If you take the Trooble to visit Amazon…

Posted on by Inara Pey

amazon-6The Lab launched its latest Amazon offering to US residents on Friday April 12th: Trooble Pigs. The accompanying blog post gushes:

We’re happy to announce a new special offer for Second Life on Amazon – a pack of virtual pets!

The Troobles have arrived and are squeaking with excitement to be the stars of our third limited-time, special promotion on Amazon. From now to April 24, 2013, you can get the Pet Pack – The Troobles (a $9.95 value) for free.

The Pet Pack includes an adorable family of Trooble Pigs including Daddy, Mommy, baby sister, and baby brother. Each Trooble has their very own fashion accessories and special talents. Mommy Trooble offers customized greetings to your visitors, Daddy Trooble can go into guard mode and teleport trespassers, and the babies are always up for a cuddle.

This is the latest of “premium packs” and “special offers” being supplied to SL users  / Amazon customers located in the USA through Amazon’s online game service, presumably as a means of promoting Second Life to the latter – something which didn’t exactly start off overly well when the original offer backfired and resulted in much amusement. Well, for me it did.

I’ve actually nothing against the Lab trying to reach out to new audiences and build new, engaged users. Rather the reverse; I believe it is more important they do so than it is for them to cut tier. As I’ve previously pointed out, tier cuts (for the foreseeable future) are liable to do more harm than good, whereas building an engaged user base can only be for SL’s betterment.

However, what I do feel – and continue to feel – is that offers like this tend to miss the point, and that if the Lab really is after attracting new users from the masses who use Amazon (even if only those located in the USA), then there is fair more they could do in which to make SL appear attractive and worth the investment.

As it is, the virtual pet / fashion accessory pigs are here and will remain “free” until Tuesday, April 24, after which they’ll presumably continue to be offer at $9.95. So if you’re of a mind and in the USA, you can hop over there and pick them up – dare I say – with no trooble at all.

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

20 thoughts on “If you take the Trooble to visit Amazon…”

    1. Well, it’s not LL’s fault per se. The mechanism by which games, etc., are offered through Amazon isn’t (as yet) available outside of the USA.

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      1. Inara
        That reply is the most disingenuous comment I’ve ever seen you make. You seem to suggest that by marketing a premium product which THEY MUST KNOW is limited to the USA, that it is not their fault/responsibility. How is that so?

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        1. Of course LL know the limits of the service. However, that doesn’t mean they are setting out to slap non-US residents as your original comment implies.

          When wanting to go with the online distributor that has the capability to market your goods with the widest reach, you sometimes have to live within their requirements. This is hardly something new – many other companies offer products and services that are geographically limited, despite being “international” in nature – so why not LL?

          Had you raised the point that LL’s advertising fails to point out the Amazon service is limited to US residents, I’d have agreed. However, to me the issue is not the geographic applicability of offers like this so much as their potential to actually stimulate interest in SL beyond the current user-base.

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        2. Inara
          In a way I was indeed emphasising the geographical discrimination element of LL’s marketing. It is something not infrequently seen in the marketing of goods and services by US companies. They appear to be unwilling to see or incapable of seeing beyond the shores of the Good Ole US of A. It is NOT a strategy for success as several large US conglomerates are now realising.

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          1. Again, LL are merely making use of a channel. They’re not responsible for setting any policies / limitations associated with that channel. Getting upset with LL because the world’s largest on-line retailer opts to keep the channel purely US-centric strikes me as akin to barking up the wrong corporate tree.

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  4. I don’t see how this sort of gift can help create an engaged user base. LL can (and should) do better than that.

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  5. I also have personally nothing against more and different venues of promoting Second Life, but I also have this feeling that this misses the point… unless LL is counting on Google searching & indexing these pages somehow and boost their PageRank that way?

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