twoflower: The Business of Fun...

Stefan Gagne (

twoflower) wrote,
@ 2008-04-23 08:38:00

The Business of Fun...
...is wrought with peril. Which is one of the reasons I never went pro; you're less beholden to the nightmare if you've got no monetary stake in it, and are providing no ongoing service. Something I should've kept in mind before launching 7Seas.

Yesterday's problems were twofold. One, a rash of non-deliveries last afternoon for no explainable reason. If the entire system shut down, or if EVERYBODY was getting non-deliveries, okay, that would be our fault. But nope. For a few minutes at a stretch it wouldn't work, then it would, then not, and so on. Very selective, very random. The only possibilities are that SL's HTTP broke or SL's inventory systems broke, both of which are highly possible possibilities. And then the problem up and went away again for no explainable reason, leaving me with 30+ IMs of delivery requests. I can cope with bugs that are my own fault... but dealing with the unstable, unreliable platform we're on is a pain in the ass.

Second, we got copied. Someone made a version of our LOLCatfish for sale. Seriously, it's a cat swimming backwards wearing scuba gear holding an object, and they're selling it for L$500 -- twice the cost of our most expensive fishing rod. They didn't directly copy our build, but the CONCEPT is so damn close it's hard to believe it's a coincidence. Funniest part? Creator told us that they "never copy", and that this was a "custom order requested by a customer" and we should "always investigate content theft." ...oh, and she "wasn't taking it down and would keep selling it" and the name of the guy who supposedly tricked her was "privlidged(sp) information". Then when we pointed out the obvious, er, contradiction in encouraging us to investigate the matter while refusing to help us out, she started wailing about harassment and lawsuits and we just ignored her after that.

We're not actually going to pursue legal action here... probably wouldn't work out and certainly wouldn't be worth the time, money, and headaches involved. But we can damn sure let folks know this backwards snorkelling cat is not ours and they shouldn't think we authorized it. Let the market decide, after that.

The old saying goes "your ideal job is to take what you love to do and make money off it." Wrong. As Cypress Hill put it, "It's a fun job, but it's still a job." The key is to structure your approach to it so the fun overtakes the job aspect. And after WingFling's done, I'm thinking that's what we'll need to do. I'll probably still be the focal point for these complaints, but I don't have to be the customer service representative; we can find other approaches, like putting them into a workflow for Jen to deal with, coding systems to autoprocess some of the simpler requests like "I need a new rod", etc. We'll find solutions. I am not just gonna sit here and stew in the suck much longer. I wanna have FUN again.

(Post a new comment)

	chanlemur 2008-04-23 04:05 pm UTC (link)
	Sounds kind of crazy, but, on the topic of "business", have you ever thought of employing people to do the unpleasant stuff for you? Or are you the only one with the proper knowledge? Maybe it's time to make the step to GagneCo. (Reply to this)(Thread)

twoflower
2008-04-23 04:20 pm UTC (link)

As suck as the suck is, I don't think we're at that level yet. Plus, in order to tackle some of these requests, due to the way SL permissions work only I can do it. However, I'm talking with Jen and we may shuffle the duty around the three of us somehow -- hence my suggestion at setting up a workflow. There's no reason I have to be both tech AND customer support for every request that comes in. There's a lot of ways we can go about doing this, fortunately.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

grizzygriswold
2008-04-23 05:34 pm UTC (link)

I certainly sympathize with your troubles, as a rl programmer who is currently dealing with bugs coming up in my work that aren't my fault and having to deal with customer complaints, I can't imagine having to do more of that in my free time. In SL, it is pretty easy with a bit of creativity and the right publicity to make something that a lot of people will have a lot of fun with. Most of the time this is fun and gives me pleasure, but as Grizzy's Cafe grows I too have to deal with minor amounts of crap from people.

A few weeks ago the fun of an event was pretty much ruined for me, because someone showed up at the club with the express purpose of specifically harassing one of my patrons who she had a vendetta against. I told her that she had 2 options, shut up or leave. She then IMed me and said that I better not threaten her again or she'd make life miserable for me. I banned her and she then spent most of the night IMing me threatening to grief and then coming back as various alts and IMing me after I muted her. All the alts are banned now, but I was a bit concerned for a couple of days.

SL is mostly fun but its always going to have its share of rude people who think the anonymity gives them license to treat everyone like garbage.

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twoflower
2008-04-23 06:37 pm UTC (link)

Which is one reason I was hesitant to go after this person who pretty blatantly copied out LOLCatfish -- I didn't wanna instigate some sort of gang war of griefing in either direction, from her and her fans or from 7Seas fishers. I trust our fans but all it takes is one lone nut to stir up the shirt, to use a slightly modified to be inobscene phrase.

Ultimately we decided it was important to tell our fishers that this wasn't an authorized product -- but to make sure the last note was "Please don't harass anyone over this." It's not worth the misery. We get enough misery from tech support.

We've hammered out a plan for offshoring most of our tech support, at least -- an alt that only exists to gather up these IMs and deal with them once a day. Hopefully the transition will be smooth but I still expect people not to read instructions and come to buzz me directly. Their responses will just be delayed since they need to be relayed, I say.

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	(Anonymous) 2008-04-23 07:29 pm UTC (link)
	Why does this sound soooooo familiar? Watching this blog and going hmm.. they are sooo familiar to the other fishing game.. did they copy it? (Reply to this)(Thread)

	twoflower 2008-04-23 07:50 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, because clearly nobody else has come up with a virtual world based fishing game ever in the history of time. The funny thing is that world also has trolls. If you wanna discuss the game on a serious level, step out of your anonymous hidey hole, please. Otherwise, the door is that way. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

(Anonymous)
2008-04-23 08:03 pm UTC (link)

This is obviously a troll, yeah. I'll reply with more length anyway since this is an interesting topic, and because SL people often have a very basic misunderstanding about copyright and "copying".

Copyright law applies to physical or visual derivatives as in the cat-fish case above... not to ideas or concepts. The IDEA of a cat in snokeling gear is not copyrightable. We can't claim copyright over every depiction of a snorkeling cat ever.

But a specific depiction in a particular pose with the same features where the derivative look is recognizable to casual observers... particularly with an overt derivative link to the original... that is copyright violation.

So for example, if our fishing system was breaking copyright by giving out... say... depictions of copyrighted Pokemon characters, then yes, it would be copying in the copyright sense and Nintendo could come down on their asses like a ton of legal bricks.

As with many other things in both RL and SL business, legitimacy and success is not just about the first person who gets around to importing some concept into a new media and establishes a (brief) monopoly.

For example, I'm sure there were people in SL selling roller skates or skating animations even before Moopf came along with his Skoopf skate vendors. And there are other people around who are still selling skates.

So, was Moopf "copying" those artists? Or were they all "copying" Joseph Huy (who invented roller skates in 1789?) Of course not. Skating is such a broad concept that implementing it in this particular media (SL) is not original. It's not about originality.

So what this is really about is who does it right and keeps the customers happy enough to stay in business.

As I've found when I meet other friendly artists at WingFling, there's really no reason for competitors to get upset about who got there first in these BROAD product categories such as wearable wings. They're a general concept that only differs in implementation and design.

As wing artists, we have different visual styles, features, pricing, marketing, customer service, etc., and those are the things that drive customer decisions. Same with fishing.

So are other wing vendors who come after me with similar product lines "copying" me? No. Not unless they're violating my copyrights and reproducing my wing visuals in an overt way.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	jenshikami 2008-04-23 08:14 pm UTC (link)
	Okay, irony -- I wasn't logged in. That was me, not Anonymous. :D And yeah, the idea of digital fishing is such an original idea, nobody's ever done it before. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	::falls over laughing:: lirazel 2008-04-23 08:44 pm UTC (link)
	This has got to be the funniest faux trolling ever! Here, have a pair-of-ducks! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: ::falls over laughing:: (Anonymous) 2008-04-23 09:29 pm UTC (link)
	and here all I was doing was making a casual observation because menus are exact for both systems. Buttons are in the same place for each, worded the same way and people have been confusing the two systems. I never said it was copyright infringement anywhere in what I wrote. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: ::falls over laughing:: capri120 2008-04-23 09:38 pm UTC (link)
	and I'm not just talking the fishing rod menus, either. I'm also talking the Tournament control menus. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: ::falls over laughing::

twoflower
2008-04-24 12:29 am UTC (link)

Ah, good, we've got a name now. We can discourse respectfully.

I've never seen another fishing system's tournament menu, since I've never owned an installation of another SL fishing system. If there's any similarity there, it's probably a coincidence. There's one distinct difference in that 7Seas doesn't have auto-paid cash prizes, so there'd be no buttons for options there. (That's one feature bullet point we're comfortable with leaving for our competition to specialize in; it's not something we want to officially build into our system. Just a personal choice, really.)

The main menu of the fishing rod itself being similar is quite likely, since SL only offers one interface, "ye standard array of blue buttons", and the verb "cast" is common to fishing in general. There's not a heck of a lot of variation possible there. But I know for a fact ours are different in some aspects, because ours have the option to unbait and rebait the hook to fish in baitless mode -- back when I played NR a half a year ago for a few days, the system didn't have that feature. (Maybe it's been added since then? Dunno.)

As for confusion, that's why all our products are named with a prefix of (7S) -- we want to make it easy for users to search their inventories for only 7Seas items, and keep it from getting befuddling. We're trying to avoid that confusion through heavy branding. If you're encountering branding conflict issues and have any suggestions for how we can improve on that front, I'm all ears!

In the end... did we copy our competitors? No. Did we decide we wanted try to make a fishing game in SL? Yes. Are there similarities because games where you periodically cast a rod and randomly get a fish generally all work the same way, be they in SL, World of Warcraft, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, or whatever? Yes.

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	Re: ::falls over laughing:: capri120 2008-04-25 03:32 pm UTC (link)
	Their system does not have a cash option button, that is why alot are asking if you seriously stoled their system cause you are doing everything they have. Just fish are different. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: ::falls over laughing::

twoflower
2008-04-25 06:22 pm UTC (link)

It doesn't? I didn't know that; I thought it did, given all the cash tournaments I've seen advertised. Again, I've never seen or touched the interface for their contests. I just made what seemed like the obvious way to go for a fishing game.

My ONLY contact with NeoRealms was about three hours of using a fishing rod, six months ago. I decided I didn't like it enough to keep using it. When we got bored one day and decided we wanted to try making a fishing system, I tried to make it do some things I remembered NR not doing (like the fish pets, and the aquariums, and such). But that's the extent of it. If anything we were trying NOT to copy them feature for feature because if all we wanted was what NR did, we'dve bought an NR system for our sim. Anything that's similar is a coincidence.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

Re: ::falls over laughing::

jenshikami
2008-04-25 06:36 pm UTC (link)

Huh, so there aren't cash tournaments. Thanks for clarifying. OK well, as previously noted we aren't following how Neo-realms works too closely, so what do we know?

And the fish -- their pet-ness, the consistent visual style, the ability to load them into aquariums, the fish-inclusive games with relevant fish stats, other fishy features -- are pretty much the entire point for 7Seas. It's really all about the fish-as-pets-people-want concept.

So if "just fish are different" then that's a big difference. I mean, it is FISH-ing, eh?

Anyway, as I have always understood it, there are lots of other differences as well. (how franchises and bait work, the XP curve and what XP mean, all the other things in 2f's latest post.)

So yeah, there will always be some people who assume that we "seriously stoled" because both systems involve casting out for a fish and possibly getting one, along with fishing contest.

But of course, those are extremely generic, obvious features that are already common to every digital fishing system I've heard of inside of SL, outside of SL, or even in real life. ;)

So to me, it sounds like people have a false underlying assumption that there is or should be a monopoly on "catching fish" as a broad concept in SL. I am sure there will always be people who think that no matter what.

(Plus there were already more than just these two fishing systems we're discussing in SL -- just try searching SLX for "fishing" and it's obvious. 7Seas has had a lot of attention lately because it's new and growing, I think...)

Rather than falling back on repeating what "people think" as a sort of secondhand veil, what do YOU think? Do you have general objections to the fact that we're in business? (It would actually be understandable! I know I shouldn't assume that all competitors will be as friendly as the ones in the wing biz.)

I mean, as noted we'd be happy to talk about it, particularly now that you've emerged from the veil of lurking with occasional anonymous comments. But rather than writing these long essays trying to puzzle it out, I might as well just ask directly:

What are you hoping to get out of this? Do you have specific questions or concerns we can help you with?

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Re: ::falls over laughing::

capri120
2008-04-26 08:15 am UTC (link)

I never said they didn't have cash tournaments. I said they did not have a cash button on the menu for the tournament. Their emphasis on "cash" tournaments is due to people asking if you can make money off it. That is what they advertise because people want lindens, they want to win stuff. They want ways to get those lindens in their pockets (as we all do). There are a lot more unofficial and private tournaments than there are official.

They have global, local and private tournaments. Official (cash prizes handed out by hosts that are paid by the sponsors. No buttons involved.) or unofficial tournaments which you just get trophies and various prizes.

Just as they are getting ready to start their second team fishing league you all are coming out with team fishing even though it's done differently.

Well, basically, as we all know people talk. Rumor has it you stoled the scripts from their system or were former camp owners, tournament hosts, builders, coders, etc. with a vendetta. But as we know we can take that at face value or ignore it.

What do I hope to get out of this? Nothing. Just advising that certain places have both systems and are saying it's too similar. :) Both sets of "loyal" customers are trying to "recruit" the others. Tensions will flare between the two systems customers. Both systems have pros and cons depending on what you want. Was there a monopoly.. maybe, depends on how you look at it.

Want I want to stress though is due to the above facts (the two loyal groups of customers)is the other sides customers attacking the other systems workers saying they are copycatting ideas to steal customers. And yes, right now there is more attention on you due to the newness of your system.

I just want to give a friendly heads up on the rough path I see forming.

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Re: ::falls over laughing::

twoflower
2008-04-26 03:43 pm UTC (link)

Outright THEFT of code is not possible due to the way SL works. Even if I wanted to copy their code, I can't, without some amazing hack nobody's heard of. Our stuff's 100% hand-coded by me.

If NR keeps transaction logs they can see that I bought a rod in the Livingtree sim several months ago, used it for a day, then never again. They've got all the proof THEY need to show we haven't seen one iota of their backend. Whether CUSTOMERS believe that or not is, in a way, irrelevant -- the truth is the truth.

As for our side, we encourage our customers not to harass or grief competitors. We aren't looking to forge our OWN monopoly, nor do we want to "crush the evil empire". We do our own thing because we enjoy it and want to share the fun, and we let the market decide what people want to play.

In fact, if you DO hear of any incidents of 7Seas fans being obnoxious, please let me know (Seven Shikami). I'll IM them and ask them to stop, or issue a group notice. Honestly, I'm trying to avoid talking about NR altogether in this blog; the only reason I'm doing it now is because someone brought it up for discussion.

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Re: ::falls over laughing::

jenshikami
2008-04-28 04:52 pm UTC (link)

Ah. Well, as we've previously described, Seven DID buy a fishing rod and we considered buying a Neo-Realms system but after just a couple minutes of fishing and a quick look at the prizes, we decided we didn't want it.

But no, it doesn't take a revenge conspiracy of disgruntled ex-NR-hosts for us to want to build a fishing system.

As for whether we ripped scripts, it should be clear to even a casual observer who doesn't know scripting that between our 1.5 year history of game development and our many, many other game-related products that we absolutely have the scripting and building skills to create those scripts on our own. I mean, we have an arcade full of original games, Insert Coin Arcade, and we've had a prize-giving system for ages now.

So if people refuse to believe that we're able to do what we obviously have already done time and time again, that's their problem. Quite obviously we have the skills to do what we've done without needing to copy any scripts, objects, or proprietary ideas.

We already know people who consider the systems similar and have personal issues with that for whatever reason, so... we get that.

We've never had a campaign to recruit, tear down, or even approach NR owners to pitch our system. Basically we just put it out on our dock and told our store's subscribers and it's spread virally since then.

Obviously we haven't encouraged customers give fans of other fishing systems a hard time; why would we bother? We have no goal or expectation to hurt anybody's business or customers. It sells all on its own, for its own unique merits.

Correspondingly, I would assume that NR hasn't encouraged customers to come here to post random accusations. But as you've so vertly demonstrated, there are customers (I'm assuming you are a customer) who decide to do so.

Of course I hope you'll do your part to quell the accusative rumors you've so eagerly posted here.

Since you seem inclined to describe rumors while not actually admitting you have an opinion and without admitting we might have a point, it sounds like this conversation has reached the limit of its usefulness. /end.

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	Re: ::falls over laughing:: jenshikami 2008-04-24 01:00 am UTC (link)
	I mainly went off on the giant copyright riff since it was relevant to the original post and it's a topic near and dear to my heart. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

thaumata
2008-04-24 06:07 am UTC (link)

for what it's worth, i used to shop at that other store and won't do it any more. i can understand a customer describing something they saw and requesting a custom design. my RL stepdad has very recently gotten TOTALLY hooked on SL and just this morning he was telling me about this "frickin laser shark" that someone had and he didn't know where to get. (lulz) but if someone comes to you and says, "hey, you are selling a ripoff," and you refuse to take it down... that's just bad business. what do they have to gain by selling that thing? you would imagine that a good business person would have made their money back on that item with the original commissioned sale.

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jenshikami
2008-04-24 12:02 pm UTC (link)

What gets me the most even _aside_ from the resemblance...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenart/2435369248/
... is that the joke (LOLcats and fish) has been completely stripped away -- the sign is gone, and it's now outside of a fishing context. It's just a rotating cat that for some reason has a snorkel on. I don't get how anybody would want that other than the person who did the custom order (assuming there really was such a person.)

Unless people who want a LOLcatfish, I mean. Somebody just put one up for auction on SLX -- it'll be amusing to see how much it goes for. :D

(Reply to this)(Parent)

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