Why I've decided to stop creating content in SL

[Ann Otoole]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:...

ps: The SL "economy" is saturated with too many merchants at the moment anyway. ...

 

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I don't think so. Odd how some quality creators somehow manage to market themselves effectively and bank good money while most sit on their hands wondering why the world is not kneeling before them. The best advice I can give struggling creators is to take a break and reflect on reality for a while. There are plenty of customers wanting to spend money out there. They simply cannot find you for one or more numerous reasons. Or you simply make content nobody wants anymore.

[Qie Niangao]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

Which free furniture are we talking about?

If we're talking about the new premium gift couch and flower vase - those weren't crap. They were very good. Better than about half of what residents put out - maybe more. [...]

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I take the other argument, that even if they're crap, they're evidence of LL trying to "buy" premium memberships by stepping further into content creation, which isn't helpful to residents creating similar content.

And I can accept that design quality -- the criterion I originally cited for my "crap" judgment -- is highly subjective.  I still think they're ugly, but they're also amateurish crap on objective grounds.  Look inside the sofa cushions.  How many scripts do we think it should take to animate two avatars on the same linkset? Look inside all the lampshade prims. How many scripts should that take? Finally, look inside the tables and vases: one texture-change script each -- with no "delete scripts" option.  Indeed, everything in the set is no-mod, so you can't remove the scripts manually (nor get rid of the antiquated shadow prims, one per item).  

Sure, there are still furniture makers selling items with scripts this crappy, but very, very few still selling furniture no-mod.

Anyway, again, I'm not complaining: it's good that it's crap.  And I agree that, crap or not, this is a short-sighted approach to stepping up the incentives for Premium membership.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

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Stanton Sinister wrote:

Hello everyone, for those who are unfamiliar to me I joined Second Life 6/21/2007 under the alias Ubah Paine. Through Ubah I was a casino, club and mall owner with a club group that had 3k plus members. Currently there are over 1100 members and I haven’t hosted an event in years just to give you an idea of how many of my patrons have quit sl altogether. I was not upset when they banned casinos or banks.

Through Stan I first pioneered the sculpted prim industry by offering full perm sculpted women’s shoes and other clothing accessories.  I sold each kit for around 3k linden at the time and now sell them for 500L because they have been pirated by people who don’t fall under the dmca act or people have just handed them away contrary to the ip clause you agree to by purchasing them. I’m not upset about that, the value would have dropped due to competition in a free market anyway. While I am an animator, graphic designer and game dev in the real world I will not be pursuing any further content creation in SL, mesh or otherwise. I could but I refuse…

I then moved on to scripted items because you can copybot a prim but you can’t steal the script inside. I designed several multi combat system integrated weapons and pioneered the mmorpg mob “monsters with exp and loot” industry. For those who are unfamiliar with what I mean by pioneered, I created the first ones and developed them over 4 years. I sat on that goose egg for a while and it faired me well. I had competition but none that offered the functionality of my product and I was even working on a fully integrated combat system with a level hierarchy and lootgen that would have been the first pve based combat system in SL and if not for the fall of the SL economy and the weak will of my scripter who quit on me it would have been finished, I’m not upset about all that however.

Anyone who has an avatar as old as I do can remember when linden labs bought out onrez and xstreet then tried to monopolize xstreet. I used onrez exclusively for my in world vendors. I would rent vendor stalls in world and while I generated revenue my patrons who owned the malls that I rented in would generate revenue. When LL decided to kill off onrez in a really short time I lost all those vendors and the revenue spent on those stalls for the rest of the month. They then made a spectacle of the new marketplace and claimed that they were going to add new pricing to free items and include a listing fee on top of the sales % which coincidentally never happened…  I know of several content creators who quit SL altogether over that whole fiasco. The majority of people now exclusively use the marketplace to purchase items instead of going in world and visiting vendor stores in your mall or club imo…

After hiring Rod Humble as the new ceo I have noticed several changes in SL. There is more publicity on random sites that I have viewed so the population is starting to grow again which is a good thing. The thing that really set me off however was the fact that linden labs is now selling linden created content in a virtual world that is supposed to be created by the user. They offer you prefab homes and furniture for signing up for a premium account. You don’t think that’s kinda stepping on the content creators toes who build those homes? Now they have integrated a new linden mmorpg sim and offering people linden created mmorpg assets…. Linden labs just stepped on my toes with that one...

Anyone who has been around for a while has noticed that the value of the linden dollar has dropped about 30% since 2007. My 1500L sold for 8-9 dollars in 2007 but now I trade the paltry chump change I make for bitcoins at 5-6 bucks per 1500L. I will continue to offer customer support for my products but I refuse to create any new content in a virtual world monopolized by it’s creators, mesh, sculpted or otherwise. I’ve decided to spend my time in a more profitable fashion designing and selling real world games and assets in a market that is not so small nor falling apart. Good luck to you all and enjoy the tyranny while you immerse yourselves in it, I'm done with it....

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I feel ya there. I just sold Sweethearts jazz yesterday foR the same reasons and other reasons compounded my decission to move on,

Good Luck to everyone.

 

[Yohan Roux]

Malls are dead, any sim that use to pay for it with malls will suffer, there has to be a new way to raise money, a new way to bring people inworld to shop and away from market place, I have an idea that I will be trying soon, but we traders are hostile to each other and wont help each other, I think my way will work, would work better if all did the same, but we wont, so I will go alone and try.

[Rene Erlanger]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

ps:

The SL "economy" is saturated with too many merchants at the moment anyway

. Too many folks think this is a market of some kind, and not a social community. Its a community, with an added market to supply goods to use in that community.

For that market to be healthy, the ratio of merchants to users needs to seriously alter to make it about half what it is now.

 

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Good and valid points!

[Ann Otoole]

You are trying to force limit commerce to only you and a few others. That is not going to work. What it means is you and the others trying to limit commerce are no longer relevant and your businesses have failed. Better start working on developing a business model that works in the new age of SL. Oh, and btw, Malls are dead.

[Clarissa Lowell]

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Stanton Sinister wrote:

 Good luck to you all and enjoy the tyranny while you immerse yourselves in it, I'm done with it....

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It's too bad. It didn't sound like a flounce until then.

[Conifer Dada]

Each time a content creator leaves SL, that's one less competitor for those who remain - at least as far as new products are concerned!  

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

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Stanton Sinister wrote:

I think th

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Fluffy Sharkfin wrote:

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Stanton Sinister wrote:

Why should people continue to create content in a virtual world that is supposed to be created by the residents when Linden Labs has decided to start providing their own content for sale...

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Because some people simply enjoy creating and really don't care too much about profit?

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I suppose there is validity in that but my discussion was geared toward content creators who desire a profit for their time spent creating content. I consider SL to be an investment of my money and time and I consider the linden created content to be a threat to my investment.

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I also consider SL to be an investment of my money and time but, honestly, if the only return from that investment  that interests you is profit then there are probably more lucrative opportunities out there which would provide you with less stress.

Creating content in SL is a great way to earn a little money (or, for a handful of creators, a lot) but the stress and other negative factors will almost always outweigh the rewards if the only benefit is profit, and if you do actually enjoy the creative aspect of what you do in SL, why not focus on that rather than how much money you can squeeze out of it?

[161488303349]

am not going to tell ppl who knows how to do this better than me, but (:

whats needed by brandnew linden home owners is insta furnish your home sets. is some ppl doing this but not enough, at least to the level of ease that many new homeowners would like the first time

like rez the box on the floor and voila instant fully furnished

the rez box has to be clever, like work out what kinda house, floor plan, it is on. move and orient itself to where it should be then rez everything exactly in the right place. without the home owner having to do any mounting manually. bed in the bedroom, couch by the fireplace, mats on the floor, pot plants and pictures, kitchen and bathroom units maybe, radio stream tuner, tv even. auto texture and color changeouts as well. diff themed sets for diff style homes

all in 80 or less prims. so to leave enough prims for owner to rez a vehicle, on the roof usually those that do this. and a few spare prims for boxes. have to be mostly mesh probly to stay under the 80 cap. sculpts could do it as well maybe even better. is big challenge to do but i think whoever can do it will do ok out of it. is the instant auto mounting that be most appealing to firsttime linden home owners i think

[Qie Niangao]

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Ann Otoole wrote:

You are trying to force limit commerce to only you and a few others. That is not going to work. What it means is you and the others trying to limit commerce are no longer relevant and your businesses have failed. Better start working on developing a business model that works in the new age of SL. Oh, and btw, Malls are dead.

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I used to think it was this simple... this, and the general response that whenever a creator left or a venue closed, it was good riddance to old rubbish.  I still kinda think that, although it's a source of constant disappointment that it never seems to apply to the ones I'd vote off the island first.

There is, however, a more subtle thing going on, and I'm not sure how much it threatens "the new age of SL."  This thinning of the content creator ranks is happening, whether or not it's for the better.  Mesh is one cause.  Creating Mesh content demands more time and much more tolerance for tedium.  (Yes, sculpties were even worse, but their technical limitations restricted their viability to only select areas of content.)  Even setting aside the effects of Mesh, it's becoming ever more difficult to keep a straight face when telling a noob to try selling something s/he's created.

Fewer content creators would certainly be good for those few surviving or emerging creators -- or so one would hope, but I'm not so sure.  I'm juxtaposing the world views of Occupy's "99%" vs Mitch Daniels' "soon to be wealthy."  How much of SL usage depends, directly or indirectly, on the "American dream" of social mobility, of being able to get ahead, where advancement is partially pegged to revenue from creations? What happens when the 99% realize that chances of improving their stations are slim to none?

We can imagine that "the new age of SL" will be peopled with more social, entertainment-motivated users who just don't have any interest in making content, or at least not in getting paid for it.  Maybe. But I wouldn't want to be the one to stake Linden Lab on it.

If we want the vast majority to be satisfied with SL without hope of making money, a recent study suggests that we'd do well to STFU about SL ever having anything to do with profit.

[Perrie Juran]

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Rene Erlanger wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

ps:

The SL "economy" is saturated with too many merchants at the moment anyway

. Too many folks think this is a market of some kind, and not a social community. Its a community, with an added market to supply goods to use in that community.

For that market to be healthy, the ratio of merchants to users needs to seriously alter to make it about half what it is now.

 

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Good and valid points!

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Doing a check a minute ago, there were 2,014,714 items for sale on the Marketplace.

What percentage of that could be defined as 'crap' (and yes I know different people will have different opinions for what constitutes crap) could be hard to tell.

One of my favorites is people who have rezzed some cubes, colored them, and put them up for sale, "a set of colored boxes."

One of the problems with the marketplace is that there is to my knowledge no 'removal system.' Once an item is listed it is there for eternity.  If I am wrong about this please correct me.

A search for a simple item of clothes, "jeans,' returns around 65,000 results.  That seems a little crazy to me. 

[Rene Erlanger]

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Ann Otoole wrote:

You are trying to force limit commerce to only you and a few others. That is not going to work. What it means is you and the others trying to limit commerce are no longer relevant and your businesses have failed. Better start working on developing a business model that works in the new age of SL. Oh, and btw, Malls are dead.

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I'm not trying to suggest anything.....i'm merely agreeing with Pussynap's comments, that there are far too many Merchants in relation to consumers. You have forgotten that SL has not grown in 3 years....infact it's concurrency is slowly dwindling away!

Malls don't work due shopping traffic moving across to Marketplace.....which partly explains why LL have lost 1500 Estate sims in 13 mths.....or 4 Mill USD annual income. LL will have to crunch the numbers and see if those extra commissions from Marketplace will compensate that loss. We need to find out total annuals sales on Marketplace and work out what 5% of that figure is.

Oh btw, Malls are not completely dead There are still those that prefer to shop in-world......you know, the 3D virtual world experience that you initially signed up for!

[Rene Erlanger]

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16 wrote:

 

the rez box has to be clever, like work out what kinda house, floor plan, it is on. move and orient itself to where it should be then rez everything exactly in the right place. without the home owner having to do any mounting manually. bed in the bedroom, couch by the fireplace, mats on the floor, pot plants and pictures, kitchen and bathroom units maybe, radio stream tuner, tv even. auto texture and color changeouts as well. diff themed sets for diff style homes

 

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It would suit the new type of Facebook user we seem to be attracting to SL. have everything ready made, let them do as little possible and learn nothing!

..half the fun is the learning process, like how to place prims in correct positions using the Edit functions and rotation tool. etc etc.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Rene Erlanger wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

ps:

The SL "economy" is saturated with too many merchants at the moment anyway

. Too many folks think this is a market of some kind, and not a social community. Its a community, with an added market to supply goods to use in that community.

For that market to be healthy, the ratio of merchants to users needs to seriously alter to make it about half what it is now.

 

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Good and valid points!

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Doing a check a minute ago, there were 2,014,714 items for sale on the Marketplace.

What percentage of that could be defined as 'crap' (and yes I know different people will have different opinions for what constitutes crap) could be hard to tell.

 

A search for a simple item of clothes, "jeans,' returns around 65,000 results.  That seems a little crazy to me. 

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Not sure it needs to be crap to be clutter.

You can have 'too much of a good thing'.

A -lot- of it is great stuff. But there's so much, and just not enough consumers to buy it.

As you note, 65,000 jeans.

How many people need jeans, how many need all different jeans from each other, and so on. Its crazy. I almost wonder if there are that many varieties of RL jeans... globally...

 

 

[161488303349]

can cater for both. like you get a full furnish insta rez pack to start with, then after a time if u want then start moving stuff round. is a big job to mount every piece by hand yourself. specially when u not really sure what it is ur sposed to be doing the first few times

is some people like insta facebooky solutions. is why most them get linden homes in the first place i think. so if that area is growing and u making stuff for the newbie market then maybe make stuff that they want and will maybe buy, instead of stuff they probly wont

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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16 wrote:

am not going to tell ppl who knows how to do this better than me, but (:

whats needed by brandnew linden home owners is insta furnish your home sets. is some ppl doing this but not enough, at least to the level of ease that many new homeowners would like the first time

like rez the box on the floor and voila instant fully furnished

the rez box has to be clever, like work out what kinda house, floor plan, it is on. move and orient itself to where it should be then rez everything exactly in the right place. 

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Actually a -LOT- of houses up for sale at present that come prefurnished.

Whether the house maker buys full perm furniture from a doze places and packs it in there with new no-trans perms, or makes it themselves, it is an established model for putting out houses in SL. I think most are making it themselves with builder kits - when you see it, the furniture all seems to have a design theme as if made by the same person - good or bad.

The rez box doesn't need to be clever , to do this you lay out everything in your build, then put a rez box' script into it to save its position relative to the rezbox. A smart builder puts the rezboxx at ground level either in the exact middle or a center side - and packs it with a marked floor footprint. The rez box just throws all the prims inside of itself back to their prior saved coords.

Doesn't need to comprehend the difference between a wall and a chair. One is at 5m x away from the box, the other 2m x and 3m z.

Look at the builder 'Inside' (Inside Prefabs ? ) for an example of doing this. All the furnishings look to be made by her as well - they're stylisticly similar even when varied in theme (such as modern houses versus tiki houses). Also fairly well done buildings. Most of them are for larger land allocations though. But there are a few for small lots.

In these types of builds - most of the content is copy mod. Allowing you to remove pieces and replace with your own stuff, relocate them, or even pull out the furnishings and put it all into a different building if its the furnishing that you liked and not the building.

Also tends to be copy/mod because if its not rez-box packing it can be risky. Well, at least for the copy side.

 

[161488303349]

yes thats true about rezzing everything including the house. like u say is lots of them have multiple houses in the rezzers, even beaches and forest settings as well. full furnished. they pretty cool most of them

was just looking at linden homes by themselves and what might work for them

[Clarissa Lowell]

If there are too many sellers it seems like you need more buyers. Not to stop attracting people who want to shop in SL.

I don't find it fun to build. I like to make shapes though.

[Perrie Juran]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Rene Erlanger wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

ps:

The SL "economy" is saturated with too many merchants at the moment anyway

. Too many folks think this is a market of some kind, and not a social community. Its a community, with an added market to supply goods to use in that community.

For that market to be healthy, the ratio of merchants to users needs to seriously alter to make it about half what it is now.

 

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Good and valid points!

---

Doing a check a minute ago, there were 2,014,714 items for sale on the Marketplace.

What percentage of that could be defined as 'crap' (and yes I know different people will have different opinions for what constitutes crap) could be hard to tell.

 

A search for a simple item of clothes, "jeans,' returns around 65,000 results.  That seems a little crazy to me. 

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Not sure it needs to be crap to be clutter.

You can have 'too much of a good thing'.

 

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BTW, that is an increase by about 39,000 items in the past month.  At that rate by the end of 2012 there will be over two million five hundred thousand (2,500,000) items for sale in the Market!

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Market-Place-Trivia-That-s-A-Whole-Lot-Of-Stuff-For-Sale/m-p/1336779/highlight/true#M46583

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

As you note, 65,000 jeans.

How many people need jeans, how many need all different jeans from each other, and so on. Its crazy. I almost wonder if there are that many varieties of RL jeans... globally...

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That was the same thought I had when I saw that number........how many styles Globally in RL.  So Wrangler uses a different shade of orange thread than Levi and Levi I think uses a heavier rivet but how much difference is there really accept in RL one brand fits my rear end better than the other. In SL, they all fit like you used a shoe horn to put them on.

 

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

 

 In SL, they all fit like you used a shoe horn to put them on.

 

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Unless they're mesh

[Perrie Juran]

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Fluffy Sharkfin wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

 

 In SL, they all fit like you used a shoe horn to put them on.

 

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Unless they're mesh

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but i like showing off my sexy derriere

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Fluffy Sharkfin wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

 

 In SL, they all fit like you used a shoe horn to put them on.

 

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Unless they're mesh

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but i like showing off my sexy derriere

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and I have no doubt that particular spectacle is often met with widespread approval

[Yohan Roux]

There are to many traders, those that have planned for that will survive, those that think they can still make a living and expand are going to die, a period of humility is going you teach you just that, humility, thing is most of you think you are gods, lol, and are you for in a shock, no the one that cuts deepest and eats worms will live, the rest will die.

 

Many of you are to lazy to change, lots to arrogant, but that's ok, don't you think that you should be the first to fall, I remember some years ago I had an add at sweethearts, 2000 lindens a month, when the owner saw I was getting business from it he put it up to 8000 lindens a month, just one add(1 prim), lol, good to hear he has gone, oops I am lucinda bulloch toe rag.

[Pamela Galli]

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Rene Erlanger wrote:

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16 wrote:

 

the rez box has to be clever, like work out what kinda house, floor plan, it is on. move and orient itself to where it should be then rez everything exactly in the right place. without the home owner having to do any mounting manually. bed in the bedroom, couch by the fireplace, mats on the floor, pot plants and pictures, kitchen and bathroom units maybe, radio stream tuner, tv even. auto texture and color changeouts as well. diff themed sets for diff style homes

 

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It would suit the new type of Facebook user we seem to be attracting to SL. have everything ready made, let them do as little possible and learn nothing!

..half the fun is the learning process, like how to place prims in correct positions using the Edit functions and rotation tool. etc etc.

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You have people who want a nicely decorated home -- and those who want to create a nicely decorated home.  (Tho not personally build one.)  I do get IMs from people asking me about a whole furnished house package, and sometimes it takes quite a long conversation to convince them that this is not what I am selling (and that quite nice packages can be found on the Marketplace). My customers are those for whom creating a beautiful environment is one of the most enjoyable things they do in SL, and understand that it takes a bit of work to do that.