Skill Gaming Ventures Start To Get Approval

On August 13th I blogged about the problems both Linden Lab and Skill Gaming applicants had experienced with the application process : Skill Gaming Applications Appear To Be A Skill Game In Their Own Right. In that post I highlighted the moving goalposts of the application process and how they were proving challenging to applicants.

Linden Lab had initially set a deadline of August 1st for this policy, that was later pushed back to September 1st. In my post I felt that September 1st was looking a little problematic, indeed I said :

I’m firmly in the camp that believes that this deadline will need to be pushed back again, but that in itself is no bad thing because we can see that this is a learning curve for Linden Lab and applicants. The important thing to do is to get this right.

Days passed and my opinion did not change, there were no signs on the public wiki of any approved games or operators. However it seems that I was wrong, something I’m not afraid to admit, because approved operators, regions and games have started to rear their heads, as we can see if we look at the public wiki page : Linden Lab Official:Second Life Skill Gaming Approved Participants.

Whereas there are a number of listed Skill Gaming Operators, I’m not sure they are all different people, here’s a current list :

• MooTownGames SLSGO
• SushantDiesel SLSGO
• SushantYing SLSGO
• SushantLecker SLSGO
• EchoBlaylock SLSGO
• PokaMachines SLSGO
• PIGamesResident SLSGO

At this stage I’m not sure if all Skill Gaming operators will have SLSGO after their name or whether this is indicative of this only really being one applicant. The same applicant certainly appears to have more than one operator licence because the contact email addresses are the same in some cases, or extremely similar in others.

There are a number of listed regions associated with each operator, but again we see some regions listed next to more than one operator.

When it comes to approved games, there are a whole host of them, far too many for me to list. However they seem to include Chess and Solitaire as well as games such as No Devil.

There are still some concerns, nowhere can I see details of the price of the quarterly fee. This seems to be a glaring omission. The fee is waived through to December 31st 2014 but it still appears to be a glaring omission. The lack of a listed fee has left some to speculate that the fee may be variable or percentage based. I have no idea whether this will be the case or not.

Skill gaming is coming to Second Life, whether this will be good or bad only time will tell but the September 1st deadline now looks as if it will definitely be met. This will disappoint those who have not applied and now have to go through the painful process of shutting down their ventures but I do feel Linden Lab are doing the right thing here by regulating this market.

I would imagine we’ll see a little confusion initially but it should settle down after that. I’ll be interested to see if this attracts people to Second Life who have never been to Second Life before or whether some of the official online gaming ventures see Second Life as a place to peddle their wares.

Tweet