CSI and SL business

The current CSI story arc and Second Life tie-in, featuring themed orientation areas and an in-world game, is generating a lot of hype in the SL blogosphere. So far, it remains to be seen whether the impact will be as great as the anticipated 1 million new signups; so far, over Wendesday and Thursday, new user signups are at a total of close to 120,000 (versus a 'usual' recent figure of between 30-50k for a comparable period).

Anecdotally, the new users led into SL by the CSI promotion DO seem to be taking part in the SL economy; I personally observed many newbies spending money on avatar appearance accessories in the CSI tie-in Fashion Avenue sim, and explaining to other newbies that they'd bought L$ from the Lindex. So, this is potentially a good thing for content creators...or some content creators, anyway; those selected for vendor spaces in the Fashion Avenue sim will likely be the first to benefit, as the new users going through the CSI orientation on the OnRez viewer have in their inventories landmarks directing them to Fashion Avenue for shopping.

This rankles with some people, who seem to feel that the vendor selection process should have been more open, in order to give more content creators a chance at a share of the revenues generated by the new users; a certain SL designer showed up in the Fashion Avenue sim on Thursday, wearing a group tag that said 'Pissed Off', and started questioning Roslin Petion of Tete à Pied regarding the criteria for selection, and suggesting that the Electric Sheep Company should have had an open bid selection process (a sentiment also expressed by Prokofy Neva). This would, perhaps, have been more "fair", but with a development deadline, one can't reasonably expect ESC to have been able to sort through the mountain of submissions that would inevitably have followed; so it seems quite reasonable that many of the content creators represented (Barnesworth Anubis, Torrid Midnight, Kin Keiko, Portia Sin, and others) were also contracted by Electric Sheep for development of the CSI build and the CSI-specific newbie avatar skins, clothing, and prim accessories. This may seem unfair, to some...but then, ESC is a business, with content creators already contracted; the expectation that they might open the vendor selection process, and thus potentially damage existing business relationships, seems rather unreasonable. And in any case, assuming a fair retention rate for the new residents, this will, eventually, be a good thing for SL's content creation community in general, as the new users move into the world beyond the limits of the CSI orientation areas.