Archive for the ‘virtual worlds’ Category

Today, an email went out to those registered at IMVUSale.com to the tune of this…

Our apologies, as much as we are working on sales we still have over 70 million credits stacked up, even higher than last month.

Imvu’s printing too much money again, giving away free credits for quizzes, contests and running sales with lower prices than us resellers do. Yet they still fail to shut down at least 12 fraud websites that are currently SELLING stolen credits at 30-38 per 100k. We really can’t do much about it until they stop this none-sense. Buying price is lowered to $39 per 100k, hope you understand the difficulty we are facing, hopefully the holiday season will bring some light.

Resellers are teaming up on protesting imvu’s recent financial decisions already, it should take some effect.

Sadly, I fear that a lot of resellers will soon face the same problems. Actually, my own credit partner DevCredits.com has already felt some pinching in the last six months or so as we frantically try to sell credits to whomever we possible can so that Tidy can continue to purchase credits from us at the rate of $46/100k. It’s been hard.

IMVU has been really pushing sales on their credits thus undercutting the resellers with ease. After all, IMVU can produce all the credits they want and sell them at whatever price they choose. And the more they do this, the less developers are paid. Need I direct you back to my post about the decline of IMVU and potential earnings?

I don’t need to say much more than what the email from IMVUSale has covered. Sad, sad day for developers.

Let’s discuss the future of IMVU… shall we? I know so many of you are eager for a place where you can discuss this topic and say what you really feel without moderators looming over you and cleaning up behind you. So here is your chance to use my personal space as your own.

As a pro developer who uses IMVU as a major source of income, it’s only natural that I hope and pray that IMVU as a company succeeds in the way I believe it should – meaning IMVU makes money as well as provides me with the tools and opportunities required for me to continue profiting from my work. Unfortunately, the last year has shown me a steady decline.

I’ve made a lot of excuses for this – the economy, the summer slowdown, more developers and competition, my lack of desire to create, file sales, etc. I’m sure any one of these and mostly likely a combination is to blame. That said, I just don’t think these things alone are enough to cause the horrendous decline in sales that I have experienced.

Sure, I’m willing to admit that I haven’t worked as hard and a lot of people view me in a different light now because of this website. I get it. But it’s not really even about me – it’s about all of us. How many of you are experiencing a decline so great that you wonder if it’s time to move on… pack your e-bags and take your talent elsewhere? Some days, I feel that way and I’m noticing that more and more IMVUers are migrating to other virtual worlds [not just Second Life although that is the major one].

How much money are we all really making these days? Whoever thinks pro developers are “rich” is sadly mistaken. Remember those days when earning 60-100k in a 24 hour span was a good day? Okay I realize not all of you reading this have experienced that – especially if you’re fairly new to our community. But believe me… some of us used to make that kind of money. I’m sure some still do, but there isn’t a developer that I know personally that is making that kind of money any more – sadly myself included.

IMVU is slowly turning into a monopoly of sorts. The big name brands are taking over and IMVU is quickly taking larger slices of the pie. All of the “sales” they are running for their credits and outright knocking the value of our credits lower with each campaign they run – it’s killing the developing community. Sure, it’s good for the buyers but think about how much you make from a product on average. We’ll say 150 credit profit. In order to make just $5 you would have to make about 10,870 credits (or about 72 sales). That’s a lot of sales to make a measly 5 bucks. But we pro developers used to get that – easy. We used to easily make upwards of 100k or more in a day meaning making $40-$50 for a days work on IMVU was likely.

That used to be $16,426 give or take per year! That’s a full time job getting paid more than the minimum wage in America. Not bad for a job you can do in your favorite pajamas while sipping coffee.

Except now we’re making more like 15-20k per day. That’s what I’m making and while I’m ashamed to say it, I think it’s only right that I be honest. I know a lot of you are making that too because we’ve discussed it. So we’re making more like $10 per day maximum. And now? We’re talking more in the ball park of $3,650 per year. That’s grossly disturbing to me. That means we’re making only about 4.5% of what we were making a year ago. Yes.. can you believe it? That much change in just a year!

Who is IMVU fooling? They suggest sales are up “across the board”… but for who!? More developers of course equals more money to IMVU in the long run, but if everyone were really making more sales, we’d all see an incline in profit and we’re not.

Do these numbers scare you? They should. They scare the hell out of me. They aren’t exact numbers but the ballpark figures are very much real. How do yours compare? I hope you all are doing a hell of a lot better than I am. In order to put food on the table, I have no choice but to continue to sell files thus sadly contributing to apart of the problem. I sell ad space here to help pay for my hosting space. I make a buck where I can. It’s the only way to survive on an IMVU income.

What are your thoughts?

• How much are you making these days? (you don’t need to give a precise answer… I realize that information is very private for some).
• Have you seen a decrease in sales and profit in the last year?
• How much of a decrease have you seen?
• Are you seeking out other online opportunities such as Second Life or another virtual world?
• Has your decline in sales meant that you needed to acquire a job outside of our community?

I’d love for you all to take time to discuss this. I will be moderating comments as usual but I will not edit nor delete your commentary unless I find it to be overly vulgar or potentially harmful to yourself or my website. While I believe heavily in free speech and that this is my website and we can pretty much do whatever we want – I cannot guarantee the safety of your account. IMVU has rights too. So please use caution.

China Bans the Selling of Virtual Currency for cash

Looks like virtual currency in China has became a problem for them and the country has banned its citizens from selling their virtual money for “real cash”. However, they continue to allow people to purchase the online currency.

It makes one wonder what affect this will have on IMVU and its China developers. Some of our best creators live in China and without the ability to turn a profit around here, who knows if they will even stick around.

You can read up on what the rest of the community has to say about this in the forums.

So what are your thoughts?

If you are a VIP member, you got to sneak peek at IMVU’s client version 2.0 yesterday. The rest of the community gets to try it out today. (Get in on the discussion here!)

So far, this new client version has been welcomed with slightly open arms by the community, although there are few who detest it with a passion. It seems to have both it’s great, bad and horrible points. Being a VIP member, I got to play with it yesterday. So far, save a few details… I have to say that I’m pleased with the changes.

So what’s different? A LOT! This freshly designed, full-window client has a modern edge. You can do just about everything from within the client – including reading your home page messages, shopping and purchasing over priced credits from IMVU. Special features include tabbed chats, in client message box, new room search filters and other little goodies (it’s up to you to decide if the others are features or duds).

Take a look at the new IMVU 2.0 (Click image to view larger).

Below are my opinions of the pros and cons of this new version. Some opinions from the community that I agreed with are mixed in.

Pros:
*Client loads a lot faster. No more standing around looking smudgy and half naked while you wait for everything to load.
*Ability to smoothly run several chats (I don’t know about y’all, but I hadn’t been able to do that in a year).
*LOVE the new listing for public rooms. I love that we can now search for empty rooms, rooms with 1-3 people, 4-6, etc. Great idea. I love how easy it is to simply sort out the AP or the GA rooms. I love that we can use the filters in multiple ways – choosing different levels of occupancy, room rating, etc all at once.
*LOVE LOVE LOVE the messages center. It’s a little cluttered, but it gets the job done (I imagine it would look less cluttered if I didn’t have so many dang home page messages lol). I love that unlike the “new” message viewer on the regular http://www.imvu.com/catalog/web_index.php/inbox page, I can actually read my messages in their entirety without having to go to my home page (funny how we were given over 1,000 characters yet you have to go to your HP to read them all lol). So this is great! BEST Part? I can select a TON of messages at once and hit DELETE!
*Absolute best part about the entire experience thus far? Tabs. I am a sucker for tabs and being able to tab IMVU instead of having 101 tabs in my browser makes for less going on on my dektop. Kudos.

Cons:
* You can’t access your inventory while shopping
* You can’t type any trigger commands
* You can’t even type “save outfit” while in the dressing room
* That shadowy dressing room is pretty lousy and makes all products look low quality
* Developers now have to make sure to create a really kick-butt icon, and rely only on that icon
* There is no way to access the product pages
* I also don’t like that we can’t fully close the “friends” window, only minimize it to our taskbar
* The categories have been much too simplified (for instance TOPS is lumped into that one category – just TOPS; I really prefer the convenience of “tops-angel tops-baby tees-crop tops-etc.,” which really allows a shopper to narrow down exactly what they’re looking for instead of going on a wild goose chase
* Yes, the screen is wider but it’s also shorter. That header takes up too much space
* Because of the screen resolution, it is now impossible to take nice screen shots for products and avatar pictures. I had to switch back to the older client in order to do it.
* No shout outs are displayed in the new client and with IMVU clearly trying to move the community away from the website, what will this mean for shout out dependant developers and credits resellers? Are they simply out of luck on that one?

A lot of the issues, I am hoping will be resolved. After all, this is just day one and it will take some time before everyone is adjusted and things start coming together. When I got the sneak peek at 2.0 many months ago, a few of the issues above were not issues at all. So I can only assume that those things will be soon introduced to us.

This new version seems much more geared towards the new IMVU user – and well, that is pretty much why it was made in the first place. Studies show that new users quickly lose interest in the site because they don’t understand how to do things. Having to go back and forth between the client and the website in order to shop was a bit of a hassle. It put off a lot of new users when they didn’t understand the simple concept of being able to buy new clothes for their avatars.

Time will tell with this one. Like I said – I’m enjoying the change thus far and have high hopes for this project.

Welcome to Kimi’s IMVU News blog. First, I’m gonna shed a little light on what this is.

First of all, IMVU is a graphical instant messaging client developed by IMVU Inc. It’s foremost a 3D chat in which you can interact with people throughout the world using a virtual environment as your chat location.

But it’s so much more than that once you get into it and make yourself apart of the community. In fact, there is so much to do on IMVU that for some, it becomes rather overwhelming. It has a little something for everyone – from it’s basic 3D chat to public forums, more intimate groups to interact with and my personal favorite… the ability to create your own content.

This blog is purely my perspective. I can’t tell you what you’ll find here because the world of IMVU is forever changing. There will be ups and downs for sure. But what I can tell you is that you will always get my biased (that’s no typo!) opinion about news regarding our little community.

Who am I? My name is Kimi – both on and off of IMVU. I am what we call a “Pro” level content creator. I’m very involved and active within the community and I’d like to think that qualifies me for keeping a blog of this caliber. I’m a very opinionated young lady, so expect me to dish it out. I’ve done and seen it all in my 1 1/2 years there from being a regular customer to online modeling, developing, saleswoman and more.

So sit back, grab a beverage and enjoy the ride!