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

Weellllll...

[popeguilty]

Traditionally, going pro in SL involves a female avatar and a selection of special animations...

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.

Re:Pyramidic

[vadim_t]

Why no consumers? Coding in SL isn't a very easy thing. To start with, LSL is their own language, which means you need to invest an effort to learn it. IMO, coding in SL isn't much easier than an actual coding job. Then you to have need business sense, advertise, etc.

There certainly seem to be quite a few consumers in SL. For example, making avatars doesn't require any special tools, but takes serious skill to get right. Any moron can attach a box to their head, but it takes months to develop the skill to make this: http://www.luskwood.com/. One of these costs about $3 US, which would make it worth it when the alternative is spending months to learn.

Of course, this can fail. It is possible to have too many producers indeed. But to suggest that it's some kind of pyramid scheme is nonsense, IMO. If SL gets flooded with people trying to make a living, some will be worthless as artists, and some bad at coding. With some luck, enough normal people will join as well. The first two will team up to sell to the later.

Re:Pyramidic

[merreborn]

"...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.

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?

[ab0mb88]

This situation could actually be every Economist's dream. Anyone who has taken macroeconomics has heard the speech about how economics is at least in part theory since it would be irresponsible to play god with an actual economy. I am sure that there are a number of people just watching and manipulating the economy of SL to see what happens, and maybe write a book about the experience. A potential collapse of the economic model from SL may hurt a few people who thought it was a good idea at the time but it could further our knowledge of economics without causing extreme hardships for real people.

Re:pyramid?

[wjamesau]

> 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.

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.

I've made $200 in Second Life!

[AdamTrace]

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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