Sylva’s Animation Factory

One of the greatest mysteries in Second Life to me is why so many Third Party Viewers eventually stop development. I wasn’t always looking for something beyond the official Second Life Viewer, so I stuck with that for years before finally giving TPVs a chance. The first one I really used was Black Dragon Viewer, and while I eventually figured out things like the annoying WASD controls, I could never get rid of that music that played every single time the viewer launched. Maybe there was a way to disable it, but I never found it, so when Alchemy Viewer came along, I happily switched over. Alchemy ended up becoming one of my favorite viewers, but then development stopped. After that I moved to Aperture Viewer, and wouldn’t you know it, development there stopped too. Just recently I told you all about AyaStorm Viewer because I thought it had a lot of potential, and now they’ve removed the Windows version, so I guess you can consider that one effectively dead for most people too. At this point I’m starting to think TPVs are cursed. Every time I get excited about a viewer, development suddenly comes to an end. So now I’m sitting here wondering what I’m supposed to use next. How long do you keep using an abandoned viewer before enough little things break that you finally give up and go back to Firestorm?

The curse of Third Party Viewers continues.

Another mystery to me is all of these collaborations Linden Lab has been doing lately with residents and community groups. We’ve had SeraPlus, MadPea, Essential Inventory, and now The Collab Circle. The whole point seems to be adding value to Premium and Premium Plus memberships by giving members exclusive freebies. I’m Lifetime Premium Plus, so maybe I’m the wrong person to judge whether these promotions are working, but I haven’t been impressed with probably 90% of the gifts. The funny thing is, when an event has freebies, I’m so focused on grabbing them that I never actually shop. I teleport in, collect everything, teleport home, open all the boxes, decide what’s worth keeping, and delete the rest. It gives me the exact same dopamine hit as shopping because, really, shopping is just acquiring stuff. By the time I’m finished opening gifts, I’m completely over it and have no desire to go back and actually spend money.

One of the gifts I did like was the balloon pack from SKVOST. The balloons themselves are really cute, but they’re meant to be rezzed as decorations. The only attachable version was the boxed package, and that included a no-transfer attach animation script, so I couldn’t even modify it the way I wanted. I ended up resizing one of the decorative balloons, wrote my own animate on attach script, and now I have a holdable balloon in exactly the color I wanted. It just made me wonder why they didn’t include a few holdable versions in the gift package to begin with.

I do hope these collaborations work out because Linden Lab is obviously putting money into them. I came across a Facebook post from one of the Seraphim founders who mentioned they were paid by Linden Lab for SeraPlus, so these aren’t just casual community projects. That makes me wonder if Linden Lab is tracking conversions from these collaborations. Are Premium memberships increasing because of them? Are people actually spending more money after visiting these events? I honestly don’t know. When I visited The Collab Circle on opening day, I was literally the only person there. Even with Second Life promoting these collaborations constantly across social media, I wonder if residents are simply burned out on shopping events. At some point, another event with another gift bag just doesn’t feel exciting anymore, especially when so many of the freebies feel more like promotional add-ons than gifts people genuinely wanted.

That brings me to the bigger issue that keeps sitting in the back of my mind. Concurrency has been trending downward for a while now, and I really appreciate Daniel Voyager for continuing to track these numbers because it’s one of the few ways we can see the long-term trend instead of just going by how busy our favorite regions feel. Whether Linden Lab wants to acknowledge it or not, the charts are showing fewer people online, and if that trend continues through the rest of the year, I think Christmas is going to be a really important test. Hopefully things turn around, because I’d much rather see those numbers climbing again than continuing to slide.