.Dust

In the last few days I came to the con­clu­sion that Sec­ond Life may prove not be prof­itable at all for Real Com­pa­nies, at least look­ing at how their pres­ence is struc­tured now in the Metaverse.

There are sev­eral con­sid­er­a­tions worth doing on this.

The gen­eral assump­tion is that a Sec­ond Life project does not require a huge amount of money to be launched.

This may be true if you con­sider the mere pres­ence in the Meta­verse. Buy­ing an island, put some build­ings and objects on it, build a store may be really cheap to develop. After you have done this very first steps you will dis­cover that:

• Any place in Sec­ond Life has to be kept alive. That means that some­one from your com­pany or from a third party com­pany has to put peo­ple in the Meta­verse to pop­u­late your Island. If build­ings are cheap in Sec­ond Life, real peo­ple need to get paid with real money and that is def­i­nitely expensive.
• You plan to run events on your brand new island. Mostly every sin­gle event I have attended in Sec­ond Life had music and videos. If you plan to run this kind of events you will end up con­sid­er­ing pay­ing roy­al­ties fees to broad­cast that music and videos. Again, real money.
• Your store is sell­ing real life stuff. What about the costs of sys­tems inte­gra­tion between the Meta­verse and the real world IT systems?
• It seems that the only way to pro­mote a place in SL is word of mouth. Nobody pays atten­tion to adver­tis­ing signs in Sec­ond Life (Yes, they are those extremely expen­sive 16m2 plots you see on sale in the Land Sale search tab). If you are going to use word of mouth that means avatars, and behind each sin­gle avatars there is a human being that need to be paid for that job. Prob­a­bly not real money but it is always a cost.
• When you build you busi­ness plan for your SL store linked to your RL store how many cus­tomer do you think you may hit? Apart from the long story that among the 8 mil­lion users only a few are reg­u­lars users (cus­tomers) you will need to keep in mind that any sin­gle island may not hold more that ⁶⁰⁄₇₀ (prob­a­bly less in high scripted envi­ron­ments) avatars at the same time. How many of these will buy your stuff? The only solu­tion is to repli­cate your pres­ence in sev­eral islands all around the Meta­verse with an increase in devel­op­ment and main­te­nance costs.
• Open­ing a sub­sidiary of your com­pany in Sec­ond Life is no more some­thing that the press will run to talk about. Dozens of new com­pany are now com­ing to SL and this is not new any­more. You will need to develop some­thing dif­fer­ent if you want some returns from the press. Devel­op­ing some­thing new and excit­ing will cost you more money (real money).

Why do I blog this? I think these are really big lim­i­ta­tions that you will need to take in con­sid­er­a­tion if your com­pany is plan­ning to enter Sec­ond Life.

Related posts:

1. Sec­ond Life Is Faster Than Real Life
2. Sec­ond Life Entrepreneur
3. Your Sec­ond Life has to be different
4. Sec­ond Life. I Am Going To Quit.
5. What do you want from (sec­ond ) life?