Subscription based Groups
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Faenzo Resident
Just like in Real Life, we need new and alternative ways to commercialize our products and reinvent our businesses. I believe Second Life merchants as well as artists and independent developers would benefit from a subscription-like function that could be added to groups.
For example, customers would join a subscription-based store group and every month they would have a fee debited from their accounts which they could terminate by leaving said group. In return, they would have access to new releases instantly from their favorite stores. It would be interesting to have different tiers as well just like Linden has with "Plus, Premium and Premium Plus" within the same group allowing them to access more exclusive content based on their subscription levels.
Not only this would be a healthy way of energizing our economy by allowing creators to stabilize their income and feel more relaxed to be creative and give the best of their efforts towards their items, but it would also benefit customers who would have access to a lot more than they normally would, making their shopping less disposable and more enjoyable.
This is just an initial thought, feel free to add more suggestions in the comment section :)
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ReBeeca Dembo
i know what you mean! like pateron page :D honestly i would love that! i would subscribe to my fave stores and get the items :D i would 100% subscribe!
Zoxin UwU
I had multiple paragraphs but I'm just going to reiterate in agreement as to what others have already said:
- This can be done with LSL anyway.
- Subscriptions are rarely worth their offering.
- Companies can't be trusted to provide content with customers best interests in mind even now (see: unreasonably no-mod content), subscriptions would worsen this tenfold.
- Larger brands which employ external workers will suck up more L$ than they already do (there's lots to say on this, but TL;DR).
- Adobe does subscription-based services, we don't do what Adobe does.
dantia Gothly
Just another way to syphon peoples money away.
Abyss Monster
This is not something I want, not as a customer, and not as a creator. Others have gone into detail in other comments far better than I can, so I won't go into a long tangent, but I personally like that my "VIP" group is a one-time fee. It's cheap, non-invasive, and the group (with group gifts + more store credit rewards) is a way to say thank you to those who make a small donation to support me. I would not ever use a subscription service, as I am generally very anti-subscription model and I'd feel predatory for doing it.
As a customer, I would simply not buy from stores that implement this model. We deal with enough of that in real life, with the many streaming services, subscription-based software licenses, and paid memberships for everything. I don't want this trend to infect SL as well, and I would think much less of creators that used such a greedy system.
ZAeL Voxel
There is no reason for this to be a system within Second Life's infrastructure.
Respectfully, what this is doing is the same system that can be implemented with platforms like Patreon, to give one example. I can also see many ways that this could potentially become abusive towards customers, and it would also have a bias of favour towards the larger-reach creattives and business owners on Second Life, which are also those who are likely not struggling for business.
As touched on by others too, the issue of what happens when a creator leaves the platform is made worse with this model, which is also a concern. Beyond that, there's also concerns around the customer's rights to retaining goods purchased or accessed through a subscription. What would be the identifier to seperate these items from ones bought from the same creator without this subscription? If cancelling this blocks access to people's inventories filled with these items, could items bought outside of these systems be affected?
With the current issues that many people experience around inventory content disappearing, and infrastructure as it is on Second Life in terms of identifying these issues and the like, I can easily see a store using the same name for subscription-obtained items and non-subscription-obtained items, and a user losing their products bought legitimately before engaging with such a system.
This would, in turn, be an administrative nightmare for brands, creators (especially those who are small or one person teams), and for Linden Labs.
If you want to have customers get an extra thank you for paying a monthly fee, again, I would suggest looking to other platforms, and make it something that does not gatekeep access to items.
Beyond that - in a time where people are struggling with the economy, adding another monthly subscription is predative, infinitely more disposable than the current methods of accessing shops, and ultimately is anti-consumer and anti-smaller business.
No thank you.
Gorgeous Aurelia
No thanks
Molly Starlight
Aslong as auto-renew is OFF by default, this is fine with me.
Else this is nothing but a long term Gatcha Scheme. Cheap today. Jacked up price tomrorow.
Akai Pixels
I'm against it. This is a very anti-consumer feature.
Just like in Real Life, subscription-based services brought us to grim reality of having to pay for 10 of them to be able to watch your fave shows, listen to your fave songs and use your fave tools for work or creation or relaxation. What started as "only $9.99 monthly!" turned into $9.99 for netflix + $9.99 for amazon (because few shows you are watching are not on netflix) + $9.99 for spotify + $9.99 for youtube (because ads are annoying) + $9.99 for photoshop + $9.99 for skillshare + $9.99 for god-knows-what-else, effectively bringing us to the point where it all became unsustainable for customer, especially with the current economy where $9.99 turned into $19.99 or even worse: $19.99 + ads or you can get it for $29.99.
Same will happen to SL: first you'll just get a useful HUD for simple L$249 monthly that helps you do something or live your RP fantasy or whatever, but then someone somewhere will decide that it's a very great way to push some obnoxious ads to your face. If you won't update to the latest version of said HUD with ads, you won't be able to use it. But! If you don't like ads on your HUD (for some reason), you can always go tier up and pay only L$549 monthly to get rid of them! What a deal!
I can only imagine how many creators will gladly jump on the ship, gatekeeping their best stuff behind monthly payments and giving scraps to "freeloaders" and that's gonna be yet another dead end for creativity, because after few top brands choose this way (and they will, look at ai adoption by top names), EVERYONE will start doing that and we'll just have endless subscriptions everywhere just because "BRAND_NAME_HERE does it". Just like every single creator was all over the gacha when it was first introduced into SL, that was nothing but a worse kind of gamble, yet it generated tons of revenue.
Another thing one should be concerned about (and that's, once again, can be applied to Real Life): what will happen with previously bought item when creator will suddenly disappear or stop supporting it? I mean, we can dream that only big names will use this feature, but even goliaths fall once in awhile. I dunno, they got cancelled on twitter and just closed their store, they got overwhelmed by irl stuff and have no time to support their SL business, or they simply lost interest and shut down it all because reasons. What the buyer will end up with? Non-functional item? With parting notecard "it was fun while it lasted, but not anymore lol. kk, thanks, byeee thx for money" in group notices?
If there is no regulation from LL and no protection for the end user, it will be a recipe for a massive anti-consumer disaster.
Kool Mekanic
It can be interesting for some scripted products too. Instead of making a limited demo, the full product is available as long the subscription is active. But then we need a function to know the owner tier in the group, like integer llGroupSubscription( key groupUuid), even if owner offline. The script can, by design, reduces functionalities and warns if subscription was stopped, and go full again if subscription is restarted. That would be a smart way to test products like orbs, rezzers, gadgets, doors... for cheap during one month, then decide to keep it or not.
LeillaLux Resident
no thank you!
Veyard Ravenhurst
Services like Netflix, Spotify, and Xbox Game Pass use a subscription model where you pay regularly to access a library of content, but you lose access if you stop paying.
Would this work the same way, where the item would disappear or be frozen from your inventory if you cancel?
Toothless Draegonne
Veyard Ravenhurst They're asking for groups with a sub fee, not items with a sub fee. Sub-fee items can already be done with a bit of creative scripting and dependency on external services, possibly via an experience KV store. Don't pay the sub, your item becomes a "dead" mesh object.
Whether you regard it as a good or bad thing, it's not exactly something new, and a group sub fee could be used more honestly to pay for stuff like the region that the group may be a land or access group for.
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