[p2p-research] abundance and scarcity in second life: market vs. other incentives

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends,

this came in at
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/abundance-and-scarcity-in-second-life/2008/09/03

Any comments and insights based on your own experience, either here or
directly for the blog?

Many thanks for any input,

Michel


   1. Gwyneth Llewelyn <http://gwynethllewelyn.net/> Says:
   February 14th, 2009 at 5:39
pm<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/abundance-and-scarcity-in-second-life/2008/09/03#comment-378237>
   e<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=378237>

   IMHO, a bit of both of your first two questions. Second Life's
*very*open attitude to allowing
   *almost any type of content*, without supervision or pre-approval, has
   given the message to the content creators that they would be allowed to do
   pretty much anything without constraints — and, unlike other
   tools/platforms, Second Life has always included the required tools to
   create content (and program it!) inside the free and open source SL viewer,
   available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. So this openness definitely attracted
   content creators — many of which never dreamed to be a 3D content creator
   anyway (the tools for that are way too expensive and require a lot of
   experience and courses to be familiar with them — e.g. Maya, Blender, 3DS).

   The market approach is naturally vital. Allowing content creators to
   retain their intellectual property rights, *and being able to license it
   to other users of SL* (this is, for all purposes, what happens when
   someone "sells" content in SL: you get a license to use content produced by
   someone else, for a small fee. A tiny fee in most cases: fractions of
   cents!), was the ultimate discovery to create and manage a successful and
   thriving digital content creation economy, which, even though each
   transaction is so little in value, sums up nicely to about a million US$ per
   day. No other company designing virtual worlds has embraced this route
   (although a few have come close). Most feel they would completely lose
   control over what kind of content is sold, and would be kept away from
   getting a share of the proceedings. They would be quite right! Linden Lab
   (LL) does not produce content neither charges any fee for selling licenses
   to use that content. They use a completely different business model —
   content has to be displayed somewhere, both at the seller's location
   ("in-world shop") and on the buyer's location (their home or group). Both
   will require server space to display that content, so LL is in the business
   of hosting 3D content persistently, for a small monthly fee. Again, this is
   completely innovative, and even after a decade since Linden Lab was founded,
   the model is so novel that "nobody understands it yet", as Philip Rosedale,
   Linden Lab's founder, put it so nicely on a recent
interview<http://videos.sapo.pt/LvRnciISAiLPs8RoWev6>
   .

   As for "volunteering" vs. "self-interest"… I'd say that volunteering *
   might* have given a huge help on the very beginning of Second Life and
   during the early beta stages. One year after Second Life opened, however, it
   was the economy of digital content that made it attractive — specially
   because you could make real money out of it. These days, SL's economy has
   gone way beyond merely buying and selling digital content (the services are
   is probably outgrowing pure digital content production) and has complexified
   to a degree coming closer to real life with every day that passes, but it
   was definitely the "economy" that jump-started Second Life, and not
   "volunteering".

   There are still volunteers in Second Life. Thousands and thousands of
   them. All of them very helpful and doing it all for the pleasure of it. But
   3D content creators that regularly offer their products for sale, as well as
   service providers of all kinds (from live musicians and DJs to their
   agents…), are perhaps a hundred thousand… "self-interest", in the sense that
   people can earn real money from this, even if it's just a little, is a far
   greater incentive for those hundred thousand



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