The Lab has launched the latest step in their campaign to celebrate SL’s tenth anniversary – and it is an offer certain to delight and frustrate.
“Celebrate SL10B With a Chance to Win a New Alienware 14 Laptop!” reads the headline of a new blog post, which goes on to read in part:
To help celebrate Second Life’s tenth birthday, we’re running a co-promotion with Alienware , the pioneer in specialty high-performance PC gaming systems!
From now until July 17, 2013, Second Life users can enter to win a brand new Alienware 14 laptop! For contest details and to enter today, visit here.
The Alienware 14 has some impressive specs: Intel i7QM processor, 8 or 16Gb of memory, either an NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 750M with 1GB GDDR5 or NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 765M with 2GB GDDR5, Windows 7 or 8 64-bit, etc. Exactly which model is up for grabs as a prize is unclear from the promotion, but I’d suspect the entry-level model might be a safe bet.
HOWEVER, before you start rubbing your hands in glee at the prospect of winning a new laptop, be advised that if you’re outside the US, you’re stuffed. You’re not eligible to enter.
There are potentially some very good reasons why the offer is limited to US residents only. For one thing, running a truly international competition with such an attractive prize with a third-party is going to be something of a logistical load to carry, even allowing for any legal / technical issues involved. It’s also likely that Alienware / Dell themselves limited the scope of the competition so that they are not hit with and headache in running it (and lets face it, “country specific” competitions aren’t actually that unusual for multi-nationals to run). But, the fact remains that in going this route, rather than attempting to develop a competition which is inclusive of all their users, the Lab is again going to be perceived as thumbing its nose at its overseas users.
Even so, the fact remains that, with the number of recent “US-only” promotions the Lab has run in recent months (and remembering that ant “US-only” limitations placed on them may not be LL’s fault, but rather stipulations placed on the offers due to technical or other reasons), it would be nice to see if the Lab could come up with opportunities to win “valuable” prizes and participate promotional offers which are both reflective of and inclusive of their international user base.