Second Life – Page 9 – The Kind Healer

Does SL now embrace part of There’s money model?

An interesting thing I’ve noticed over time, in particular on the [#secondlife][IRC] IRC channel, is the vehement tone I sometimes get from those who have used There.com and are now firm SL converts. Reasons are as varied as the individual, but one very intriguing argument is that There is specifically oriented to making US$ money off their subscriber base.

Quick primer: There has its own currency called the Therebuck (T-buck or T) that are only purchasable from There at a fixed rate (normally 1800T == US$1). This currency is used to buy and sell items from both There themselves (web store) or from others (web auction), as well as for submission of new items and textures (for sale or not). Initial sales are charged a base commission to There in T, which tends to create a set starting cost for items (for those keeping score, a rather complex pricing chart is available at their Developer’s site). This is also on top of the fact that all submissions are 1) screened for approval due to it being a ‘Rated PG’ meta world, and 2) explicitly taking all [IP][I_P] rights from you – There owns it now.

Now, ignoring the last note (since IP rights is a big difference between the two), how close is Second Life getting to this type of money-making model? Current observations:

– LindeX (SL’s ‘in-world’ currency exchange) charges $0.30 each buy transaction, as well as a 3.5% commission for each sale. Given the current volume of 3Mil L$ daily at about 260L/US$1, that’s approximately US$400 a day or US$146K a year – *before* the transaction fees are ground in (we don’t have # transactions a day available yet). Quite a bit of money, and can eventually go higher as more residents (in particular Basic accounts) get money for their micropayments.

– Other than Dwell/Traffic, external sources of ‘free’ L$ beyond the weekly stipend no longer exist. Even the stipend itself is not free per se, unless you only have Basic accounts – and the stipend value for the Yearly Premium is still _way_ better then LindeX will get you today. This forces the newcomer (including the Basic account) to spend US$ on L$ transactions inworld, or start to learn the building tools rather quick.

– The current ‘money sinks’ that are paid to SL services in L$ – not US$ – as of today are 1) Classifieds (L$250 for two weeks), 2) uploads (L$10 each for any allowed type), 3) ratings (L$25 each point given). The average new product will likely involve about L$100-L$1000+ in uploads depending on the complexity, even for a simple outfit; Actual items like vehicles are a whole other matter…

Though differing in style, the need for Linden Lab to make more money from their ever growing userbase is taking them towards the same US$-centric format that There uses. The upside for SL has been a more stable and thriving economy however, so the changes have been well worth it.

–Alan

[IRC]: irc://efnet/secondlife
[I_P]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

From a Latus to a Meta World

A [recent white paper][VRAS] (though not yet done) referenced in the New World Notes weblog made me swing by the GoG forums again, regarding a discussion on Cyan’s [Latus Project][Latus].

The two have an interesting parallel: The want to have a distributed system of 3D interaction worldwide, while still allowing small group entitiesto work on their own.

This is the crux of what I feel is a meta world. It can be just you, a small group of friends (LAN or WAN), or encompassing the entire Internet and then some. The smaller group is important, in fact vital – for it is in those smaller groups that big things begin to happen…

–Alan

[VRAS]: http://slwriters.cust.nearlyfreespeech.net/wiki/index.php/Virtual_Reality_Architecture_Standard
[Latus]: http://forums.guildofgreeters.com/index.php?showtopic=7070

Second Life Community Convention

I am currently sitting again at the NY Law School. This time however, the participants only for State of Play have left and now we’re about to kick off the Second Life Community Convention.

This is a first for Second Life. Though unofficial gatherings have happened before, this is an officially sponsored event. I hope that it will be an interesting way for the SL folks to interact in RL from here on.

More later in the week. I’m going to be busy from here on out today.

–Alan

[Followup] The weekend was a nice one, overall. I do not have much else to say really, something like SLCC or SoP is new to me and really don’t have anything to compare it to. I’m following a couple other folks’ blogs now (look to your right) and will comment to them as posts happen.

–Alan

State of Play – My summary

I’m writing this from the State of Play confrence right now, in the afternoon of the second day. I’ve had an amazing time, although being 3rd shift, I’m also horribly tired.

This is a terribly truncated summary, as there are much more detailed descriptions out there. Most of them have probably posted by now as well. :)

Day one was Oct 7, Friday. There was an initial discussion about the financial possibilities of the Meteverse applications like [Second Life][1] and [There][2], as well as the MMO environments like [WoW][3]. Questions ensued regarding regulatory and legal issues, and I think was quite interesting; I even had a shot to pop a question in myself.

Most of the late morning and the afternoon was evoted to workshops. I participated in one which was discussing virtial identities, and the sharing of such. A very good real-life example – maintaining reputation across MMO environments – was used as the starting point of the second half of the workshop, which was to come up with possible solutions. Suggestions from a simple linking mechanism to more details forms which would be useable by MMO hosts for quicker authentication were discussed, and all of them viable to one degree or another. It would be quite exciting to see if any of this actually comes to frution; Time will only tell.

The evening dinner was a discussion on the expansion possibilities of the more larger metaverses, in particular [Eve Online][4] and [Second Life][1]. Both use different forms of scarce or basic starting tools and/or resources, and for the most part allows the customer base to generate the content and interact as they see fit. They also are what’s called ‘one shard’ or ‘one location’ systems – unlike an MMORPG like [WoW][3] where its one fixed content server which is repeated as many times as needed to get your customer base up to the millions. It had also turned out to be quite an interesting discussion.

For the completeness in context of this weblog, I must remind that Until Uru is also a multi-shard system; However, though the content is both fixed and (currently!) not extendable at the moment, the players there have done an amazing time generating their own with tools even more scarce than what is available in an MMO. One upcoming example, the [D’ni Olympics][5], I in fact will probably be attending based upon the possiblility of my pulling out the Honor Guard ‘uniform’ again.

At this point, I collapsed at home for over eight hours; I had very little sleep Fri morning, but was quite enjoyable. Definately going to do this again.

So I arrived back here late in the morning, about 11 AM or so. Spent most of the time so far in the main lobby; Some PCs were set up (one of them crashed already :) ), available with the Second Life environment for login.

I did have a brief chat with Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), regarding the 1.7 Preview, and the odd fact that I noticed some driver files of theirs says they are owned by NVidia. That was for my own curiosity, but I may post it. Still thinking about it…

–Alan

[1]: http://www.secondlife.com
[2]: http://www.there.com
[3]: http://worldofwarcraft.com
[4]: http://www.eve-online.com
[5]: http://www.dni-olympics.info/

Stepping back from SL, due to RL

After thinking about it, I do need the spare time right now to help my brother and my mother. Any off-time I actually find during this period I’ll likely spend on Myst V, or on the Greeters forums.

This is not the first time I’ve done this. However its the first time I’ve done it with land I actively need to maintain. I’ll login to Numbakulla from time to time since that only takes a few minutes; Otherwise right now I’m not seeing an issue as of yet.

Time will tell. I just hope that my mother gets better in the interim…

–Alan