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.