Sony Online Entertainment’s Landmark, formerly known as Everquest Landmark has issued a call to arms for the creative types to sell their wares on the Landmark marketplace via their player studio :
Player Studio offers players the opportunity to create in-game items that can be sold in the marketplace for royalties (i.e. real world money!)
After you’ve mastered building in Landmark, take your creations to the next level! Save a piece of your creation or the entire project as a template. Price them and place them on the Showcase Marketplace and earn real money when other players purchase them.*
Get to know the builder audience, understand their needs, keep tabs on what is available on the Showcase, and build things that players will need or want. You can contribute to the Landmark community while earning real money. Turn your hobby into a profit center.
The email I received about this had some additional information regarding who can participate, which is rather an important piece of the pie :
Player Studio registration is available for Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. More countries coming soon!
There are other important points to note, some of them very important. The FAQ makes for interesting reading, especially the part about how player studio works :
SOE’s Player Studio program invites players to download sample geometry files for actual in-game objects and through the use of standard third party art tools, learn how to develop, design and personalize items of their own – from re-coloring and re-texturing, to reshaping an item’s geometry. Once complete, players are encouraged to name and create a description for their item, describe how the item will fit into the game’s ongoing narrative storyline, and submit it to SOE for review and possible inclusion in the SOE Marketplace. If a player-created item is selected for inclusion in the SOE Marketplace, SOE will share 40% of the net amount it receives from the sale of the item with the player that created the item.
The free nature of the Second Life marketplace definitely has advantages over Sony Online’s player studio, both in terms of commission and in terms of freedom to create.
In many ways it’s unfair to compare the Landmark marketplace to Second Life. Landmark’s marketplace is aimed at, well, Landmark the game. This will mean there will be more of a design philosophy revolving around items to add to the game both in terms of appearance and performance.
Second Life is not a game, as many are quick to point out. Therefore the same sort of limitations do not apply and people are free to upload pretty much what they like, within reason of course.
Sony are going to apply a vetting procedure for items, Linden Lab do not do that. I prefer Linden Lab’s approach, although I have certainly read comments from people suggesting that Linden Lab should apply some quality control to stop Second Life being awash with low quality merchandise and content that degrades performance. I disagree with that in the case of Second Life, people learn from the low quality merchandise and one man’s low quality is another man’s dream item. However Linden Lab should definitely promote their good building practices more frequently.
However it does make absolutely perfect sense for Landmark to have quality control, because it’s not a world with the same sort of blank canvas as Second Life. We are looking at two different concepts here, although there is clearly some crossover.
Second Life’s user generated content and economy are certainly envied by many, although the problems that accompany such content probably aren’t envied. However Second Life remains an excellent choice for content creators, but as we see with Landmark, others are slowly starting to creep into the territory that attracts Second Life content creators. I imagine this will continue at a slow pace but for content creators, it’s certainly good to see more worlds embracing the concept, even if they can’t quite match the dynamism of Second Life.
I’ll be interested to see how the Landmark marketplace turns out, I’m sure more will follow suit over time, but for now, Linden Lab can be quite content with their marketplace, despite its flaws.