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Companies Continue to Get a Second Life
PreacherTom writes "Reuters and CNET aren't the only players staking online claims in the virtual world of Second Life. Yesterday, Wired magazine opened their 1-acre digitized headquarters, complete with neon-pink sliding doors and a nouveau 50 person conference room. Businessweek takes a look at the new virtual offerings from Adidas, Toyota, Lego, and even Major League Baseball in their pictoral spread. 'We are this canvas that allows companies to do what they want to do in Second Life,' says David Fleck, Linden's vice-president of marketing. 'It mimics real life much more accurately.'"
I'm waiting for the day someone opens up a virtual world within second life.
Third life, as it will be called, will be paid for with second life currency. Your characters use SL computers to connect to it, which then runs in a nearly full-screen window within second life (other people who don't play third life can even watch over your shoulder and stuff).
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I completely agree. I started my Second Life account, similiar to you, just to see what it was all about. This was in March or so. I also had heard that people were actually making money by creating and selling objects, and since I'm a coder, I thought that sounded like a fun challenge.
I spent some time in world, watching what people like to do. Mostly, this involved spending time in some sort of dance club, dancing and chatting. I noticed there are a lot of "mostly empty" casinos. Lots of extremely simple gambling devices, lottery type things, etc.
So, I made some casino games, based on real life games. I made some lottery balls with my own twist on 'em. I made some fun party game kind of things, and put them up for sale on a popular shopping website.
I never bought into the system, bought any land, etc. My total investment is $0... I have, on occasion, rented a store spot in a mall, or some floorspace in a casino to test a game, but that was all purches out of profit.
Now that I'm sort of over the kick, I rarely log into the world anymore. Even was I was more active, I never really "got it". I wasn't looking to make friends, chat, shop, or hook up, and their appeared to be nothing left. But I still get emails that my stuff sells, and occasional messages (that get routed to my email) if someone has a question about a product of mine that they've bought.
Since March, I've made about $500USD. Certainly less than minimum wage per hour of coding/testing that I've done, but getting paid for programming little games and having some fun is certainly a change of pace.
I've posted it before... In the real world, you simply cannot make up your own casino game, rent floor space at a casino, and see how it does. It's prohibitively difficult for most people to make clothing and sell it in a shop. However, in Second Life, it's almost trivially easy. I think this is the appeal.