The Great and Powerful Oz...
Our welfare system, dear comrades, may be coming to an end, and the economy is going to be overrun even more by oligarchs. At least that's the take-home message for this correspondent from Philip Linden's latest Town Hall Meeting with players.
On 23 November, Linden Labs CEO Philip Linden said he'd like to see more large tracts of land being purchased by land barons because parceling out smaller plots is too much work for his staff. And he indicated that the stipend system whereby LL puts LL$500 in our boxes each week (and makes the game pay for itself if you work it right on GOM), will be tied to a formula involving the influx of new players. "Over time, the amount of incentives will need to drop as the % of new users is lower relative to the overall population," said the game CEO.
At the previous Town Hall Meeting, Linden had said the new investment from Benchmark Capital and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar would enable him to hire more staff and put on more servers. Yet not only does the game lag more than ever, LL seems to be backing away from the idea of putting staff on tasks like new-land division. When pressed by player Toran Cruyff, who reasoned that the $8 million investment would " help handle the distribution of the land and other issues," Linden appeared to back off from this commitment, saying rather vaguely, "Yes... some are dedicated to community support... stuff like land." I guess this means more nights on the help desk, Lee!
IOW, if we do really well and make lots of interesting content and invite our old friends from TSO and other games to come to SL, eventually we will be punished by lower welfare payouts, because the money will have to spread that much farther, the new players will become old players and expand the whole player base. Still, it might not happen all at once, and we might get to have some say in the matter. "So I think the question is best how to allocate incentives? I suppose eliminating ratings stipends could be a piece people might like... but we are open to a community process," said Linden.
Linden already pays tens of thousands of real-life US dollars in Linden script, says Philip -- in the 3rd week of November alone, the company's balance sheet showed 7.65 million Lindens paid out in stipends and other gifts to players. At the GOM going rate as of this post hovering around $4.00/1000 LL, that's US $30,600 per week. Something's going to have to give here! Multiply that figure by 4 weeks in the month, and instead of supporting all these welfare bums who ought to be paying LL more for the entertainment, you could be using that $122,400 a month for hiring , let's say, 2 programmers, even allowing for benefits and payroll tax, or several administrative assistants and customer service staff on site. (Not everybody wants to telecommute like Tigger! )
And speaking of labour costs, Phil indicated that it simply wasn't in the company's interest to keep subdiving smaller plots on new sims as they are rolled out, and it would simply make good business sense to mark out large plots, and let "real estate agents" (or land barons) handle the busy-work of subdividing, pricing, haggling, and selling. "I think that long term we are going to need to sell more and more land per unit time. We don't have employees enough to continue to parcel that land to small pieces." (See my post above for my proposal to Philip on this score.)
The Buddha has spoken...
Let's face it: big parcels just make more money for the Lindens, and to maximize this profit, they have to cost them less staff time. Well, they can't really be making more than a few thousand a week from these auctions, yet a thousand here, a thousand there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money LOL.
This week's auction shows this policy may be coming on line as a 14,928 peninsula parcel in Wetheral we have our eye on opened at US $149 but now has surged to $368, and an island-looking parcel called Ravenglass (sounds like some horrid mystical faux ebil Vampire place) opened up at US $587 for a whopping 58,704 square acres -- or is it always like this?
Now what about our pogey?! In discussing "median" and "average" balances among players, Philip left some of us behind, especially with this kind of mumbo-jumbo -- "this means that as long as the user base is growing, a rational strategy is to watch the average balance, and give the difference between the average and the new user allocation to the overall user base as incentives." Translate that out of game dev eco-talk, and leave aside the draining of meaning from the word "incentive" and what we could be seeing is a pinch on LL to reduce stipends if the subscription base doesn't grow much beyond the current 17,000 and also pressure to lower stipends as new players age up, and the cash burn increases each week for LL.
Now, I know we're supposed to understand this convoluted statement about "average and new user allocation" as still something that provides incentive for the whole system ("what's good for Ford is good for the whole country") but I'm given pause by something else Phil said in passing, "I suspect that our incentives will be remembered as just a tiny bit of starter fluid for the economy."
Ermmm tiny??? Remembered??? Starter fluid?? That implies that, well, it's just used to start. And after awhile, it has to end. Trust me on this, people used to the Soviet welfare system are trained to detect the slightest scintillation in pogey policies, like Putin's much-ballyhooed cash-for-benefits reform. I'm worried. Already, I didn't buy that lovely new detachable multi-performing penis that I could have bought this week because welfare as we know it may come to an end. And frankly, as I listened to Philip speak, I hustled off to the GOM terminal and cashed in some more packets of 1000s...and waited and waited and WAITED through his whole talk for them to sell, even at a penny less than the previous orders...when I went down a dime I finally unloaded them.
Why cut off incentives as they are now delivered? Because like all that oil money for the princes of the House of Saud, it leads to corruption, gaming the system, and unproductivity. Because as this seemingly left-leaning but actually corporate Randian CEO indicates, meritorious content is king, and people who create content need to have a generous reward system, even if it means cutting back welfare for "the people".
"My gut is that the rapidly growing financial opportunities for content creators just making and selling goods and services will be the primary drivers," says Linden about SL's future direction. In other words, this dwell stuff (aptly called "dwellfare" by one witty poster on the forums) is for the birds. We never did find out how dwell works, and frankly, until we do, we and all our sims-oops-I- mean-avatars are going to appear AFK on our lots daily in the hopes that it might just work like TSO LOL.
And if our welfare is cut off and we can't game the dwell system? Perhaps there's a bit part for us in a large cast on the big projects? Just like the larger land parcels, Philip envisions larger projects as the obvious direction for SL. All these mom-and-pop shops and little customized retail shops on half a 512 are loss-leaders, or perhaps at best incubators for the really big stuff -- and Linden Labs own development as a company. "We are aware that big projects often have huge payoff in terms of exploring what can be done in SL, what we need to work on next in the platform, etc.," says Linden.
A-ha! It is like the world of the Sims, or any other online game where players can use the game company's basic engine to generate custom content. SL is revolutionary in that customers get to keep their custom content and even sell it -- but they are dependent on LL for access to servers and other in-world necessities -- which can be withdrawn at any time "for any reason or no reason" under the TOS. It works something like the Florentine philanthropic family the Medicis where rise of the Medici in Florence coincided with the triumph of the capitalist class over the guild merchants and artisans The Medici were celebrated patrons of the arts, to be sure, but they were also remembered for establishing an artists' academy which had a certain repertoire of image and themes and essentially filtered out anything that wasn't a certain style they wished to promote. Of course it helped to be amici degli amici. Patronage -- yet subtle or not-so-subtle control...
...but more to the point, instead of paying programmers or game developers to come up with ideas, LL can get enthusiastic volunteers from among geeky programming players who are willing to pay not only subscription rates but land fees and tier fees for the privilege of working on The Next Big Thing for next to nothing, as long as it keeps within the overall "likeminded" cannon of what is commercially promotable and can help the whole game world -- and not cost LL much except a bit of staff time in advising and some temporary -- temporary!!! -- waiver of tier fees. I marvel as my SL friends spend hours -- days -- weeks building extraordinary edifices or designing fabulous clothes and furniture and then make a pittance of Lindens or even RL dollars for them -- without any stock or stake in the company of LL itself. Even Starbucks barristas are fed the illusion that they are "stock-holders".
Come to think of it, $30,600 a week is chump change for 17,000 willing and enthusiastic unpaid workers, many of whom are top programmers and fashion designers, and many others of whom provide the consumer base to enjoy all these riches and fuel the economy. Heh, and Uri thinks EA is a sweatshop?! That works out to 55 cents a week per player -- kind of like sewing pajamas for Disney in Haiti?
Will this system of gigantism -- big land, big projects, big people -- hurt the proverbial Little Guy, the boutique eyewear designer or the whimsical scripter who gives away her creations for free? Are we to be subjected to endless "synergy" hype and resource draws into projects like Neverland? I'm going to say "yes," but we'll see. The fact is, as with all forms of socialism (and capitalism, for that matter), somebody has to pay. It's a question of who.
Still, we don't live in 16th century Florence but for all practical purposes (even in a game with international pretentions) America, and while gigantism may be the driving force of SL, it won't be without democratic participation -- at least, there will be conference telephone calls for all the major land-owners (only a dozen such barons buy significant amounts on the auction each week).
Towards the end of the Town Hall session, Player MagicJustSue Kojima asked plaintively, "what about all the social people in here who don't have the skills to build or to design, the stipends help us so much." Magic put her finger on the problem -- sure, you can have all these content-creators, especially BIG content creators on BIG parcels, but somebody has to feed the Moon and generate the dwell! Somebody has to buy all that stuff! Somebody has to shop! How can you have a world only of artisans?!
"Yes that is true...," demurs Philip Linden, "but there is also concern that the bonus on stipends isn't well enough correlated to value created, and subject to gaming." Hey, it is a game! As we well know, gaming games is one of the most fun games there is! (And BTW what is value -- aren't consumers creating a value, too, by moving the economy?)
"But it is incredibly important that such [incentive] programs be as uniform and objective as possible, and this is something that is hard to match up," says Linden "So, we'd love more feedback on whether we should simply not have such incentives, or alternatively what sort of methods to fund big projects are maximally fair."
Faced with the unfairness of incentives such as payout for ratings that are given more as social rituals than actual merit for design of clothing or building, some players are saying the system should be abolished. Maybe the ratings should only be tied to specific objects. If an object sells a lot or is copied a lot, it gets an automatic higher rating, and buyers can rate it as they can already rate its creator. We can just envision how THAT system will be gamed out: people will host events where they sell an item back and forth to each other for $1 all night.
By the end, Trimming Hedges was confronting the LL CEO with some of his own logic when he commented, "it seems like the free market advocates are only in favor of the free market when they're making money. Isn't trying to prop up the linden just rewarding speculators? Wouldn't cheaper lindens make land more affordable for more people, making the game better for everyone?" We're not sure actually of all the ways the Lindens do prop up the Linden, but we've never heard a clear statement as to whether they themselves do or do not play the GOM...
Says Philip, "I think the market (when it is large enough) is indifferent, which is good - it values everyone equally. And does so more objectively than people."
*Shudders*. OK, I understand the "value created" in SL then -- malls, laggy clubs, sexay avatars, money balls, portable penises, hoochie hair. It cannot be denied. It's indifferent...and objective! Yay!
So how can we game it? Rizpah Galatea asked the CEO, "I would respectfully ask SL to define **exactly* how dwell, weekly stipends, hi scores, etc. are calculated now. This should be a written formula available for all to see." AMEN, we say, Rizpah! Phil replied: " "Yes it should, I will work on publishing it ASAP."
Agreed! We can't wait, Phil!
Dwelling for dollars...
