You know, it's not easy being FIC. All that fame and glare and Prokofy criticizing you on his blog.
We only see the FIC from a distance on the runway, getting out of the limo, or with our noses pressed up against the glass as they raise their champagne glasses. But on their side of the firewall, it can be very tough, as we're finding out.
You thought it was all wine and roses, with the free advertising on XStreet and even a special store for selling content behind the firewall, SLE Work Marketplace, which only the gods of the Gold Service Providers (and the demi-gods, the plain Service Providers, I take it?) are able to sell at.
But word on the forums today was that a whopping 30 percent was being grabbed by the Lindens as a commission fee from sales by the GSP to their clients. Gasp!
I began to check this story out, because it was a bit garbled in the forums version, although the point was accurate -- that Linden Lab is reinforcing the FIC system even harder these days, wiring content and rules down tighter to spell less "your world, your imagination" than the old days.
And I caught up with one of my frenemies, who is welcome to out themselves in the comments, who explained a number of things to me and confirmed that yes, indeed, Linden Lab is grabbing 30 percent commission from sales on SLE Work Marketplace. Gasp!
The forums version said that Linden Lab was forcing the GSPs to bid for each job that they found of enterprise clients needing developers, and then the Lab would take 30 percent as a kind of finder's fee. That does *not* seem to be the case, at least not *yet* (eek, I hope we aren't giving them ideas!), but they *do* take 30 percent off any content sold through this SLE Work Marketplace thing which I severely dissed as a concept, calling it also unethical, and over which I cut all Linden cards except Philip's (and accidently left one other, about whom it shall be known in due course) and over which I cut GSP cards, too, including this source. But, frenemies ye always have with you...
Apparently there is a lot of excitement around this store. Perhaps it's mainly been hyped by Justin Bovington. In fact, it largely seems to be about a convenience for him not to have to copy the same stuff over manually for clients and have them be able to buy and upload stuff without facing all the "clutter" and amateur ugly content of Xstreet (as he's been explaining all along, and more forcefully lately). Ugh. So now he has his way, although for the life of me, I still cannot understand why he felt the need to slam all of SL's content makers, amateur to professional, slam XStreet, and bully everybody with this elitist content pyramid tip he and the Lindens have conceived just to get his way for his client. It just makes no sense, except as class warfare. Justin wrote some enormously long post here that got sort of buried and I'll have to find it and answer it in detail, but it was off-topic and self-justifying, failing to justify his grand slam on the content makers of SL.
So apparently the way this works, is just as I had baldly stated it before: the Lindens use the very exploit that Stroker went to court over -- that sim back-up copying exploit -- in order to upload sim loads of content into the Enterprise people's games. Well, not their games, but, you know what I mean, their behind-the-firewall thingies. So, even if you only bought a lamp, you'd have to have this whole sim backup upload (because of the way the web interface panels works and because of some awkwardness in the system that is inexplicable -- I wondered why, if all content is just an XML file, i.e. a bunch of pixels, why it can't just be piped with a digital signature, or code, or zip up, or something that would work to put it through a system requiring a purchase and then a delivery to behind the firewall. Something just doesn't add up here. It's not merely about permissions -- which are a good thing for LL to be checking. It doesn't seem logical to me that all this sim back-up stuff is required and that the osmosis membrane between the main grid an the firewalled grids can't be made permeable for the right price or the right customers
Nobody knows -- yet -- whether any *new* customers have come to the Immersive Workplaces gambit beyond the initial bunch that were already partner of LL's. So it's hard to know if the Lab is doing well with this experiment -- but one senses that if they made as big an bold a grab as 30 percent on the content off the special closed store, then they either are seeing there is a big demand for content after the initial purchase of the SL-in-a-box, or they expect there will be a demand down the line and they want in on it -- but it's a marker for something. Sims-in-a-box obviously don't show up on the regular grid so you can't even count them that way. I'm waiting for the day when some grid monkey slips up and moves a dbase table and somebody sails right into the middle of a board meeting, horrifying the trustees with their ass-less pants and butt-crack-displaying bikinis lol. It's more likely to be the other way around, though, with some PowerPointing blatherer falling into your poseballs because of a sim back-up mix-up. Yeah, I know firewalls are just impassable. Say, did you realize that the outage of SL around Christmas was a giant DNS attack on many sites, including SL?
But the word on the street is that not only is the Lab grabbing 30 percent from each sale among the SLE set -- that's certainly more than even their increased commission on XStreet or the LindEx which are stlil in the single digits. The Lindens now intend *themselves* to get into the content business.
You know, if you want something done right, do it yourself, kind of thing. You look good, we look good? You looked bad, so we looked bad, so we need to make the look now, not you. Like with Linden Homes. The Lindens apparently get a lot of requests for content-making from the virtual office types and they want in on it -- again. They do not want to leave this lucrative market merely to their own customers who have been waiting patiently in the wings, honing their skills and joining all the right FIC groups, hoping to get into the big league finally. No, they want to grab at the stream, such as it is, directly and not allow all these platformer users of theirs do better than they are doing themselves.
It's funny how when Linden Lab gets in the way of the free market and competes against land barons with its own Linden Homes project, it's the GSPs who are likely to sneer and say, "Get a different business model". But now that "different business model" is coming to call at *their* door, and it is one that says "In Soviet Second Life, the platform develops *you*" -- and you are fleeced like sheep once you become good enough to get into the GSP -- a privilege for which you of course pay. Is this starting to seem not even like an Amway scheme, but like buying your way up through the levels of Scientology? Say, give me that old-fashioned religion that only takes a tithe (ten percent)!
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