Coming Soon To Second Life – A Licence To Skill

Cerise over at SLUniverse has noticed some new wiki pages being published by Linden Lab with regards to the thorny area of skill gaming in Second Life.  The wiki pages are official Linden Lab wiki pages, which means I’m not supposed to distribute or copy any content, which is a shame. However I can paraphrase and link. The pages are :

However hot on Cerise’s heels are Linden Lab, who have now blogged about the subject, which means I can officially quote them : Coming Soon: Skill Gaming in Second Life. I should have had a wager on how long after Cerise’s post Linden Lab would blog, of course that would not have been a game of skill and is therefore forbidden! Where was I? Oh yes, skill gaming coming soon to Second Life. The coming soon part is important and is also likely to be controversial because skill gaming exists in Second Life today. However things will change on August 1st.

There’s a lot of detail in the blog post and more importantly the wiki pages, but here are the key points to chew over :

  • Skill games that offer Linden Dollar payouts will be allowed in Skill Gaming Regions only.
  • Only operators approved by Linden Lab will be allowed to run skill games that offer Linden Dollar payouts on Skill Gaming Regions.
  • Creators of skill games that wish to make them available in Second Life may do so only through Skill Gaming Regions and only after the games have been approved by Linden Lab.
  • Access to Skill Gaming Regions will be restricted to Second Life users who are of sufficient age and are located in a jurisdiction that Linden Lab permits for this kind of online gaming activity.

The devil is in the detail so I suggest that anybody interested reads the details carefully. However there are some very interesting concepts being applied by Linden Lab here. For a start, to apply for a Skill Gaming License …. wait that’s too long, I’m going to rename this as a SGL, ok? Right, to apply for a SGL you will have to pay a non-refundable fee of US$100.00. Note this is just for the application and will be applied even if your application is rejected.

The above fee and licence applies not only to those wishing to run skill games on their skill gaming region, it also applies to those who want to create skill games in Second Life. On top of this the fact that the tier is getting even higher! Skill gaming regions will cost US$345.00 a month in tier, instead of US$295.00.

Other fees are mentioned, for both creators, owners and those who want to operate skill gaming venues, they are all required to pay a quarterly licence fee . I do not know how much this quarterly licence fee will be, it is being waived through to December 31st but it would be nice if Linden Lab gave people an indication of how much this fee will be.

Another interesting aspect of this is that there will be restrictions on who can access Skill Gaming Regions … SGR’s? Ok we’ll stick with the long form on that one. There will be no officially sanctioned skill game operations on Linden Lab’s mainland. I hear some folk cheering at the back, simmer down. Therefore all official skill game operations will be on private regions and if you are not considered old enough, or live in an area where skill gaming is forbidden, you won’t be able to enter a skill gaming region. Currently this rules out folk from :

Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee.

Another interesting aspect of this is in terms of Linden Lab authorising content, determining that content must be named in a certain way and that content is forbidden from being group owned. This is obviously a governance related issue but Linden Lab have always stepped away from authorising content in the past.

There are other issues here, the application form makes for interesting reading as it asks people for details of skill gaming operations they’ve been running since January 2013. The form also asks them if they have provided required account documentation, which I would safely bet will be a requirement.

However then there’s the legal issue and the form and FAQ both mention legal opinion, in this case whether an attorney can provide a reasoned legal opinion on the legality of the games in question.

My first reaction to all this is that Linden Lab are doing the right thing here and it’s a shame it wasn’t done earlier.  However I feel that existing operators of skill gaming will run a mile due to all the hoops they have to jump through and fees they will incur.

This makes me wonder why Linden Lab are introducing such a policy and therefore it leads me to speculate that Linden Lab know of some official companies who are looking for an opportunity to engage in virtual worlds who won’t find the process of such an application so daunting. These companies would not want to see their ventures undermined by people running illegal skill games, so Linden Lab are making everyone follow the squeaky clean line, which is absolutely correct.

There’s too much to this for it to be an issue of Linden Lab wanting rid of skill games in Second Life, they wouldn’t go to all this trouble unless they thought there would be takers for this venture. I am of course speculating but I feel a well known brand may well appear in Second Life in the near future.

This looks rather interesting and the concepts applied are ones that could be applied to future Linden Lab virtual worlds too, interesting times indeed.


3 Replies to “Coming Soon To Second Life – A Licence To Skill”

  1. Like you say “The devil is in the detail”. Just how far will LL go in defining a “game”? For instance, is a Money Tree a game?
    Should be fun seeing this play out over the coming months 🙂

    1. Money tree doesn’t have a pay in component for the user to win, so it’s outside the scope of the policy.

      Greedy Greedy on the other hand may have a problem as the pay option is for users to play for the pool.

  2. i think LL will loose a lot of investors in SL! Smaller land owners and rentors supplement their income with a few games in their clubs, malls or shops. Why not limit these smaller investors to the amount of games they have, perhaps 12?
    i know one game seller closed his shop while pending all of these changes, and he had been here since 2007! i also know an owner closed his casino and he created some of the most exciting games you have ever seen! He didnt even sell them, he did it for fun! Isn’t that was SL is all about?
    If LL contiues along this path with ALL these fees, there will be only a few people creating these games and in the end there will be only a few companies controlling ALL the games in SL!!! Is that what LL has in mind?
    btchroxy Sorciere

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: