Two things came up this week which made me think. (O.o)
One: I closed the NCI newbie mall. Not without reason. Applications have gone from the 2 per week I was experiencing a couple years ago to now 1 per month. And, often, that 1 didn’t create anything yet so I’d have to turn them down. (>_<)
Two: This post on the SL forum.
And, I really have to think. What is the creative market in SL like these days? (o.O)
That is, who’s making what? Why are my favourite stores becoming so slow to update? Why have some stores stopped updating at all? And how dependent on prefabs are SL creators becoming all around? (._.)
Even the NCI sandboxes have often been reduced to a couple oldbies trying out small builds while everyone else pretty much hovers around in IMs or some open chatting. I remember when at least half of the crowd was trying to make something new. Now, that just ain’t the story anymore. (T_T)
At the same time, I’m rebuilding my sim to be a nice haunted little spot to explore a bit and I’m not relying on prefabbed buildings this time around. I had made some mesh walls with window and door cutouts and I’m finally putting them to use. They’re bloody hell to align, but, when in place they match a prim build but only use 1/3 to 1/4 of the overall LI prims and sculpts would use. (^_^)
Still, when I get updates from the store groups I’m in, they’re more often than not new ‘discounts’ as opposed to new items. Instead of branching off and creating new things, they’re just shuffling the prices on what they’ve already had for a while. (>_<)
There are exceptions, I know. Graves has been doing new outfits lately and even working in some mesh details. DE just released some self-made mesh cargo pants which are insanely detailed. (^_^)
But, they’re not the norm now. (>_<)
There are so many stores lately which haven’t updated a thing. They just sit, idle, and maybe make something new when a fresh prefab/template comes about. (._.)
There could be some argument that the creative people have moved out to open grids, but as a member of OSgrid and InWorldz and a few others, I’m yet to see anything that really shows a ‘2013’ sense of newness. (>_<)
I can’t take anything away from Inworldz because it’s been too long since I’ve been there, and I didn’t know it that well when I was there. That said, metropolis grid (hypergrid.org) is celebrating their 5th anniversary and there’s a few artistics sims and such around there. I’m hosting a “build off” where we try to recreate a painting…I don’t know if any of this counts or would be what you consider “creative” or not.
Honestly, I think with the increased demand skillwise brought on by mesh people are finding that SL and other virtual worlds aren’t worth their creative time -given the high skillset requirements I think people find they’re better off putting their creations on renderosity or turbosquid than on SL or anywhere else.
Doesn’t feel that way to me; as I said over in that forum thread (gah, you’ve tempted me into posting to the forums!) I’ve seen plenty of creativity lately, in lots of stores (new and old), art builds, sims, and so on.
I think that what happens to a lot of us oldbies is that at first we find lots of new places and think “Yay!” and then we have a list of places that we like. Then because everything changes those places go away, or stop updating, or whatever, and we think “Boo, all these places have gone away, SL is dying!”; but in fact if we went back into the mode of finding and listing new places (rather than the mode of checking things on the old list), we’d find that there are as many cool new things as ever. (Mesh and amazing light-baked textures have produced quite a bit of stuff that I think of as 2013-flavored.)