Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake …. I love that line! Anyway, on with the show. Bryn Oh’s Immersiva has had to close due to financial difficulties. The sim had previously been very generously backed by Dusan Writer, who has gone very quiet lately, does anyone know what he’s doing? I hope he’s ok, I liked his blogs on Second Life a lot. Anyway, unfortunately, for whatever reason, the backing no longer exists, there’s a link here to another sim which hosted Madpea production games.
The good news is that Kiana Writer of Madpea productions and Bryn Oh have both stated in comments on blog posts that they have no desire to leave Second Life. They did request special support from Linden Lab but that request was turned down and I agree with turning it down, not because I don’t think Madpea productions or Bryn Oh don’t add anything to Second Life, quite the opposite, I just get uncomfortable with the idea of Linden Lab subsidising experiences when other people’s creativity is stifled by the same issues at play here, namely how difficult it is for artists, game makers, roleplayers etc. to make ends meet to have a Second Life presence.
This doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy, I have great sympathy, I just feel the discussion needs to be opened up to looking at ways to making it so that artists and their creativity can thrive.
So how can that happen? Well one idea might be subscriptions, there is no easy way to subscribe to the fees of a venture in Second Life. Whereas Linden Lab can put me on recurring billings, there’s no easy way for sim owners in Second Life to get people onto recurring billing and whereas you may think that people can easily manually pay, the reason we’re on recurring billing with plenty of companies is because recurring billing is easier all round.
If a Second Life user could signup to donate some Linden Dollars every month on a recurring basis, I’m sure some would. The big issue would be ensuring that people could easily withdraw from such a venture, which is why any such system would really need to be a server side solution developed by Linden Lab, third party ventures would unfortunately reek of dodginess, such a system would also be good for landlords by the way.
Arts and entertainment in Second Life largely rely on donations, sure artists can sell their wares but art isn’t a big money mover in Second Life from what I’ve seen, certainly not enough to sustain a sim or two long term, yet whenever a nice attraction closes people complain that this isn’t good, but these sims close because of a lack of funding, rather than a lack of will.
There are implications here for Linden Lab’s strides to make developing games better, people won’t develop too many game sims (as opposed to games for people to play) or attractions whilst there are big issues on raising tier, it’s easier to just rent parcels on a sim than it is to develop them into an attraction and yet Second Life loses something everytime an attraction closes. Tier is a barrier but I maintain that tier prices can’t be dropped until Linden Lab develop other revenue streams, this is a vicious circle for artists, but it’s one that there’s no easy answer to, someone has to pay the bills.
Really it’s in all our interests for artists and game makers such as Mad Pea Productions to stay and thrive in Second Life, but the onus should be on the wider community, not Linden Lab, although as I’ve said I do think tools could be introduced to make it easier for ventures to generate funding.
They already have this built into Marketplace for recurring listing advertising. It would be nice if they opened this up for everyone to use. It would not be too far off from the way PayPal handles subscriptions; users can drop it at any time.
The more tools they give merchants, the more money LL would make. I would gladly pay 3% for a tool like this on Marketplace with a nice API.
The marketplace example is exactly the example I was trying to make, far better than the one I cited regarding tier payments, yes, people can sign on or sign off anytime they want and yes, a fee may be incurre but it would probably be worth it.
Set up rental boxes on your art sim, mark the area PATRONS or SPONSORS.
Similar to the buy-a-prim that Ina did a while back, but this would remind people to renew through IMs… and it gets them to comeback and visit every now and then for fresh content.
-ls/cm
That could work with a little tweaking of the messages, Ina had some half decent comms from the SL Shakespeare sim as I recall.
would a donate L$xx / month feature added to Groups not be a simple way to address this
As long as people were sure what they were signing up for, we already have people who get confused about group liabilities.
Once upon a time sims in SL had ways to fund themselves, mostly by renting out a portion of the the land to merchants and residents.
Then along came linden homes and marketplace, and that ended. And now SL too is winding down; as places no longer have any means to support themselves.
Yup, people used to complain about malls (they still do) but they were an economic neccessity, now they’re struggling things are starting to bite as that income stream helped people to be more creative. This is why the whole tier issue needs to be addressed in tandem with Linden Lab generating more income streams.