Linden lab simply cannot accomplish this. Only the Second Life users and customers are able to do so.
Linden Lab doesn’t have the manpower to even come close. It’s a platform business.
With the exception of policy and enforcement, Linden Lab’s contribution to the live Second Life user-experience is – essentially – zero.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
Assume for a moment that Linden Lab plonked down a new simulator, and crafted an engaging and compelling online experience in that simulator. Just suppose. How long do you think that would take? Let’s be charitable, and suggest that we’re talking about a mere 250 man hours. Just six weeks (and change) for a lone developer, assuming that they had all the skills to do it alone.
Now that simulator seats… well, opinions vary, but let us be generous and suggest that 40 users could enjoy that experience comfortably. Some of you might suggest that ‘comfortably’ doesn’t happen with more than ten, but we’re being generous here.
So, that works out to 25 man hours (half of a work week) per attendee. Once the development is done you could just amortise the development hours by stamping out lots of copies of it to seat more people, right?
Well, yes, but it doesn’t stop there. Online experiences need supervision and support. Sometimes the sim will need resetting.
If you don’t have someone supervising an online experience, then you’re just pissing around, amateur-hour style.
Assuming that the sim is open 24×7, then you need a supervisor/support person 24×7.
So, ignoring the cost of initial development, that’s 4 man-hours per attendee, assuming a full-house the whole time. More if the sim doesn’t fill up.
That gets expensive really quickly.
Then your audience finishes up with their experience of the sim, sometime between 5 minutes and (say) five hours later. You’d better have something else ready for them when they do.
The fact is, that the number of engaging and professionally managed experiences that any single organisation can maintain is very small, unless those experiences are each highly profitable.
To-date, pretty much the entire user-experience of Second Life is user-driven. Ask me if that is going to change anytime soon. I’ve got a big sackful of no, right here.
If Linden Lab wants the user-experience of Second Life to be more engaging, compelling and professional, then they have to turn to the users and customers of Second Life – the people who create that user-experience, each and every day. Linden Lab has to make it easier for them to do it, easier for them to advertise and promote it, easier for people to find it, and find ways for it to be more rewarding.
Because Linden Lab can’t do anything about the user-experience on its own, and it would be the worst kind of folly for it to think that it is able to.
Sums up pretty good why the Mainland is usually such a shambles with Linden builds in disuse all over the place, no active anti-griefing and harassment policies (only passive ones which are hindering the experience more than enabling it; like learning sandboxes on Help Island where your stuff disappears faster than you can make it due to extrafast autoreturn), no idea of where newbies are dumped onto the grid (STILL Waterhead with it’s supply of 2006 notecards and it’s motley collection of hoodlums) and so forth and so on.
A future for SL may indeed lie in private estates exclusively. Mainland maintenance is a costly affair indeed.
I totally agree, which is why I keep on about tools. With improved tools content creators (us) would soon find MORE new and exciting stuff to do…. it’s an obvious logic to the new grid managers out there…. free uploads, cheap prims…good tools….that HAS to be a recipe for success.
They need to make it cheaper for me to do it also. I can get people in and i can get them to spend, but it’s never enough to cover LL’s high maintenance costs. I have to rely on my own group of investors (friends).
I’m here still cos my friends are here and LL have some great tools (even if some are beyond LL’s knowledge to fix- http://tinyurl.com/4k3axvs). If you are going to build an engaging professional experience you at least want the ability to make your money back from the time spent on it.
is it harder now than ever for Landowners to find ways to make their investment back now that Marketplace is killing the inworld shopping experience? With a Magic boxless Marketplace, people wont even need a plot to place a magic box. Private land owners will see a massive drop in renting for shop spaces as there will be no need for them. Land owners have to start thinking now about how to make private islands profitable.
Is it possible that a reduction in Private islands migth cause LL to reduce Tier costs in order to help sustain privately owned islands?
It’s like Working for a games developer that at the end of the month charges you for your creativeness instead of paying you.
ARGH thinking to much….
Loki — Before we had Marketplace there was SLEX, with boxes as well, and if there wouldn’t have been some third party smartalec would’ve created them. (In fact, I see possibilities for a ‘blackmarket’ system without Linden oversight or age limitations.) Back then you could already rent space just for your SLEX box. You never really needed an in-world shop.
What killed shopping is unknown to me, but Marketplace is hardly to blame. The RL crisis surely hit as virtual goods are undoubtedly among the first things to go off the shopping lists.
@Laetizia Yes the inworld shopping has been dieing over time, im just saying that the new improved Marketplace that all new people are directed to is the nail in the coffin so to speak. And with a boxless Market place coming you wont even need to rent a space for a box. You could be a content creator with no need to own or rent land at all.
So what will the incentive be now to own land? Land just drains you of your money.
After some thought, my take on this : Linden should establish a continent, let’s call it ‘Showcase’ for short, where outstanding builds from the rest of SL could be duplicated (leaving the originals in situ) and gathered together to create ‘best of SL’ experience for visitors. It would demonstrate the diversity and quality of SL in one easily navigable space, condensing the SL experience for the benefit of new (or established) Residents. Builds should probably be included in Showcase for a limited time only — maybe 6 months — so there would always be a reason to go and visit Showcase to see what’s new. There are, of course, issues with IP and in-world perm’s to sort out but nothing that’s insurmountable.
The decision of what to include could be made by Resident suggestion and voting or by Linden committee or a combination of both. The Showcase builds could also be TP-linked to sites throughout SL, so they encourage further exploration of SL and don’t just become a dead-end location in themselves.
We are both the content and the content-creators in SL, not Linden Lab, but one of the hardest things in SL is finding the really good stuff. Make that easier, at least in an ‘introductory’ way, and it could make a huge difference.
Linden Lab has been instrumental in bringing us to where we are today, but Second Life is very much a world and an experience built by its residents. Sooner or later we’re going to outgrow Linden Lab and need to go it alone.
Millions of kids will pay $15 / month on World of Warcraft. Fifteen bucks is less then the cost of a movie and popcorn and about 1/3 of what I pay for broadband. So it seems reasonable to suppose that if Second Life produces ‘compelling enough’ experiences, people will pay $15 a month to enjoy them. So let’s start with a new business model in which Linden Lab charges everyone $15 a month. (Please don’t start screaming and yelling at this point, just hear me out.)
Let’s say a sim is ‘compelling enough’ if it always has at least 10 people playing in it, and each visit usually lasts an hour, and a visitor comes 10 times before getting bored and goes on to play in other sims. That adds up to 7200 hours of ‘playtime’ a month, by 720 unique visitors, who collectively have will have paid Linden Lab $10,800 that month.
Suppose now people will find Second Life, as a whole, ‘compelling enough’ if they can always find four ‘compelling enough’ sims to play in. So your ‘compelling enough’ sim would account for about a fourth of the above amount, $2700 a month.
Suppose now if you create a ‘compelling enough’ sim, Linden Lab will give you $700 and forgive the tier cost. It keeps the $2000 for itself. Would $700 a month in pure profit attract you to build a ‘compelling enough’ sim?
Suppose so. And suppose Linden Lab attracts 1000 people like you who create ‘compelling enough’ sims to become a ‘compelling enough’ world. Linden Lab would pocket about $2,000,000 a month. Is this enough Linden Lab to keep going? What if LL found 10,000 people like you?
If you don’t like any of the above assumptions, change them. If I made math errors, correct them. But it seems people ought to be proposing business models like the above, and running them through the kind of rough analysis I have provided. If we, as users, cannot do ‘compelling analysis’ of our ideas, it seems unlikely we are smart enough to provide the ‘compelling experiences’ that Second Life needs.
What are you people talking about, when you say shopping is dying? More stuff is being sold now than ever before.
Let’s get the facts straight here.
Right now, there is absolutely nothing compelling enough in SL to make the everyday user feel like they’d be getting their money’s worth paying a monthly fee. Beautiful builds are nice, but how long can you stand there and admire them? Having your own 512m plot and a home is just not worth the monthly fee. Having a rousing chat (type or voice) with other users in welcome etc. areas is okay, but would you pay for it? User designed games are okay, usually pretty spotty performance, but the experiences one gets just aren’t worth money. And no one will feel like paying monthly simply for the privilege of being allowed to shop and spend even more money. What needs to happen is more care and better technology server side. Only then will users be able to create more valuable content for the everyday user, if the current model is to survive.
To: Laetizia Coronet:
What killed shopping is LL’s continued greed and the foolish executive decisions involving only US laws and not taking the ENTIRE WORLD into account for these highly restrictive laws. I watched since 2006 and LL took out the building blocks of the SL economy and actually created their VERY OWN economic depression AHEAD of the outside world by almost 2 years. I used to be able to clear $3000 L in a single night, NOW I’d be lucky to see THAT much in 3 months!
I don’t believe they will survive with all these ‘Bush League’ restrictions on their grid. I have seen many hardcore SL’ers leave for ‘foreign grids’ – places that don’t charge for every texture upload or for their greedy ‘tiers’ Let’s face it, these jerks are asking us to pay rent after buying the parcels or sims! In the old US of the past they called that ‘taxation without representation’
I now create my content in another grid, FREE from a silly constantly changing ToS that no one ACTUALLY reads short of ultra-geeks. What I create, despite what LL MAY CLAIM is MINE, not theirs. I provide it to their grid of my own accord but by no way is it legally theirs. Such silly laws STOP at the US borders and don’t ACTUALLY apply outside of said regime.
@Foxxe Wilder: While I agree with most of your points, “taxation without representation” is not what you describe. It means that a citizen is taxed to pay for government programs without having a voice in politics, through a representative like a Senator or member of the House. What you’re describing is continuing to charge rent for a property after a purchase is made. I’m not sure what the proper label for that is, but it’s a ripoff to be sure, and something like that would never fly in real estate in the real world. But then, this isn’t the real world, is it?
@Scarp lets read the posts right, we are talking about inworld shopping dying. The act of teleporting to a store and searching for an item and buying it from the shop.
Shopping is just another experience. I agree with Tateru. LL cannot and should not pre-fabricate “events”. They should enable folks to do so. But: It´s hazardously bad business to charge big time for disfunctional basical service and viewer experience. LL fails to grant a more or less lagless environment and fails to deliver a working user interface. Two deadly sins among a lot more, less deadly but still painful ones. LL must deliver a solid and user accepted technical base at least, and if they do not do this pretty quick, SL will fail finally- in absence of the hype it enjoyed during the early years.
er.. maybe make a sustainable system for people who CAN make immersive entertainnment to get paid.
this month is the first in 4 plus years that I need to pay LL for server space (a lousy 4096) out of non inworld profits. not good.
ya think?
@Tateru — “…the users and customers of Second Life” are not merely “the people who create that user-experience”… we are that user-experience. The heart and soul of SL is experiencing other users — thus, by definition alone, you are correct: the Lab can do nothing on its own.
In the same vein: the Lab also cannot actively facilitate its users/customers in the creation of “experiences”. Loud, whingeing complaints of favo(u)ritism will immediately follow, as they have done in the past, whether deserved or not.
Which brings me to: @Jovin – who decides which the “outstanding” builds are?
By the way, they tried something like that almost 8 years ago, when SL was still in beta: “Community projects”, for which groups of residents organized and applied for space. A total of 10 were tried — only one (Kazenojin) has survived as anything like a community, one more (Yamato) had its land “protected” and its building repurposed by the Lab as an orientation station, and a third (Wild West Town) is evaporating, a prim at a time.
soror has it right: the only thing the Lab can do is improve our tools, and stand out of the way.
“we are that user-experience” – Absolutely. A point that cannot be stressed too often.
I remember in the good “ole” days, Second Life was making people so happy and making people rich so obstacle-freely that money did grow in trees (trees nurished by rich people helping bootstrap the pennyless into the market), and all you needed was a good idea brainstorming publicly somewhere or asking someone in the right place and the right time (there were plenty of both all around) and you would be given the land and the guidance to build/make whatever you felt like doing; it really felt like heaven, a place you can make your greatest dreams become real and share the results with your friends and anyone else that would be welcome. But as time passed it more and more started to turn from the perfect V-world into a ghoul of the likes of Windows Vista and worse….
@ Loki; I could not agree more. We have abandoned over 1/2 sim of mainland (roadside shops and one themed mall) and pulled out of 6 malls because we can no longer cover the tier with sales. Sales on Marketplace have increased during that same time. LL’s cut on Marketplace does not come close to lost tier!
@Jovin; Have you seen LL’s vision of outstanding builds? With a very few exceptions booooooring!
@Tateru; very good post, now if only LL would get out of they way and devote their energy to the technical aspects of making the platform work right!
Any woes with in-world shops probably has less to do with any wouldbe Marketplace cannibalism and more to do with a stagnation of user base.
I know I myself at least haven’t traded in-world shopping for Marketplace, I still prefer the former, but the truth is any slowdown in my shopping is solely due to the fact that I already own 100% of what I want from my favorite shops. I’m no longer a new customer of theirs, and since Linden Lab isn’t getting a lot of new customers, more than likely shop owners aren’t getting a lot of new customers.
On Tateru’s post, I agree. Linden Lab shouldn’t be in content creation at all. I understand Second Life isn’t the success they want it to be, but they sometimes wreak of impatience with their user base. Stuff like Linden Homes makes no sense to me…what was it supposed to do? If the heyday of land boons was over, the answer wasn’t exactly to compete with the barons or upstarts, or pit them against one another, it was to improve the platform and services so the USERS could think their way out of whatever rut there was.
Same for new avatars; instead of Linden Lab shopping for new users and hand selecting some places they should maybe shop, why not instead give scripters an easier way to package and deploy prims already as a solution to store owners? Dressing a new user in a nice leather jacket doesn’t fix the issue of the strife they’re going have to go through when its time to hit that Search button, lag rez somewhere, bug someone while confused, walk 20 meters to where they intended to teleport, lag rez, bug someone while confused, press demo on a vendor board, bug someone while confused, pay 0L or 1L, wear a box on their right hand, bug someone while confused, try and rez the box but can’t due to land permissions, bug someone while confused, go to a sandbox, rez, bug someone while confused, copy to inventory, wear a light show of spinning demo warnings, and either go try another demo or quit.
Everytime Linden Lab offers solutions bolstered by things they can do that users can’t, in direct competition to its users, its truly just a showing of a lack of faith in the platform and tools they provide us. It’s bad enough when the creator of a platform is competing with its users, but its worse when they refuse to compete on any semblance of a level playing field.
Linden Lab’s been advertising a lot of pets lately. I’m sure when some marketing guy finds a drop off in the conversion funnel of people using Second Life due to pet ownership Lindenimals will roll out. Sooner that than poll content creators of what limits they’ve reached and what more can be done on Linden Lab’s part to spur new, immediate innovation.