Can Second Life Content Succeed With A Paywall?

It's mystical, eerie, and unforgettable-- see for yourself-- but starting this month, you can only access Black Swan island after paying L$199 (about 75 cents.)  Created by metaverse development company Rezzable -- in full disclosure, a sponsoring partner with this blog-- the entry price buys you a working wristwatch for your avatar, and the right to enter Black Swan.  Which seems like a pretty good deal, but the thing is, the paywall method is rarely used by Second Life site owners, certainly not prominently on a regular basis. 

"We have seen the interest in corporate sponsors (like L'Oreal Paris) evaporate," Rezzable CEO RightAsRain Rimbaud writes on the company blog.  "We think the best way to go forward is to charge for an object that can then be used many times for admissions."  If the experiment succeeds, other quality content developers may follow suit.  Aleister Kronos thinks that a paywall scheme will work in certain circumstances, namely "the... ahem... 'Adult' market", while Peter Stindberg raises an even more salient point:  "Yes," he writes, "we all know about profitable SL enterprises. My own company, Babel Translations, is very profitable-- but only within the SL economy itself."  In other words, can professional content creators make a profit from the in-world economy?

Comments

[Hal]

Is it really such a jump? We are invited to pay a few hundred, even a few thousand, L$ per week to rent land in SL. Wouldn't it actually be equally, probably more, profitable to charge the same kind of money for access to an amazing build for a 24 hr period? Think of it as the difference between renting a house and renting an hotel room in a resort.

For (future mainstream) more casual users of SL it actually makes more sense and could be incredibly lucrative for the best builds.

[Anomouse]

Ah greed I hear its good ;-/
To bad I liked their work.

[Laetizia Coronet]

It could work, but avatars who paid and find the whole thing a disappointment may well be lost as clients forever. One needs to be pretty damn sure of the quality of what's "behind the wall".

[anomouse]

It could work if someone was foolish enough to pay for entry lol
To many great places in SL that you can go for free besides I would never pay to just enter some stupid hyped up sim lol Dont think many others will either

[Galena Qi]

I would purchase entry to a group of sims that I plan to spend a lot of time in, but not to one that I want to visit only a few times. I do a lot of exploring in SL, and if I had to pay to enter each new place, this would definitely curtail my explorations. Also, this limits entry to those with $L, which many newbies don't have. Where will their new customers come from?

I love Rezzable's work and understand it isn't just a labor of love, but I think they're on the wrong course. Better would be to offer tiered access - for example one free visit before having to buy an entry pass. Even that won't work unless the content changes frequently. Black Swan is amazing, but it is fairly static.

[csven]

More interesting to me are comments like those from "anomouse". It's as if this is something new and entirely stupid. Yet what are theme parks if not virtual experiences? Same is true of going to a movie theater, a concert, or any other experiential venue. Why is it automatically "foolish" to pay to experience a digitally virtual creation and a legitimate business model for companies like Six Flags or Disney?

I don't get the socialist angle. In either case, money is paid for something entirely intangible. And in both cases, I can choose whether or not I wish to take the chance on whether or not I'll enjoy that experience. Same going to a concert, to the movies, or to Las Vegas.

So why the animosity? If anything, this falls under Lessig's argument that content creators should have control over their work. Is Lessig wrong? If so, why? And should we force all creations into the public domain? And if we should, then why should anyone expend their own irreplaceable time to create anything?

[Ann Otoole]

I understand it is working out quite nicely for Rezzable. Their sim(s) their business. Isn't something I would try.

After thinking about it for a few days I realized something. When I need a sandbox I pay L$35 per day to the Finance Sandbox. So how can I say anything negative about the concept? L$35 a day tends to make that sandbox very usable while free sandboxes tend to suffer.

[YP]

Let's see how long it lasts. I think I'd rather have people visiting my sim, than having no one see it.

[Nightbird Glineux]

*shrug* They're welcome to try it. I'm welcome to stay away.

Still, the "caught between a rock and a hard place" situation that they appear to be in has me thinking. :(

[YP]

You can still see what you're missing if you manipulate your camera just right. Guess what, there was no one actually there.

[Arcadian Vanalten]

Interesting idea, and I'm kinda conflicted on it. Honestly, I LOVE Black Swan. Once. Maybe twice. Been there a few times showing it to friends, but the impact for me, at least, dropped dramatically in subsequent visits. Being stuck in a montage that's a full-tilt rip of the intro to the Twilight Zone is kinda anticlimactic. Still, they clearly did put a lot of time, skill, and effort into it, and as such, it's not unrealistic to expect to be compensated for their talent. Besides, last time I checked, having a full sim isn't cheap by my standards, and I can't imagine it working on any smaller scale.

Art has its overhead as well, and I'm sorry some folks are naive enough to think that an artist should be above being financially rewarded for his/her skills and efforts. I don't foresee LL excusing them from having to pay tier, and I don't have a problem w/ contributing to support the uniquely experiential and immersive arts that SL allows.

[rightasrain rimbaud]

yp--actually sim has very solid traffic still even with paying. So we see that there is in fact a market for people who appreciate and are willing to sponsor high-end creative areas.

People in SL spend (according to LL) $1.5mm per day--so issue is not will people spend money on inworld objects/services, but on what.

We don't force anyone, in fact you can of course still cam around sim, but sim is also interactive and fuller experience is only available if you want to step-up and support the sim directly. Is L199 a lot? It is an individual call of course, but we don't think unlimited access to the ever changing Black Swan is overpriced at all. We have new pieces and events scheduled in July/August like this event http://rezzable.com/style/fashion-inspired-black-swan.

I think issue is more about price/benefit than no price and some open, free random virtual world of broken, incomplete things or vapid malls.

[Arcadian Vanalten]

SO, the L199 is a one-time expense for unrestricted future access? I wasn't really sure if it was a "per admission" basis. Unless it changed pretty significantly, I wouldn't keep re-paying to revisit due to the dropoff effect (although it's still fun to see others react to it for the first time), but as a one-time admission pass, that's actually not bad. I've spent more than that on individual items of clothing, hair, gadgets, etc that I've liked less (and used only once).