Originally published on my Patreon
Within a day of Second Life’s new Creator Partnership Program being announced, over 300 people signed up with proposals (as the description goes) “to co-create content and experiences that delight both new and existing residents”. It's the brainchild of Marketing VP Brett Linden and Steeltoe Linden, Manager of Product & UX Design, and Brett tells me the program “represents a major pivot in how the company collaborates with the SL community”.
“Honestly, it really came out of a conversation that we had with Brad,” he explains to me in a Zoom call last Friday, “and I think that we have just recognized it's long overdue… there's a desire, I think, from the community, to try to find ways to work with us.”
Among the first fruits of that effort that SLers probably noticed is the Avatar Welcome Pack (pictured above), featuring high quality mesh heads, bodies, and clothing from some of the community’s top fashion brands.
My own immediate reaction there, I’ll admit, was skepticism: Not only do ultra-realistic human avatars come with a number of negatives (as I explain here), how will new users even be able to figure out how to put them on?
That challenge, it turns out, has been fixed. After the call, Steeltoe shared a screenshot of the simplified user interface he helped create. It's the one that new users signing up via Project Zero streaming will see, to easily choose their first look from this Welcome Pack:
Avatar Starter Pack running in Project Zero streaming
“What I communicated to these creators was, ‘These are intended for new users’,” Steeltoe tells me. “New users have trouble with HUDs. So can we do something that doesn't require HUDs and they said, ‘Absolutely’, and their decision was to make separate versions of the heads and bodies they already made, and call them Light or Basic, and they look good out of the box.
“What I think we've achieved here is to get new users over that first really big mountain they have to climb, which is head, body, shape, skin -- that's that's really tough to get those pieces put together and to make them work together and to make the right choices, compatible choices, of those pieces. So I think we propel them up to a first plateau with this Welcome Pack. From there, because the head is LeLUTKA and the bodies are legacy, these users can immediately start acquiring more content.
“And we even included notes in our blog post specifically directed at experienced residents, to say, hey, experience residences, if you see a new person wearing one of these complete redefined avatars, here's how you can help them -- remember that there's no HUD and so on and so forth. So I'm aware that experienced residents do a lot of the heavy lifting of educating our residents on how to customize their avatars.”
To put it another way (as I see it):
A core goal of the Creator Partnership Program is to grow the Second Life user base (both new and lapsed users) through a collaboration of Linden Lab development and grassroots community creativity.
You can see that in another company/creator collaboration which also addresses the first-time user experience. Longtime SL game developer MadPea created a HUD that will be seen by some select new users, giving them a set of daily adventure Great Heist quests and rewards.
While it’s too early to know if this new avatar UI or MadPea’s game HUD can help with user growth, they’re pretty bold experiments -- and a sharp departure from earlier first-time user experiences.
You can see just how much here:
Yes: For the new users who get put into the MadPea onboarding experience, they get daily rewards, similar to how huge free-to-play online games to grow their user base.
Brett again: “The [first-time] user experience is always in evolution, right? It's like, there's no moment where we stop saying, we, oh, my God, we've got it. You know, obviously you've seen that. We've tried with various degrees of success over the years, different iterations.”
Some of those iterations will include contributions from the creator community, either through HUDs like the one MadPea made, or new community gateways:
“[T]his creative program is building a bridge for how we might leverage and work in partnership with the creator community for making improvements to the user experience,” Brett tells me.
“People sometimes misunderstand that Linden Lab is a large conglomerate, staffed with thousands of people. That's not the reality. You know, we're essentially an indie-style size company in many ways.” (Having been to their relatively small office building, I can confirm that.)
Enter the SL community creators as collaborators: “We try to turn to the fantastic talents of the community, and they also have a lot of in the trenches experiences when they come in. Obviously, we build and we continue to work on our own original stuff that we do. But there's no reason that we shouldn't try to work with the talents and skills of the community as well. “
More highlights from our Friday chat:
WJA: Why choose hyper-real human avatars with all their issues for the first Welcome Pack? Are they extremely high poly like many mesh bodies?
Steeltoe Linden: All of these avatars, dressed up, wearing everything, come in at a low Avatar Complexity [number], and definitely lower than what you run across in the world.
Brett Linden: [T]his is one implementation of a Welcome Pack. We have additional Welcome Packs [coming soon]... we might have themed or seasonal or limited edition promotional packs that are available for new users specifically, and then other things that are maybe more sophisticated for existing Second Life users as well. And the nature of what those will look like will depend on how each individual creator wants to work with us.
WJA: Have you all done outreach yet to people who also work in VRChat and Rec Room and Roblox and so on?
BL: I think we'd love to do it. I mean, honestly, no, not yet… We did have a presence at GDC, the game developers conference, and there were some meetings that happened there with non-SL creators for those platforms and others as well. So yes, there have been some, but no, we have not done a dedicated outreach to the degree that I think is possible. That's something that we've already had conversations about doing.
WJA: What kind of other Welcome Packs do you have planned?
BL: [W]e're just trying to be very cautious about what that will look like. But yes, there will be additional Welcome Packs of some form, and they will be themed.
Just to give you a hypothetical, you can imagine, like a pet pack, or a fantasy pack… [then] maybe we do an acquisition campaign.
I'm gonna use the fantasy analogy -- so maybe we do a fantasy-themed, targeted campaign for people, for fantasy role play enthusiasts, and so the visuals, the messaging and all that takes them through [account creation] and then their first landing experience, ideally would match the expectation of a fantasy community. And then there might be a fantasy specific world impact for that individual that could take on a lot of different forms.
Again, I'm kind of getting ahead of the game here, but from a strategic point of view, the idea is for new users specifically, is to find content that would appeal and be accessible and easy for them to use -- doesn’t have to be an avatar, but it could be other things too -- that would benefit them.
And there may be things where these packs come in for an audience that is not necessarily geared towards new users. It might be things that are geared towards sophisticated users where we just have a promotion as well. So Welcome Packs are part of it, and that's not the only part of the whole opportunity.
WJA: I was just talking with an SL content creator. They want to know, “Why won’t they just hire someone to make a comparable body to what is on the market so we can have equal access to the developer kits?"
SL: A new avatar? Well, the market is really quite saturated as it is, and we have talked about that casually, internally, [with] creators, but no, we haven't really pursued that. One lens that you can look at Senra through is that maybe that might have become a standard at some point. But as I said, the market's pretty saturated, and it's hard to get a toehold in this huge amount of diverse content that's already available.
WJA: I’m sure there's been charges of favoritism about the Program, especially like you launch with LeLUTKA so it kind of gives them a leg up on the competition. And how do you address that whole criticism? I think
BL: The answer to that, I would hope, is that we are very open to talking to anybody and everybody, and that's evidenced in the announcement of the Creator Partnership Program, and it’s genuinely an open call for collaboration. Doesn't mean that if I have 300 [applications] that I'm going to do 300 deals, of course that doesn't scale.
We have our strategic lens on what we're trying to achieve, but the idea is that we have created this open process for people to do so… And in fact, without naming names, I can tell you that some of the likely candidates that might be considered to be high level, different players in those spaces, have already reached out to us and/or are in the form submission queue. So in some cases, we've talked and we're talking to them, and others we will be, so we're open to having those conversations
I believe this is sort of a pivot, you know, to being more open about ways that you can work with us. And by giving this open forum for people to communicate with us, we've been trying to do more and more…. Doesn't mean that we're going to do everything that everybody wants us to do, and we're going to still get things wrong occasionally, as we do, but we are trying to open up those conversations, be a little bit more open.
The Program announcement and sign-up link is here.
Images courtesy Linden Lab. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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