Shep Korvin - Blog is the new Black

Meanwhile...

Almost forgot to mention - I'm sponsoring this week's picture contest over at Linden Lifestyles....

 

Some might see this as nothing more than a cheap scam in which I get to see a bunch of my friend's avatars virtually naked.

Damn.

Busted.

Seriously though, a lot of people who only really know me through the Lucky Chair business are surprised to discover that I run a few (more conventional) content-creation sidelines too (The aforementioned LapGirl Boutique being one of the more successful brands in my portfolio). I often test-run new "Lucky Designs" inventions in one of my stores.... and when the Lucky Chair regulars show up for a preview of the new tech, and ask - out of curiousity - "whose store is this anyway?" - they have a bit of a double-take when they discover it's mine.

Well, here's my viewpoint: would you take fishing advice from a guy who's never actually caught a fish? Would you take your car to be serviced by a guy who's never worked on a real engine before, but has read a bunch of really good books on the subject? Or board a plane that's about to be flown by a pilot who has some radical new ideas on the science of aerodynamics, but has never actually sat in a cockpit....?

Of course not; that's crazy. And by that same token, I wouldn't presume to tell people how to build an SL business, or how to promote SL products, unless I had personal experience (and success!) at doing exactly the same thing myself.

And *that's* why I run a sleazy lingerie empire in my spare time.

No, really it is...

:)

How Big?

Metrics. I wish I had them. If I'd only known _just_ how big the Lucky Chair phenomena would be *before* they hit the streets, I would've included a networked visitor counter in each and every one. As it stands, I have absolutely no idea how many virtual butts are dropped into a virtual chair each day in the name of indiginous brand advertising. And that bugs me.

Earlier today, I was reading Tateru's headcount stats over at New World Notes. I can't remember seeing these before (clicking the blog category tags suggests that Tateru has only been producing them for a couple of weeks), but I was kind of fascinated by just how low the throughput is on a lot of the commercial brand lots in SL. Pontiac, for example, has the highest throughput of all... but Tateru calculates only 62 (estimated) visitors per peak hour.... and second-placed L-Word only has 36.

I wonder how many people sit on a lucky chair in the space of an hour? I bet if you tallied that figure across *every* Lucky Chair in SL, it would easily be a 4-figure number (seriously! - there's a *lot* of those things out there now!)... but unfortunately, due to the aforementioned lack of foresight, I have no way of knowing :( 

Time for an experiment...

I switch to one of the lucky chair channels, and wait for a promising looking SLURL to pop up.... within a couple of seconds, I spot an announcer calling the chair letters at a place called "Fridays Girl". I've never heard of this place, but it looks like they have 5 chairs, and there's a dedicated "caller" active there now, so it's probably a good example of a "serious" chair installation. 

It's 1pm SLT on a Monday.... online concurrency is (surprisingly) over 40k, so I guess that's not too distant from peak ratings. I warp into a good hiding place at the other end of the sim, untether my camera, pan into the store.... and start counting...

                            

It's a boring job - but I'm prepared to suffer in the name of science! For an hour, I note the people coming in, and the people going out. Fortunately, this venue has all the chairs in a special annex (along with a couple of mobvends, and a prize pyramid), so it's pretty easy to distinguish chair users from other visitors.

The result of my (highly unscientific and somewhat random) investigation: 35 visitors to the chair area.

According to Tateru's projections, this chair installation is pulling in more visitors than Dell, IBM, AOL.... and is only one warm body behind equalling the popularity of "The L word" (and I bet the people who comissioned *those* campaigns paid a tad more than the 8 bucks that the owner of this place invested in lucky chairs!)

But... this is just one lucky chair installation. There are *hundreds* of stores across SL running similar lucky chair set-ups. How many other people are spending time in Lucky Chair hotspots around the grid during the same period that I'm spending scoping out Friday's? And just how "engaged" is the typical chair hopper - I keep hearing stories of how some people spend an 8 hour day just chair-hopping around SL... to them, chair-hopping *is* the defacto SL activity - that's the point of the SL "game". If you consider all the lucky chairs across the grid to be one huge, distributed advertising campaign for indiginous SL brands (and trust me on this - as the SL population grows, distributed events are the *only* way to go).... it's the killer campaign! None of the real-world brands have come close to this level of popularity amongst SL residents.

I guess, as the creator of this whole scene, I should be shouting this fact from the tallest roofs.  

if only I had those metrics...

(and a roof)

Vista, 3rd Generation Lucky Chairs, and Nuclear Armageddon.

It's been a bit of a tecchie weekend in the Korvin household. My old hard-drive has been threatening to give up the ghost for a couple of weeks now, so I figured that a pre-emptive strike against it at the weekend (when I tend to have more free time on my hands) was a better option than being forced into late-night remedial action if it decides to croak on me mid-week. So, parts were ordered, and a HD amputation was scheduled for Saturday Morning. The only problem: this is my boot drive... so I'd need a fresh O/S install... and would it be *entirely* sensible to rebuild a windows XP system, when - at some not-too-distant point - the inevitable migration to Vista looms?

To cut a long story short, I went for a fresh Vista install. And... to my complete and utter surprise... SL is running flawlessly! Better, in fact, that it was on the same hardware under XP - I've clocked up a good 10 hours or so in-world over the last two days, and didn't have a single crash. Given the horror stories I've read with other people using Second Life on Vista, I'm somewhat relieved. I suspect it may be - in part - down to the fact that I don't really have the latest uber-hardware (a single core Athlon 64 3700 processor, and a GeForce 7600 GT) - but, so far - my vista experience has been absolutely rock solid. Sweet! :)

So, whereas Saturday was O/S upgrade day, Sunday became pyscho code-crunching day... with a long-overdue stretch of lucky chair work...

                             

Yup, the third generation of Lucky Chair is now *very* close to completion... and, as the more observant of you may have noticed from clues in the pic, I've "aquired" one or two of the more popular features that have emerged on certain lucky chair clones/rip-offs over the last couple of weeks. Well... I figure if they ripped off the original Lucky Chair concept from me in the first place, the least I can do is rip off their best ideas in return... Karma and all that. Put it this way - you can either get really upset about people ripping off your ideas ("stealing the food off my table", etc etc) or just look on the competition as free R&D. I'm trying to deal with this one the second way. Note: "Trying". ;)

Obviously, I have a few new killer tricks of my own up my sleeve for the 3rd gen chairs too. No sneak previews on those yet though. Walls (and blogs) have ears...

However, the big crunch-point on distributing this line is going to be the price-point, and - more significantly - copyability. I've always resisted requests to release a copyable chair in the past - my logic being that over-saturation of lucky chairs will - ultimately - be their downfall; the day that every 2-bit mall owner puts a complimentary chair in each and every rental, serving junk that nobody wants... that signifies game over for lucky chairs. Or, to steal a (totally unrelated, but excellent) metaphor that I saw on Cory Doctorow's blog the other day: they function like uranium.... "a little pile gives off a nice, warm glow, but if the pile gets bigger, it hits critical mass and starts a deadly meltdown".

Sadly, control over supply of chairs is now out of my hands; if other people are dumping copyable chairs onto the market, my only real option is to do the same, or lose market share. I _do_ have a sense of foreboding that this spells armageddon days for the chair scene... but, if that's the way it's going, I guess I might as well ride my baby into the nuclear fire, Doctor Strangelove stylee...

(besides, I always have my next big project to fall back on.... right? ;) )

Prize Pyramid - Field Test

As promised... here's that "very close relative" to the lucky chair that I was talking about earlier, having its very first field-test on-site in LapGirl Boutique...

How does it differ from a lucky chair?

After claiming a letter, the "winner" is given the chance to improve their prize by bringing other people into the store to collect other letters. Each time a letter is claimed, another tier of the pyramid lights up ... and lighting up the entire pyramid awards the top prize to all participants.

So, here's two big advantages over a lucky chair:

Firstly, a user can't tp in, grab the prize, and tp out again - the pyramid has a buffer period (currently 7 minutes by default) in which winners are offered the opportunity to attract somebody capable of unlocking the next tier and improving the pay-out. If they leave the sim during this period, they don't get their prize. There's no way to skip or fast-forward this period - so users are either going to work their address books to bring in more bodies, or (if they don't have sufficient contacts online, or are just happy to take the first tier prize), they're going to start browsing your store to kill time. Both of which are good results for you.

Secondly.... the winner has a real incentive to bring more people into your venue... they *want* the top prize - they *need* to light up the whole pyramid ... and anybody they bring in to light up a level is going to have to hang around for their own 7-minute "count-down" period.

OK... this is probably sounding more complex than it should ... bottom line: it's a pretty intuitive system to understand when you see it in action (the first test-victims had no problem at all getting to grips with it), and devilishly effective at bringing small crowds into your shop who _must_ hang around for a short time before leaving.

Assuming this test session completes without problem, the Prize Pyramid will be on pre-sale to members of the "Lucky Designs" group tomorrow, with wider distribution to follow ASAP.

                           

(P.S. - don't sit on it. It's not a chair. It's pointy. Sitting on it would be a baaaaad thing.)

It was the best of times / the worst of times...

It's been a frustrating couple of months... well, actually, it's been a *fantastic* couple of months in terms of raw sales - Lucky Chairs have been getting a lot of positive word-of-mouth coverage on the forums lately, and they're flying off the (metaphorical) shelves - but frustrating from the point of view that the day-to-day running of chair sales, user support, buyer advice etc suddenly seems to be taking up 100% of my in-world business time. I'll not pretend that this isn't a nice state to be in - the chairs are a *very* good revenue source right now - but it's frustrating that the other projects I have on the drawing board are suffering as a consequence. I guess this is the point where I have to recognise the fact that I'm spreading myself a little thinly, and make big decisions with respect to growing the business - do I start outsourcing project components? taking on staff? Reposition myself as a "Project Manager"? (*shudder*) ... Scary prospects!

That said, the May bank holiday gave us an extra-long weekend here in the UK, and I used the bonus time to get some scripting done on a new promotional toy that's been floating around in my head for a couple of weeks. It's a very close relative to the Lucky Chair, but has - I hope - a new, addictive quality all of its own. The game mechanic behind it should encourage longer (10+ minute?) linger-times by its users, which will hopefully please those store owners who get disgruntled by blitzkrieg chair-hoppers. Hopefully I'll be able to wrap up the development later this week - expect beta/pre-release details posted to the Lucky Chair Owners group soon.

Longer-term, I've been plodding away at my "big" new project. Realistically, I'm not expecting this to launch until the 3rd Quarter, as it's a somewhat ambitious, multi-media kind of scheme (and I want to make sure my summer vacation is past so that I can keep my hands on the project in the weeks following the launch)... but it _should_ provide an entirely *new* alternative to Lucky Chairs. Incorporating a totally new game mechanic... a totally new way of promoting your venue... and advertising possibilities the likes of which haven't been seen in SL before. See why it's taking so long to get together? ;)

So many schemes, so little time...