One last try for anc's mermaid prince!
Linden Lab's new gatcha policy wasn't a total surprise, as it has been bruited about on Reddit fora and SL threads and blogs, usually in the form of some know-it-all "Internet lawyer" claiming that because his own country has a gambling law that might apply to gatchas, LL will buckle and ban gatchas in SL. And now they have. What I explained over and over months ago, when Drake, an obnoxious an uneducated Australian enamored of Roblox with many grand ideas about how the world should work, is this: a bill drafted by Josh Hawley (yes! that Josh Hawley) inspired about ostensible concern for children falling prey to lootbox expenditures in games was not a law, would not likely become a law, never even got into committee -- and PS Hawley is under investigation now for the January 6 Insurrection and has other fish to fry). The FAILURE of such a bill-not-law means something valid about the ability to prosecute moral imperatives around perceived gambling. There is no federal law; California's law has emboldened some class-action suits but they have FAILED. The LL-friendly lawyer touted by SHamlet warned that a law would be passed and LL would crack down. But...no law was passed. All of that is important to remember going forward, as the policy was made without a law in the US, and only the vaguest jurisprudence related to actual laws abroad, and the mechanism for enforcement internationally remained truly unexplained. LL could have fought this; it chose not to. As I noted in the forums, I think this has everything to do with Raj Date, Elizabeth Warren protégé, who served a term on the consumer board at the Treasury Department, and nothing to do with Japan or Belgium:
Raj Date was the first-ever Deputy Director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). As the Bureau’s second-ranking official, he helped steward the CFPB’s strategy, its operations, and its policy agenda. He also served on the senior staff committee of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and as a statutory deputy to the FDIC Board.
Before being appointed Deputy Director, Raj acted as the interim leader of the new agency, serving as the Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury. He led the CFPB for most of the first six months after its launch.
Currently, Raj is the Managing Partner of Fenway Summer, an advisory and investment firm focused on financial services and financial technology. In that capacity, he chairs the investment committee of Fenway Summer Ventures, a fintech venture capital fund, and works with clients of FS Vector, the fintech advisory firm. He also serves as a Director for a number of innovative firms in financial services: Prosper, the marketplace lender; Green Dot, the bank holding company; Circle, the digital asset firm; Grasshopper, a de novo bank; and College Ave, a private student lender.
He is a graduate of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley (highest honors) and the Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).
The combination of computer programmer with belief in code-as-law, with the old-fashioned law degree ostensibly grounded in rule-of-law (including over programmers) is deadly, as I recall from the persona of Benjamin Noble. Mr. Raj does not have to worry where his groceries are coming or how is sales are doing in his little online business obviously. That's fine, I'm not a socialist let alone a communist and I think capitalism should thrive even if it should be regulated. I'm a Democrat, I voted for Biden. I wouldn't vote for Elizabeth Warren, however, and that's where we differ markedly. I do wonder if Raj personally, like Benjamin Noble, believes he will make his mark in the world by being a first mover on this crackdown in the Metaverse, ostensibly for a "better world".
I don't make a living from SL; my little operation in SL doesn't relay on gatcha re-sales for anything except offsetting costs a little bit; I mainly give away gatchas. I don't regularly make them as a form of creativity or business in SL; I have made two disastrous experiments, one, the Shaman's Gatcha in which not a single person but one lone Fantasy Faire shopper ever played one of them (but he did get the rare sword), and the other, a Dinkie Tea Ceremony Set, while it got maybe 3 dozens people to pull it a few times, sold more in the fatpack form and still sells. I say this because most people suspect if you take a position opposing the Lab and its Friends you must have some dog in some hunt. I actually have a Gatcha Addiction Treatment Center, the Shaman's Hut, which isn't a joke but a self-paced meditation and tutorial on how to either get better and playing and selling gatchas to reduce losses, or how to break loose from them entirely. I've thought for some years now about gatchas and their role in the economy and their role in emptying out people's purses and the insanity of how they pile up in inventory unused and unsold, impoverishing people along the way. I've been highly critical of the increase of $75 and $100 gatchas which is why I have called for a boycott of the Arcade for many years.
I'm mainly concerned now about how the policy will be mitigated, about "the little dressmakers" as they were dubbed 10 years ago in the Copybot scandals of that era. These are people who make their living in SL, or at least make some cash to offset RL expenses, ever more necessary in the pandemic, people who are actually quite famous in SL and who sell lots of gatchas (you'd have to sell a lot of them in order to make even a modest living) and people don't even realize their background or location.
Yesterday afternoon and evening I had conversations with some of the gatcha makers, one of whom I contacted as I encountered his lovely gatcha at the Gatcha Garden event, commenting that it was likely my last gatcha pulling session. I set aside $2000 after I heard the news, and went around to a dozen famous and not so famous gatchas to collect a few dozen items which I mainly give away or use to decorate my rentals. Completely coincidentally, I haven't been buying or selling gatchas much in the last 5 months for a whole host of reasons I'll blog about another time, but among which were the decline in quality and the increase in pull prices to $100.
o This gatcha maker told me gatchas made up most of his income, I was truly surprised as my impression of him was that he sold sets and non-transferable items for the most part, with gatchas quite rare in his stock. He said he had already been contemplating a dump of his sim because of the economic slump in general -- worse this summer for pandemic and other reasons -- and this pushed him further. He didn't think he would close his store but it was a real challenge. He was pessimistic about the prospects.
So LL has lost an island tier, and will lose more; maybe they will lose the tax off the MP and the tax on LindEx transactions and cashouts but they must have contemplated these losses as not large, and temporary. I think they will be shocked at how wrong they are and will do everything not to admit it for many months.
o Another man who totally makes his living from only gatchas was trying to put a good face on it and seeing it as an opportunity, especially to get out of the treadmill of events and ever-new and exotic sets. I had thought from our last conversation that he had in fact pivoted to sets but I was mistaken; those sets were gatcha fatpacks with gatchas. He was mulling over this or that alternative and I urged him to put his items on transfer and sell them at the same price, keeping out rares for higher prices and/or selling fatpacks. He thought there would be limited appeal for fatpacks at say $1500 even, as fatpacks now don't sell as much. I agree that those urging fatpacks as a solution aren't looking at the actual sales of them now, which are dismal compared to gatcha pulls. People are contrary, and would rather pull $2000 of gatchas in the hopes of getting a rare to resell for $2000 than to just pay $1500 to get the non-transfer fatpack. That lets you know what this is about for people: not just gambling, but a form of economic activity, like gold-mining or bit-coin mining, a get-rich-quick scheme or even if played shrewdly, a steady stream of good income. The gatcha is a double gamble: first you have to get the rare, but then you have to sell it, in a saturated market.
o A gatcha re-seller who is really good at wrangling the stuff, staying way ahead of seasons and such wondered whether business would continue as well once the supply of fresh gatchas disappeared in September.
o Apple Fall casually announced that he would put his gatcha EXCHANGES out but not his gatchas, which were retired two years ago! and he has made no more! Gatchas stopped being a factor for AF's economy long ago, and he has so many sales that he can afford to give away tens of thousands of dollars in "Monday perks" and have $50 sales all the time, or even $0 sales of older inventory. I always have a feeling that Apple Fall, which used to be called warehousesales and not Apple Pancake, with the new name, was a whole team of people doing prototypes for businesses of the future in the Metaverse. Maybe it really is one kid out there but it never feels that way to me.
o Contraption said also casually that everyone could come have a final pull until September 1 ($75 and $100) on these intricate music boxes, but then fatpacks would be sold for $5000 (!) because they are expensive as to time and trouble and hard to make. Understood. And that lets you know that highly skilled craftsmen like Wainwright were repaid for their labours in zillions of gatcha pulls and can only make this up with $5000 blister packs. The reality is that Contraption mainly sells clothing and decor, sometimes in sets, not gatchas any more. Like Apple Fall, with their skills, market share, and renown, they don't have to worry about the impact of this policy. BTW Wainright is a RL designer and developer and has no need of SL.
o Raindale (Keiralans) announced that she was very hard hit by this policy -- gatcha sales make up most of her SL sales and SL is her livelihood -- and she was making gatchas available for 25. THIS is what I mean by impact -- maybe there are mainly men -- and some women -- who have RL businesses or jobs and aren't hit by this, but there are mainly women -- and some men who have been devastated. Read her plaintive note:
As some of you already know, gacha will be banned from SL since September,1...
https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/8586-policy-change-regarding-gacha/
I am really trying to cope with this news and to figure out what to do next, but right now I feel very lost.
Most of my income came from gacha and I seriously doubt that I'll be able to cover my SL and RL expenses with regular releases only...
My C|M collections never get as much sales as gacha sets (even when they have 10+ items in). It's not about quality, time and effort. I can spend 60+ hours on a highly detailed project, and it will never bring as much money as a gacha set made in a week...As you might notice, I don't make a lot of gachas these days. Arcade covered my fullsim rent + other fees, and an extra set every other month helped me to maintain my modest middle class lifestyle here in Russia.
In order to make this money without gachas I'd have to create 10-15 new releases a month - that's unrealistic, and I will be burnout in just a few weeks.I do love gacha both as a creator and a shopper, I think 2/3 of the stuff I've ever bought were from gacha machines, and it really feels like one of the last things I actually enjoyed in SL is soon to be gone.
Maybe it's a sign for me to move on and finally do something else outside of SL.
I'm not closing Raindale just yet, and have no such plans in the next few months! But if it turns into a hobby without any real profit - I'll have no choice but to minimize my time here.
The most confusing part for me - is what to do with existing gacha sets.There is no way I could possibly re-package hundreds of items into individual products, make new pictures, replace note-cards etc... it would be a huge waste of time and prim space (especially since I'll most likely have to move to a cheaper sim with less prims)
________________________
What I decided for now:
________________________I will make copy+ full-sets for gachas that are currently in main-store - after September,1
I will have to completely retire (remove from store) most of the older machines in the Outlet area.
I will try to hand-pick the best prizes from all the sets and re-package them into copy+ releases - it will take some time and there is no guarantee that a certain product will ever be for sale again individually.
I will still exchange all the prizes purchased earlier (or from re-sellers) to copy+ on request
*yes, re-selling gacha prizes is still going to be legal________________________
For now, I put all of my machines on 25L$ per play - let's enjoy our final days of "risky gambling" and "lucrative business" XD
Of course, I'm open for your requests, ideas and suggestions - just drop me an IM/NC
*my English is in a bad shape today, because I'm pretty upset - if you didn't understand something from this NC - please ask!
Keira ♥
o Jinx also announced 25L gatchas while she decides what to do.
o Libertine has put up a post with details although Alia is still pondering about the form in which he will sell his precious eggs. I find this whole thing torturous, thinking of the enormous hours he has put in on these exquisite creations, of which I own hundreds, including complete year sets, whose doubles I give as gifts or hunt prizes. The labour of creativity of a person like Alia reverberates and reverberates through the economy and social world and people can't know how deep this is. I was inspired by Alia to start my own Surprise Egg line, very different than his, and certainly not executed with anywhere near the skill, but which are a creative outlet for me. I can't imagine how this transition will work to keep Alia paid as well as he was before, as he should be.
o Minimal said briefly, while expressing sorrow, they would be retired in 30 days.
I will post these notices and others I find later.
In this thread, a few actual merchants as distinct from a lot of alts talking through their hats said they were sad about this and it hurt their bottom line but they would adapt.
Patch Linden, VP of Program, came very early this a.m. and closed the thread ostensibly because of "fighting among yourselves" but said he would re-open it later after it cooled down. But I believe the real reason is more about my pointed remark re: the middle class in Bellisseria in the "ticky tackies that all lookd the same". Bellisseria is his success story. He can rightl take pride in it. But getting rid of gatchas, which are not only "predatory" to the prudes of Belli and tacky to the aesthetes there, but constitute economic competition to them as non-gatcha merchants or shoppers who support non-gatcha merchants, is something most of the Belli forums regs seemed lustily to approve. Every home in Belli is decorated with gatchas, however. There's the rub.
And some bloggers are honest about this. I thought this was very well said -- gatchas are beautiful, cheap, fun, enabling people to decorate their house cheaply.
As I said in the forums, gatchas arose to cope with increasing dislocations in the economy induced first by the RL 2008 recession and even before by the end of the SL honeymoon in 2006-2007, the removal of the telehubs, which represented the democratization of the economy away from oldbie monopolists and one-category market movers, the VAT tax, the GOM ban and end to third-party currency sales; the crackdown on banks and gambling. SL has a somewhat realistic but also toy economy controlled like China or Russia. The currency is basically kept at a fixed exchange rate like the old Soviet "golden ruble". Mercifully, SL only takes 10% tax and only on the Marketplace, but by refusing to fix search for 9 months, by banning economic activity from Belli, by failing to encourage and manage inworld advertising, LL ensures that only its most favoured merchants can succeed.
Likely some of them are having private and urgent convos with the Lab now, especially big breedable makers, as the policy on breedables simply is not clear. My guess is that LL will fudge on this not to deprive their best merchants of a living; to keep people from losing their pets during the pandemic; and to further harm the economy by barring those avid re-sellers, too.
I made up a list of demands, and I'm happy to say that at least one of them has already been met by Patch, while neither he nor anyone else would admit that, of course. Yet that list, as a separate thread, is now deleted and I'm suspended for 3 days for "spamming". One thread focused on demands to LL, separate from LL's own thread of 300 pages seems completely reasonable, as does even another thread in the Merchants section about merchant alternatives. Two threads are not spam. Texts that may feel as if they disparage an LL official may be the real problem. Otherwise, how can you understand the removal not just of the "spam" of two other threads, but a comment within the "only authorized thread" as well that is not actionable on the face of it.
I said that 30 days is not enough and we should have 60 if not 90; I don't see them budging on that but at the last minute they will extend it and like Putin or Nazarbayev when they impose draconian laws, will seem like liberals for easing them slightly in the event.
I said punishment had to be made clear, and whether first time offenses would lead to permabans, etc. and that is what Patch responded to: he said first time offenses would be allowed; this was not a sanction to violate the policy, but an effort should be made to comply. OK, that's nice, now we need more.
I can drop one demand of a tax holiday on the MP. It won't make that big a difference to merchants, who factor it in with their pricing, and LL won't lose face that way. And that's reasonable. They can't lift and reimpose the tax on every whim at every crisis. They want the MP to be stable. So the holiday is out.
I do think it's worth insisting on LL working out other avenues for sales, having so drastically and pre-emptively harmed the economy before there is a single court case of any validity with a decision that applies to LL, let alone any action against LL per se.
I think clarification of what drove this is in order. There is slightly more from Patch on this, referencing other countries, but he or other Lindens should answer why, in a state where Apple shrugged off a lawsuit in the end based on the lootbox complaint -- and Google did as well -- why they, as a little country, can't bask in those precedents and not harm their economy -- which is better for users than the big dogs who take 30%.
I think the Lindens should not actively prosecute yardsales in Bellisseria. They should role out the mall they discussed where people would have some outlet, preferably with no rent, in the same place they socialize and have the much vaunted commuuuunity.
The idea that no commuuuunity takes place around commerce is so rabidly insane I don't know where to start. Such forums socialism is uninformed by actual events which are like a cross between the grand round at an opera in the old days and the promenades on streets in Eurasian capitals or the rodeos and fairs of the Western United States. Of course community coalesces around commerce, and that's more than fine.
Then I went on to mention my hobby horses -- fix search (my God! fix search! especially now!), have a resident ad system at infohubs and welcome areas etc.
Again, forums-marms sniff that we shouldn't have the company doing things for us, and these merchants should make it on their own. Except...the Lindens manage the LindEx, something they created to REPLACE third-party services that created higher value for it. The Lindens manage the Marketplace -- a system they bought from user developers who ran it well enough and didn't charge a tax. The Lindens intervene everywhere, with higher cashout fees now and even more draconian rules for the birthday -- no business logos can be shown. Not a tip jar can appear. Belli lots cannot be in search. Business is driven to the Mainland and private islands, into a corner, where there's a bonanza for some and failure for too many as they cannot get visibility with the terrible advertising in SL, which exists as "too much" in the form of ad-farming on every corner and "too little" with the inability to find things in search or see past the clutter of events and classified purchased by the most wealthy.
It wasn't the intention of Linden Lab to harm poor people originally; if anything, they were making a better world. They never really played up this angle as they have an aversion to commerce as techno-communists at heart, or techno-libertarians in practice that thing commerce should consist mainly of and largesse for programmers and graphic developers in RL and gigified hard labour for the rest of us. I'm in the gig economy and I know what it's like. There are some times over the years, however, when they've expressed pride in this ability of poor people to make a living and help bring about that Silicon Valley Better World.
The beauty of SL -- the miracle -- is that Black single moms in Detroit, injured war veterans in Columbus, OH; backdrop and weapons and vehicles and dress designers in Eastern Europe or South Asia; Brazilians, Poles, Russians, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese -- they could all flourish in SL with wonderful businesses that earned them the $2000 or $3000 US dollars they needed for a modest living -- or even a good living in their countries. This has now been severely undermined. I have seen all this with my tenants. I have marvelled how some people have improved their lot, helped their families, had an amazing outlet for their creativity.
The form this took for a lot of reasons was gatchas, because they were in demand. The claim that gouging, predatory, selfish creator fascists ripped off poor addicted people isn't the way to understand this. Sure, there are poor and rich who spent their grocery money on gatchas. But what's more the point is that poor people bought furniture for their homes for 20 cents and not 20 dollars. That's the reality. They didn't have to resort to sex work, placating a dom, working as a club bouncer to have a virtual life. I have tenants who literally go work as dancers or DJs and drop their pennies day by day into my very cheap rentals, so I know the world they are in. For the clever, or even not so clever, selling a set of gatchas on the MP for $5000 was that $20 that made a real difference in RL between going out to dinner and staying home, or eating rice and beans or steak.
History is written by the victors, although less so nowadays with more social media. Telehubs, the VAT, gambling, the banks -- the history of these phenomena are all distorted by Ll and their friends. Gatcha will be, too. Smooth lawyers will be lauded for having warned their clients instead of fighting alongside those clients to reverse or at least mitigate this policy.
UPDATE: I wasn't surprised that now I have a three-day forums event for "spamming".
This is because I opened up two other threads alongside the 400-page thread started by Linden Lab itself, one with a draft list of demands urging discussion about mitigation, and another about how merchants should respond with alternatives and strategies to cope. The thread with the list of demands is closed; Patch closed the main thread as soon as he saw my wry comment about Bellisseria, certainly itself not a bannable offense, then closed the separate thread which is hardly "spam" but a legitimate separate thread. Fangirlz were on hand to bluster that I was just seeking attention when I was in fact trying to rally people to coherent activity which I think already yielded results. The second thread I opened hasn't been closed which lets you know they simply sought technicalities.
It's always hard to take SL seriously when this sort of unnecessarily controlling behaviour takes place. LL has made a shocking policy with bad roll-out, for no reason we can tell. We have no choice to accept it, but they themselves know they have to accept it better. Thirty days is simply not enough time when no law was passed, no prosecutor's letter has been received as far as we know. A 60 or 90 days rollout letting major events take place already schedule so that every event has a last round, would have been completely fair and not harmed the ability to enforce the policy. It would enable people to seek alternatives to their livelihood.
I have always found that Lindens do not really take seriously the small people who make their living in SL. Patch Linden once made men's clothes although we don't know his avatar or business name, at least we in the general public. Given his "learning on the job" trajectory as to the acquiring of graphics and management skills, I would have to imagine that store of his was some significant income for him at one time. Maybe not. Maybe he's a Trustifarian although I hardly think so, or he wouldn't be in Sl. Draconian measures as to economy and speech are rooted in insecurity from both old and new Lindens. What is driving it? This remains to be discovered.
Are you seriously defending gacha, which is the nastiest version of predatory capitalism yet invented in the world aside from possibly venture capitalism? Why should anyone care about those creators who make their entire living by scamming people with gambling? I certainly do not. It goes beyond a free market to something that is wholly harmful to literally everyone in the gaming community. You should be ashamed to defend such predators. I'm only angry that the nations of the world have not all banded together to ban this nonsense completely. This is not about people of colour or women, this is about predatory capitalism, which is never okay.
Posted by: Skye Alexander | 10/23/2021 at 01:26 AM