New World Notes

EA Should Have Made Star Wars Battlefront 2 Free-to-Play With No Upfront Retail Price, Says Game Design Guru Raph Koster

Veteran game designer Raph Koster has a thought-provoking blog post published in response to the massive controversy over pay-to-win loot boxes in the new online game Star Wars Battlefront 2 from Electronic Arts, which retails for about $60 but requires paying much more to unlock all the game content. (Similar to the gacha controversy in other online worlds.) The problem, as Raph explains in detail, is AAA games like SWBF2 are becoming more and more expensive every year ($120-200 million+, not counting marketing), and it's becoming near impossible for game companies to make a profit just from retail sales.

But how does he think EA could have avoided the imbroglio?

"Not having a box price?" Raph tells me. In other words, go completely free-to-play with no retail box, and make loot box purchases (or whatever) a completely optional payment. "What most angers people, I think, is the perception of double-dipping."

Some MMOs and games like Team Fortress 2 have made quite a lot of money as F2P, though it'd probably be difficult to convince a hidebound company like EA to ditch retail sales completely:

Substance Painter Challenge: Win a 1 Year Substance Subscription & Other Prizes from Allegorithmic & Sinespace

The Substance Painter Challenge is a new contest from Allegorithmic, a developer of industry standard tools for material creation and texturing of 3D models, in partnership with  Sinespace, the upcoming Unity 3D-based MMO from SL pioneers (an NWN media sponsor): Create 3-6 to images in Allegorithmic's Substance Painter for a chance to win three prize packs, each worth over $1100 -- including a 1-Year Subscription to the Indie Substance Monthly Plan, sponsored by Allegorithmic, and a 1-Year Subscription the highest "Standard 5" package for Sinespace, sponsored by Sinespace. More details on the Sinespace blog. Also, tomorrow at 8am Pacific time, Allegorithmic's Vincent Gault and Sinespace founder Adam Frisby are giving a masterclass on Substance Painter on YouTube live: Go here to view it then, or here on New World Notes tomorrow morning.

This Weekend: Second Life's Virtual Ability Island Hosting International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference (Free & Open to the Public)

The 6th annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference this coming weekend has an impressive roster of experts speaking on disability issues, and it's free and open to anyone who wants to virtually attend on the Second Life island known as Virtual Ability: Location info/direct teleport here.

As longtime SLers know, Virtual Ability is a RL non-profit using Second Life as a social platform for the disabled, and the brainchild of the amazing Ms. Alice "Gentle Heron" Krueger, who was featured in the recent Atlantic Monthly profile of Second Life:

Explore This FCC Broadband Coverage Map to See How Much the End of Net Neutrality Will Likely Screw You Personally

Via reader "irihapeti", here's an interactive map from the FCC displaying broadband coverage across the US, a vivid illustration of Philip Rosedale's point that few Americans have a meaningful choice between competing broadband providers -and why the FCC's proposed ending of net neutrality, the regulation that prohibits ISPs from charging extra for different Internet sites and services, is so concerning .

You can adjust the Minimum and Maximum number of providers on the map interface, which is an important way of indicating how likely a given area is to be hurt by the end of neutrality. An area with many providers -- five or more is a pretty good bar -- probably has enough competition that local consumers can easily switch their provider, if their current one starts adding extra fees for specific Internet services, or throttles them. (For example, let's say, broadband-heavy virtual world/social VR/MMO usage.) As you can see in the screencap above, folks in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and a few other big/wealthy cities will probably be fine if net neutrality goes away. (Though notably and ironically, people in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Bay Area may not do as well.)

Less than five competitors, the option to switch gets increasingly difficult -- two or less, and switching is probably next to impossible.

How many Americans have two or less broadband options? Here's how many:

Linden Lab Aims to Fully Deploy Second Life to the AWS Cloud by "Hopefully Next Year" -- Though Third Party SL Viewers Pose Major Challenge

Linden Lab announced plans to fully deploy Second Life to the cloud last August, and now here's Linden's senior systems engineer Tara Hernandez giving more details of those plans. She gave the talk at Amazon's AWS re:invent 2017 conference, and so it's mostly about deploying Sansar in AWS -- which is somewhat ironic, because that's the same conference where AWS announced its own VR platform Sumerian, a Sansar competitor. Anyway, if you're a hardcore cloud geek you should watch the whole thing, but the meat on the SL cloud deploy happens around 32 minutes in:

We're still making a lot of money [from SL], we want to keep thing running as long as possible. So we are actually going to try and retrofit Second Life, a thirteen year old data center-designed product, into AWS. We're going to containerize it. We're going to have to figure out how to solve the fact that there's 8 different ways to access a single database. But we're already working on it... so hopefully next year, we'll be back to talk about how this migration went -- and we'll be running a 13 year old product on a brand new cloud.

One of the biggest challenges to doing that, she mentions, is dealing with third party Second Life viewers, which are much more used than the company's official software:

That's good and bad: It's great because we have an engaged user audience, and it's bad because nothing ever dies. So when we move this thing we have to make sure we don't break stuff. But I have a really smart team, and I think they're going to pull it off.

I'm not on her team, but if I was, I'd recommend just outright buying one of these big third party viewers, like Firestorm, and hiring its lead developers. (Who are currently working on the viewer for a pittance of donations from, frankly, its largely ungrateful userbase.)

Another interesting point from a bit earlier in the talk: Ms. Hernandez hints at using AWS to instance Second Life regions, so they're not always "on" -- which would be a good way of making region deployment cheaper for the company, and thus, opens up the potential of passing on region discounts to the users who pay for them:

Cajsa's Choices: The Stylishly Sensual SL Photos of Shiloh Lyric

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Shiloh Lyric’s photos catch my attention with bold colors and heavy shadow, strong emotions, and tasteful eroticism. Light is an important element in her work, even when its power is evidenced by its absence. I love how her work demonstrates how much more erotic discretion is than blatant exposure.

There are nudes in her stream and sexual images, but they are artfully done. They don’t scream “Look at me, I have sex.” After all, having sex is the most ordinary, universal, not-unique thing any of us do.  

After the break, more stylish sensuality from Shiloh -- who shares inspirations for her work, advice for new SL photographers, and a glimpse at her RL:

Philip Rosedale Defends Net Neutrality, Warns of Dire Consequences to Social VR Platforms Like Second Life & High Fidelity If It's Ended

Second Life and High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just made a strong public statement in support of preserving net neutrality, the Obama-era regulation that preserves an affordable Internet for American consumers by prohibiting ISPs from charging extra for different Internet sites and services. Ajit Pai, Trump's appointee to head of the FCC (and formerly a lawyer for Verizon), is moving forward on his announced plans to scrap net neutrality, arguing that it will encourage competition and new Internet services. Rosedale, however, argues it will do just the opposite -- and adversely impact users of MMOs/social VR/virtual world platforms like Second Life and High Fidelity:

"The end of net neutrality would be especially negative for high bandwidth services like SL and High Fidelity that are delivered by less powerful companies," he tells me. "I would not be surprised to see providers with no competition simply re-introduce by-the-megabyte billing for 'non-premium' services, taking us all the way back to the stone age of AOL and other early online services. "

The "no competition" part is key, because a majority of Americans do not have a meaningful choice between competing broadband services. As Rosedale explains:

Virtual Reality Hype Check: VR Headset "Shipments" Don't Necessarily Mean Sales -- And Definitely Don't Mean Usage

"Strong demand" actually means demand from retailers, but not necessarily consumers

I keep seeing this report from analyst firm Canalys in the tech press (infographic above) as evidence that we're seeing a huge surge of interest in virtual reality headsets, or at the very least, that VR headset sales are slowly rising out of the doldrums:

Virtual reality headset shipments are showing no signs of slowing, as the quarterly total exceeded 1 million units for the first time in Q3 2017. Sony took the lead, shipping more than 490,000 PlayStation VR (PS VR) sets in Q3. It was followed by Oculus, which shipped 210,000 of its Rift headsets. HTC took third place, shipping 160,000 Vive VR units. Collectively, Sony, Oculus and HTC made up 86% of the total market in Q3 2017.

Little noticed, however, is the Canalys report's fixation on the verb "ship" to the exclusion of "sales", which aren't mentioned. There's a good reason for that. Shipments are not necessarily the same as sales:

WHAT DOES “SHIPPED” MEAN?

... These “revenue recognized” products are sold to a distributor, typically for a phone that’s an operator. These sales satisfy the requirements for financial reporting as revenues booked. But they are not in the hands of users. Nor are they “activated” and they don’t generate page views that are measured by web analytics companies. Most analysts and companies now use the phrase “Shipped” to describe these revenue-recognized units though it’s also common to hear “sold”.

Emphasis mine, because it's boggling how often this subtlety is missed. The Canalys report seems to be indicating a small growth in VR headset purchases by retailers who are anticipating increased interest in these devices by consumers. However, that doesn't necessarily mean all or even most of these 1 million units are already in consumers' hands.  We probably won't have clarity on actual sales until next quarter or even next year. 

Even more key? Neither shipments or sales necessarily mean usage -- whether consumers are actually consuming content on their VR headsets on a regular basis, or giving up on them after a few tries and letting them gather dust on the shelves. And we do have some indication on current usage -- VRLFG.net is one place to go, since it pulls data from Steam's API to track people playing VR-compatible games and software on Oculus or Vive. And here's how many people are doing that right now:

Watch: The Hilarious Hell of the Second Life Noob Experience

This is fairly witty and fun in an in-your face way: Longtime SLer Lexy Nexen creates a new avatar named BasicAzzBecky (because of course she did) and then tries out the new first-time user orientation for Second Life noobs, semi-trolling fellow noobs who are actually noobs. We were just talking about how the SL experience of those who left is as valid as those who stayed, so here's an F-bomb heavy illustration of why that is. To paraphrase Sartre or maybe Kim Kardashian: Hell is other people's avatars.

This Year's Big Christmas Movie is Not Only About Avatars, It Also Assumes the Audience Already Knows About Avatars

Milestone for an once obscure term that some 10-15 years ago, was mainly known only to virtual world users: Avatars. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is this year's high profile, big budget Christmas movie, and it's about high schoolers being transported into a game world where their avatars are quite different from who they are IRL. At one point in the trailer, Dwayne Johnson casually says "avatars", as if the audience already knows WTF that even means: "I think we've become the avatars we chose!" And this is not a sci-fi movie like Tron: Legacy where the avatar aspect is more specific to the story's background, or even the actual Avatar movie, where much of the movie was devoted to explaining step-by-step what avatars are supposed to be: