Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Great comment from a reader based in Brazil, expanding on my point (and that of a fellow Brazilian) about the difficulty for metaverse content creators in the developing world to succeed, due to high costs of entry:

It works the other way round too, the $ is very valuable and gets me a higher standard of living than using that dollar in the USA.

I can eat well, afford rent and my bills, all from Second Life content creation. Adobe prices their monthly subscriptions in the local currency too, but yes [avatar software creation tool] Marvelous Designer is very expensive compared to Adobe's monthly subs.

Reader "Reiille" from Mexico, echoes that point:

 1 USD is worth 20 pesos to us, which of course, if you earn that back in revenue, it can be a huge financial help. I myself have been trying to break into the market, but the investment to be made to put a new brand out there is more than I can afford, so it's been a slow burn. 

So while breaking into a relatively static market* like Second Life is difficult for creators in the developing world, once they do break in, they have a tremendous edge:

Unsurprisingly, many if not most metaverse content creators for whom it's a full-time job seem to be from developing nations. To take a recent example: OSMIA is based in Ukraine, where the minimum wage comes out to about USD $231 per month. A dedicated and talented full-time SL content creator can make twice or three times that, simply from their virtual content. 

This makes me wonder how many of the 1600 SL creators who make over $10,000 a year are in the developing world — or what's probably better described as Middle Income Countries.

* For creators just starting out, I'd recommend starting with a platform like Core or VRChat over Second Life, since their economies are much newer and/or unofficial.