Want to Save Your Second Life Estate? Do What Desmond Did, and Offer Your Renters a Minecraft Server

Last month I mentioned that SL land baron Desmond Shang has a Minecraft server which he offers free to people who rent space on his steampunk-themed estate of Caledon, and here's an interesting follow-up: Minecraft is helping him keep his estate in Second Life thriving.

"I don't keep 'hard stats' on this yet," Shang acknowledges up front, noting it's just several dozen of his renters who play on his Minecraft server. "But it's quite clear already that some people are hanging onto their Caledon estate land, or have rented new land, simply because they want to support the Caledon Minecraft server experience.

"It's a modest boost," he adds, "nothing that is going to make or break an estate. It may ultimately save a Second Life region or two, but certainly not ten or 100." But the reason this works points to the problems with Second Life's land revenue model, and why people rent virtual land in the first place. And as SL sims continue to disappear due to heavy tier costs and natural attrition, his strategy is definitely worth considering. As Desmond puts it to me:

"It's basically a 'cool fun thing' to play with, associated with the estate and everyone's friends there. The community friendships are what makes it work. A weekly barbeque would work too, but that's harder to organise than a Minecraft server." Plus, he goes on, it shows "[t]hat the estate manager is actively looking for ways to make people happy... Failing that, it's a race to see who can offer the most unsustainably cheap land in SL. Don't 'win' that race." In other words, why offer your renters more land in Second Life, when you can offer them free land in Minecraft?

Desmond's advice to other estate owners who might want to add a Minecraft server of their own:

• "First, if you have five Minecraft-hating oldbie SL purists renting from you, don't bother getting a Minecraft server. But if you have 100 to 500 people on your estate, some of them will already be playing Minecraft with or without you.
• "Second, realise that Minecraft is more complementary to SL than competitive. This is important. Minecraft has no significant land or 'prim' limits, it's embarrassingly inexpensive (my hosting runs effectively $10 USD/month), and it's particularly ill~suited for dance parties and 'sexy' stuff. It generally won't eat into people's SL time, but may eat up all their Facebook game time.
• "Third, people will bring their parents and their under 16 year old kids. Relax, the world won't end, it's just fine.
• "Fourth, back up your Minecraft server files regularly, and whitelist it. Griefers constantly poke around popular Minecraft host IP addresses, and will destroy everything if given the slightest chance. It's simple enough to stop them, just don't allow them on your server.
• "Fifth: You will totally get used to the cubey nature of the thing. After awhile it's just one more quirk, like SL's 'air typing.' Not a big deal at all."

It's a smashing idea and a great strategy to retain the many sub-communities of SL without spending more money on virtual land.

Photo by Emilly Orr, featuring her and Desmond in the Caledon server.

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Comments

[Ezra]

The important thing is to establish a community and keep it friendly. If Minecraft helps his estate, awesome, but as Desmond put it that's not the only way to achieve what really matters, a friendly fun community.

Ultimately estate owners resorting to Minecraft and other external perks isn't going to turn land attrition into growth. Linden Lab will have to adjust how they price land if that's the goal.

Linden Lab has had 3 options with pricing:

1. Price for no profit and utmost growth.
2. Price for some profit and some growth.
3. Price what the market can bear for utmost profit and no growth.

They wisely ignored option 1 which most bigger companies in San Francisco vying for TechCrunch coverage don't, and thus have made it 10 years with a single product.

But, they mistakenly became affixed with being just about the only company in any of our lives or any of their lives that charges a giant one-rate flat-fee per month that never gets any cheaper even as hardware and bandwidth gets cheaper.

It's very obvious that Linden Lab isn't oblivious to the fact tier prices are hurting Second Life more than anything else; even the viewer. They're a-ok with how things are. So long as they have a CEO that can brag about incredible profit margins every SLCC, it doesn't matter the hundreds of sims that bled away from one SLCC to the next.

Right now, the sim bleed is still at a slow trickle, but growth and success aren't the only things that can happen on a curve. There aren't many more SLCCs Rod can appear and brag profits while flippantly refuse to discuss tier prices.

Of course, I'm sure if Rod has it his way Second Life won't be the sole nor primary source of revenue for Linden Lab before sim attrition turns exponential if Linden Lab keeps its resolve to price for blood rather than growth.

I guess in the meantime though we can keep championing crowdfunders and Minecraft servers to save sims and buy Linden Lab enough time to create a new money maker.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Minecraft's hosting prices are where SL's -should- be.

But its too late... the hype is over, and lowering those prices to realistic levels won't bring in a flood of new people...

So we'll just have to wait for whatever replaces SL to be properly priced from the get go, because those execs and 1%ers backing LLs won't accept taking the hit to their coffee budget that is the difference in revenue that would result from lowered tier... Like people who abandon land rather than shortsell it; they'd rather make nothing from a non-existent service than less from a healthy one.

[Adeon Writer]

I wish SecondLife could have even one drop of Minecraft's community... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCCCD1jMP0o

[jokay]

Kudos to Desmond.. steampunk mines ftw! ;)

Minecraft has been a great win for us @ jokaydia too, and has allowed us to finally build a viable community for kids called Massively Minecraft (many of whom have parents who have or do hang out in our opensim/sl spaces). The interesting thing is we're actually seeing our teen miner's level up past redstone and cubes to wanting scripting and curves ... and thus starting to explore jokaydiagrid and opensim in general.

Having a virtual foot in many environments (including SL) and sharing them all with our community has been a big win and i have to agree a great way to add value.... next stop the cloudparty (maybe!)! ;)