Email a copy of 'The future of virtual goods' to a friend
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Hypergrid Business
Covering virtual reality, immersive worlds, and other emerging technologies
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There is a question of supply and demand regarding Opensim based grid platforms. When there is enough demand for commerce, goods, currency, creators, marketplace it will be created. This is currently taking place, it will happen, it just takes time. You can expect to see different types of markets, different market places, some open, some closed. For example I expect to see an educational web marketplace for all those edu grids with low cost or free items to stock grids with objects and we will the same happen for other niche based grids.
For example a business type marketplace to stock up company grids, office chairs, desks, pc's you name it. A company installs Opensim on a server, goes to this marketplace, spends 200 USD and has all the goodies they need to commence their virtual world meetings. Low cost, accurate, good for creators.
You will also see many locked marketplaces such as xstreetsl, they are driven by a script, just a script, ebay is also just a script so it is just a matter of time before the script gets listed on Gforge. Once this happens more will become possible, better content, more interesting for people to visit a grid and so on.
We do start noticing that creators are starting to smell money on Opensim based grids, they list their gestures and poses for sale not just to Second Life users but also to Opensim grids so they know there is money there. We always said that Opensim would be a good thing for content creators, so far we saw that content creators view Opensim grids as evil who will try to steal their content, they figured because there was no content these new Opensim grids would go out to copy things. Now that they see this isn't the case they start to turn around and see the benefits. Same work, more money for them, one doesn't have to make a lot of calculations to see the advantage of this for content creators, so instead of the big threat, the new grids will become their friend and they should embrace them really.
Also for Second Life itself, these grids aren't really a threat, sure Linden will lose some market share to them but the grids will even make Second Life stronger in a weird way because the technology created by Linden becomes more universal and expands. So in long term this will benefit Second Life.
Virtual
Very nice summary on the virtual goods business 🙂
Some comments about the economics of all this:
(1) Second Life's "ECONOMY" is counting each transaction – it's like transaction volume on eBay. It's not equal to SALES.
(2) The size of the non-gaming virtual world market in terms of revenue is generally in tens of million USD. Social networks market size is in hundreds of millions. Online games with virtual goods is in billions. It gives some idea on a profitable the direction forward for both virtual worlds and social networks.
(3) Virtual goods are "digital" and not physical but certainly exist, as much as an MP3 song, a movie or else.
(4) Virtual goods do not have to be in a virtual world, nor sustain an open virtual economy. The services working the best are generally closed systems (e.g. Tencent, DeNA, GREE, Cyworld in Asia, Stardoll, Habbo, etc. in the West). Virtual economies / currencies can be introduced into almost any online property to activate or monetize users in a variety of ways.
(5) B2C scales a lot better than B2B