Why do I do all this ? Flashback... (cont'd)

I just can't stop talking... but hey I have not finished bashing you with my little story !

So they were a success and the more feedback I got the more work I was producing. Updates became necessary and overall went smoothly (I'd love to talk about the many little anecdotes I experienced such as the time I had to issue a script to my all my 100 customers after a week because I simply forgot to include the update part in the cuffs). My vendors were multiplying, Sophia Barrett the bubble girl even allowed me to squat her spot at Latexia (which she founded in the first place), and paid an ad for my cuffs for months (yes she's that nice !).

I quickly realized I had created a niche. Before I started, people liked SL restraints for the animations they triggered, and for their design. My stuff is different, not so good-looking but aimed at making the keyholder feel almighty and the sub... helpless. It is aimed at experiencing D/s more than playing it. Now don't get me wrong, everyone has their own kink, I'm not saying I have changed the BDSM landscape that much, and my goal was certainly not to compete against my friends Ame and Lulu. Some people love the design, some people love the scripts. I could have been much more aggressive on the market but... that's just not my style. And I still see SL and its scripting language as toys (although the relationships I have built there, while strictly online, are real).

No, my real goal, and you will laugh at this, was to raise the bar. That could be the real reason why I do all this : SL offered me a challenge, and I took it up. Oh I know what you're thinking : "That's a bright speech but money is spent, it's just commercial after all". No it isn't only commercial. If it were I would have bought sims, hired personnel to help me with the build, scripts and customer support, advertised to death, and undermined competition. I could have done all that. But I'm still the amateurish type, my shop is still ridiculously small and on a crappy mainland sim (yes, right where I lived before, I'm sentimental). If I wanted to make it a job I would have left my RL one, I can do that but I'm not crazy. I do that for the fun of it first.

Now, I know that most of my ideas have been copied and mimicked, I have been mad about it in the past but now I know better than to give a damn. Ideas cannot be patented, and other creators are imitated too. It would have been nice to have given me credit at least, as far as I know only Lulu did when she released her prisoner plugin, using my HUD cache concept. The others are just not grateful, or too proud to admit some of their ideas are not their owns.

So I think that answers the question "Why do I do all this ?". Because I must do something, because it's quite a challenge and because I love what I do. I know some people see me as some greedy monster... I won't bother trying to prove them wrong besides this blog entry.

And that was only about my business, I have not even talked about SLBI and Tesscatraz. I will later...