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How To Go Pro in Second Life
Wagner James Au writes "Soon after Second Life crossed the 100K subscriber mark in January, there's been a rush of big companies itching to develop and promote their brand in the world: first it was MTV, then Coke, and now with SL at 225,000+, they keep coming: this week, for example, Twentieth Century Fox had a virtual world premiere of X-Men III in Second Life.
Since SL is completely user-created content, this entrance of big money has helped create a whole new profession: freelance metaverse developer. Aimee Weber, who got her start designing and selling avatar fashions for fun, has since become one of the best in this field, recently creating a promotion environment for a Warner Brother's singer in SL. So I asked her to come to my blog and give advice on how to get your scripting and 3D building skills to pay the bills."
> as soon as there are too many people trying to take money out of the system
> the whole thing falls flat
That's actually not what happens-- people don't take Linden Dollars out of the system, they just sell L$ to other SL subscribers. So the currency stays in the world. Linden Lab adds more L$ to this pool via a tightly controlled monetary policy (they have an economist on staff) to keep inflation in check.
> there isnt any 'natural resorce' in SL
There is: new content created by the Residents. As long as they keep creating new content that people are willing to pay for, the economy will stay active.
"...because it will become a world with lots of producers and no consumers."
That'd certainly be a change. SL's biggest problem has always been a lack of producers. In the begining, it was *useless* to consumers, 'cause there wasn't much to play with. You had to build it yourself. For casual players looking to just log on, goof off for an hour or two, and log out, that's a deal breaker.
And of course, the more producers you have, the more toys their are for consumers, and thusly the more consumers join.
The SL producer market is fairly analogous to the real-world software market. They're both skilled, technical jobs, and fairly inaccessible to your average user. Of course, the real-world software market has had its ups and downs as well. But if you ever suggested that there'd be more software producers than consumers, you'd be laughed out of the room.
Techies are still a minority.
Seriously! It's not much, but it approaches "real money" for some people.
I'm a programmer in RL, and the idea of creating and scripting 3D objects sounded like a lot of fun to me, so I signed up for a FREE account, and started playing around. Soon, I'd created some casino games and other little gadget-y/holiday products, signed up for a FREE account on slexchange.com, and listed my items for sale. And people actually bought them! And the more people who bought them, the more they got exposed in the world, and more people bought more!
As with any game, I kinda lost interest (Guitar Hero had a *teensy* bit to do with this). However, to my delight I found that even though I wasn't actively working SL, my items were still listed, and still selling. Pretty cool.
The point is that motivated people (like me) can actually HAVE FUN and MAKE MONEY at the same time.
That was my experience, at least. And the other day, I thought of a product that I thought will be VERY popular in SL, and have started scripting it. I'm excited to see how it goes.
Seriously, where else can you come up with an idea, implement it, and see how it works? In real life, could you build your own slot machine and rent floorspace in a casino and have people play it? Not likely. But in SL, you can do stuff like that all the time. That has some value to it.
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