How Much For That GuruBall in the Window?
[But only because “How Much For That GuruBall In Your AlienPants?” didn’t fit on one line.] Reader Tom Gordon of AlienPants writes in reference to a recent 3pointD post on some Amazon.com employees who are trying to connect their service to the virtual world of Second Life. He makes an interesting point about pricing goods and services in SL. His thoughts after the jump:
A little over a year ago I integrated one of my own real-world services into SL. For the past few years we’ve been running a live-response game cheats service via premium SMS, and I wrote a little SL application that hooks an SL prim (a GuruBall) into the service, allowing anyone within SL to ask a question of the GuruBall, and have it answered by a real person somewhere outside SL. Bridging from SL to the real world proved to be fairly trivial in the end, even with SL’s old architecture at the time (limited scope XML-RPC interface).
Whilst it all worked fine, the paradigm broke down when it came to pricing: Pricing the responses at an equivalent level to the real-world version was too expensive in L$ for people to use the service, whilst at the same time pricing the service at an acceptable level in L$ would have meant making a real-world financial loss every time someone asked a question. So we shut down the service (well, it’s still there, just not being used).
While I understand that L$ can be exchanged quite easily for US$, I think there is still an issue with the perceived value of virtual money as opposed to real money, and I wonder what impact the introduction of real-world prices [Tom’s talking about Amazon here] will have on a virtual economy.
I’ve wondered something similar myself. SL pricing is, at the moment, very sticky. Despite fluctuations in the L$/US$ exchange rate, most SL vendors are exceedingly reluctant to raise prices enough to keep pace with changes in the valuation of the currency. As Celebrity Trollop pointed out in a 3pointD comment thread, this may begin to change if a substantial number of SL vendors adopt the VendeX system, which automatically pegs your L$ prices to the US$. But this would probably still keep prices for prim fashions and the like relatively low, as they probably should be. The friction comes when you try to price a real-world service in an atmosphere of virtual goods. I’m not sure what AlienPants was trying to charge for their GuruBall service, but I can well imagine it might have appeared quite high when compared to prim goods that often cost 50 cents or less.
Pricing, of course, was probably not the only problem faced by GuruBall. I’m not sure what the service provided in terms of SL information that was better than what the Live Help system provides for free (if somewhat rudely, at times). But that’s not the point of this post. The issue here is how SL residents will take to real-world prices coming into their world. SLBoutique already sells some real-world goods that are priced in L$, so it may not be as terribly jarring as one might expect. But I’d wager that “virtual” culture will keep real-world prices depressed for some time, until (if) SL becomes more integrated into the real world through the kind of better Web hooks currently in development.
Feeds
As I’ve mentioned to people who’ve asked, this is why I stopped working to bridge SL to my CAD system. The real issue is that of pricing (especially since rapid-prototyping is still expensive in the real world - beyond what most people would pay). Even milling models as you recently reported is relatively expensive - and I don’t see how those guys are providing quality goods with any profit margin. I hope they are, but I just don’t see it.
This may be one of the most important challenges being faced online. The disconnect between “virtual” things being either free or cheap and the challenge that “real” things and services cost real money to produce profitably.
The most sensible “linkage” strategy I have seen was a story from China about using virtual items as coupons/promotions for real items (buy a real outfit, get a corresponding virtual outfit free).
See: http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/466-Habbo-China-to-Match-Real-and-Virtual-Purchases.html
This use of promotions/coupons may be the only way to bridge the two “worlds”.
The ability to talk to teh real world has been our focus, and hes led to the proof of concept for Wimbledon. It really had to wait until the httprequest became available. We used the XMLRPC but that was a bit limited.
Being able to link virtual objects to the purchse of real objects seemed an ideal thing to do. If you assume that eventually all browsers will be metaverse ones, then the rapid deployment in the virtual world of you product, so that it can be purchased for real woudl seem an attractive model.
The exmaple I have used is of a product from http://shop.wimbledon.org. I can sell that in SL. It is effectively a banner ad in Sl for the real world item. The difference is people can take that banner ad around with them (in this case as a vehicle or an attachment. So the banner ad can travel around . This is not a normal web metaphor as I am sure you will agree.
Equally the ability to use a 3d space to configure products means it is a good control interface.
None of this means the Sl product is expensive, quite the opposite, but it acts as a lead into other products that are more pricey.
See more on this at http://eightbar.co.uk/2006/06/27/wimbledon-in-second-life/
Of course, but perception of cost can sometimes be an issue. I’ve sat in focus groups and seen people argue tooth and nail that something is heavier because it *looks* heavier than another product, even though the items are all weighted and the one they picked actually weighed less than all of them. Perception is a very real obstacle. The carryover from both Wal*Mart pricing (sometimes below cost - a loss leader) and P2P filesharing does have its affect.