reward or provide help for those who make all the cool stuff in Secondlife, Linden Labs has abandoned them, but why?
The answer is that linden labs makes it’s money primarily from land tier fees. So as long as they keep selling sims they keep making boatloads of cash.
The other part of the plan is to keep a steady stream of new people coming into the game. So as a merchant if you buy land and because of the adverse conditions in Secondlife you pack it in and sell your land to avoid the tier fees, there’s always another sucker around the corner! There’s no point in making Secondlife a viable place to do business because it doesn’t improve the bottom line. These are not the ideals on which Secondlife was founded and I believe that this is part of the reason that Philip Linden stepped down as CEO of Linden Labs.
The same major problems that plagued Secondlife when I first arrived in the game have never been addressed let alone solved. Vehicles still have the same difficulty crossing sim barriers, transactions fail, inventory disappears into the void never to return. Scripted items perform erratically not due to bad scripting, but because of server side glitches and grid instability. In the face of all this Linden Labs just rolls out a never ending litany of new features, to sell the idea of Secondlife to new people as those of us who lose all faith in SL, either go back to basic accounts or leave the game altogether.
If Linden Labs really cares about the in world experience of their customers they will have to dramatically change the way they do business. Real and enforced protection for content creators must be established and maintained. The stipends must be restored. Creation of new sims must be reduced in order to increase and then stabilize the value of land. Long time problems and stability issues must finally be addressed and dealt with.
In the face of real world economic problems people will be less and less eager to invest time and money in activities that don’t deliver. It is my opinion that Secondlife is in serious danger of falling by the wayside in the increasingly competitive marketplace for online virtual worlds. If Linden Labs wants to stay at the forefront they have to up the ante, but how can they do this?
Well, up to date technology would be a good start. Everything from the SL viewer, to the game engine to the models for the avatars is woefully outdated software that is only used because it can be obtained for free. Current games employ the Havok version 7 software while secondlife has only recently begun using the Havok 4 engine. Even the databases are slow and outdated versions of freeware server software. It’s ironic that it’s against the terms of service in SL to resell freebies because in a way that’s exactly what Linden Labs are doing!
This is all the opinion of one secondlife user, but I know that I am not alone in feeling like Linden Labs doesn’t care about me as a customer, a Secondlife merchant or a content creator. As things currently stand, the second some competitor comes up with a viable alternative to SL I will be very interested in moving my business to a new world with new possibilities. I am not the only one. The clock is ticking Linden Labs, ball is in your court it’s up to you to fix your world before the people who make it what it is simply leave you behind.
For those of you who are unfamiliar or new to Secondlife, all premium members used to receive a weekly stipend, mine was 400L as I recall. These stipends were of great benefit to the online economy as it enabled people to purchase items for their avatars without having to purchase lindens or find an in-world job. This was a tremendous benefit to the thousands of merchants in secondlife, the very people that create everything you see on every sim. Killing the stipends has created a society of scavengers who don’t buy anything in the game. This is because there are so many sims now that merchants have resorted to camping and freebies to bring people to their land. The hope here is that by giving items away for free the traffic rating of their land will go up and attract paying customers. This is seldom effective. It is a desperate move by merchants to try and continue to do business. If this is obvious to me it should be obvious to those who created Secondlife. However, rather than reward or provide help for those who make all the cool stuff in Secondlife, Linden Labs has abandoned them, but why?
The answer is that linden labs makes it’s money primarily from land tier fees. So as long as they keep selling sims they keep making boatloads of cash.
The other part of the plan is to keep a steady stream of new people coming into the game. So as a merchant if you buy land and because of the adverse conditions in Secondlife you pack it in and sell your land to avoid the tier fees, there’s always another sucker around the corner! There’s no point in making Secondlife a viable place to do business because it doesn’t improve the bottom line. These are not the ideals on which Secondlife was founded and I believe that this is part of the reason that Philip Linden stepped down as CEO of Linden Labs.
The same major problems that plagued Secondlife when I first arrived in the game have never been addressed let alone solved. Vehicles still have the same difficulty crossing sim barriers, transactions fail, inventory disappears into the void never to return. Scripted items perform erratically not due to bad scripting, but because of server side glitches and grid instability. In the face of all this Linden Labs just rolls out a never ending litany of new features, to sell the idea of Secondlife to new people as those of us who lose all faith in SL, either go back to basic accounts or leave the game altogether.
If Linden Labs really cares about the in world experience of their customers they will have to dramatically change the way they do business. Real and enforced protection for content creators must be established and maintained. The stipends must be restored. Creation of new sims must be reduced in order to increase and then stabilize the value of land. Long time problems and stability issues must finally be addressed and dealt with.
In the face of real world economic problems people will be less and less eager to invest time and money in activities that don’t deliver. It is my opinion that Secondlife is in serious danger of falling by the wayside in the increasingly competitive marketplace for online virtual worlds. If Linden Labs wants to stay at the forefront they have to up the ante, but how can they do this?
Well, up to date technology would be a good start. Everything from the SL viewer, to the game engine to the models for the avatars is woefully outdated software that is only used because it can be obtained for free. Current games employ the Havok version 7 software while secondlife has only recently begun using the Havok 4 engine. Even the databases are slow and outdated versions of freeware server software. It’s ironic that it’s against the terms of service in SL to resell freebies because in a way that’s exactly what Linden Labs are doing!
This is all the opinion of one secondlife user, but I know that I am not alone in feeling like Linden Labs doesn’t care about me as a customer, a Secondlife merchant or a content creator. As things currently stand, the second some competitor comes up with a viable alternative to SL I will be very interested in moving my business to a new world with new possibilities. I am not the only one. The clock is ticking Linden Labs, ball is in your court it’s up to you to fix your world before the people who make it what it is simply leave you behind.