Flea Yatsenko

Well, the majority of the SL economy depends on LL web because most of it is via marketplace. Even if you just want to search for something to buy, you're usually going to the marketplace before in world search. At least that's what I do. SL grid has become extremely stable compared to what it used to be 10 years ago, with it being closed for a day for maintenance. They've done great there, honestly. But I worry about the web part of things, which is where people buy and sell L$ as well as buy in world stuff for SL. If that part is broken, the SL economy is broken for the same time too.

Well. I leave my SL dashboard pinned as a tab in my browser and check it often. There have been a few weeks where just clicking a link or reloading the page gives a 500 error. And then the status alerts show up. Sometimes it's so bad I have to retype in secondlife.com again to get it to work. I'm not sure if it's a hosting problem or a code problem or what. But if you have the luxury to check SL web properties often, 500 errors, long loading times, etc tend to crop up a bit. I also watch the status page often. I've always noticed a correlation between sales being bad and billing and other types of maintenance, with the cycle I've stated in my other post about maintenance, low cost sales, high cost sales, maintenance, repeat. SLMP is running quite nice right now though.

I am actually quite concerned that the focus on PBR and mobile viewer has left not enough people to focus on maintaining and keeping SL running smoothly. Given LL's business environment, I imagine a lot of people are really excited to be working on those projects, but when "SLMP is throwing a ton of 500 errors, can someone look into it?" type of things comes up there's probably a lot of crickets. I'd imagine there's a couple really awesome Lindens doing all the dirty work and they're totally over worked.

It's not just you. I've always had kind of niche products and never really had to do events or advertise and did well. I've been very fortunate. But for the last year or so, things have been very bad year over year. I'm talking about half of what has been traditionally normal. Some things that have changed for me 1. Customers who come and make huge bulk orders are basically gone 2. More low cost items selling more than higher end products 3. Massive droughts in sales where I'm making like a quarter or less of what would be normal 4. Poor search placement, older products being shown more. Even results when just searching my own store aren't what I expect. And I'm used to doing SEO from my other work 5. High end products aren't selling and instead it's very cheap builder's kits or older builds 6. The good times that would be offset by sales droughts are not nearly as good as they ever were I really don't know what's going on. I blamed SLMP search for a while, because the results were bad. But they have improved a lot and things are still rather poor. I've always noticed a pattern with sales where things would get good, SLMP/billing/etc would have maintenance and have problems, sales would dry up, then lower end stuff would start selling, eventually moving to higher end stuff and great sales until the process repeated. But it feels like now that process is broken and it never gets past SLMP/billing/etc maintenance and "entry level" product sales. I have no doubt events have become saturated and they're not what they used to be. But I have never even done an event and have done well (I thank the market I'm in being not overly competitive), and I'm still having lots of problems. This is definitely, for me, the worst part of the year in sales and I usually get bummed this time of year. But even comparing year over year (i.e. this 2023 sept to 2022 sept) things are bad. And they weren't actually very good in 2022 either. The real world economy is also very bad. I had a lot of RL work lined up this summer with a lot of people promising me tons of work. It never came. One RL place I work for had a ton of clients cancel a ton of work. Another had a million dollar house and the $300 check they wrote for some small work bounced when cashed on the same day. I think things are very bad in RL, more than anyone is admitting. Which is actually very scary to me. I have been selling in SL for a long time, I've noticed that usually recessions are great for SL because it's a lot cheaper to have fun in a virtual world than to go out and have dinner and some booze. In fact right now that's even truer, because a dinner for two with booze is easily $50+ here in the states. But that shift when people would come to SL instead seems to not be happening either. It's pretty scary because it makes me feel a lot of people don't even have the money to avoid RL and instead buy a parcel and build a home or hangout or whatever. I think it's easy to point the finger at LL and SL but there's a bigger picture here and I really don't think it's very good. I think people are struggling to pay for food and dropping $20 on a mesh body or something isn't really a luxury a lot of people can afford. This post is getting rather long winded, but I will make one complaint about SL and LL, and it's the reliability of the grid and SLMP, which completely reduces user's ability both to find and purchase content as well as to use it. As an ecommerce site SLMP is horribly outdated, slow, and shows irrelevant stuff way too much. I always say that people should consider if Amazon worked like SLMP. Sometimes pages throw 500 errors, sometimes your order doesn't go through for 12 hours. You search for NIntendo and get SNES games instead of Switch. But I think a lot of people have lost patience with trying to buy things and being able to use the things they've bought. There's so much fighting for people's attention on the internet and honestly their dopamine receptors are fried. They have zero patience now. And if things aren't working they just leave and don't care. Also, this is a hot button political topic so I'll try and present it in the most reasonable way. But people from developing countries have found SLMP is a way to make money and they have driven down the prices of content. This, definitely, and it's demoralizing me for making content for SL like none other. I finally set up in world vendors and yes, that's the stuff that sells mostly in world while old stuff keeps selling on SLMP. Why spend money and time making new stuff if it's not going to sell and you're just going to end up coasting on old stuff? My sales are so low that a major build costs so much it's no longer worth doing anymore. There's something massively broken technologically with the SL platform. And guess what? All these people being shown old, outdated stuff think that's what SL is and that's all that exists so they get discouraged. If you're not making stuff like you used to, you are seeing sales drop massively. Being an SLMP merchant isn't about creating new things and making more L$ now, it's about trying to make enough stuff so you can still make as much as you used to. In the last year I have never sold so much outdated, sub L$100 products ever (excluding my cheap sculpty rock pack people seem to love for some reason I'll never understand). In fact I used to get excited when I got an email about a sale. Now it's more an annoyance because it's probably some L$99 thing I made in 2015. And I'm in a pretty unique situation to analyze sales because I'm working on a new search engine and sales analysis platform and I imported the last like 5 years of sales data and have been making web pages and doing all sorts of cool queries to look at things. Anyways, this ended up much longer than I thought. But I do feel strongly that there is something very wrong with SL on a technical level and it's not making any progress at improving.

I noticed more of my modern products are selling well, but there's also an uptick in SL maintenance related to billing, SLMP website, etc.

Any time you introduce binary packages into a Linux build from a third party that's not open source, whatever libraries that proprietary package was built against can conflict and cause problems. I had an Nvidia a long time ago. This has probably been fixed but what would happen is Xorg would update before the graphics drivers and the drivers would break because they wouldn't support that version of Xorg. Also, once your card gets dropped from support you have to stay on the same version of Xorg or switch to the open source drivers. I built a 24 core server board a while ago for baking. It had an ATI Rage Pro 128. The open source Radeon drivers worked out of the box (but it was so slow you wouldn't have known unless you checked glxinfo lol). People complain about the Nvidia driver because it's the better performing and working driver compared to nouveau. But it's never fun to add proprietary software to an open source ecosystem, unless you're running it in a container or something. But the video driver is so embedded into crucial parts of your desktop environment, it gets difficult. I haven't had a Linux and Nvidia build in a very long time, things have probably changed a lot. But I remember a lot of system upgrades only to find 3d was broken and I had to roll back packages until Nvidia updated their driver.

Unity, the viewer being used for the mobile client, can also make DirectX Windows and Vulkan/Metal versions for Linux and OSX. I think OpenGL might not be relevant for SecondLife forever. But buying anything on a future promise is also a terrible idea. Regardless I agree with Amelia, OpenGL isn't really all that relevant anymore and it's been replaced by Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX. SL's problem is more about being a 15 year old game engine that's using outdated technology, and what graphics card can handle outdated stuff better than the other. Personally I think we'll see 7800XT hit $350 to $450 by April 2024. I'm going to wait, but I use Linux and the open source AMD drivers are extremely good. The graphics card market is really messed up right now. I.E. everything is over priced and it's still selling out very quickly.

I am a big AMD fan and I would never buy a new AMD graphics card within the first 3 months of it releasing. The price almost always goes down and the early drivers are usually terrible. Sometimes they're not even properly supported in Linux.

SLMP search will never be good. There's too much legacy content and all the content is organized in archaic ways, like categories and keywords. There are too many items and not enough computational resources to accurately use sales data, especially for products more niche than mainstream clothing and home related stuff. Last I heard only the top 50k selling items on SLMP have their sales data weighted in results. When you consider there are people here who have 10k+ items in their gacha store, you realize how small and futile that number is. I don't even know what kind of sales data SLMP tracks. But if it's anything like what we see in the merchant dashboard, it's just lifetime product sales. Which is completely useless data for old stores, because people will buy old stuff and older products which are worse will have to be dethroned by newer products. I.E. 10 years of a product making L$10,000 a year needs a new product to make L$100,000 in the first year to beat it in the sales data SLMP dashboard has. If that's all they're using for sales data, they are in trouble. You know the old phrase, "garbage in, garbage out"? That's what SLMP's product database is right now. Poorly organized and labelled products missing important data for sorting and organizing. The expectation that it'll be fixed and anywhere remotely close to Google product search or Amazon can be dropped forever. SLMP has rewarded poor listing practices for a very long time. I.E. if you spam keywords, make 10 different listings for 10 different color variants, edit your pictures and make them deceiving, etc., you will make more L$ and still rank high. Now the SLMP database is filled with inaccurate and low quality listings that SLMP team has to try and make sense of and deliver to potential customers. No amount of tweaking or adjusting things is going to make things better. SLMP search needs a radical change and it needs to accept that there's a lot of low quality listings and outdated content that needs to be removed from default search results unless a searcher actively makes a selection to show those types of products. SEO for web pages is an ongoing battle that web sites constantly have to fight to keep up with. SLMP has none of that, a listing that's 10 years old for a prim build has as much relevancy and power as one that's 3 days old (at least looking at the current state of search). I'm not even happy with the results SLMP gives when searching just my store.

As someone who works with larger platforms like this, they intentionally make them confusing and borderline contradictory so they can do whatever they want with regards to banning or keeping content on their platforms.

SL mobile is going to have to play by Apple's rules if they want to appear on the App Store. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america iOS is the majority of mobile devices in the US. You really don't have to shoot the messenger here, LL Is going to have to play by Apple's rule or else the mobile SL client is just going to be deleted from the App Store forever, with no way to reliably sideload. Like it or not the mobile client being on Play and App Stores is probably going to see a resurgence in something like a teen grid. You're free to look at the App Store guidelines or look at the App Store to see if you can find anything that remotely offers what you mention as adult content. Roblox has "17+" content and to access it you have to upload a government ID and I don't know how it works in iOS. Fact is because of Google and Apple's rules, you're not going to be able to download the SL mobile client from an app store and have the "full SL experience" some of you want. No need to kill the messenger, but Apple can tell LL they don't want SL mobile on iOS for pretty much any reason. If you think Apple is going to be fine with people having sex in private areas on their phones, you're nuts. That's pretty much porn. Again, you can stop with your laughing emojis or whatever. I'm not the one that's got a problem with this stuff, Apple and Google are. And LL is going to have to do something about it.

I looked a little bit about iOS and it's a nightmare, hosting your own local server, signing certificates every few weeks, etc. It's simply not feasible. I don't think a lot of G rated sims becoming popular in SL would be bad. I think it would be great, actually. Leave the adult/mature stuff alone and it could bring in a whole lot of new users and a different audience. And I think that's what LL wants. As long as they can leave the existing users alone and not change anything for them. Let's be honest, SL is for power users who have a high end laptop or desktop and that market is doing nothing but shrinking. No matter what LL does to make SL better, it's going to be stuck in a shrinking market. PBR, all this other stuff they add, it's amazing. But it's not going to bring in new users. Right now there's no reason to make a G rated sim. In fact it's discouraged. Why make a G rated sim and risk getting in trouble for breaking the rules when you can just make it adult and the same people are going to show up? Now, if you make a G rated sim and it means you get a lot of mobile users to show up and get involved, you're into something. And mobile users are generally pay pigs. I.E. running a G rated sim that mobile users like would probably become very lucrative. I'd actually like to see SL go back to that, that's how it was 10 years ago and now it's just sex everywhere. I'm not saying get rid of it, calm down. But to get more options for just social places and to make it so the people who run those places can make money off of it, that's what I miss about SL and I really hope mobile brings in new users who can bring that back.

Not as bad as you think. LL Hosts their own APK for android users to side load. It's a pain to side load on iOS, which is a bummer for iPhone users. But the versions in Play and App Stores are going to be massively limited, probably no adult regions at all. no adult anything on marketplace. I wouldn't be surprised if the app store versions were limited only to G rated sims and G rated sims suddenly became very, very moderated. LL has control of everything though, they could easily just flag sims as "App Store Approved Content" and the mobile client from the app stores could only access those sims. Lots of ways for LL to go about it, none are perfect. But if they host their own APK Android App, LL won't be held to any standards. But sideloading iOS is still a pain and it's going to be the biggest problem with letting mobile users get the full SL experience.

The rights holder has to contact LL for it to be removed. Copyrighted material on marketplace falls into three basic categories 1. Merchant has worked a deal with the IP holder of the copyright material and it's legitimate 2. The rights holder doesn't know the infringing IP is being sold and hasn't filed a DMCA yet 3. The rights holder knows the infringing IP is being sold and doesn't care because they'd rather have the advertising or whatever while someone makes money from their IP The rights holder technically owns the rights to everything on the grid that uses their IP, so if they file a DMCA and want it removed entirely from the grid, it can be. If they just want it removed from SLMP and being sold, it can stay in people's inventories.

The mobile viewer will be free, though. So it won't directly generate any revenue. LL's revenue comes from marketplace commission, tier, premium, etc. There will be no revenue from the mobile viewer. It only exists to get new users into the ecosystem to start paying. LL has to have something worked out with Unity, because there's a chance for hundreds of thousands of installs for $0.

Part of the TL;DW for that video is they are trying to find ways to not show highly outdated products. They are requesting marketplace to detect what kind of items are in the listing (mesh, prim, sculpty, etc). Also multiple variants for a single listing, but that's a dead horse we've been requesting for a very long time. I think what they really need is to pick a date, like 5 years ago, and mark older products as "legacy" content. Notify all merchants that their products are about to be moved to legacy status. Give them a chance to update them, like 3 months. Then make search only show non-legacy products by default and then let them show legacy only or include legacy if people want to when they are searching. Every 6 months or so, products move to legacy that are older than X years, merchants are notified they should update their products, and after a certain window the products that aren't updated are moved to legacy. All it really needs to do is even just have the listing updated, because merchants who aren't in SL aren't going to update their stuff and it'll be able to slide into legacy mode no problem. There are also plenty of other metrics you can use, like the last time the merchant logged in. I.E. if they haven't even logged in in the last 2 years, move them to legacy. Haven't made a new listing in several years? Move to legacy. Hasn't sold in over X amount of years? Move to legacy. Using a legacy content status allows older items to not show up in search while not deleting older content. I don't want to delete old stuff either. The more old stuff they get out of search results, the better search results will be for finding new high quality stuff. Time frames are up for debate, obviously. I don't know what's best. But LL needs to do something because the current search results actively discourage creating new quality content because older stuff will be prioritized in search. They are also talking about variants and how to get merchants to actually use them. My thoughts are simple, multiple variants in separate listings are hurting search results and quality of search. So, marketplace should search stores for similar listings where the title and text are very similar, and penalize listings that have other very similar listings in search results until they are merged into one listing with variants. Google, Bing, Yahoo, all will absolutely obliterate you if you're harmful to their search results and you're trying to rank in them. SLMP has like no penalties for bad behavior. And I'm talking things like spammy listings, not so truthful listings, etc. The simpler the solutions the easier it's going to be to create and the better results should be, in theory. Switching to legacy content listings should help.

It's using Unity game engine. Unity can make it work on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and more. https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/206336795-What-platforms-are-supported-by-Unity-

I don't think people realize how bad that demographic is with computers. A lot of them only grew up with touch screen devices. I can't find the pictures or stories now, but there's plenty of content of college students using touch screen keyboards to code, not understanding how folders and files work, taking screenshots with their phones, etc. Current Second Life is completely inaccessible to that crowd, because they don't have the technical skills required to figure it out and they probably don't have a compatible device that runs Windows or Linux since they're probably on Android or iOS. Some of that generation are fantastic with stuff and some are absolutely clueless beyond Android or iOS. LL is going to have to meet Play Store and App Store rules, the mobile client you download from those stores is going to be neutered based on what content it can access. I am hoping they have a direct download on the website that doesn't have to comply with the regulations on app stores.

If you use copyright content, the rights holder can have it deleted from the grid at any moment. Do you really want to sell stuff to people when it can be deleted from their inventory at any time? Do you want to deal with customers wondering why their stuff they paid you for was deleted from their inventory? Are you going to refund them? Can you replace it with something that's not the same? It's not worth it, you might make a lot of money quickly but you always run the risk of stuff being deleted unless you can acquire proper permission to use it.

That's awesome Niran, that's the kind of little stuff that SL needs to get more wide stream appeal.

LL has done an amazing job of attracting great content creators and keeping them. Meta could only dream of having some of the content creators LL has in the metaverse. Look how many stores have been around for 10+ years. That's ridiculously good for a content creation platform. I mean to get random creators from all over the internet to to produce all sorts of content, and to continue to produce content, is honestly amazing. The place where LL hasn't done well is attracting content consumers. There are empty sims everywhere, major lack of people in tons of places. SL's biggest problem is lack of people to consume content and just spend time in world. Mainly because the barrier of entry is too high from a hardware and software perspective. It has a learning curve, you need a good enough computer to run it. The end result is a bunch of power users who would rather create content than make stuff and use SL as a social platform. But I think a lot of what LL creates for SL is focused on content creators. They need someone to come in and start pushing ideas for people to use the content. Social features, almost like Bumble-type stuff. They need an outside perspective to get SL to start attracting more people who want to use SL, not make stuff for SL. And that includes people who just want to make their own sims or in world places, not even mesh, textures, scripts, etc. I really hope this listing is a sign they realize they aren't ever going to grow if their business model is to get people to pay for sims and land that will be shut down because they weren't socially successful. It just has turn over at this point. Someone builds a sim, they have tons of content to pick and choose from, they build something really neat, no one really shows up, they realize it's not worth the money, then a new one shows up and the process repeats. The end result is just people replacing people and no real growth happening. Unfortunately this is a really easy problem to diagnose and not easy to fix. I think the idea is to have the mobile client try and fill that role. And I wouldn't be surprised if LL was realizing their limitation here. They have some great talent there but they are more like game engine designers than they are game creators. The mobile viewer is amazing for this and I hope it ends up on Windows, Linux, and Mac too. That said there's a lot of competition in that space. SL can do very well though, you can find practically anything for SL. Other platforms not so much. I really hope they are planning on putting the mobile viewer into an entirely different team's hands and try and target a completely different market while they continue to keep the SL viewer and the power user features going. I am optimistic that's the plan. At least I sure hope. As long as I've been in SL it's just been spinning wheels with places opening, closing, creator leaves, cycle repeats.

I'm actually not so sure about that anymore. I logged into beta PBR grid and changed my settings to low, and metallic PBR and a lot of materials are just black instead of their proper colors. I think it's still using PBR because when you change settings it does the screen dim and undim thing only the PBR rendering engine uses. I thought they were going to leave ALM in for low end computers, but I guess it really doesn't make sense as PBR renderer runs far better on my machine. Even if PBR isn't enabled on your region, you can use the PBR viewer to see how the new renderer handles legacy content. Also I can't believe I didn't say this early but thank you so much firestorm team. Now I don't have to run the SL viewer on WINE anymore for PBR stuff. And yes with a little bit of testing the PBR renderer works great on Linux for me with AMDGPU .

It doesn't. And you will be able to use the standard viewer with ALM instead of PBR. The old deferred rendering engine is getting removed and ALM will be the low end version. The content creators who think PBR is a replacement for textures are going to be very disappointed. LL can at least block older versions of viewers to get people on PBR quicker. But with ALM still being around I'm sure given the SL userbase there will be a lot of people who hate change and hate PBR and refuse to give up ALM. Anyone who was around for the change from prim to sculpty or sculpty to mesh knows that it takes a long time for things to change. Now if you are building a sim or even a little parcel or skybox, some of the stuff won't have PBR and some will. More growing pains. Standards take time to change. Yes legacy content will still look good. Yes a lot of people won't care that some stuff has working reflections and some are baked reflections (or something in between). But it's not going to be a clean break. I do not mean to hijack the thread about PBR. It's great it's landed in Firestorm since that's the only viewer I really use. But people who think we're just magically going to have PBR everything and everyone will use PBR are out of touch. Baking is never going away, it's a feat LL got the mobile viewer to look that good on what is basically a GPU/CPU around a low end celeron in performance, to think they will have PBR and all this other stuff on that sort of hardware is not reasonable. PBR is more about the lighting engine than the materials. Lighting, reflections, etc all look way better

the new mobile viewer is non-PBR. Basically, the existing diffuse textures will be the fallback if you don't have PBR enabled. It should look very similar and won't break existing builds, but it will have different lighting.

Best selling is going to be a mess for a while even if they fixed the code. Because the code doesn't have proper sales data to give good results. The larger the store, the worse it's going to be and the longer it's going to take to fix. And best selling works by number of transactions, not L$ earned or anything. Mine are a little funky right now too because some of the old cheap stuff was selling better. But the last week or so my newer stuff has been selling a lot more. But it'll take time for the sales data SLMP uses to calculate best selling to be updated and reflect the changes they made. Right now, only really immediate effects we're going to see are the results not showing horribly outdated products. After customers keep buying the newer stuff, it'll start to show in best selling results. But it's going to take time, and LL to not break anything before the sales data improves.