Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Since we were recently talking about the harsh economics of shadow meshing in the Second Life economy, here's a look at another SL market with some impressive revenue numbers: Premium mocap animations.

Paragon, a Los Angeles-based mocap studio, has been creating and selling RL mocap dances in Second Life for over five years. (Marketplace page here.) That includes the excellent dorkiness in the video above: Deadpool's dance from the opening of Deadpool & Wolverine, a motion capture of dancer Nick Pauley AKA Dancepool, who actually performed it in place of Ryan Reynolds. (Currently selling for L$300 to L$330, click here to get the Deadpool dance from the Mount Paragon sim.)

Pauley himself is a top dance pro and social media influencer, while the mocap process is time consuming and expensive, so I was curious how the economics here worked. Can an SL merchant really make a profit from real life mocaps that sell for the L$ equivalent of less than $2?

Paragon Owner/Producer Jon Nakagawa gave me a full run-down:

Mocap Margins:

Profit has been constantly steady at 150% profit return (or 60% net profit margin). That means for every dollar invested, we gain an additional $1.50 in profit, resulting in a total of $2.50 returned (initial investment + profit).  

One year after our opening (our first article with you), we had a huge spike and enjoyed our peak during COVID with a  350% profit return (or 78% net profit margin), but since then those numbers receded to the aforementioned. Plus our overhead and expenses are greater now 5 years later. 

Mocap Overhead:

What people don't know is that a motion capture production is like making a music video. Thousands of dollars go into a single day production. We need to pay for crew and talent (but luckily I own the studio equipment). Then, there is post production expenses where it goes to mostly to my animation team for animation data processing. We do about 5 productions per year to create one year's worth of content in Second Life at a rate of 3 releases per month. For this reason, we do not do custom animations. 

What kind of dances sell in SL — and what don't sell as much

Not all releases profit the same. For example, niche or cultural dances won't do as well as something more mainstream like a TikTok dance or a trendy popular dance genre. Also, male dances don't do as well as female dances, but I still produce one every month.

I would say more women buy male dances than the male consumers, so that helped a lot. 

Couples dances are the worst because they cost twice to produce and only appeal to a smaller demographics. We always take losses here and if we produce too many we would alienate our single dance customer base, as we found out. We did an experiment and felt the aftermath one quarter later. 

So overall, it is difficult to get a handle on copies sold because there's packs and there's single dance animations and sales varies between releases. So over the years, I came up with a method of balancing profit and loss of releases to get the steady profit margin we have now. The popular dance genres offset any losses from the niche dances.

Because of the support of the SL community, we are able to do this. The artist in me wants to create and cover a wide selection of dance genres for everyone and not be restricted to one dance genre, and this approach has worked out well.     

Overall results: "The business is doing very well as a top content creator in SL breaking into the six figures USD revenue and profitability is strong."

As for the Deadpool dance above:

"[It] did very well for a male dance, and after a month since its release, we broke even on what we spent on it. That dance was a bit more expensive to produce because of the licensing from Darrin Henson, the original choreographer for N'Sync." (On brand for Deadpool, Pauley's dance is actually modeled after Henson's moves for the boy band.)

I'm grateful to Jon for sharing these stats! I suspect there's room for many other mocap dance merchants — for instance, dances from J-Pop stars targeting SL's fairly large Japanese user base.

Do you know about other SL merchants with an interesting niche? Let me know in Comments! (Yes, self-promotion is fine.)