As I mentioned yesterday, it has been weeks since the podcast. Gianna mentions that in the opening post. Lots happening in her life; hurricanes, holidays, and work. Whatever, we have a new podcast titled ‘Duh’ and I got to listen to it this morning.
Free Second Life Amazon Offer
As usual I don’t quote or transcribe the podcast. I write my take of what I hear. So, be smart, listen to the podcast before you react to anything.
02:00 Drax talks about his time off the podcast thinking about and forming a new collaboration for a big project. I am sure it must be Angry Frogs… (NOT).
03:45 Wackadooles having the same old talking points.
04:50 Talking about recent drama. The Amazon thing is first.
06:15 Discussion about offering SL as a game on Amazon. Drax thinks it is a good thing because of the number of people using Amazon. SL defies categorization, so being in ‘games’ is no big thing.
8:30 Karl agrees Drax is right. Since one has to pick a category, which category would you put it in?
09:30 Discussion swings into the free offer. If you don’t know, the Lab made SL available on Amazon for US$9.95, which I think is the free SL account with a vehicle package taken from the Premium Account package the Lab offers.
What got things going was the 1 per customer free offer. If it had been just the vehicles it would probably have worked. But, the free offer included L$1,000 or about US$4.00. So, the first action of many was to circumvent the one-per-customer limit and stock up on free Linden dollars.
If all the current users signed up, say just the peak concurrent login, that would have been 60,000 purchases or $240,000 worth of Lindens. That would have gained the Lab nothing in the way of new users. So, that would have been money down the drain.
The result is the free offer had to be withdrawn. However, today (1/12) the free offer is back, but without the free Lindens. I’ll cover that in another article. But, for now I think EVERYONE went off half-cocked slamming the Lindens for a ‘supposed predictably’ bad move. Remember. Hindsight is great and foresight suffers from severe tunnel vision. I’ve done a lot of really dumb things that seemed like a good idea at the time.
11:00 Still on Amazon moving into discussing people exploiting the offer. Gold Rushers.
13:00 Game category – better explanation of what SL is.
13:45 The Maze. Very clever and no lag. If the Amzon install took you into the Maze people might hang in with SL. Discussion on initial experience and setting new users expectations.
17:00 Discussing Ciraval’s thoughts on why vehicles were the primary promo feature of the offer. How does one explain what is interesting about Second Life.
22:00 Lab adding distribution channels. SL is not in GameStop.
24:00 Twitter stream – Second Life is evil.
24:30 Discussion on other Linden Lab games. Karl carries on about the font on the Versu site. Drax wonders why the art director for that site doesn’t work with the Lab to improve the SL graphics and promots. I’ll have more to write about that .
27:30 Linden Lab hiring. Visit Linden Lab Careers. Discussion wonders through the Lab site and into the Lab’s other products. Interesting… sort of…
32:00 More about the Versu, the interactive story telling.
34:40 Dio discussion. Karl suggests it is like Pinterest.
36:15 Patterns and CreatorVerse. Drax likes CreatorVerse.
37:40 SL and Virtual Worlds, Phoenix support ending, coming materials improvements., hardware upgrades, Exodus Viewer, and lots of interesting things.
41:30 Are virtual worlds dead? Botgrils post on SL looks at the issue. It is Part 1.
43:30 Drax comments on question. Basically believes it is not over. What is over is some people’s expectations.
46:30 Karl chiming in.
48:00 Starts direct answer to question.
50:00 Gianna discusses the question. Gianna belief is that Linden Lab does not have what it takes to get Second Life to mass acceptance.
52:00 Gianna makes it clear she believes in virtual worlds and SL. She has lost faith in the Lab being able to bring SL to mass success.
54:00 Mostly about what is success.
56:00 Podcasting a big phenomenon but requires too many steps to use, which is why radio is more popular then podcasts.
59:00 Skyrim as example of virtual worlds being popular.
01:01:00 When tech allows a virtual world to be as easy as Xbox games, SL may take off.
01:03:00 Valve’s Steambox code named Piston, a game PC like Xbox.
01:06:00 Discussion on tier.
01:07:00 Drax’s new Flufee video. Political satire.