Will Steam Help Us?

[Josh Susanto]

>Of course the max they'll ever fit on a sim won't come near the numbers that can play WoW at one time,

That's the superficial downside for the foreseeable future.

The real upside is that people who feel creatively limited by platforms like WoW can at least get the ball rolling in SL in terms of content generated almost entirely by user interaction.

If LL doesn't somehow manage to thwart the potential provided by Steam users, the RP sims can each begin to function as competing GP R&D labs.

If there's a demand for some of them to expand, I assume ways can be found to make that happen, eventually.

In the meantime, I think we've already seen that making a bigger game space can actually be very counterproductive if there isn't enough appealing content to fill it with users.

 

[Josh Susanto]

>I see Valve kicking LL to the curb in less than a year.

That might be just the threat that is needed to make LL shape up.

If Valve could compellingly demonstrate with statistics that they had provided 200,000 new users (not my estimate, but,- you know - just for the sake of argument) and then Vlave demanded to have the individual identifying as CTL removed from the organization in order to renew the LL/Valve service contract, what do you think would happen?

[Josh Susanto]

>I don't really understand what you mean by, "producing content just for that audience".   

I think we all have some ideas already about what "that audience" would demand in terms of content as compared to the current market, but we can't really know. They could be people who are getting tired of the other Steam-related types of content, or they could be people who want more interactive content control of the same kinds of content, or they could be both. My guess would be both.

But that's not necessarily important.

Responsible merchants will continue to risk new product types as they always have, and will continue to adjust to perceived shifts in the market as they always have.

The part I find doubtful is the "just for that audience" part, since it seems to imply that the interests of that audience are essentially different from those of current users. This could be true, but I would more expect a mere shift in terms of what interests are emphasized. Surely, practically anything that will interest those new people either already exists or has already been tried in SL.

Moreover, if there really is a new market for types of content that are currently marginalized in SL, that could also result in developmental efforts that make such content more appealing for existing users. 

Old users and new users might be demographically different in some ways, but there's no reason to think that most of them couldn't just as easily be characterized as fitting one group or the other. I must tend to doubt that you're going to see a more bimodal or more polymodal distribution of content interest types than what you already see. Maybe furries don't hang out in vampire sims or vice-versa, and that sort of thing is bound to continue. But if combat simulation should happen to improve (for example), that might do as much to bring vampires and furries into the same sims as it would to bifurcate the total user pool into combat people and non-combat people.

 

[Josh Susanto]

>Overall, I think it's a misguided attempt to attract a new type of customer, in spite of the fact that what is available here and what can eventually be implemented here will never measure up to the stellar graphics and game play found on dedicated gaming programs/platforms.

As misguided as I agree it probably is, I suspect it could still end up working out decently if LL doesn't continue to produce more bathwater with which for new people to throw out their respective babies. If there is even one aspect of SL that is in any way superior to the other platforms, that could be a viable hook for an adequate number of new users. Probably, that hook is the comparatively high degree of control of users over content design. If LL should simply leave that alone, it would probably be exactly what they need to start getting re-established as a respectable platform. For that reason, I can only assume they're going to start "improving" things, like they did with the shadowing on curved surfaces. 

>So while they'll be able to generate numbers that look like a success, they will instead be flooding the grid with unhappy and disillusioned newbies who quickly leave, spread negative opinions among their peers, and further bog down the platform with stuff that no one ultimately uses.

People who don't like it will of course complain, but they'll mostly stop talking about it immediately after blogging their first gripe. For that reason, LL really only needs to please about 20% of the new users, and that shouldn't be to hard if they simply stop adding new pre-broken features. And with any luck, the critics will be about evenly divided between people complaining about hom much SL sucks and others simply complaining that Steam is what sucks for directing its users to a platform that is so dissimilar to what else they offer (which is really not necessarily a bad thing, eh?). 

[Josh Susanto]

>Do  the math,more sellers then buyers will always lower the economic results.

Not for component-level producers (like me).

Hardware stores always seem to squeeze through a recession.

And some of them prosper. 

[Josh Susanto]

>Someone making beds and skirts isn't going to see that.

They will if they can somehow provide beds and skirts appropriate to the new scenarios in which they will be needed.

The larger picture, though, is (or should be) a total net increase in supply chain movement and flow of currency.

Put simply, more total economic activity should also ultimately empower existing users to buy more of what they already buy.

The merchant who sells the rocket propelled grenade lauchers might want a bed and a skirt, but probably not.

OTOH, she might want a collection of jungle plants produced by someone who wants a bed and a skirt.

The very design of SL assumes that the partitions between user types have little or no practical meaning, and I think that is probably the very thing that has allowed SL to survive this long at all.

A platform that does everything a bit clumsily will never be of great appeal to someone who wants a platform to do one specific thing, but there is a large pool of potential users who just don't like all that much the idea that the platform they use has to be basically about one thing if that means not being at all about a bunch of other things. 

SL offers a more genre-balanced experience to users than do the less contextually clumsy platforms, so, assuming that is a viable means of appeal to the new users from Steam who bother to stick around, this greater balance of interest will almost certainly be reflected in a diversity of buying habits. 

[Josh Susanto]

> A real gamer will walk into SL, see massive lag, from all the sculpty wearers, texture abuse, and sculpty builds, and turn right around and uninstall SL.

Or there will be enough of them to damand that things be fixed.

(Of course you know that I think there's no reason that sculpties couldn't be rezzing just as quickly as meshes, given the same amount of data, but that's beside the point).

[Josh Susanto]

>Josh, you misinterpreted my numbers - I said if 10% try it out and 5% OF THEM stay 

You're still saying the same thing.

Did you mean to say "5% of those"?

[Josh Susanto]

>But this does not mean that those are all shopaholics.

They don't need to be shopaholics.

They just need to produce some threshold margin of growth that will allow the platform to provide an even yet-broader appeal to other new users, rather than continuing to sink into stagnation. 

[Josh Susanto]

> if the whole point of SL is not getting through to them.

Then maybe they just need to be told why anybody keeps coming back at all.

What are the reasons?

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Darrius Gothly wrote:

From a purely technical perspective, the reason such MMO's as Far Cry, WoW, EQ .. and every other targeted game program can be so efficient is because they pre-optimize the scenes, the scenery, the whole graphical representation. The amount of code that has to execute to render even the most complicated vista is barely spit in the bucket compared to what the SL Render Engine has to run.

You can have flexible or fast, but you can't have both. 3D Games opt for fast at the willing expense of flexible. But that's okay because people in the game are looking to engage the game elements, not the surrounding decorations. But SL is intended to allow the "players" to interact with the scenery. It's what makes it a virtual environment with complete flexibility.

If LL goes the route of writing the tool set to implement a fully-featured RP game then they will have to completely retool the render engine, optimizing it for that purpose. At that point they'll wind up creating a completely different platform entirely. So they might as well just write a whole game too.

The reason RP Sims thrive now is because of the 100's if not 1000's of coders and developers that over time have gradually optimized and slimmed down the game devices to work the best possible in the SL infrastructure. For LL to take on that task would be not only grossly unsuccessful but also a monumental waste of time. Their first year's worth of releases wouldn't begin to hold a candle to what's out there now. So once again they'd completely destroy a viable and dynamic niche all for the sake of "doing it their way".

I'm not saying they won't. However I am saying that they'd be damn foolish to try.

---

Generally, we tend to agree but I'm gonna have to hold my position on this 1. I have created whole new games in Far Cry, and I've created my own combat system in SL. Given how far the average computer has come since I created levels in Far Cry, I don't see an issue at all. Yes, it is true that given SL's massive abuse of textures and waste of geometry, the average joe with no sensibilities in graphics rendering and gaming, will have a pretty laggy game. But.... when the whole rpg's environment is custom made with meshes that are specifically made for gaming, and mesh weapons, a knowledgable creator could make a very smooth running rpg with few of the issues 1 would have in a normally crowded SL venue. With my own SL combat system, even with a dozen people, there is no lag at all, despite it all taking place outside my main store. In SL, we can actually have more geometry than Far Cry, Wow, and many other games, just not as crazy as a PS4 or Xbox720 game.

As far as the coding, it is not all that complicated. Most RPG systems in SL all basically do the same thing. The differences are pretty much no different than different settings. My system actually differs from the norm more than most systems do. Even with a prebuilt system, there will be more than enough variations to have a robust amount of differences, what makes it better is that people can concentrate on those aspects, rather than the backend stuff, which is always the tricky part.

Yes, Roberto and I spent almost a full year developing our own system, but I would easily give all that up for 1 universal system that is easy to create for and is more robust. Don't get me wrong. I think we did some very ingenius stuff with our own system, but the value of having 1 universal system would far outweigh those ingenius parts. Plus, I could goto those develop user group meeting and suggest some of our own features, and how to implement them.

The best part about it tho, has to do with the resident/customer experience. The experience would be more universalized. So, a person can just walk in and understand right away how everything works, instead of the clusterfluck of ways that things are done now. I agree that competition and variety are a good thing, but I also think SL is confusing enough without having to spend a few days everytime you want to learn a new rpg. The competition will still be there anyways, and probably more competition.

 1 aspect that I don't think many people see, that I see on an almost daily basis, is the amount of people always looking for a better rpg system. Like I said, almost daily I am approached by people looking for a better rpg.

 

[Josh Susanto]

>We definitely need a lot of people with empty inventories around to keep this pyramid economy working.

There are about 6 billion people who have never used Second Life, so there might be a way to go yet from that angle.

And if it is to become an economy to which the pyramid quality is unimportant, that will probably take a while to make happen.

If users are allowed to continue making both design and funding decisions for content development, a large enough market will have to exist in order produce the optimized results foretold by market capitalist dogma, and that may mean allowing the pyramid dynamic to play itself out to some kind of terminal correction (or that could just be catastrophic, OK, I get it).

At least the money in SL flows in more than one direction, at least some of the time.

How many pay platforms can you name in which there's really no legal way to cash out?

[Josh Susanto]

>You can have flexible or fast, but you can't have both.

But the faster ones are becoming more flexible and the more flexible ones are also becoming faster. 

The speed-up is just a general thing with computer technology, though, so there's not much point in focusing on that, especially as speed will eventually approach some point of diminishing returns at which everyone will have to turn to flexibility as a focus.

And when that happens, who will be better positioned - the platforms that are 1% faster or the platforms that are 2% more flexible?

[Josh Susanto]

> I don't think Valve will do that more than once or twice before telling LL "Your platform is stupid, get off of ours."

By then, there will be plenty more for them to subrogate in the works.

It will be cheaper for LL to clean up their act and try to make nice than to fight that mountain of aggregated microclaims.

So, naturally, LL will pay someone a lot to try to fight it, lose, and ultimately completely go under as a result.

Or something in the culture at LL could change before that, but don't hold your breath. 

[Bittersweet Lime]

Oh come on - "of those" or "of them", this means exactly the same to me, I am not a native english speaker and in german there is no difference between both. I have even pre-computed it and said it is 0.5% of steam users - that is 0.1*0.05 = 0.5%, how hard to get is this? 

[Bittersweet Lime]

I would not call a more than 50% decline in L$ spent since 2008 "stagnation", tt is a massive decline (for those who do not remember those times or were not in SL yet, about 2.1 million US$ were spent daily in SL).

In a socializer world like SL, this is very bad, because there is a positive feedback loop with socializers. More socializers coming in attract more socializers to come in, more socializers leaving make more socializers quit. This positive feedback loop created the hype in 2006/2007. But this positive feedback loop can easily kill a socializer world as well.  SL is not in stagnation, it is near the critical mass, which still keeps it alive.

Look around in SL - it seems to be mostly empty. That is the iimpression a new resident might get quickly. And the "hot spots" have like how many people each?- 20-25-30?- So the destination guide with "hot spots" just adds to the impression, that SL is an empty world. Or did you look at the "showcase" sims?- You go there and no one around. How does this look like to a new resident?- It looks like a dead world, which is long past it's glory days.

SL needs far more than a "threshold margin of growth" or it will continue to decrease until it hits the point, where LL will decide that it is not worth the hassle anymore.

[Josh Susanto]

>Oh come on - "of those" or "of them", this means exactly the same to me, I am not a native english speaker and in german there is no difference between both.

A difference between both would be a difference specifically contrasted with a difference between either, which would treat a possible difference between an item and itself, which is impossible. 

If you do not care about the difference between one identity and two identities, I shouldn't be surprised that you also do not care about the difference between a subgroup of a primary group and subgroup of a subgroup of the primary group.

Except that I see that you do, apparently; just not when it comes to the grammar. 

I'm not really interested in this kind of argument, but if you want to split hairs, we shall split hairs. 

Otherwise, I should simply recognize that you must have meant what you said you meant, and point out that I also meant my first response not as a criticism of you, but merely as a clarification to readers more generally of how what they should really expect would probably be different from what they had read in your message.

[Josh Susanto]

>I would not call a more than 50% decline in L$ spent since 2008 "stagnation", tt is a massive decline (for those who do not remember those times or were not in SL yet, about 2.1 million US$ were spent daily in SL).

The total trend is certainly more than mere stagnation, yes. I only meant that the current state of things is one in which there is neither rapid growth nor decline. 

I'm not especially concerned with the 50% decline because that could be explained as a massive market correction, such as the burst of a bubble or the collapse of a pyramid. 

If the market peak was 100% above baseline, then a 50% loss from that is not necessarily a sign of any real kind of trouble, in and of itself.

The problem is the baseline. LL needs to stop the slow trickling away of the remaining value before they start looking for new ways to artificially inflate consumer confidence. More than anything, this means the removal of technical deterrents to normal use by normal users. Things like failed access to inventories are much larger long-term threats than something like a backfired marketing strategy. 

[Bittersweet Lime]

I don't want to split hairs, Josh, but languages are different and in german there is no difference, because we assume that people think about what is said and put it into the right context, which I provided as well. I spoke of possibly 200,000 new users, what is 40 million * 0.1 * 0.05 - can it be any clearer?- I don't see, that anyone thinking about it, could get it wrong.

I do not agree with your view of the current situation. SL is not in stagnation, it is in continuing decline, so much, that LL stopped reporting the numbers. Why would they have to, if it would just stagnate?- No, it does not stagnate, it shrinks and if it continues shrinking, the chances get higher, that the critical mass of users is no longer maintained and SL might collapse - this could happen as fast as the hype was created by the same mechanism in 2006/2007.

[Drew Bhalti]

My only concern besides selling is the grid came to a grinding halt when we hit 79 or 80 thousand people online, what's it going to do when it hits 200k? 

[Josh Susanto]

>I don't want to split hairs, Josh, but languages are different and in german there is no difference, because we assume that people think about what is said and put it into the right context, which I provided as well. I spoke of possibly 200,000 new users, what is 40 million * 0.1 * 0.05 - can it be any clearer?- I don't see, that anyone thinking about it, could get it wrong.

The 40 million number was not present in the original context.

No language gap explains my failure to appreciate a number which was not yet stated.

Moreover, I would have had to calculate backwards from your final figure (by using the numbers you did provide) in order to reach the number which I was led to believe you meant to imply in place of the 40 million which you did not mention. I didn't do that because I assumed that anything you left out from your figures either would not be necessary in order to compensate for your grammar, or would be provided for that purpose. 

Every language has shortcomings. It's difficult for me to belive that German considers a similarity or difference to be a distributable property among 2 items, such as in a construction like "difference between (both/each/either/neither)".

In English, if your left sock does not match your right sock, your right sock cannot match your left sock because difference or similarity is a reciprocal relationship, not a distributive property.

>I do not agree with your view of the current situation. SL is not in stagnation, it is in continuing decline,

I can't disagree with the general trend of decline. But the current mechanisms of decline are not identical, as a collection, to the decline described with the 50% figure. 

The 50% loss is mostly due to the disillusionment of speculators.

The current losses, regardless of the comparative rate of loss, is due more to persistent technical and service failures which have no clear relation to the collapse of instinsic overvaluation.

Without more and harder numbers, I don't think we are really in a perfect position to agree or disagree about whether the current state of things is more like a stagnant reflection of the stagnant RL economic situations that inform SL market dynamics or more like a continued correction of overvaluation. But I fail to see what bubble, other than SL as a whole, is being slowly deflated here. Pyramids normally collapse much faster than they have bene built, and that's not really consistent with what people have so far explained is happening to SL right now.

I do think we can agree that we are at a crossroads.

If Steam does not bring a significant number of new users, I think that we can probably both see that LL needs to fix old problems faster than creating new ones anyway, if they intend to stop the continuing losses.

And if Steam does bring a significant number of new users, I thimk we can probably both see that this opportunity will be wasted if LL continues to create new problems more quickly than fixing old ones.

[Josh Susanto]

200,000 new users doesn't mean 200,000 new concurrencies.

It means some fraction of that.

Probably it means just the amount needed in order to jam up the grid so that most of the remainder never even get logged on to begin with. 

Maybe the existing concurrency plus about another 50K?

That is150,000 brand new, possibly permanent non-users.

 

[Deja Letov]

---

Gadget Portal wrote:

That's not what Steam is. Technically speaking, Steam is just a store where you can buy games and an instant messenger.

 

It does nothing to help scrappy computers play games.

 

Your other questions bring up good points though. It's a topic I'm wondering, myself. LL doesn't take responsibility for anything that goes wrong in SL. Marketplace non-delivery? Just go file a JIRA. In-world purchase failed? Resident to resident dispute. And so forth.

People will then turn to Valve for resolutions, since that's what they're used to- buy a game/microtransaction through Steam and it fails, Valve will refund you if the developer won't. In this case, I don't think Valve will do that more than once or twice before telling LL "Your platform is stupid, get off of ours."

---

I don't think Steam users are used to going to vale for issues with certain games. If I am playing a game on steam for example and purchase something from a developers wesite for use in the game, i wouldnt go to Valve for support of that purchase because I didn't buy it through Valve. I doubt very much they would integrate Valve into the buying process. They will simply be the portal to find the SL viewer, download it and start playing. That will probably be the end of it.

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

 Iwas reading a couple blogs / articles about SL's move to integrate with Steam.  Seem to confirm what many of us were sayin in this thread that the Steam move is a strong indication of LL leaving the current customers behind and change focus to the GAMER market.  That shoul not be surprising the day Rodvik was announced as CEO.

Rodvik knows "GAMING" and so when all you know is how to use a screwdriver then everything around you looks like screw.

As many of us have said in this thread and the other thread "forced to close".... LL has no clue what made LL so addictively popular to their customer's and why LL's customers started leaving SL.

With Rodvik going after the "Gamer" market that constantly needs speeds & feeds, adreoline pumping excitment and very low patience..... he is attracting a high-maintenance population to a LL operation has has no customer service maturity and is notoriously known for its "shoot from the hip" product/service development and zero quality assurance testing.

SL Residents might **bleep** and complain a lot about the large laundry list of LL faux pas's but we are still loyal to the SL grid.  Rodvik is abandoning the current market and now attracting a new market that will not be 1/100th as tolerant of LL's immature business practices. 

As such, Rodvik's strategy will force a lot of the current SL population to migrate to the competing grids (I am sure the owners of SL's biggest competitor are drooling and excited about Rodvik's plan) and then have a new population that will very quickly abandon SL when they all realize very quickly that the SL grid has none of the speeds that they are used to and absolutely no customer service.

I think Rodvik is making a big mistake on this strategy.  He should have spent his first 3 months TRULY studying what makes his current customers tick and what he could do to make them happy.  THEN .... once he restored improved SL services and customer service, he could have considered expanding on a solide SL foundation.

Rodvik is simply coming to the conclusion that there is nothing he can do to improve the current population so lets just focus on a new customer base.  If the old population hangs around - great.

[Josh Susanto]

I guess it's a bit like radiation or chemotherapy.

The treatment may kill the patient, but the patient is going to die otherwise anyway, so why not give it a try?

If Rodvik makes everything faster and smoother, I'm OK with that in principle, but I don't thinks that's going to happen.

Not every game is a question of how quickly people can jump and shoot with their thumbs.

I haven't see everything that Steam offers, but the core appeal of games is ultimately in escalating challenges to creative problem solving ability, and SL could work that angle a lot harder than most of the 1st person shooters that already exist ever will. 

If Rodvik can get the marketing spin to focus on angles like "openly emergent narrative" and "evolving challenge structure", the most imaginitive and intellectually curious gamers should actually see a huge opportunity to do something other than eradicate gold farmers and outbid their college roommates on Craigslist for items that will make them invincible. 

And those are the people SL actually needs, aren't they?