Grendel’s Children are in the news for their decision to downsize, now you may never heard of Grendel’s Children, or visited, but trust me this is a big Second Life brand and was one of the first places to appear on the revamped showcase. Prim Perfect, Tateru Nino, Daniel Voyager and New World Notes have all covered this story, there’s good commentary there, I decided to ask about a couple of other things whilst I had the ear of Toady Nakamura.
Grendel’s Children
Grendel’s Children has pets, dragons, jellyfish, full avatars, and new skins that can enhance (or completely change) your avatar’s appearance.
Visit in Second Life
Now I’m sure there will be speculation about the reasons for their decision to downsize, but Toady Nakamura of Grendel’s children contacted me to assure me that this is due to frustration with support and that it is nothing to do with the inworld economy:
“Our sales are solid. We downsized due to frustration with Lab non response to fixing sim problems. We sold and got rid of the problem as it was taking too much time from staff making avatars.”
Well having the ear of Toady I decided to get some more information, namely birthday parties and Mesh!
Grendel’s will be five years old this September and yes there will be something happening, Toady told me: “Fifth birthday starts around 15th September and we are planning a very fun time.” which is something to look forward to and then I moved on to Mesh, which I think Toady gets asked about a lot and the answer is, not yet.
“We will bring our mesh work to SL when all can see it. I do not want my name on a textured torus and we will not be calling people ‘luddites’ or worse for not using latest greatest viewer. When all can see, we will bring our meshes in.”
The issue of Mesh is a debate that I’m sure quite a few people are having, on my roleplaying sim, the sort of sim where avatars made by Grendel’s might appear, we have discussed whether we should make rules about Mesh, we are currently taking a wait and see attitude but we want as many people as possible to enjoy Second Life, rather than viewing a textured Torus. However progress does have to be made at some point, but it doesn’t have to happen right now, we don’t want to scare people off the grid because they can’t use Mesh.
Toady appears to be acutely aware that some people won’t be able to use or view Mesh and doesn’t see the need to rush into bringing Mesh to the Grendel’s Children store before there’s much more adoption of Mesh enabled viewers, whereas some may throw around tags such as ‘Luddite’, it seems a perfectly sensible view to take at this moment in time.