Gavin Hird

This is not a discussion about Apple vs Andriod. It is a discussion about Linden lab's market place, and where I have made suggestions on how a developer program can be fashioned along the same simple lines for enrollment and benefits. It is NOT a suggestion to adopt Apple's business model.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: If Apple's App Dev program is your idea of "low barriers to entry"... we are on a totally different wavelength. LL putting in Apple's model would destroy SL's future merchant community growth or merchants and content. Not sure the developers in the iOS program who so far has had $3 billion in revenue paid will agree on that. How much has so far been paid to the Andriod developers who are supposed to give their apps away for free mostly?

Toysoldier Thor wrote: PS - have you ever researched how many hurdles a developer must go through to be an APPLE APP developer??? There is exactly one: Pay the $100 yearly member fee if you want to trade on the App Store. If not, download the free Xcode and iOS/Mac SDKs from the App Store. I have done it. It takes 2 minutes to get into the program. ;-)

I am totally with you there re the linking of alts to a main account. It should not be possible to create one without linking it to a main. Also the inventories should be shared between main and alts. Mesh needs a search flag in the marketplace, then they don't need to change anything else. Somebody found out that the "100% mesh" was searchable, but that is not true. It only yields a return because people have put 100% mesh in the description field which is indexed

You are putting a lot of words in my mouth I never uttered or wished for. My statements are purely for the Marketplace. The oportunity for everyone shall still remain as is in-world. The problem with the marketplace is one of crowding the way it is laid out – crowding of freebies, crowding of demos, crowding of ripped and stolen goods, crowding of old stuff that hang around in servers people have long time forgotten about. It does, in addition, remove attention from in-world activities and discourage land use for commercial purposes. Which bites LL's hand much more than mine. A sound developer program can be run modelled on Apple's developer program where barriers to entry and participation are low, it gives you rights to trade in the App stores, and it gives you great access to documentation, beta products and forward looking product plans. Fashioned in this manner, the barrier for the hobby builder who finds he wants to go "pro" is very low. it does not eliminate the issue of ripped and stolen goods, but it minimizes the attractiveness of it.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: (PS to make you feel better - I was forced to PIOF but only because I wanted to convert all my profits to RL $) Good! As I have stated elsewhere, a developer program is overdue. You should only be able to trade on the market place if member of the developer program. The program should have a yearly fee to be a member. You would have to disclose your real identity to the program manager (LL.) As a member you should be able to trade all your content on equal standing regardless of prim, sculpt, mesh, script ... Membership fees should be used to develop the marketplace, such as having multiple brands for one developer, seasonal products, varieties, much better reporting, campaing management, bundling management, etc, etc. I don't think a direct connection between premium and developer is a good idea as I can see many cases of people wanting to be member of one or the other.

This is not a question about your customers and the realtion to them. This is a question about you - as a merchant and developer - and your relation to Linden Lab and your fellow merchants. By having to disclose your real identity to Linden Lab to be able to trade on the marketplace, it makes you much more responsible in terms of what goods you offer and how it was obtained. It makes it possible to legally go after you if you infringe on other peoples IP. Nobody has said that your RL indentity must be revealed to the rest of the SecondLife community unless you decide to do so. I don't care if I only know you as Toysoildier, but the minute I found you infringed on my IP, I would be very interested to know who you are. Having that disclosed to Linden Lab gives me a certain assurance.

Well, you possibly could, but having to register as a developer / merchant would help eliminate the large amounts of goods being offered on the marketplace that have been ripped off other SecondLife developers.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: ROFL... first of all.... LL doesnt have to take me serious. I Judging from your other and many postings concerning the marketplace, I think you want them to take you very serious, but I guess they already took your point. ;-) To the matter, your can ROFL all you want but the fact is that having registered developers and merchants on the marketplace would significantly cut down on copybotted or otherwise copyright infringing goods that currrently floods the market as freebies or very cheap items. It would also flush out a lot of old items still offered by people who have left SecondLife. Having the same type of registration and quiz for everyone trading on the marketplace would seriously sober up the place. It would also treat all merchants there the same.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: As was mentioned.... its a matter of policy / principle when operating online with online gaming / social networks to have a strong level of adherence to maintaining high anonymity. I really didnt want even LL to know my RL personal identification - in any way. Why would you expect LL to take you serious as a merchant and remain anonymous? A very good and sound business principle is that the parties are known to each other. IMO you should not be able to list on the marketplace without LL having your real identity on record.

I have had meshes go down from 67 in land impact to 21 when the mesh was separated in 3 parts and then linked in-world. So having a few components might make sense. 18 parts seems a bit on the high side though for a chair. Having 18 parts may also do something to your load times for textures unless they all use the same UV.

I am in total agreement with you there, and it was something people booed at me over 2 years ago when I first started advocating it. But even more important is the transition to mesh, as the inefficiency of the scultp and heavily texture dependant prim based content will bog down any tablet that is on a mobile network to the point where it becomes unacceptable (both from a performance and overall bandwith perspective.)

There is another aspect to this debate too, and why it is important to dampen the impact of free items on the SL economy also in the short term: LL has initiated and wants a transition to mesh based content, which technological is a sound direction as everything at the end of the day are meshes. (Sculpts are special, particularly inefficient instances of a mesh based object.) However, the process of creating mesh items is much more complicated, requires highly developed skills and often involves workflows in software applications that can run in the thousands of dollars to purchase. Also, there is a substantial market for mesh based items outside SecondLife, and items that are produced for SecondLife can equally well be sold at hundreds of other locations. Sold at much higher prices than one can expect to get for the same item in SecondLife. This represents a problem in that good creators may entirely dismiss making creations and products for SecondLife if they see little to no return on their efforts. So they never bother to enter the SecondLife market with the creations Linden Lab wants to improve their overall product (SecondLife.) It also swings the other way as SecondLife creators who start developing mesh content, may fast find they can make substanially more income by offering their creations elsewhere. For Linden Lab to be successful with a transtition to mesh, the value of work done in SecondLife and for the creation of SecondLife content must be set higher. This means that creators must be able to expect real life payments on their work to a much higher degree than what is now possible. This is also another reason why there is a need for a (paid for) developer type account and organization for SecondLife, and that only registered developers should be able to trade on the marketplace.

You will get a clustering at the minimum price all right. In the app store it is set at $0.99, but I often see that price point is used as an intro price or a campaign price. I expect the price picture will be more scattered as the market develops. I think the mean price in the app store is around $5, but you also have products running at many hundreds. On iTunes I think the mean price went a little bit up when they lowered the minimum price to $0.79 and also made it possible to sell over the $0.99 they ran with initially.

The joy of what exactly? You can still list your items free, and in-world it is all go.

Luna Bliss wrote: The only solution would be for LL to limit the amount of freebies each merchant could offer on the MP. It's a good thing to impose limits/laws on people sometimes if it preserves the whole - this freebie problem seems to be one of those cases. Agreed, but I believe indirect regulation rather than direct regulation would work better as certain parts of the market is all about open source items (like scripts.) As I have stated before I believe this can be accomplished with the following mechanisms: To be able to list your products on the marketplace you must be a registered developer. Registration has a cost, and it must be renewed annually. A minimum price is established for priced items that can't be undercut by anyone. This is a mechanism that has worked pretty good both on iTunes and Apple App store, and has also been adopted by Microsoft for their mobile marketplace. Alternatively items can be listed for free. If you list items for free, they will not be profiled or even returned in any regular product search. You have to explicitly search the free items category. Search results in the free items category are not given any boosts or relevance, but are returned in random list order as default. The shopper can then sort the list according to newest / oldest. This is to prevent both gaming of the list, but also remove some of the merchant clustering in the search results that we now see. Demo items are not returned in regular product search, but can only be viewed via a regular item that has a demo item linked to it. If you search for the word demo, the search engine will only list regular products that has demo items linked to them. Access to the demo is as per above. For in-world search I don't see any particular need to impose any of the above, because you would actually have to move to the location to see the item in question. This improves in-world mobility and presence, which is good.

The next this that happens in your real world story is that the mall is converted to a Wallmart where all the crap comes from China, and your customers use food stamps because all the jobs that existed are gone. Starting to see any parallells here?

Tari Landar wrote: I was actually truly interested in why some people really hate freebies and their merchants so much they'd want to eliminate them. I'm still rather interested in that topic actually. Might need to start a new thread on it though, the topic is MIA. I am actually more interested in understanding why people think they are entitled to flood the market with any amount of free stuff, and in the process completely undermine the business model SecondLife is built on. With a continued drive for lower prices and more free stuff, the only thing that will be MIA is SecondLife itself.

I have never said to remove freebies from the marketplace, but give them less focus and attention. Free items are up to a certain point important, but for SecondLife to survice, the content creators must in sum be profitable enough to make it worthwhile to support new technologies such as mesh. The investment to get started with mesh is substantial. They must also be profitable enough to find it worhtwhile to pay tier. Without tier, LL would be out of business tomorrow. New residents are immediately pointed to the marketplace for their shopping. The large amount of immediate available free content hurts in-world concurrency because the new residents (16k per day), now have significantly less incentive to explore in-world than before. All new residents (as soon as they come in contact with the gen-pop) will want to improve their avatar and their looks. Since they at this point in time has not bought in to the in-world market economy and are reluctant to spend, their attention is turned to the marketplace to satisfy their needs. Here they can siginficantly improve their avatar without spending a Linden dollar, or even setting foot in another sim. In essence, they stall in on the website, when they should be active in-world. Within the timeframe of this first resident hour, most also leave, so something goes significantly wrong here. I think it might be a combination of being overwhelmed; the viewer, the immediate pressure to participate in the in-world economy, the clunkyness of enhancing the avatar, lag (underperforming hardware), and other facors. Many also come because they expect an adult experience, but the investment to upgrade your avatar for that is substantial. So they leave frustrated.

So what? Still loosing 5.2 million new signups per year. ... and I did not complain about massive listing, but massive focus. Completely different issue. ;-)

The massive focus on the marketplace with new residents ruins the retention, because it gives new residents less incentive to explore in-world. To some extent it makes it look just like another shopping site, only that it sells pointless virtual products in a phony currency.

No, they don't do fine with a hit and miss plan. SecondLife is not a web site. Stop treating it like that!

Do you get any click throughs all the way to a purchase on these? Your guess is as good as mine... ;-)

Ranking top on google means squat when 98% of your new signups leave within the first hour never to return. Over 5.2 million of them do every year.

I am not sure your long tail is more than 3 years for technological reasons. Sculpts will fast be replaced with mesh items, and for many content creators the transition can be a rough ride. Combine that with the mobile client LL is working on, you may have to make significant investments to be successful.