Rodvik Speaks – Part 1

RodVilla has at long last spoken on the blog, a rare treat these days, a blog post that talks about Second Life and Linden Lab. I could go off on a tangent about how the blog isn’t being used efficiently but for now I’ll just look at the content. I’ll split this into two parts, because I like doing that! First of all we’ll look at tier, Linden Lab branching out and the new creators program.

Tier won’t be going up in 2012, Rodvik tells us, but in reality tier needs to come down, however, as I’ve said before, Linden Lab need to find alternative revenue streams for this to happen, it’s totally unrealistic to expect Linden Lab to drop tier prices before they have other revenue streams in place but these alternative revenue streams are needed for the long term future of Linden Lab. Some may suggest that Linden Lab are addressing this by talking of branching out in completely different areas to Second Life, I’m not convinced about that, Second Life needs to be self sustaining, relying on other products probably won’t fly, but for Linden Lab, branching out makes perfect sense.

The problem Linden Lab have is with turning Linden dollars into US dollars, their previous attempts to incorporate advertising on the website failed in part due to the GlamAdapt advertising program being US dollars only, however it surely wouldn’t be that hard to have a service whereby you had to sell your Linden dollars to pay for advertising in US dollars, that’s how many land owners pay tier, the problem really was a third party being involved. I know some people don’t like advertising but really, it’s not always intrusive and I really think Linden Lab are missing a trick by not having advertising on their website, but this is all old territory for me, I still can’t fathom out why they aren’t trying to get the likes of Adobe to advertise on their websites, maybe they have and Adobe aren’t interested.

Then we move on to the big discussion issue, the content creators program, of which there are no details but speculation is rife. People have long called for content creators to have payment info used status, I’m not convinced by that at all, although I can understand why people call for it. However, a successful content creator is likely at some point to provide Linden Lab with their details, they need to if they want to cash out for a start. I have an admiration for any content creator or business owner who starts with nothing and builds up Linden dollars, but if they want to turn those Linden dollars into US dollars, they need to cash out and that means providing information.

However this content creators program is likely to cause some fuss, as the Mesh uploads caused some fuss, however anyone can get their hands on some Mesh prims inworld if they know who to buy them off or have friends who will upload for them, so it’s not a massive barrier, it is an annoying barrier for people who just want to play around with Mesh and see if they can make decent content, but it’s not the end of the world.

However, like all such programs, it’s important to keep an eye on the details. The content creators programs is going to be based on the tools used for the Linden Realms game and these are powerful tools, so Linden Lab want to keep in check who can create with these tools, that in itself is reasonable but let’s hope this doesn’t morph into something bigger than that whereby all content creators need to be in this program, people who want to learn shouldn’t be discouraged from doing so, the learning process is part of the beauty of Second Life.

The thing is all we can do right now is speculate, which isn’t always healthy, when the details arrive about this program, that will be the time to decide whether it’s a good idea or not but it will be divisive, there’s no two ways about this, however as long as the process is open, rather than just some people being given the nod with a behind the scenes process, it should be something people can aspire to be part of, we certainly don’t need a program that only seems to grant a select few priveleged access because they are deemed by some unknown criteria to be safe hands.

The improtant thing to remember here is that this content creators program is for a specific toolset, it’s not about people being able to upload textures or sell the content they create, if it were for uploads or people being able to sell items inworld, then I’d say it was a very bad idea indeed, however that’s not the case.