Making money in Second Life thread

Ok, so enough fagging up the "what do you do?" thread. I'm going to try to start this and I would greatly appreciate it that it stay "professional" or "serious". I'm posting it in this grown up stuff forum for that purpose. Based on the "what do you do" thread plus some IM's I've gotten there's obviously enough curious people about how to make money in SL.

So you want to make money in SL? There's a few things you need to know before you start your journey.

• Installing/Getting Ready
• Be aware the username you choose will be the name you are known as. It's called your user name. This is not to be confused with your display name which can be anything else. However, anyone can see your username, and scripts in particular use usernames because it's unique. You are automatically assigned a surname of "Resident" (You can no longer have surnames in your usernames as of like 3 years ago). Because people will know your username make sure you use a complex password. Amazingly, SL does not have 2FA encryption though theft of L$ is generally not a problem because when you cash out Linden does a good job of investigating the L$ to ensure that it's "clean" before paying out. But if you make it big, the thought of having $5,000+ USD worth of virtual currency sitting on an avatar protected by nothing more than a password IS unnerving.
• SL interaction is much like web pages. With web pages, you have a browser which "interprets" a webpage a certain way and then displays it. In SL, you have viewers, and the viewer will display the area you are at a certain way and then displays it. There are many viewers to connect to SL with. The official client, while the most "up to date", is in my opinion one of the worst to use. Most people usefirestormorsingularityto connect to SL. These are open source. The official Linden Lab viewer is also open source, but the server code is not.
• After logging on, make sure you go to preferences and set them they way you want. Especially in firestorm, I recommend going to preferences (CTRL-P) and going to Move and View tab, and make sure "WASD moves instead of opens chat" is checked. This allows you to use WASD for movement and hit enter to open up nearby chat window (similar to EQ). I would also go to "Privacy" and uncheck all the options around "sending LookAt targets". In short, if you leave these enabled, it will send data about what you are looking at to other people around you and they can see exactly what you're looking at, so if you're going to look at someone up close they will know if they are showing the LookAt targets. There are TONS of preferences, but there is also a search bar for the preferences on top of the window that makes finding things easier.
• Tutorial Island and the hub you're put after account creation is a cesspool of people. Just ignore everyone.
• Try to find a "public sandbox" to hang out at. In the upper right, you'll see a search and magnifying glass. Click the glass, and then click "Places" and type "public sandbox". Pick one that has traffic in the middle (they might range from 1000-15000 traffic, so pick one around 6-8k), then click Teleport. A sandbox is a public place where you can create things. Most lands do not allow you to create things on their land. Be aware you might have an occasional griefer here. Also if you ever get random popups that say like "Soandso requests permission to take control of your camera" or something like that always ignore or deny those. These are things that only happen in sandboxes from stupid people just trying to make life a pain in the ass for new people. But if you say yes, you're actually giving control of your avatar to other people and then expect to be anally raped on a sex machine. Or something. Just don't click "Accept". (If you do close the viewer to log out and log in again, permissions will automatically be revoked on logout). If you are a premium account ($72 a year, but you get a L$300 weekly stipend so it works out to about $15 a year) you have access to premium sandboxes, run by LL where none of that crap happens and you can work in peace.
• There are many more females in SL than males. While I'm sure there are a large number of males playing females, LL once released statistics that still showed based on avis who had legit account info with them, there were actually more active females than males. As such, a lot of products are for women. By this I mean, if you wanted to, I dont know, make clothes... expect to make many more womens clothes than mens.
• SL is a very complex platform to get used to. Expect to take 2 weeks just to get used to the terminology and controls. They seem convoluted at first, and they are. But once you're used to them, you're golden.
• You can only cash out so much before hitting limits. If you hit the limit, open a support request and request your limits to be raised. This is generally never a problem for them. You can do this every time you hit limits.
  
  How to make money
• To be totally upfront, making enough to replace your full time job is unlikely. I worked over 12 hours a day early on. Less than 1% of theactiveSL user base makes over $1,000 USD a month from SL. This isn't a get rich quick scheme, you really do have to work and put passion in your products as if they were real to see positive financial results. It took me months before I made my first $1,000. If you're currently making minimum wage though.. I'm sure SL can be a better option for you as long as you possess some marketable skills.
• There are many ways to make money. It all matters to what your skills are. But it must be stressed again that like everything else, it starts off slow. Especially if you have one single dinky product. Don't expect to make much here until you've got a decent portfolio. In the right markets with the right skills you can expect $100-$200 USD a month without a huge effort. Nothing (except things that breaka few policies) is off limits.
• Mesh creator (Blender, 3DS Max, etc). You can do well making custom things, and quite well making your own creations too. The market is pretty flooded but theres always something new people go crazy for and suddenly some new thing ends up being a hit. A lot of mesh creation is for custom things though. I personally have a need for custom mesh things a lot.
• DJ. If you are a generic DJ in a club you can expect only tips and not much (expect 0-5 USD for a night of DJing), though some established DJs do fairly well in specialty high traffic clubs, probably bringing in 25-30 USD for a 2 hour set of DJing. If you are a live performer you work on tips plus you are paid to perform. Those are used more for official events (even Linden sponsored ones) and can generally pay you 100 USD or so for a 1-2 hour performance.
• Scripter! This is the most fun IMO and where I make a lot. If you want to be a scripter and become an LSL master like me you can expect L$3,000 - L$4,000 an hour for custom work (5-6k for a really complex project) which isn't much, but as an alternative you can entice the customer by simply saying that you want a percentage of sales. You then have an agreement where you will get X percent of sales for the product that you scripted for them. This works out to much less money in the immediate term, much more in the long term, and straight up a lot of money if they end up having a popular creation. Have to have mutual trust though. A scripter has several advantages though, as your market is everything from cheap trinkets in SL which go for almost no money to the really complex and expensive skill gaming objects which sell for ungodly amounts of money. I know someone who has made over $12,000 USD for coding a single skill game. Those are hard though. But after you've scripted a ton of things for people and you're getting 10-20 or even 30% from each sale, it starts adding up. Quickly. Very few people are good scripters in SL and you'll almost always be in demand.
• Skill game operator. This one is very lucrative but has a very high start up cost (expect to put $10,000-$15,000 USD and a lawyer just to get started). They aren't taking new applications at this time for it though but maybe they will open it up again. I imagine these people are hitting or close to the $320,000 USD monthly limit because all that shit is absurdly expensive (good for scripters though).
• Land Baron: This is very lucrative, but also can be dangerous. You basically are a landlord. You need employees. You need TENANTS. You need a website (here'san example). Linden Lab only accepts USD for land, which is $295 a month for full regions (less for mainland, butit gets complicated). Fully rented residential land will give you ~30-50 USD profit per region depending on how it's parceled out (some maybe more, I don't know enough about the land industry). Some of the very large land baronshave 500+ regions.
• Musician/Sounds: If you make sound effects/music and stuff you're actually not going to make much. You can do a little bit custom but this isn't high demand unless you're doing a live performance. Sound effects and such are not generally needed.
• Ignore all the club jobs, etc: These are all garbage and don't pay shit. Don't open a club either, it's stupid and you'll waste your money.
• Others: There are ... other jobs in the "dark grid" so to speak. Explore at your own risk. Be prepared to script stuff if you're going to be a scripter.
  
• Dont close yourself up to markets. We joke in the other thread about cocks and stuff. But if you're a scripter and some company wants to hire you to script their bits for 30% of the sales, just do it. Get numb to all that crap, and realize you're going to be making decent money from it. If you're a mesh creator and all the tits look like shit and you think you can do better, make better mesh tits for the masses. Make a fucking fortune.

I'll keep this updated if I think of new shit. Anyone is welcome to ask me anything about it, and if you want a tour IM me and we'll set up a time and I'll give you a quick tour. Just please keep the questions you ask me civil, I'm well aware SL is full of weird shit. Oh, and if you want a tour, I promise I won't take you to the cock shop.

Khane_sl said:

When are they moving from scripting in LSL to C#?

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With Project Sansar, AKA Second Life 2.0. There will be some great opportunities, because people can't bring over their past creations, however, they CAN bring over their money. This basically means LL is making them re-buy everything in the new platform, with the idea that it will be enhanced (since the new platform has much more tech).

Ask the CEO - Second Life

Ebbe Linden_sl said:

Q. Does Sansar have a similar scripting architecture as SL? Or will that be quite different? Will Project Sansar use Mono-based LSL or Javascript?
A. Project Sansar won't use LSL, but will instead use C# as its scripting language.

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Noodlemod_sl said:

What is a "skill game operator" exactly?

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One who operates skill games . Since Skill Games accept L$ and pay out L$ on winnings, there are special rules for skill games in Second Life (because they are illegal in several states). One of those rules is that you have to get a license from Linden Lab themselves to operate the games.

Linden Lab Official:Second Life Skill Gaming Policy - Second Life Wiki

Here's a screenshot of a game place running one game exclusively (the most popular skill game atm, No Devil). The creator of No Devil is most likely a multi-millionare I'm sure.


And close-ups of no devil's from the creators own location (And yes, you are seeing those L$ values correctly, people do win that much sometimes).


edit: If you live in a banned state for skill gaming though, you can't participate in it in any manner whatsoever, including owning skill gaming land, creating skill games (you can if you make them free but if they accept L$ and pay out L$ you cant). Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee are all banned from skill gaming in SL.

I was zoomed out, but yes, it probably is 200 ft tall. Sorry the image quality is really bad uploading it here. Movement in SL is free in most places. In other words, you can fly, teleport to a specific location, etc. There's little to no hindrance. You also have a mouse-look camera where you can cam around, zoom in and out from thousands of meters from your avatars present location. Most of the time you don't really need to even "move" to look around.

There are certainly limitations but if you need to understand the logic behind how you do something just ask. Lendarios mentioned last night, for example, if you had a dog and a stick, and threw the stick how could the dog get it.

In SL, objects communicate to each other through regular chat channels. The dog opens up alisteneron a chat channel (int32 based so there's 4.2 billion channels available, channel 0 and 0xFFFFFFFF are the only reserved ones - the former is PUBLIC_CHANNEL where people actually see, and 0xFFFFFFFF is the DEBUG_CHANNEL) and has alistenevent. The stick meanwhilegets "thrown"(andthis) and once it lands sends out aregion-wide chat messageon the same channel as the listener you opened on the dog telling the dog thelocation of where it is in the region. This also allows the dog to know the GUID that sent the message so it knows the object GUID of the stick for use in other functions if needed. The code in the dog would then filter these messages to make sure theowner of the stickand theowner of the dogare the same person. If so, then you could code a few ways to have the dog fetch the stick. You can have the dog make anarbitrary path toward the stick while checking if it's reached it. You can simply usellMoveToTargetif your dog is physical. Lastly, if pathfinding is enabled in the region, you can use that tohave the dog find its way to the stick.

Then for fun, the more you throw the stick, you can make the dog smarter to where eventually he goes directly for the stick (though that is what llMoveToTarget does in essence).

I doubt hardly any. Self-replicating objects are mostly patched these days, and even back then while it made headlines, it actually only took the service down for around 2 hours. You can still make a self-replicating object, but they won't be as destructive as they once were because of tighter LSL controls.

The first part is a REALLY hard question to answer. It really varies, but you can do pretty much anything. You have to approach SL on what you want to get out of it. Me personally, I spend about 95% of my time in SL working. Either scripting, building, or something to make me money. But I do spend time socializing and knowing people. You need to know what people like, don't like, trends, etc. Make contacts/network. You also need to advertise your things. You need to see whats popular, and even better you need to question something popular and ask yourself, "Can I do that better?". Because if you can truly do it better, you can win those customers and they will likely move.

Most people, honestly, probably waste their time (from our perspective). I imagine most people want to make it their IRC channel and hang out in clubs, socialize, etc. But instead of a bland text chat, you have your avatars which can be incredibly detailed, while having a live DJ (very common btw, most clubs have live DJs most hours of the day). Other people want to go shopping -- SL is a haven for shopping (of course thats good for people like me too). There are many people who create nothing and only buy shit. While I've linked a lot of things here that are in the web marketplace, in-world stores people love to go look at. SL "fashion" is a huge thing - just google sl fashion blogs and see a bazillion of them, very often the drama amount DMCA takedowns makes for some fun times. Some people truly act out SL as a true "second" life, including having kids, marriage/partnering, and having a SL "mom" and "dad". People also roleplay. You have everything pertaining to roleplay from sci-fi, steampunk, cyberpunk, vampire RP, to gorean roleplay where the men rule and women are all subservant slaves.Here's just a few of the Sci-Fi RP sims for example. And dayum lots of furries in SL too, although they love to spend money so yeah. There is no "health" in Second Life, however, there is a framework for it if the sim owner (land owner) enables it which will allow scripts to "damage" you and you get health in that manner. Once you "die" you play a death animation and get teleported to landing point of the region. So it's common to have lots of guns and shootouts and stuff. Space battles, etc.

While in world, though, I really don't judge people. As I said, every person in SL is a potential customer of mine and I try to keep that reputation very high. But I won't lie that there are some fucked up people in SL, no doubt.

People come to me all the time with scripting requests. My most recent was that someone wrote a book and wanted me to make it interactive via a HUD and in-world items. I could do that for them, but it wasn't worth my time and I declined it. The most obscure/strangest thing I ever coded was for breedable pets. I wrote a reproduction module for a company for their pets which take the traits of the male, traits of the female, and tells the backend server the traits to apply to the egg that gets made based on the actions taken by the male and female throughout their lives. Breedable pets, again,a HUGE businessin SL (note that I did not work for fennux, it's just one of the more popular breedables in SL).

For the retail stuff (that's a fair word) these are things I actively seek out. Occasionally someone will come to me for it, but not often. There is a way you can check (at least with firestorm) how many scripts a specific object uses. So if I see someone has hair on and its got 150 scripts in it, one for every single strand for example, I find the creator of that hair and say "Hey for 20% of sales, I'll make a single script that will act the same way as 150". Sometimes you get ignored. Sometimes you get a no thank you. Other times "Sure!". It makes me look good, but also makes them look good as people are usually cognizant of the resource use on their avatars, some sims even kick you out if you are using too much. Hair with 1 script is way better than hair with 150. You can also actively go to any company and just offer your services. It never hurts to say "Hey I'm a really good scripter, if you need anything please friend me and leave me a message I'll be happy to help you". EVERY business needs scripts in one way or another.

Scripting isn't everything in SL, it's just what I talk about the most because it's what I do the most. Most creative people build houses, business malls, and other structures. Many people do custom builds, and some people also decorate. Sim owners like to be able to say "Hey I'll pay you L$2,000 to decorate my sim for xmas".

Oh, and might as well say it, sex is obviously a huge thing in SL. Yes, it gets quite perverted. I've scripted some sex stuff (no cocks or vaginas though). There are tons of strip clubs, escort clubs, etc etc. I'm sure they make good money (because there are so many) but I don't run any (darn).



Feel free to browse the inworld-employment forum to see the kinds of things people hire others for:Inworld Employment - Second Life

Edit:

Here is a picture of new tokyo (27 people present at time picture was taken):


And here is inside of a typical store - obviously just one small part of it (can only fit so much on cam). This one sells cybernetic stuff for cyberpunk and cyber demon avatars:

Yeah, the problem is Second Life itself had a massive amount of hype and it all failed, though I would say a lot of that was Linden's management. They played (especially early on) a 100% completely unregulated approach. This is great in many respects, but some things NEED to have SOME level of regulation and that pushed people away. IBM for example while they offered classes and stuff, Second Life didn't really offer them all that much from a typical phone call with a join.me meeting or something and the unregulatedness of it meant that people could just grief them in conferences, etc. It was too much of a pain. Corporate people pulled out.

Sansar (SL 2.0) is supposed to play hard with Oculus Rift, and they arecertainly aiming for that market big time. Whether or not they learn their lessons from SL 1.0 are yet to be seen. They want to "own" the VR space, and they can if they execute it nicely. Linden Lab from just SL 1.0 makes an absurd amount of money. They can certainly build a cool platform, it's just whether or not it's going to be executed well that time will tell.

Not sure if anyone's ever seen this info graphic, note that they are in the 13th year. This one is from the 10th.