I’ve finally got around to finishing off the kitchen I started months ago and she will be on sale in the next week or so or as soon as I’ve finished the texture change hud to go with it. So have a look out for the next kitchen post which will give you the full juicy details plus some tasty samples of the texture options you will be able to choose from.
However I’ve included some kitchen pics in this post to whet your appetite and you will find them randomly sprinkled through my musings on Kitely and the SL Marketplace. In any case my homely kitchen needed to be finished off and out of the way to give me more time in my dwindling schedule to kickstart my Kitely store.
There will be several texture change options via the hud, including, black, red, white, blue etc
I am really loving my 4 Kitely sims, although with building in SL, real life, a zillion other interests, families, friends and lovers (the latter is plural just for poetic licence… : ) I’ve barely had time to go there. Hopefully that will soon change and the invites will go out to come and have a look see.
These 4 sims or a ‘mega region’ as they are officially called have 100,000 prims and can host 100 concurrent avatars. It costs me around $45 a month or something like that with no set up fees. That’s just £30 a month in English money or for us Brits the price of an ok’ish meal somewhere with maybe a glass of wine. The same cannot be said for the equivalent 4 sims in SL. The set up costs for these 4 sims would be $1000 …. each….I’m sure they would maybe do some sort of deal if you were buying 4 at once but that’s $4000 straight off to set them up….that’s the price of a really expensive meal for 6 bankers in London with vintage champagne. It would then cost $1000 a month to run those 4 sims and although SL does offer many perks the tier costs are truly exorbitant. They may continue to ignore these exorbitant tier rates, believing that as they have the highest concurrency out of any grid they therefore have no need to worry that people will really go anywhere else. But and it’s a big but….in less than a year there has been a definite sea change.
In May 2013 when I joined Kitely I searched in vain on the SL Marketplace for any full perm collada (mesh) and raw terrain files to set up my avatar in her new place, so that she wouldn’t miss SL too much when she wasn’t there. It was virtually (no pun intended) impossible to find anything (textures, mesh clothing, raw terrain files) that could be used outside of SL and on any grid. Grid wide, full perm products were as rare as hen’s teeth.
Today just 8 months later the SL Marketplace is stuffed full of goodies to help builders and consumers make the transition to wherever they want to go and the choice will no doubt increase as more builders realise the market potential for allowing their products a life outside of SL. I bought some gorgeous raw terrain files in SL for use in Kitely all completely legit and although they were not expensive they were very well made. I’ve also set up my entire Kitely wardrobe from the full perm mesh files I bought in SL which should keep me in reasonable style for the next 6-8 months. Almost every texture creator now offers texture packages licenced for use on any grid and this is just the start. I even managed to pick up some decent full perm hair too….thank god!
At the moment the Kitely Market cannot compete with SL’s choice and quality, no one can and if SL creators and builders (a savvy, talented and quick to adapt bunch) continue to create products for use in other worlds outside of SL and sell these on the SL Marketplace, this will be in direct competition with Kitely’s own promise to enable goods to be exported to any grid. This wasn’t planned but is just a brilliant example of the way markets work, demand creates supply. So,if people are creating a demand for more grid wide products they must be planning on going to other grids …right?
The advantage that the SL market has is just it’s sheer size; over 2 million items for sale, with millions of dollars changing hands every month plus many builders have their own blogs to support the download of full perm items for use anywhere. Recently sites such as Duuzo have started to spring up providing products to the SL and Opensim community for use use wherever they want.
So it will be interesting to see how all of this will pan out over 2014;
- Will more and more SL and new merchants use the SL Marketplace to sell grid wide goods or list on Kitely as well?
- What impact will this have on the look and feel of SL and Linden Lab’s focus?
- How long will it be before a big company realises the real demand for virtual goods as assets similar to music assets and sets up in direct competition to SL’s Marketplace? Now that we can upload Mesh it would be easy for people to buy anywhere and bring it in world. The advantage being that as long as they have a copy on their computers it’s theirs forever
I’ll continue to build in SL and grow my Kitely presence over time . I have so many builders’ gadgets, aids, scripts and technology in SL it makes sense to continue to use it to create and test out the waters in Kitely whilst gazing across my vast and now beautifully terraformed megaregion…..watch this space!
moco homes emporium 