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."

Comments

Pyramidic

[Golias]

As soon as Second Life becomes mainly populated by people hoping to make a living off it, it will become pretty much impossible for anybody to make a living off of it, because it will become a world with lots of producers and no consumers.

During the California Gold Rush, the people who made money were the outfitters. If you want to make money off Second Life, write a book on how to make money off Second Life. Or sell programming tools. Or training seminars. Then use your vast wealth to soothe your guilt for having ripped off a bunch of saps until you die and go to Hell where you will burn forever with everybody who ever established a pyramid scheme or other means of exploiting the ambitions of fools.

Just sayin' is all.

pyramid?

[Burlap]

I can't help but wonder how many people will lose their shirts when the SL pyramid collapses. There is only money to be made so long as people are willing to put money into the system, as soon as there are too many people trying to take money out of the system the whole thing falls flat.

there isnt any 'natural resorce' in SL, you cant generate weath, just get it from someone else, who gets it from someone else, who gets it from somebody who was willing to spend a buck on something... but if that first guy is too cheap to buy the first thing then the last guy cant make any money.


and what will happen to all this money if the server resets?

Re:pyramid?

[Erbo]

I've just started in on SL myself, and I can tell you that economic issues are currently a hot topic of discussion there.

Statistics are showing that Linden Labs is dumping way more money into the economy than is getting taken out; as a result, the L$ is now trading at 340/US$ and going down from there. The primary way money gets poured in is through stipends; LL is trying to cut off the spigot by eliminating the weekly stipend on free accounts, and there are those that would like to see them eliminated for "premium" (paid) accounts as well. They're also phasing out "dwell" (bonus money paid out to landowners based on how many visitors they get and how long they stay). Whether this will halt the decline in the value of the L$, no one can say; on the other hand, it'll cause a certain amount of pain for the holders of free accounts. Some will upgrade to premium, but some will quit SL altogether.

(Some people question the value of a premium account, because, with the premium stipend at L$250/week, you could get more money just buying L$ on the open market with that US$10/month. The premium accounts also get the privilege of owning land, but there are ways for basic accounts to own or rent property, too.)

LL has encouraged content vendors to raise their prices, but many of them are refusing to do so because they don't want to screw their customers, or precipitate an inflationary spiral, or both. And the contract of LL's "economist on staff" has just expired; no word on a possible replacement yet.

Now, this is not to paint a picture of gloom and doom. SL is still going strong, and, with the 1.10 client release, it's never looked better. The introduction of more dynamic lighting effects and flexible primitives open up new possibilities for content creators, and a new capability for making HTTP requests from scripts offers some interesting possibilities for interaction between the SL world and the RL Internet. (As a software guy, I'm interested in the content-creation and scripting aspects, but I'm also interested in the virtual-community aspects of the world, too.) Money's one aspect of the whole environment, but it's certainly not all of it. It's still worth your time to check it out, if you haven't.

Re:Luskwood

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I know someone in game that makes between 400-600 USD a month by selling
animal penises. It's funny, but there's a market for it in this game.