A Quick Peek at Red Light Center

This is a new 3D social game designed primarily for its adult content. It is currently being advertised as “open beta” and it does have a few bugs and lacks much content.

A lot of the doors around town simply say “coming soon”, and if you try to access anything interesting, like the streaming video, it asks for you to purchase the VIP membership for $20 a month.

Currently there is no custom content, so you are very limited in wardrobe and avatar looks, and most of the wardrobe is extremely revealing, at least on the female side. Animations are also very limited too.

For all intents and purposes, this is just a clever gimmick to sell membership in a porn site. There is nothing here that isn’t doable better in Second Life.

The one thing I am interested in is this: What the makers of this program have done is make a simple bare bones 3D chat and navigate system. I am curious as to how small it is and how simple it is. A simple bare bones 3D chat and navigate system as a front for other websites and commerce besides just porn could be huge.

http://www.redlightcenter.com/flashtour.asp

Update: The makers of this program also have opened up a MySpace like place for adults (R-rated content) http://www.utherverse.com

They WILL add custom clothing for sure as it is an option available in the profiles. They should add custom faces as the 3 they currently offer are pretty boring.

Bottom line: Not worth $20 a month just to access porn content. There is not enough free 3D content to keep people around for long. The social networking end shows promise and it is done much better than Xpeeps, but the community is a bit too small right now.

UPDATE #2: Wired did a review of Red Light Center as well and came more or less to the same conclusion as me. Their review is here.