Question for Lindens.

[Arielle Popstar]

33 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Because they blew 8 figures on Sansar, which failed. Then they had to sell that platform. Then had to sell this platform.

Hadn't looked at it like that before but yeah! Not good.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

SL doesn't look old now except for the Classic avatar and some of the really old stuff.

Yes, SL has some very wonderful content and some regions are exceptionally well done!  Unfortunately most new users never get to see it because apparently they aren't sticking around long enough to hunt around and find it.  They simply look at the Classic avatar and the really old stuff littered around them and think "Ewww this is old and ugly!" and log out never to return.

If LL want to capitalize on all the work that they've been doing to bring PBR to the grid they should be planning a complete overhaul of all the new user areas and similar regions in order to really show off exactly what Second Life is capable of in 2023!

[Silent Mistwalker]

LL can't afford the price tag of even a single ad run during Super Bowl.

Quote

Most 30-second ad spots cost between $6 million and $7 million, Fox Sports told the Associated Press this week. A few sold for more than $7 million. That doesn't include the cost of making the ads in the first place; elaborate, star-studded commercials aren't cheap.

https://www.10tv.com/article/sports/nfl/superbowl/how-much-does-a-super-bowl-ad-commercial-cost-2023/507-366430ad-2496-4032-b589-5308783fae26#:~:text=Most 30-second ad spots,studded commercials aren't cheap.

[Silent Mistwalker]

9 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

You know you''re officially old when you get your first snail mail from them with your name on it!  It's a common topic in some clubs in SL.

I was getting those when I was in my 20s! 😲

[Silent Mistwalker]

5 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

It's that they didn't get instant gratification sexually.

I think not getting instant gratification, regardless of intent, is the number one cause of SL's retention loss.

[EliseAnne85]

26 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I think not getting instant gratification, regardless of intent, is the number one cause of SL's retention loss.

Yes, probably.  I realized that after I wrote my post.

Plus, I was wondering do avatars all decked out in super-duper Mesh avatars go to help people in starter areas where they are in a Classic avatar and that newbie goes "Ah! I look awful compared to you!"  Or, something along those lines. 

People could not only be hesitant about creating a mesh avatar, but the choices alone can make one's head spin.  And, it's far more expensive then when we joined when it was all only Classic avatars.  I can't imagine what I'd think today starting.  I might think the mesh avatars are confusing, how can I choose from all this, and do I really want to spend that much money?  And, here I'm thinking it's free to try but I look like a fish out of water.

[Silent Mistwalker]

6 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I can't imagine what I'd think today starting

I'd pretty much be thinking the same things I did in 2004. 

The only reason I did stick it out is because there were a few people I knew from another platform that were already in SL. If I hadn't known anyone, I wouldn't have logged in past the third day.

[Jennifer Boyle]

On 2/13/2023 at 3:38 AM, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

LL can't give a discount on the purchase of L$ since it's a resident to resident transaction and while they could give a discount on tier fees it would pointless since that would only matter to residents who are invested enough in the platform to consider owning land and spending a monthly fee on it.

There's no reason that LL can't sell Lindens if they want to. After all, they give them to premium members every week. They could even make the ability to buy a larger amount of Lindens for a discounted price a premium perk.

 

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

58 minutes ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

There's no reason that LL can't sell Lindens if they want to. After all, they give them to premium members every week. They could even make the ability to buy a larger amount of Lindens for a discounted price a premium perk.

 

I noticed a few MMOs don't sell gold directly to the players/users.  I don't know if it's some legal reason or whatever.

[Paul Hexem]

16 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

I noticed a few MMOs don't sell gold directly to the players/users.  I don't know if it's some legal reason or whatever.

Because most players would complain.

And if they don't care about that, because then predatory pricing schemes would look that much more obvious. 

[xDancingStarx]

Some people here on these forums are of the opinion that the steep learning curve SL presents to the user is rightfully in place, functioning as a barrier for the less technophile users. Would be a waste of money to spend this much money on showing (superbowl) ads to the wrong people.

I obviously don't share the opinion referred to in the first sentence, but you'd still be wasting a lot of money, though.

[Love Zhaoying]

20 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

Some people here on these forums are of the opinion that the steep learning curve SL presents to the user is rightfully in place, functioning as a barrier for the less technophile users. Would be a waste of money to spend this much money on showing (superbowl) ads to the wrong people.

I obviously don't share the opinion referred to in the first sentence, but you'd still be wasting a lot of money, though.

Curves? I'm bad at the maths, sorry. 
That whole "cowkulate the area under a curve" stuffs did me in.

[Orwar]

On 2/14/2023 at 10:43 PM, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

I noticed a few MMOs don't sell gold directly to the players/users.  I don't know if it's some legal reason or whatever.

   Because, in principle, most game developers don't want their games to be 'pay to win'; if they have a subscription based business model for example, many gamers frown on there also being micro-transaction type content for sale (especially stuff that has an impact on gameplay - costumes and vanity items might be seen as more of an annoyance than it being 'game-breaking'). But, at the same time, if the game has no officially approved of means of buying in-game currency, there's undoubtedly going to be a market for bot-farmed resources via third party websites. And whilst most MMOs have strict rules against purchasing currency through other players, there just aren't any tools at present that are capable of accurately determining whether a transaction was legit or if it was in breach of contract; it's been attempted by so many developers for so many years, but there still are false positives which obviously just kick up outrage among their users - same issue as with automating the process of determining whether a player is an actual human being or a bot. 

   Some things just aren't meant to be automated. Some MMOs also have a feature that, if enough players report a person in a given amount of time, that person is going to be temporarily banned until the issue can be looked into by staff - this of course just meant that people with large numbers of friends, guild mates, or even social media followers decide they don't like someone, they tell people to report them for something they didn't do so that they get auto-banned. In some cases it has even led to really mobster-like monopoly grabs of specific resources; anyone can collect the resources, but if you just make sure that anyone who tries to undercut your hiked up prices gets nuked off the platform you can extort entire game realms.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/12/2023 at 9:54 PM, animats said:

This is the famous Second Life commercial.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/517348093

It won awards. But it didn't show any of Second Life.

 

It showed avatars and how you can customize them, and the theory is, that's what is most interesting to people, and judging from the amount of shopping and amount of traffic at stores that sell heads and bodies and clothing, the theory is accurate. 

[Gavin Hird]

On 2/13/2023 at 3:41 AM, Paul Hexem said:

They can't advertise on adult platforms- people clicking on those ads are looking for instant results, not tens or hundreds of dollars invested to make an ugly avatar in a clunky UI with partners that might say no.

They can't advertise anywhere else because the adult activity has them banned from everywhere.

Truth is, SL is unique because of all the things it offers- none of which it does well enough to advertise.

There is that, but the real reason for not advertising is that the SL backend is not scalable, so it becomes pointless to spend money on ads to significantly increase the influx of new users only to see the backend grind to a halt and the entire thing crash and burn. – Which happens to be why a mobile client distributed to millions would have the same effect. Hence it is not developed. 

Edited February 16, 2023 by Gavin Hird

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It showed avatars and how you can customize them, and the theory is, that's what is most interesting to people, and judging from the amount of shopping and amount of traffic at stores that sell heads and bodies and clothing, the theory is accurate. 

No, it showed paid actors doing sci-fi/fantasy cosplay while hanging from Hollywood flying rigs, with some digital effects.

No avatars were harmed or used in the making of that dreck...

[Jackson Redstar]

"META" is DOA but Zuck has enough bucks to keep that thing around for years

[Arielle Popstar]

3 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

There is that, but the real reason for not advertising is that the SL backend is not scalable, so it becomes pointless to spend money on ads to significantly increase the influx of new users only to see the backend grind to a halt and the entire thing crash and burn. – Which happens to be why a mobile client distributed to millions would have the same effect. Hence it is not developed. 

They could just create a Secondlife 2 using the same code they already have with or without a hypergrid connection between the two. That would allow them to expand without overloading the original. 

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

There is that, but the real reason for not advertising is that the SL backend is not scalable, so it becomes pointless to spend money on ads to significantly increase the influx of new users only to see the backend grind to a halt and the entire thing crash and burn. – Which happens to be why a mobile client distributed to millions would have the same effect. Hence it is not developed. 

You say that as if a mobile viewer would somehow attract new users that wouldn't immediately leave for all the same reasons they leave on PC.

[Gavin Hird]

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

They could just create a Secondlife 2 using the same code they already have with or without a hypergrid connection between the two. That would allow them to expand without overloading the original. 

Hypergrid is a way of horizontal scaling, but as you know Hypergrid is a mess when it comes to sharing data between the grids, so it needs a lot of work to be a seamless experience. 

[Gavin Hird]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

You say that as if a mobile viewer would somehow attract new users that wouldn't immediately leave for all the same reasons they leave on PC.

Every mobile user needs a login slot on the servers, inventory, group, IM and other server resources more or less in the same line as a fully logged in users. The exception being if you only want to make a chat type of login, but that defeats the purpose of mobile users having kit in their hands which are as powerful as yesteryear's desktops and therefore could run a fully logged in experience. 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

You say that as if a mobile viewer would somehow attract new users that wouldn't immediately leave for all the same reasons they leave on PC.

Mobile is magic! Is solution to everything! 

People only use phones now.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

There is that, but the real reason for not advertising is that the SL backend is not scalable, so it becomes pointless to spend money on ads to significantly increase the influx of new users only to see the backend grind to a halt and the entire thing crash and burn. – Which happens to be why a mobile client distributed to millions would have the same effect. Hence it is not developed. 

Isn't the "back end" more scalable now that everything is on Amazon Web Services?  I don't see why it wouldn't be, unless LL didn't pay for enough "beans".

Unless you mean, "Maximum avatars per region" (which changed a couple years ago but just for some scenarios).

Or, "Maximum total concurrent avatars in Second Life".

[Arielle Popstar]

19 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

Hypergrid is a way of horizontal scaling, but as you know Hypergrid is a mess when it comes to sharing data between the grids, so it needs a lot of work to be a seamless experience. 

Much of the mess comes from different versions combined with issues resulting from amateurs (like me) setting up the networks. Much if not all the mess would be circumvented by using the same version setup by the same network engineers.

[Arielle Popstar]

23 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Mobile is magic! Is solution to everything! 

People only use phones now.

Consider it like this. Already more then 50% of computing devices use a mobile platform or one compatible with it (Chrome OS) so at the very least, S/L could potentially see a doubling of its concurrency if it had a mobile viewer. Also consider that quite a few PC's are not capable of accessing S/L because they don't have a video card capable of running anything other than a text viewer or at best, Radegast. So there would be a greater number of mobile devices having the ability to access S/L vs the PC.