Just Askin' - payment problems? - Second Life Insider

Just Askin' - payment problems?

Posted Oct 17th 2007 9:00AM by Tateru Nino
Filed under: Just Askin'

This isn't about Linden Lab billing, though you might have thought so from the title. Lordfly Digeridoo has an excellent point about the whole MDC business (that's Metaverse Development Companies). Basically that the whole shebang can fall down because a percentage indulge in poor payment practices.

That is, they pay like money-juggling startups, or impenetrable behemoths. Either way you get paid late or never, which drives the creators away from the problem MDCs (because creators talk to each other), who have to fall back on more inexperienced creators, clients get bad experiences, and the MDCs who do do the right thing start starving for clients too (because clients talk to each-other too).

Granted, I've yet to see someone like Australia's Telstra, who have always paid my invoices promptly (in 4 to 8 years - I have no love for them and stopped doing work for them years ago. Still waiting on payments, however) - but when I've signed a contract which clearly states 30 day payment terms, and I'm told 3, 6, 12 months later "Oh, it takes time. that's how we do things here. There's a process." - Well, why did you give me a contract that said 30 days?

I'm comforted endlessly by the fact that there is a process, of course. As it happens I have a process too, which is to mention your payment policies to anyone I know who might be considering signing up with you.

At the end, maybe one third of the contract jobs that I've taken on have paid up, and exactly one of them has paid on time. Many of the rest are in the 30-day rinse-repeat cycle of "Golly. I can't seem to find your invoice. Could you send it to me again?" which alone can string things out for many months.

And to contrast, there's blogging. It pays. It pays regularly. It pays on time, every time. What should I spend my time on? Tough call, huh?

How many of you are in the content creation MDC-subcontracting business and have been paid late? Or paid never?

Tags: lordfly-digeridoo, mdc, telstra

Reader Comments

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1. Reason #527.3 why business in SL is a joke. It's a video game, folks.

Posted at 2:03PM on Oct 17th 2007 by SqueezeOne Pow

2. Escrow services can help with the payment issue. I've used escrow.com for SL jobs and it worked fine. Yes, there's a fee, but I just see it as a cost of doing business.

More generally, this comes down to issues of trust and credibility. Ebay rankings are a hint of what the future might bring.

In response to the previous commenter: If we assume that SL is a video game, then why does that mean people creating content for it shouldn't get paid? The last I heard, lots of people were getting paid to make content for video games.

Posted at 4:49PM on Oct 17th 2007 by Troy McLuhan

3. My complaint is not with SL, SqueezeOne. This is about RL people and RL companies. Admittedly ones who are treating things a bit like a game.

Posted at 5:24PM on Oct 17th 2007 by Tateru Nino

4. There's a lot of this IRL too. We usually only offer terms to customers that have a good history, otherwise it's strictly COD. In all but one case where we have chosen to offer terms to a new client we've either not been paid or only paid after considerable amounts of time and legal threats. One suggestion is to include in the contract that the cost of collecting late payments will be borne by the client.

Posted at 8:16PM on Oct 17th 2007 by skribe

5. Bad business and flaky people are all over the world. Basically you should expect this from any "company" that's really just a guy in his bedroom like I imagine most of these SL "companies" to be.

The problem seems to be people wanting SL to be a legitimate business platform yet still have the anonymity of a fake name and no visible RL info to your business associates. That makes the first guy to make a move in a transaction a potential victim (i.e. if I do the work with promise of pay afterwards or if I pay all or a portion up front expecting work to be done after that). You should expect to be screwed in such a situation.

What I'm saying is you can't expect ethics or fairness in a place where you don't REALLY know anyone unless you've met IRL.

My SL business ethic is that it can only be based on trust. I only exchange money for services such as scripting or building on any large degree (I run a military group that needs some big things done sometimes) if I a) have known the person for a decent amount of time or (b) we both have pieces to the puzzle and it's in both our best interests to do it right.

This also goes for any building of equipment where full permission scripts or objects are exchanged. This is a situation I'm in plenty with building equipment for my military group.

SL business should be looked at as roleplay in a video game because that's all it is. It's not legitimate and won't be until the anonymity is done away with.

Don't put any more money into a game than you're prepared to lose.

Posted at 2:04PM on Oct 19th 2007 by SqueezeOne Pow

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