Didn't companies have a presence in SL years ago....

[Kylie Jaxxon]

Interesting

IKEA wants to pay real people to work in its new store inside Roblox game | CNN Business

[Eddy Vortex]

Quote

If successful, candidates, who must be aged 18 and over and live in the United Kingdom or Ireland to apply,

Ah shoot, I don't live in a civilized country so I can't qualify. Would've been an interesting gig.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

Yes. Dozens used to be in here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Businesses_and_organizations_in_Second_Life

 

I read about the IKEA thing. So silly. Oh, and last I heard, they'd only be hiring about 10 people.

[Kylie Jaxxon]

10 minutes ago, Eddy Vortex said:

Ah shoot, I don't live in a civilized country so I can't qualify. Would've been an interesting gig.

Agree!!

[Kylie Jaxxon]

9 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Yes. Dozens used to be in here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Businesses_and_organizations_in_Second_Life

 

I read about the IKEA thing. So silly. Oh, and last I heard, they'd only be hiring about 10 people.

Thanks for the link!!  When I came in, I only remember the Weather Channel

[Ayashe Ninetails]

Just now, Kylie Jaxxon said:

Thanks for the link!!  When I came in, I only remember the Weather Channel

I remember Kelly Services (the employment/temp agency) had a presence. Annnnd, some car manufacturer had a showroom sim. A film director or two also had projects going, I think. There were a LOT!

[Ceka Cianci]

Remember when the occasional celebrity would visit SL?

I remember Bruce Willis was here one time and did an interview in an avatar on stage.. I can't remember who interviewed him though.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Yeah, there used to be corporate presence in Sl...

Back in the Age of Stupidity, when people actually believed that SL was going to be a world of business to business teleconference executive power meetings, with the short gaps between meetings occupied by standing in virtual art galleries listening to bad jazz music, and discussing Hegelian dialectic.

 

Then people realised that was a dumb ass pipe dream that would never fly, and got down to the serious business of land flipping, barbie dress-up, and SLex.

The corporates realised the tax write-off from rrunnng a sim wasn't large enough to cover the costs of paying a staff member to run their tax write-off sims, and that teleconferenced power meetings were better handled in MS Teams, or Zoom, or Skype, and they all sodded off.

 

[Kylie Jaxxon]

12 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Yeah, there used to be corporate presence in Sl...

Back in the Age of Stupidity, when people actually believed that SL was going to be a world of business to business teleconference executive power meetings, with the short gaps between meetings occupied by standing in virtual art galleries listening to bad jazz music, and discussing Hegelian dialectic.

 

Then people realised that was a dumb ass pipe dream that would never fly, and got down to the serious business of land flipping, barbie dress-up, and SLex.

The corporates realised the tax write-off from rrunnng a sim wasn't large enough to cover the costs of paying a staff member to run their tax write-off sims, and that teleconferenced power meetings were better handled in MS Teams, or Zoom, or Skype, and they all sodded off.

 

I thought I remembered hearing that SL wasn't reliable enough back then to keep a connection for these corporations while they were conducting their business meetings.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Kylie Jaxxon said:

I thought I remembered hearing that SL wasn't reliable enough back then to keep a connection for these corporations while they were conducting their business meetings.

That might be, but, voice spam was a PITA, and text chat wasn't "private enough", nobody wants to cut n paste internal finance figures into a chat system that other people can eavesdrop on. And then there's the whole "how long does it take to teach people to use SL to teleconference" thing.

Waste of time, effort and money. So they didn't bother.

[Bree Giffen]

I remember going to all the real world company sims back in the day. I tried to score as many freebies as I could. 

There were a lot of boardrooms and auditoriums built in these places as if the companies planned to bring in many avatars for meetings and presentations. The regions were usually empty when I visited them even at the height of SL's popularity. 

A long while ago I chatted with a university professor who told me that the school had his department go into SL to hold meetings. He said that they did this for a few weeks but eventually stopped because everyone started changing their avatars and getting involved in all the seedy parts of SL. 

[Kylie Jaxxon]

30 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

I remember going to all the real world company sims back in the day. I tried to score as many freebies as I could. 

There were a lot of boardrooms and auditoriums built in these places as if the companies planned to bring in many avatars for meetings and presentations. The regions were usually empty when I visited them even at the height of SL's popularity. 

A long while ago I chatted with a university professor who told me that the school had his department go into SL to hold meetings. He said that they did this for a few weeks but eventually stopped because everyone started changing their avatars and getting involved in all the seedy parts of SL. 

I could see that happening, lol

[PheebyKatz]

Iunno, I'm kinda glad I don't have to see ads for Coca-Cola and McDonald's every time I go exploring. I'm glad SL got the boost it did at the time, but yeah. It'd suck if corporations overran our little virtual world like they've done IRL.

[Codex Alpha]

7 hours ago, Kylie Jaxxon said:

Interesting

IKEA wants to pay real people to work in its new store inside Roblox game | CNN Business

It's the secret dream of LL with SL and Sansar, that corporations would come and have stores there, and sell their products as 3D versions to customers. Bespoke creations by the not-so-average-now-have-to-be-super-skilled-user were just the lure to get early users, and it kind of still is like that.

Many users of Virtual Worlds would love to buy their official Harley motorcycle, Marshall stack amp, etc. Most of these companies now have all their products in 3d asset form, for product shots and the like - a transition into a mega-virtual-world-store would be easy, as just the brand naming will sell their products, vs some freelancing guy making a "Harshall"-style amp nobody wants.

If Second Life or Sansar had 250,000,00 million user accounts and a concurrency of 56,000,000 DAILY potential customers - all the corporations would be back in full force.

This is not a surprise to me. The user count on Roblox is mind boggling and surreal.. it's a TON of users, and it is gearing up to be everything LL wanted SL, Sansar, HiFi to be, but kept sabotaging themselves and their platforms with ideologies, political agendas and 'more important' missions than making a profit.

Edited June 7 by Codex Alpha

[bigmoe Whitfield]

8 hours ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

I remember Kelly Services (the employment/temp agency) had a presence. Annnnd, some car manufacturer had a showroom sim. A film director or two also had projects going, I think. There were a LOT!

Nissan did and I still have their altima lol.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Nissan did and I still have their altima lol.

Lol, that's awesome! Thank you - I couldn't for the life of me remember which car company it was!

[PheebyKatz]

8 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Then people realised that was a dumb ass pipe dream that would never fly, and got down to the serious business of land flipping, barbie dress-up, and SLex.

I always figured business types would prefer stuff like group texting over things like picking a body with a face that wasn't their own and wearing a rave outfit, figuring out how to walk around, and figuring out how to use a chair inworld, but for all I know it could have worked.

They totally had me at barbie dress-up, regardless.

[Madi Melodious]

10 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

A long while ago I chatted with a university professor who told me that the school had his department go into SL to hold meetings. He said that they did this for a few weeks but eventually stopped because everyone started changing their avatars and getting involved in all the seedy parts of SL.

This is what happened to a friend of mine.  His company moved their meeting to SL, paid for prim accounts for everyone too.   Everyone started showing up as all kinds of weird avatars.  Big chickens, dogs, dragons and the like.   After two meetings they pulled the plug on it and wrote it off as a bad idea.    Funny thing is they forgot to stop paying for the accounts to something like 10 years later.  

[Caroline Takeda]

Yes, they did have a presence.
But they did everything wrong. They created something to look at for branding instead of something that would be useful to users.

The "Deutsche Bank" Towers were a typical example of how NOT to do it. Two towers resembling their RL building in Frankfurt, with nothing else to do but a basketball thing on the roof.

If I were a marketing manager at IKEA, I would have created all their RL products as virtual items and given them away as freebies in a huge IKEA in-world store. I would be flooding Second Life with free, high-quality furniture. I'd even take the *****-storm risk (or deliberately causing one) and offer beds with sex animations.

The same could work with clothing brands, cars, and sailboats. 
 

[Codex Alpha]

9 hours ago, Caroline Takeda said:

If I were a marketing manager at IKEA, I would have created all their RL products as virtual items and given them away as freebies in a huge IKEA in-world store. I would be flooding Second Life with free, high-quality furniture. I'd even take the *****-storm risk (or deliberately causing one) and offer beds with sex animations.

They'd never have to do that. What's more important to a large company is how many users you have, and how active (concurrent) they are. They're not going to just come and help promote a virtual world - without being in partnership and expecting growth from said platform. SL and others have to earn companies coming here, not the other way around. Roblox has millions of users - IKEA would rather gamble there, and if there is traction, I foresee corporations exploding in Roblox.

[Bree Giffen]

The only good thing a Company can do in a virtual world is to build brand awareness, goodwill and possibly show some products virtually. The best Company region I ever visited would have to be AOL pointe. Yes, the you've got mail AOL. They had a location designed by the Electric Sheep company which had a park where you could skateboard, a sticky wall where you could launch yourself and stick to a wall, a pop trivia game where you click on buttons to answer, and all rewarded you with linden dollars. A thousand times better than any kind of money tree or camping for dollars that was available at the time. I used to go there to skate around to collect lindens and it was genuinely fun. 

Roblox is pretty much all mini-games. Ikea just needs to gamify their virtual store and reward people for playing. The only problem I see is that Roblox really is just for kids. I see the same problem for Fortnite which is only for teens. The audience of adults who would likely buy furniture just doesn't play in those game worlds.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

Belarus's embassy is still in SL.  I always heard it is an official embassy, built back when institutions like Coca-Cola and IBM were building sims.  Tier is probably still getting funded by an agency who lets that line item fall through the cracks every year.

I do like the idea of Belarus and Ukraine doing diplomacy in SL, though.  When diplomacy fails, out come the dong guns and orbiters!

[Roxy Couturier]

On 6/7/2024 at 6:25 PM, Codex Alpha said:

Not hard to beat $15

Not to mention sunk costs of development

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Nearly 300 streamers playing Roblox on Twitch at this moment (every single one of them over 12 years old), with over 5,000 people watching, donating, gifting subs (twitch viewers love throwing money around!).  Judging by the titles and thumbnails for the streams a lot of folks are either playing mini-games (that are fun and work! 🤯) or just hanging out with friends much the same as folks do in SL, Minecraft, and a bunch of other platforms/MMOs/etc.

Where there's people there's money and if there's one thing Roblox has that SL lacks it's an abundance of concurrent users!

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Where there's people there's money and if there's one thing Roblox has that SL lacks it's an abundance of concurrent users!

What's interesting is this move by IKEA seems to be less about attracting new customers and more about attracting new hires. All virtual workers have to be 18+, submit an updated CV and optional video, and live in the UK or Ireland.

From their most recent press release:

“We’re excited to launch paid work on Roblox to showcase how we do careers differently, bringing our unique careers philosophy to life. At IKEA, there is no set route to career progression. Our co-workers are able to change roles, switch departments, and grow in any direction they choose, both in the game or in the real world. There are many ways to learn and grow at IKEA, and that's what IKEA on Roblox is all about.”

...

IKEA has launched the first phase of its drive to attract a new generation of co-workers. Entitled ‘Careers Done Different’.  

The virtual store opens on 24th June and is designed to introduce users to the breadth of roles and career progression routes available at IKEA through a series of games inspired by real-life jobs at the Swedish retailer.

 

It sounds like they're targeting the young adult/college student/recent grad demographic looking for their first careers. Interesting, and looking at it that way, it makes sense why they'd target Roblox for that. We've got that demographic here in Second Life as well, but I think the general perception is our platform skews quite a bit older.