Anshe Chung and the 10 L$ fever

Anshe Chung at the Non-profit Commons launch event, originally uploaded by rikomatic.

The last days i was reading a about this, in SLnewspapers and in SLblogs.

The first notice i had was through The Avastar (maybe is not the most serious news source, but can be fun), later in this Vint Falken’s post and in this Storm Thunders’s post.

First the facts and the words:
On September 6th ACS (Anshe Chung’s company) flooded SLexchange (a company partially owned by Chung) with cheap furniture for 10L$/item.
In the SLexchange forums was clear that Anshe plans to lauch a full collection of quality products at this price.

Her full reply at the protests in SLexchange forums was:
All our artists work in a new fully air-conditioned studio in a class A office building and environment according to German workplace standards. They receive clearly above market compensation and full benefits and insurance package. Some of them already afforded to purchase their own apartment. At ACS we have regulated working hours and file regular tax reports contributing to the general society and social systems of the country we are located in.

In IMVU the average margin of content creators for items they sell is about 10-15 L$, while in Second Life content prices are still at almost the same levels as 3 years ago when the population was only a fraction of what it is now. We think this is one reason why IMVU is growing much faster than Second Life now. Therefore we decided to make Second Life more competitive and more accessible to players by providing high quality products at prices that allow Second Life to remain competitive in the long run. Our plan for the end of this year is to have between 50 and 100 internal designers and scripters working on 10 LINDENS, plus a network of local partners we are currently training here. We plan to create a full range catalog of decent SL content.

I think this is definitely good news for the content creator community of SL, much the same way ACS entering the IMVU content market helped the content creator community as a whole to grow their business. In IMVU, the increased internal competition and improved quality of the product catalog greatly accelerated growth of the platform and market as whole. Many content creators reacted by strengthening their brand’s focus and focusing on more complex / high end products, actually increasing their sales in the long run. I hope we can recreate part of this success in Second Life in the coming months and all benefit from economic growth again, after the stagnation of the economy here in August. (From Vint Falken’s post)

Well… now my thoughts:

Anshe Chung tries to compare IMVU with Second Life, both are so different that you can’t just compare them. She has the right platforms to can sell the products at the prices she wants, she has more than 600 servers, she has at least two Welcome Areas (Linden Lab let some private owners to have Welcome Areas, as Chung, Azure Islands, …), she has SLexchange. Maybe we can call “dumping” what she is trying to do, but…

But i think is no so important as some can be afraid of. This 10L$ objects will be like freebies. There are really good quality freebies, i use some of them in my home, but nobody has all freebies clothes, or all freebies furniture. We all want ourselves and our homes to be special different, unique. Most of the residents (me included) are not worry to pay for an object if we like them (of course, within a reasonable price).

But, maybe, what really scares me in this story is something deeper than the 10L$ products. Something is changing in Second Life. Do you remember “a virtual world owned and created by his residents”? After seeing the Linden Lab’s Second Life Grid project and this ACS action i see that they will have to change the slogan to: “a virtual world owned and created by the corporations”.