SL Gacha Developers Lose Estimated "Tens of Thousands of Real Life Dollars" Due to Known Duplication Exploit, Says Top Brand

Above left: Items as originally available in PocketGacha; above right, items being sold multiple times without permission on the SL Marketplace

HyperGrid Business has more details on the unauthorized resale of multiple gacha items reported by NWN last month, apparently made possible by someone making use of a known exploit that Linden Lab acknowledged existing last October:

“It is an exploit that involves the person crashing a sim and duplicating a transfer item in unlimited amounts,” [PocketGacha's Oobleck Allagash] said. “It duplicates perfectly with all the original aspects intact and the creator name the same.” “The best I can muster for a speculative look at this would be that tens of thousands of real life dollars were lost over the past two years,” said. “That would be a significant blow to sales by creators, many of whom are one-person cottage industry artists whose livelihoods depend on every sale.” For the past few years, Second Life has been lax in addressing the problem, said Allagash. The company has been reluctant to remove dupers from the ecosystem, and instead remove only the affected Gacha, but the duper remains in the ecosystem, and continues to re-post the removed Gacha.

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Candida Whirwind]

You don't have to go through all this trouble. Rigged mesh and mesh items are freely copied with the right viewer, and with the use of a third party tool, it can put together the rigging of an item from the viewer's cache and spit out a completely rigged dae for upload into SL. Has been out there for a while .

The people who sell ripped Gacha do so hidden in plain sight. No one is going to bother to check that the item is from a legit creator, if it's a great price they are going to buy it, end of. I think LL knows this also and they are not going to expend much resources to stop it.

[patchouli woollahra]

LL claimed previously that sim crashing and rollbacks to duplicate no-copy items was a ToS infringement that would lead to serious punishment. it's time for them to seriously put their money where their mouth is and come down hard on these folks - or this will keep happening as the ill-gotten gains outweigh the losses.

[Clara Seller]

All creators of conscience should stand up for justice and refuse to create Gacha ever again. Let it be stricken from the Marketplace and it's name never uttered from this day. Do not feed the beast. Gacha helps Trump. Gacha is out of fashion.

Whatever helps get rid of these Marketplace Tribbles.

[Bluebov]

Nobody freak out! LL are putting fees up on creators to fix this!!! Right??