March 2014 – Page 8 – Ciaran Laval

March 6, 2014March 6, 2014

SL Go – Feel The Technology And There May Be A Subscription Model After All

First of all, a public service announcement. Many of our dearly beloved bloggers were given equipment and an extended trial to test SL Go by Onlive. This means those bloggers can give a far more informed opinion on the technology than many of us. However please don’t take this to mean those bloggers have been paid, they haven’t. Providing people with equipment and extended free trials is perfectly normal and perfectly above board.

Some of these bloggers are being unfairly criticised over this and I say unfair because those bloggers have declared they were involved in the trial and in some cases provided with the equipment or even working as a consultant. That the bloggers are declaring this is positive, if they were hiding these facts I’d be highly critical of them, but they aren’t hiding these facts.

Obviously this means they have a different perspective on matters in some cases because they have had more time to play with the technology, but they have provided a hell of a lot of important information on this product. Having said that, I can declare I have been given nothing at all and have not been involved in the trial in any way, shape or form. Indeed my sources didn’t even tip me off about this or give me any inside information! My sources are currently being frowned at, a lot.

Now let’s take a look at the actual product. Actually first of all, let’s look at the blurb:

Enjoy Second Life at speeds over 50 FPS with a 512-meter draw distance. During each secure session, a powerful cloud-based server streams SL in full 3D to your mobile device in real time over any fast Internet connection.

Stay connected to your in-world friends and events. Manage your virtual business from anywhere you can get online. You’ll have access to the full Second Life Viewer interface, plus touch controls for navigation. Leave your desktop computer at home and let us do the heavy lifting.

Bold claims, can it deliver, well actually, yes it looks like it can. I’ve tried it for a few minutes on a Google Nexus 7 and for a few minutes on my desktop PC. Let’s just pause here and be a tad critical of the free trial, at twenty minutes long it is nowhere near long enough for people to appreciate this product and therefore want to pay for the service. Having said that, I would highly recommend people who are interested in how this works do engage with the free 20 minute trial, it will only cost you time. Oops, you have to be in the USA, Canada or the UK to try this unfortunately, but the trial, as brief as it is, is worth engaging with.

I’ve been impressed with the performance on both devices. On my desktop, I can set the graphics to a higher setting than my desktop PC suggests I should set them and I can walk around happily with those higher graphics settings.

I did experience a few glitches, yesterday the desktop client informed me I hadn’t configured my firewall for UDP, today it loaded fairly happily. I received a warning about my controller, which isn’t surprising as it’s a Nostromo N52 and I received a warning about low power settings, but it worked, I could login to Second Life.

Now this is where the short trial really is a pain point, it’s easier for me to play around with the desktop client because the controls are ones I’m familiar with. On my Nexus 7 they aren’t, but you feel rushed by the limited trial and so I felt the desktop version was the way to go.

Another glitch was that the text on the menus sometimes went blurry, I’m not sure why that was but as I’m sure some of you will have figured out, I don’t exactly have a state of the art PC!

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March 6, 2014

Price Comparisons For SL Go Are Difficult, But Please Leave Coffee Out Of It

Often when people are debating costs of online services, such as MMO’s or SL Go, the coffee argument will be trotted out. On the face of it the coffee argument is a good one, the cost can be compared to buying a few cups of coffee a month, which is true. The problem with the coffee comparison is that coffee is a consumable product, with little investment opportunity. I mean you may get a coffee loyalty card which can earn you free coffee, but you know that each cup is going to be disposed of in one form or another.

People who spend time in MMO’s and virtual worlds such as Second Life are investing in their avatar, there are various different ways of doing this but people generally don’t think of this avatar investment as a disposable product. They see it as an ongoing cost in developing said avatar.

That avatar investment is extremely important for developers of MMO’s and virtual worlds, it’s the hook, it’s why people are prepared to keep logging on, there’s progression. This is why in MMO’s a hardcore mode where you lose everything if your character is killed is not the norm, some have it as an option, but it’s not the norm because if that were the norm, people would see their character as disposable, like coffee.

Coffee is not a good comparison, nor is Pizza or even a trip to the pictures. This of course leaves one in the awkward position of trying to find a good comparison. In terms of something like The Elder Scrolls Online, it’s other MMO’s, and there are plenty of them with different pricing structures.

In terms of SL Go, it’s a lot trickier because there’s nothing really like it. Lumiya is a mobile client for Second Life, but it doesn’t deliver its service in the same way as SL Go and it won’t provide the same levels of performance. However Lumiya will provide a means of logging into Second Life on a mobile device.

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March 5, 2014

The Trouble With Pricing Models

No matter what price a company puts on a product, there are going to be people who complain about it. There are umpteen examples of this, a glaring one for Second Life users is tier pricing. The tier is too damn high for many potential use cases of Second Life, but it is what it is. However there are ways and means of introducing pricing structures that can help to attract more customers.

The Elder Scrolls Online will be out soon, with an upfront fee and a USD$15 a month subscription fee, and there have been plenty of complaints about it. The price itself is not outrageously expensive but the pricing models for MMO’s has for some time been moving away from a subscription only model. Indeed Second Life is a glaring example of a product that moved from a subscription only model, to a choice of payment model and undoubtedly prospered.

I’ll be amazed if The Elder Scrolls Online does not change its pricing model within a year or two of release. I’ve seen this before with Star Wars The Old Republic, Age Of Conan, Star Trek Online yadda yadda yadda. The MMO market has moved on in the main from the subscription only model. There are at least two whopping examples of pretty much subscription fee only models, World Of Warcraft and Eve-Online. WoW has the people, that’s something you simply can’t buy. Eve-Online is far more niche, that’s a good advantage, but in the main the subscription only model is heading into extinction. The thing to note is that many a free to play MMO model offers a subscription option.

Now the new SL Go is getting criticised for its pricing model and I personally think this is a bridge that the concept won’t be able to cross. The technology really is brilliant in terms of delivery, the pricing model is quite heinous and there is a virtual world precedent here, Kitely.

Kitely had a pay per minute plan, it was not quite the same as the Onlive SL Go model, but it was a pay for your time model. On January 1st Kitely changed their model quite substantially, announcing in a blog post:

Until now, users had a certain number of Minutes that they could spend in-world; this was similar to the Minutes in a cellphone plan. Unfortunately, using Minutes had some downsides.

The biggest problem was that using Minutes caused anxiety among casual users: they had to count their Minutes and “spend them wisely”. But starting now, visitors never pay for visiting a world. It’s possible that a user won’t be able to visit a particular world due to the access settings chosen by the world owner, but if they can visit the world then it’s completely free for them.

Whereas paid time has not been completely removed from Kitely, the onus now falls on a sim owner to pay the bill for visitor’s time, but Kitely has a range of other options that mean sim owners can avoid such fees and it’s this sort of range of choice that helps end users.

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March 5, 2014

SL Go – Brilliant Technology Shame About The Pricing

First things first, I haven’t been involved in the beta testing for SL Go, I haven’t been lent a tablet by the people behind the project and I haven’t spent much time using it. If you want an in depth and what appears to be a very balanced review, go and read Inara Pey’s blog post on the matter. Inara’s post is important as it explains some of the pitfalls of SL Go and how it’s not the full Second Life experience, due in part to security issues. However it’s not that watered down an experience.

If you’re wondering what SL Go is, Linden Lab have blogged about it:

OnLive, the leader in cloud gaming, today released an exciting new service for Second Life users. SL Go, now in open beta, is a mobile Second Life viewer for Android that delivers a fully immersive desktop-like experience on tablets.

With SL Go, you can experience Second Life from anywhere you have Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity, with ultra high-quality graphics, full shaders, shadows, and the Advanced Lightning Model on Android devices. Not only can you get high-quality graphics on a low-powered device, but you also don’t have to sacrifice frame rate or draw distance for high fidelity inworld explorations. Thanks to super-fast gigabit connections with OnLive’s high-performance gaming servers, objects and textures rez quickly when logging in and teleporting. OnLive has clocked the SL Go viewer at upwards of 200 fps set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, allowing people to participate in events, engage in combat games, and generally enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on a mobile device.

With SL Go, OnLive has brought touchscreen interaction to the Second Life experience, but if you prefer keyboard and mouse, you can opt to connect these devices and interact with your friends in the same way you always have. SL Go gives you access to edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management just like the Second Life Viewer on your home computer.

There are more details in the blog post, such as how you go about signing up for an account, pricing etc. First things first, it works and it works bloody well. There are no two ways about this, even during my brief testing period I could see that this service delivers.

Obviously the experience is different to using Second Life on a PC. Movement and such like are different, but for those who have experience with tablets and especially playing games with them, the experience is likely to be quite rewarding.

Point and click and mouse view, concepts I barely touch in Second Life on a PC are life savers on a tablet for me, but of course with a tablet you also get to pinch, zoom and drag, which actually adds something to the experience.

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March 4, 2014

Adult Content And TOS – Which Way Will The Wind Blow?

I think it’s fair to say that Ebbe Altberg has made a positive start to his Linden Lab leadership. Ebbe has helped return the Jira to a semblance of sensibility and made positive strides to addressing the Marketplace and communications issues.

Ebbe hasn’t said anything about tier yet, but as that’s a long standing issue I’ll leave that aside for now. However two areas where Ebbe has been a little more uncomfortable shall we say, are the TOS and adult content.

On the TOS, Ebbe has said :

I’m still getting up to speed on that topic. I’ve had several discussions about it. It’s not a simple topic.

Trust me. It’s not becuase we have an intent to arbitrarily profit from your stuff without your permission. That would be very bad for us as we’re all about user to user. We could seriously harm ourselves if we started doing that.

But, the edge cases and the potential cost to us in certain scenarios are quite substantial.

Making the spirit and the language match up seems to be very difficult. I’ll learn more over time but for now I can’t promise anything other than what I said above.

What these edge cases are remain a mystery and obviously it may be difficult for Linden Lab to discuss edge cases because it may cause problems. However from a standpoint of transparency, it would be better if Linden Lab would at least enter into a dialogue with content creators because the TOS remains content creator unfriendly. I absolutely believe Ebbe when he says Linden Lab have no intent to steal content and yes, it would seriously harm Linden Lab if they did. However the question remains as to why it’s so difficult to change the wording to reflect that.

I know some people have tried to address the Lab over the TOS changes, and as far as I know, they haven’t got far, but this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The other issue is adult content and what will happen with it going forward.

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