10Lindens is a new brand by none other then Anshe Chung herself. Right now she plans to sell a series of furniture for 10L$ each, wich translates in about 3 cents per sale. Undercutting the existing furniture industry by at least a factor 10. In a world where resources to build cost nothing but time, market value is all about a fragile balance about what people are willing to pay for their virtual products and time invested by the creators this could be a dangerous move.
So how will she be able to afford this undercutting of SL content creators that invest time to design their products? One of the ways is saving money on production by using cheap labour and copy tactics. A second, more appalling one is to use your influence on the SL trading website 'SL Exchange'.
As one of the stockholders of the website, Anshe Chung has arranged for her own category (cars, houses, 10linden). Her items systematically appeared on the top of search results and the furniture seems to get their (4-5 star) ratings nearly instantly. Of course Anshes right to moderate comments on the forums and on her products helps to. The staff of SLX seems overwhelmed by the negative feedback this 'co-operation' has generated and hastily closes forum threads mentioning the 10Linden brand, or openly discuss how people think SLX's involvement is wrong, and removed the 10Linden category (temporarily).
The irony is, either the obvious 'Wallmart approach' will fail from the start, because people will be willing to pay 1$ for quality - or succeed and collapse on itself. There are not enough people buying furniture to support the costs of production in the long run. At 3 cents per sale, you'd need 1.200 sales to support a 4k sqm plot for just the shop. Should the concept succeed and it creates the economy she aims at, SL loses its attractiveness to the people that have coloured SL since it was born.
The slogan 10Linden uses, and explains all:
"10Lindens, No hesitation!"
In other words: Don't think - just buy. For ACS this translates to 'Don't think, just sell'.
Note: 'Interesting' history/rant on Anshe Chung
19 September 2007
How to kill a virtual economy: 10lindens
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1 comment:
If people don't like what she's doing, then, why buy it? People need some of what WalMart is selling to at least survive, but not so in a virtual world. Her items come with her association as well... so if you don't like Chung, then support who you do like. It's a virtual world, this should be easier to do than in a real one.
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