Price for New Private Islands to Increase
Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 6:02 PM by: Zee LindenDue to ongoing investments in developing and maintaining the underlying technology of SecondLife, Linden Lab is increasing prices for new Private Island sales. Please note that this increase does not affect tier fees for Mainland land or existing Private Islands that you currently own.
After we run out of our existing inventory of approximately 150 regions, the cost of Private Island Set up will be US$1675.00 per region and monthly Maintenance fees per region will be US$295.00.
We have shut the land store down to give this information time to reach everyone. We are offering a limited amount of inventory at the old price when we reopen the land store at 1pm SL Time on November 1st. We will be shutting the Land Store down again to change the prices as soon as possible after we run out of Inventory. In the event orders for existing inventory are oversubscribed, Linden Lab will allocate availability by limiting orders per unique account.
Effective immediately all orders placed outside of the Land store (by phone or email) will be charged at the new price. No orders placed since the land store was taken down on Friday will be accepted. If you require special placement (next to another’s region) or other individual help, please contact the Concierge office AFTER you have placed the order through the Land Store. Orders that are currently in progress will receive the old price.
Prices on the mainland and for qualified educators and non-profits will remain unchanged at this time.
Edit: More information has been added on this topic. Check the Land category to see the most recent information.
http://blog.secondlife.com/tag/land/
October 29th, 2006 at 6:26 PM
Just when I was about to buy a PI! LOL What are the chances! Well, I am glad about it though.. because now the servers are going to be upgraded *as mentioned in the Townhall Transcript!!!* making the sims and PI’s less buggier! Thanks Linden! (seriously!)
October 29th, 2006 at 6:29 PM
Well, that should pretty much kill any new island sales.
A 35% increase in up front costs and in monthly maintenance costs? You’ve just made it financially infeasable to compete with mainland parcel sales. Congratulations on securing your land sales monopoly. I sincerely hope it doesn’t kill your creation. It certainly just killed several new sim designs I had in mind.
I design and build sims for my customers - designs intended from the first steps to be financialy self-sustaining, and which are intended to fully amortize the investment within the first year. The added up front costs and added monthly maintenance costs will make it almost impossible for a private sim owner to offer land sales at what the market considers a ‘reasonable rate’. I seriously doubt that I can manage to create a viable design for a residential-only sim now, if I have to do it on such an expensive server. A 35% increase in land purchase prices and a 35% increase in monthly land maintenance fees would be necessary. The market won’t bear that. The only other alternative is to spread out the time it takes to become financially self-sustaining, making it take several years before the initial costs of purchasing the server can be amortized, and the sim actually shows a profit for the sim owner. Most potential sim owners won’t be able to afford that.
PLEASE consider continuing to offer the class 4 servers, for those whose sim concepts are not so money-oriented. Maybe those new servers are viable for a sim that is all mall space, or that has a Corporate sponsor with deep pockets, who can afford to wait 2 or 3 years for the sim to become profitable. But it will be impossible to create a residential sim without jacking land prices so high that no one will bother looking at private sims as an option.
This is a BAD move. Someone hasn’t bothered to consider the consequences of their choices here. No matter how sweet these new servers are, they won’t do anyone any good if no one can make a sim with them that is financially self-sustaining.
October 29th, 2006 at 6:44 PM
My main concern right now is will this effect ownership transfers as well? I’m currently paying off a sim through a 3rd party and it will transfered to my name soon. If it gets transfered to me after this price change does that mean I will be paying $295 a month tier instead of the $195 I’m currently paying now?
October 29th, 2006 at 6:45 PM
well you can be fairly sure i will not be buying any more private islands not at these prices how can we compete with main land now at these prices. i sure hope i am wrong but i am thinking you just destroyed private islands. we private island owners offer services that LL can not and now we will be forced to pay more per month it really does not make any sense. you say you are having trouble handling customer service yet you are killing a major item that will help eliveate some of the burden you have in providing customer service. just 5 minutes ago i was called to one of my islands to take care of a problem that would of needed a liaisons attention. but because it was on one of my own islands i was able to take care of the offending objects.
October 29th, 2006 at 6:49 PM
I’ve supported most of LL’s decisions, so I’ll give you guys the benefit of the doubt here for the moment, but I have major concerns that upping the monthly maintenance cost for new sims will means that, from now forward, new privately owned islands will begin to shift substantially toward monetary interests, and we’ll begin to see far fewer ‘private’ interests. ‘Culturally’ important sims like Svarga, or Taco, which are really not in the business of making money, will be at a serious disadvantage.
Aren’t you the least bit worried that upping the monthly cost of sims will begin to erode the ‘cultural’ side of Second Life? It’s becoming too costly to simply rent a sim for non-profit purposes.
I understand the importance of upgrading, and I certainly understand raising the start-up fee, but the monthly fee raise seems like overkill and I don’t see it benefiting Second Life as a whole community.
October 29th, 2006 at 6:52 PM
So what are we paying extra for, exactly? Is it just faster machines, or will the new islands have greater prim allotments as a result of having these great new servers?
October 29th, 2006 at 6:53 PM
I am extremely disappointed in Linden Lab.
-Ghoti
October 29th, 2006 at 9:01 PM
Already sent my reply to the LL contact address. I’m going to speak with my bank account on this one.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:02 PM
Okay, I have read this blog regularly but don’t believe I have ever commented, but I must now. This is about the dumbest, stupidest idea I have ever heard. You just screwed over the many of us “little guys” who have been working towards getting one. I was hoping to be able to in a couple of months, now you just made it pretty much “unreachable” are you trying to screw SL Linden Labs?
October 29th, 2006 at 9:05 PM
I think this will really really hurt the community style island projects like Caledon or the Valley sims, in addition to making island land sales a lot less feasible
October 29th, 2006 at 9:06 PM
Recent Town Hall Excerpt:
[15:25] Umphrey Sachs: why and how often do sims change servers? I notice on some of my land that the sim has changed over the past few weeks.
[15:26] Joe Linden: The system is designed such that any region may come up on any available CPU (of the proper class) out of a pool of “spares”. There is really no way to know which machine a given region is going to come up on and no reason to “peg” a region to a given CPU. Anytime a region goes down for any reason, it may come up on another machine.
Im guessing this means paying the new fee guarantees you nothing but a higher price. Were simply paying for their equipment and not necessarily guaranteed we get to use it. Pretty lame, I was about a week away from ordering a new sim.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:07 PM
I was just looking at buying an island for a new venture that I have not been able to find anywhere in SL. However, this venture is not about money. It is much more about creating a cultural experience that doesn’t exist. I would not feel a bit bad about paying the additional up front cost. But, the additional monthly cost will make getting the venture to the point where the cash flow is reasonable almost impossible.
For many people, this is a hobby, not a business. When a hobby starts to take alot of time and $300 per month in order to enjoy that hobby, that is excessive. As a person new to SL, I think it’s going to be easy now to decide that I don’t really want to make the investment in a PI and building the cultural experience I was after knowing not only that costs have gone up so drastically. But, will probably go up again if this is any example.
I agree with the previous poster that said that this will turn SL from being a well rounded cultural experience to an experience very much driven by commercial (malls, casinos, etc) interests.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:14 PM
Yeah this is really going to wound the community.
News flash- we dont want big time RL companies here; we like what we, the residents, have created this world to be.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:16 PM
There goes my dream down the tube, 3 months of working in sandboxes and saving up money… darn.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:19 PM
There are alot of problems that will arise. But LL i am sure knows what they are doing. I hope
My main problem I will post in the fourm
Good Luck LL, I shall not purchase a sim anytime soon
“Not becuse of the Price increase alone.”
October 29th, 2006 at 9:20 PM
Scout, read down further in the transcript:
[15:38] Jesse Murdock: clarification: if a sim comes up on a random machine and isnt pegged to a certain one, how do you say that a new estate bought after the upgrade get s a new machine?
[15:38] Joe Linden: Good question… As I indicated, the region will always come up on a machine of the correct Class, so if you bought a Class 5 it’ll always come up on one.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:21 PM
Scott: Note Joe said ‘OF THE PROPER CLASS’ so a class 5 sim will always come up on a class 5 CPU, just not necessarily the same one all the time.
Also, how does this effect void sims, are they rising to the same level?
October 29th, 2006 at 9:23 PM
Island buyers are interested in why WE are floating the cost for the 1 million free system taxing accounts. Is this the best model you could come up with?
Sounds pretty out to lunch to me.
Increasing monthly fees by 50% for a product with this history, and doing it to the island owners who make SL more then the buggy chat app that it is, unbelievable.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:24 PM
My land group was planning on purchasing a private island in the very near future. However, now with such a high increase, there is no chance we can afford it.
I guess I just can’t see the entire picture of how this will actually help LL. I think less people now will actually purchase islands, which overall will equal less money.
My theory is, that LL just wants to attract huge corporations, since they are only ones who will be able to afford such high tier fees.
I love Second Life and I appreciate all the hard work LL does, but this PI fee increase is ridiculous.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:28 PM
You know this is one of those things that will close to destroy the island economy…..and next to impossible to set up a 16 parcel rental sim, competing wih mainland, is now impossible…another move from LL that shows me they r going dowhill, slowly
October 29th, 2006 at 9:30 PM
I was just waiting for the class 5s to purchase a sim.
When you guys had a hardware shortage a little while back, I IMed live help and asked if there would be a price increase for the new hardware. Can’t remember who replied but it was a liason. They LOLed and said something along the lines of “Why would that happen?” Riiiiggght…
You people are off your rocker. That price increase is ridiculous! Count me out, I won’t be buying any sims at these prices
October 29th, 2006 at 9:34 PM
That kind of price increase is beyond ridiculous!! For a commodity that is yet unproven for a service that is, at present, not worth that kind of money. You have GOT to be kidding!! I just bought a RL house and was thinking of buying an island or five after the beginning of next year. That idea is totally gone now. At this point, the concierge service for island owners sucks the big wazoo and I won’t pay such an inflated price for what you offer now. Until and unless the service and other bennies are well above what you offer now, the price is WAY out of line.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:37 PM
I never could afford a sim before, and now i never will. This will definatly discourage growth in second life. You could buy your own computer for less. And you can do more with it!!! 1,500 USD can be used for many things to make your life easier instead of wasting it on a virtual 256×256m region of land… If ANYTHING i think the price should DROP! This is another one of your tipicle Laim Brain Linden Plans that ruin the environment for everyone… As if the plague of Newbs and griefers caused by them starting the unverified free access weren’t enough…
Another thing i should bring up. Seeing that the ONLY way to get total privacy in Second Life is to buy your own sim and hide it, this totally screws all of us “not so rich” people out of commen decency. The fact = no matter where you go in SL some newbie or inconsiderate person is going to find you start nosing around. Even if your on a visable island sim in the middle of a checkerboard of 500 sims. They find you…
October 29th, 2006 at 9:37 PM
[...] Secondly, Linden Lab is raising the prices significantly for island ownership, bumping from $1295 setup / $195 per month (USD), to $1695 setup / $295 per month. They seemed to have been forced to post this earlier than a suspected November 1st announcement date, but, markets are conversations— the Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that. [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 9:38 PM
Linden Lab lies and misleads the community that has gathered around its sole product.
Maybe you’ll throw this comment down the memory hole like you did the forums and so many of the comments on this blog, but you can’t hide that from the community, and you can’t hide that from the investors you seem so eager to shield from the outcry of the community. The last year has gone from bad… to worse.
This is not our world. And you USED our imaginations and free labor to create this wonderful playland you sell to corporate America. LL used us and is now throwing us away.
I dare you to prove me wrong.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:38 PM
This is a business…I am greatfull for having gotten in under the wire, having purchased my sim last week, but the reason I did buy it was because I saw the looming specter of rising prices, given the huge press coverage and jump in membership. With the huge number of members, our number of potential customers increases, and we will all make more money. If prices didnt go up, we would be flooded with sims as more people entered the game and our rental rates would stay flat or even go lower.
What I believe will happen is that class 4 sim owners who need and can afford an upgrade, and they will sell their old sim to someone who doesnt need the speed…so the residential areas will gradually migrate to them.
Is this good or bad? Hard to judge…but it is the nature of capitalism…and Second Life. The market rules.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:41 PM
I tried ordering several sims over a week ago. There was an error. so I contacted customer service. No answer. Left a message. emailed concierge. waited a week. no answer. Now after all that I can no longer afford my sims. ouch. In any other situation I would’ve walked away never to do any business with these guys again.
Is this customer service? Are we really moving in the right direction? I think not. I think this is a bumbling move towards taking advantage of some recent press exposure. Locking in the new price benchmarks before the new users get settled in.
I think you’ve come close to pricing-out some of your best talent. Personally, I will attempt to afford the new prices but if these prices go up again in the years to come, I know that alot of business types will abandon the scene as less lucrative and creative types will simply stop affording it all together.
~Lefty
October 29th, 2006 at 9:41 PM
We need to protest this with signs and voices. This is wrong!!!
October 29th, 2006 at 9:46 PM
I don’t understand why when LL has been planning on the Class 5 Servers for a while now, they decide to Up the cost of an already expencive investment that tends to fail unless the RL Owner has a Deep pockets to draw from. Most of the people who are planning on buying a Island just had their dreams and hopes Dashed thanks to the price hike…. Normaly i applaude LL for all the work they do manage to do for us and for making such an addictive game for us all. But this is a bit of a burn to all those who try to make money here… Gee Thanks.
You could not have planned the cost into anything else? Thanks..
October 29th, 2006 at 9:47 PM
What worries me is that this seems not to have been a very well kept secret, and that as a result, people that had inside knowledge have been able to take advantage of this news, and may profit from it, at the expense of people who did not know.
Maklin Deckard posted this in the last blog thread, quoted from the answers forum:
“It’s not uncommon to let large customers know in advance of significant changes to policies and features. In this case developers, including agencies, long time SL residents, and community builders were given notice so they could work the price increase into proposals they were making.
It’s important to note that this knowledge did not allow them to purchase any regions to the disadvantage of other Residents.” - Robin Linden
And then we come to learn that one land baron, a “long time SL resident” has placed 80,000L ads offering to buy island sims, above purchase price (but well below the new price). Hmmmm.
Well, I guess that confirms it.
What were you thinking, LL? You don’t seem to realize that you are talking about real money here, and sooner or later, what you’re doing will ruin you? Either legally, or simply in the lost trust of your residents.
This is nothing less serious than insider trading. It is scandalous. If you really believed that those you told would not use the information to the disadvantage of other residents, then I want to live in your world, where eveyone hugs each other and floats on a pink cloud.
I am no land baron, but I own two sims, and have paid thousands of $$ to play this “game”. I have an increasing sense of worry that, since I am not really important to LL, my own investment (which is significant to me), is going to be pulled out from under me, as the Lindens change a “policy” or a “feature” without fully thinking through the effects of it.
Take as a simplistic example, their idea to “green up” mainland sims. Sounds great. But it also increases the value of the land in those sims - green land sells for more - quite simple. Whether this is good or bad is not the issue. The issue is that they didn’t even consider that when they brought the idea forward. They are stumbling around changing things, and thereby affecting peoples economic reality ingame - it seems without really understanding what they are doing.
Which, for me, might just make it too scary to continue. Right now - my tier and account fees approach $6000 US per year, and I make just about enough inworld by selling items/services and buying/renting land, to cover all those costs. I get off on it, and don’t need to make money - just break even. But, when things like this happen, it makes me feel vulnerable, like this balance could be so easily upset by a policy change by the Lindens.
I might go back to the days when I hung out and danced in clubs, and was all sparkly and witty, and stop trying to actually build something in SL…
October 29th, 2006 at 9:51 PM
How interesting…since when did SL become an experiment in socialism?
I suppose that I, as a land owner, have too much (I lose about L$10K per week), and so I have to subsidize LL’s support system for the 1 million free accounts that aren’t losing money every month to build a viable business model here (and I’m not talking about land speculation).
What you don’t realize is that my business pumps more than 50,000 lindens through the SL economy every WEEK. I employ 10 residents an above scale wages, and I have hundreds of satisfied customers that spend a minimum of 2,500 lindens per sale.
Just when I’m on the verge of turning a tiny little profit, after investing THOUSANDS OF REAL DOLLARS HERE - despite the irresponsible actions of your staff in stabilizing the platform, you decide to kill the economy.
Thanks for nothing, Phillip & company!
October 29th, 2006 at 9:53 PM
[...] I posted this in answer to this post regarding a price increase on private islands that LL released ONLY to ‘developers’ a few days ago and to everyone today — on a SUNDAY EVENING — showing that they really do not give a damn about the huge community who created their world for them. It wasn’t the sheep, it wasn’t the Millionsofus Pod People. It was you, me, that Blingtard who lags your sim with his sexball dungeon, and even crumudgeons such as Prokofy and Lewis Nerd. [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 9:54 PM
First of all, thank you for the announcement and not letting the rumours drag on any longer.
OK, some questions:
How long will LL continue to grandfather island sims running on Class 3 & 4 servers? Obviously you will have to retire these servers at some point, and I assume you guys will be asking for the higher tier payment when you do. A reasonable estimate would be appreciated so that residents can plan ahead.
Will the lower tier fee transfer with sims running on class 3 & 4 servers? If I sold one of my sims on November 2nd, would the new resident be paying US$195/month?
Maingrid land is now financially more attractive to new residents looking to own large amounts of land, & those looking to set up rental businesses in particular; is this a motivation or a consequence? Do you have any concerns over disruption of the equilibrium between two types of land?
The servers that maingrid land run on will also need to be replaced at some point, and given your reasons for price increases, I imagine they will be applied there too. How far off would you say this is? Do you see maingrid tiers being brought back into line with this new estate island tier rate, or would it be coupled with another increase in Estate Island tier?
October 29th, 2006 at 9:54 PM
Just doing a little math… not sure if I did this right but… after the rate hike…. meters per USD:
Mainland:
$195/month per region
65536 meters single owner -
336 meters per USD
72090 with 10% group bonus -
370 meters per USD
Island:
$295/month per region
65536 -
222 meters per USD
…. that looks like 40% more for islands now. 370 versus 222
Unbelievable… unless I screwed up my math.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:58 PM
Amethyst Rosencrans - “…. that looks like 40% more for islands now. 370 versus 222″
it’s actually 67% more for islands per meter - 370 is 67% higher than 222…
October 29th, 2006 at 10:00 PM
WOW! Ok LL, this is just getting amazingly horrible now. Not only did these actions make the sole decision to NOT purchase a large island from you, it has totally removed my faith in your company as bleeding edge. It seems that the sell out has begun in fact. I find it rather interesting to find a sim out there that is owned by someone who’s profile shows them as not using payment info, it just so happens that this person is associated with Nissan — nice sell out LL , is this why you must punish us so that you can continue brown nosing large corporate entities? The funny thing is, the reasonings for this change were to improve SL overall with new hardware, when are you going to get it? It does not matter how much hardware you throw at a problem, it will not always fix it and in fact it can have a negative impact. The underlying software of SL is what, 5 to 6 years old yet upgrading server side hardware is more important? Will this new fancy hardware solve lag, solve texture loading, solve the horrible physics lag and the horrible border crossing? Will this get us HTML rendering on prims, that was promised over a year ago? Will this get us the new Havok backend that was promised from over 2 years ago? Will this get us the new rendering system that was promised to us over a year ago? Will this get us Object to Object communication that was promised over a year ago? Will all new sims be able to handle double density prim counts? Will all sims eventually handle over 100 agents on them as promised many updates ago (the sim my group owns land in is still capped at 30 and when we even get close to 18 agents, the lag gets bad)?
I agree with many comments I have read so far, what justifies the price increase? Will we in fact be getting a total update to SL soon, I pray that that is the case. That reminds me, I haven’t seen the Aditi preview grid for a while, I really hope you are using it to develop a truly new and improved SL.
( and before anyone huffs at the physics comment and makes smart remarks. The physics system is in use all the time in SL, just because an object does not have that physics box checked does not remove the physics for the object, as long as the object is not phantom, physics interactions are still being calculated. Why do you think you don’t walk through solid walls or why floors keep you in place, it isn’t magic, it is the physics system doing that. The only way to remove the physics calculations of an object is to make it phantom, then it doesn’t need to calculate that data. With this in mind, the more residents = the more physics interactions with objects and the world = the more physics lag which has been getting worse every update)
October 29th, 2006 at 10:04 PM
Once, us mainland resellers were trying to tell LL that not being able to distinguish land search between mainland and estate was crippling the mainland land sales (and it did). Now estate owners are crying its too much money (which possibly it is), and how estate land sales will suffer. Well it seems LL stuck it to the mainland once, now once to estate owners. I can fully see why they increased the price, and it will prevent myself and others from owning estates now. Funny how now estate owners cry out “oh we cant compete with mainland now” whereas we said we couldnt compete with estate land when it started showing up in the regular land search without distinction. Well we made it through, certainly estate owners will make it through the price increase as well.
Perhaps the estate owners really should get with the program now to make estate listings more visible in the land search tool by adding a distinction.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=132721
As us mainland resellers realized a while ago, asking for a change doesnt happen easily. If you dont like the increase stop buying servers - that might work (doubtful but maybe) and we all know that probably wont happen.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:18 PM
I will continue to point out that even before the price hike, prices were 3-4 times more expensive than industry for application hosting of dedicated servers (which SL is not, at 4 sims per machine) MINUS the customer service options (web-based ticketing and uptime and response time commitments. Now it’s astronomically more. The Linden in that discussion said we were paying “premium” for the development.
So for folks saying that LL needs to pay for expensive hosting, they’re still charging many more times other hosting companies. It’s pricy, but not nearly enough to justify their prices, folks. Do some research for companies that host dedicated servers with, say, Oracle and applications on them, and run your own comparisons. Look at how much they charge for a *dedicated* (that is ONE customer per server, not FOUR) server equal to any Class 4 or Class 5 LL has, and look at their support contract. It’ll become clear.
LL is still an applications hosting company by any technical definition, and is still gouging the customer base to pay for their startup costs. Time will tell if this is a viable business model.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:20 PM
I have been saving for a while now to get my own Island SIM… Looks like that just went down the hole. There is no way I will be able to afford the new cost of tier for an ISLAND! Even the one hundred and something dollar tier is pretty expensive I was barely going to be able to pay that now this really puts having an island out of reach for me. I guess I will have to wait until prices go back down or something else comes in to reach.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:20 PM
I have made protest Signs and will place them for free in a box outside the serenity woods market.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:25 PM
What the frack are you smoking? In the computer world the equipment gets better at the same price from year to year.
We are swimming in alts and griefers and now you introduce a steep price increase. Are you trying to run the private residents away from “private” sims? When are you going to announce the sale of Linden Labs to Disney or America online?
October 29th, 2006 at 10:26 PM
I’ve been reading this all and I am thoroughly appalled. So when does the grandfathering run out on the sim I own? A month? Two months? how long before I’m being stuck with the Linden ego-stroke of a bill here? Let’s not forget the changes thrown down on the LL buy and sell market. Hiking the buy price and forcing the sell price down, LL? Sounds like you want to make sure people can’t sell any Lindens, only by them.
Forgive me, but I find the integrity of this company and those at the head of it in serious question.
I paid $1250 for the machine my sim runs on. When I call it quits, I want that machine. I bought it and I’ve been paying nearly $200 a month to have it connected to your service, but the machine is mine. Plain and simple.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:26 PM
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/16/looking-forward-to-class-5/
“a low-power version of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo based server CPUs. This gives us better performance for fewer watts”
“Finally, there are fewer, bigger system fans, and power supply efficiency goes from 67% to 84%; power usage while running the sim process is about 175 watts, vs. 230 for a Class 4.”
I thought this would lower the cost of running the servers.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:27 PM
# Delu Elytis Says:
October 29th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/16/looking-forward-to-class-5/
“a low-power version of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo based server CPUs. This gives us better performance for fewer watts”
“Finally, there are fewer, bigger system fans, and power supply efficiency goes from 67% to 84%; power usage while running the sim process is about 175 watts, vs. 230 for a Class 4.”
I thought this would lower the cost of running the servers.
Llauren Mandelbrot says: So did I.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:36 PM
this is ridiculous,why only a few got notice? now we have all to rush to the land shop at 1 pm wednesday? this is going to kill growth,WHY WE HAVE TO PAY for the free accounts.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:38 PM
Just. Completely. Ridiculous. While I’m glad my community bought an island before this insane price increase, I feel sorry for anyone else who was planning too, and most of all I feel sorry for LL. Sorry because you’re killing any chance at long-term viability for your product with really bad decisions lately.
Let’s get one thing straight. You seem to think that the current round of interest by the media and by various corporations is somehow the new trend of things and will be your route to profit in the future. You are sorely mistaken. Where is the ROI for all these new corporations who’ve come into SL recently? Nissan. Reuters. Sun. Pontiac. Etc. How, exactly, do these corporations make any type of money from their presence in SL? Product sales? No, of course not. They’re experimenting to see whether this is a viable advertising vehicle. In other words, they’re paying for traffic. They’ve been wooed into experimentation by all your hype about “1,000,000 residents”.
Residents? Please, we all know better. 1,000,000 AVs does not equal 1,000,000 residents. The ones that aren’t simple alts often don’t stay because SL isn’t something most people can wrap their heads around. You *did* read the big article on Yahoo News a couple weeks ago, right? Most of the people who tried SL during the recent wave of publicity were essentially going “why would I want to play this game?”
And of the ones who do get past the concept and the learning curve, who are these people? Techie neophile geeks, for the most part. And a relatively small percentage of those are people who understand the techie neophile geeks and figure they can make a buck selling in-game products to the techie neophile geeks.
The corporations who are experimenting with SL will pull out as soon as they realize that they’re not getting the traffic numbers to justify the cost of keeping a sim in the grid. Their money is much better spent paying for traffic in the more traditional media channels. They’ll get far more eyeballs per dollar.
LL, you are completely losing your core audience. The audience who will stay loyal to you. You keep making it harder and harder to *earn* the in-game currency to cover tier or at least mitigate it. You’ve taken away dwell, you’ve cut stipends, you’ve cut developer incentives. The *only* people who can make money are the very successfull clothing or scripted object designers. Which is a tiny percentage of the population. You are slowly making it impossible for people to justify creating content for you. You are fools.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:44 PM
The customer should not have to pay for the mistakes the company makes. It was YOU LL who created the unverified accounts that lowered your income. It was YOU who forced the residents to deal with the countless swarm of griefers and idiots. And its YOU who is making this idiotic decision to fix it by making US pay more for the same crappy service and software we always had. I am glad that i tiered down to a basic account. I refuse to give money to someone as uncordinated at making desisions that help their player base.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:47 PM
As Kenny Linden once inimitably put it to me, “There’s always another guy to buy the island.”
And there is. $1675 is sticker shock for those who have been saving and hoping to own an island some day and who were planning on covering its tier in whole or in part with micropayments or even Paypal US dollar subscriptions. $425 as the differential in price is way too steep for long-time residents of the mom-and-pop variety; to deep-pocketed corporations who can write of “server storage space” it’s nothing. They don’t have to think how to cover the tier with individual rentals.
Meanwhile, even for the mega-rentals company Anshe Chung, the differential between the old model of $195 for tier and $400 for possible rental income, marginal as it was, is now destroyed by the new reality of $295 for tier and $485 — it will be hard to charge more than mainland.
There are some island developers who are smugly certain that customers in the high-end premium market will pay $30 or more for the old $20-25 4096 m2. I’m not sure that even the top independent indigenous developers, if you will, can lay out not only the compelling content but the management skills needed to command those kind of prices.
It really seems as if a deliberate cap on the growth of communities created by independent forces has been placed, in favour of wealthy corporations who can either make communities or not, have people live in houses they rent or not, and it won’t matter to their bottom line.
In a world with only 19,000 landowners, as Philip reported at the “Picnic” conference in the Netherlands, can you expect the Lindens to behave any differently?
No media ever pays for itself through subscriptions; it pays for itself through advertising. Better World vision or no; it has to get the bills paid by ads or else very high-premium subscriptions. And there *will* be another guy to buy the island, just as there were plenty of people who came in and bought $1000 mainland sims off the auction like hotcakes, when we imagined they’d never sell so briskly. There are a lot of wealthy people in the world.
Hiro is asking all the right questions. But I have to laugh at the idea that this latest storm on our tropical coasts turns out to be “mainland v. islands” again. I fail to see how the mainland is given such a “windfall” by this. Look at the map. There are tons of parcels for sale on islands that aren’t selling. Now they might, since they are on older sims with older tier. People will look to those cheaper island parcels to buy before the buy mainland.
Now look at the map 24 hours from now on the mainland — and see how mainland premium land will be cornered once again by ACS and other top barons, making mainland rentals agents also capped in development and unable to buy new land — it will be priced out of their margins just like the islands suddenly became priced out of the reach of those planning just for one end-use or business start-up island sim.
It’s sad that always and everywhere, the harsh and accelerated developments of this virtual world always chiefly have the effect of pitting one group of residents against another, with no disputes resolution system.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:48 PM
I see a lot of people in this thread associating the cost increase with the deployment of the new “Class 5″ servers. Yet I see nothing in the announcement from Linden Labs making that association. There is absolutely nothing here saying that LL can’t and won’t charge the new rates for simulators deployed on the old hardware. And I doubt very much that this decision has anything to do with the new equipment.
I’m a bit surprised by this decision myself. I was expecting the opposite: reduced costs to encourage investment. But the causitive factor remains the same in either case: Linden Labs isn’t making a profit yet, and they need to find a money source.
Other on line environments get their money from subscription fees: $15 a month multiplied by a million or so subscribers makes for a healthy income. But Linden Labs closed that door early this year: they aren’t going to charge subscribers. So who does that leave? Landowners. They can either encourage more landowners by lowering the barriers to entry (I.E.: reducing costs), or increase the revenue per owner by increasing the costs.
I had a discussion once with some folks in the municipal mass transit business. They told me ridership was down, so they had to raise the cost of a ticket. I asked them “So, if only one person rode the bus, you’d charge that person a million dollars a ride?”: they looked at me blankly, like the simple logic escaped them. Let’s hope that Linden Labs isn’t quite so dense.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:52 PM
I have been saving for the setup fee for an island for about a month now…trying to get plans ready to sell my land and get the island ordered. I own 32000+ sq m which I know is not a lot but it’s still $125 a month…the land is split between my private home and Faded Lotus (a public Dungeon). I am so mad, disappointed and frustrated with Linden Labs. I have been disappointed over and over by things the Lindens do or don’t do (like fix the things they break), at the same time I do love this “game” and have a family here so I try to be supportive but I’m ready to say the hell with it all and save myself $125 a month…
Things have been hell lately…greifers, goo, textures not loading, missing textures, the fricken lag… and now this price jack on islands…did I miss anything?
Linden Labs…you are killing Second Life…Thanks a bunch
October 29th, 2006 at 10:54 PM
Thanks for your comments & questions. Please keep them coming. It was not an easy decision to raise prices & we do not expect anyone to be happy about it.
After a thorough analysis of where the business is and where it is going, we recognized that a price increase was long overdue. Our pricing before the increase was basically at our operating cost. There was no way that those prices would enable us to continue to devote the engineering resources to continue to develop and enhance the world indefinitely.
Increasing the price of private islands is the first of many steps to rationalize our pricing and everyone should expect more changes in the coming months. We do not know at this time what those changes will be, but I hope that we’ll be able to identify segments of customers where we can offer discounts from our list pricing. Currently the only customer segments that receive discounts are educators and not-for-profits. There are no large corporations that receive discounts - and in fact - this increase was in part a recognition that large corporations are willing to pay much more than we were charging.
We did let our customers in our Developer Program know of the changes ahead of the broader announcement to the community. We did this, as businesses often do, not to give them an advantage, but rather to solicit feedback and input. Unfortunately, somehow news of the increase did start to leak even before we started in this dialogue. As soon as we became aware of the leak, we shut down the land store so as not to give anyone an unfair advantage. We are leaving the land store closed until we are confident that the information about the increase is widely disseminated.
When it reopens, we expect that the limited inventory at the old pricing will sell quickly. The limited inventory does include a full rack of new Class 5 servers, but we are not raising prices because of the new servers.
Please keep your comments and questions professional and I’ll do my best to answer them as best I can.
Thanks again for your understanding and continued interest.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:59 PM
More changes
October 29th, 2006 at 11:10 PM
I hope that LL will limit the number of sims a purchaser can buy from the 150 some remaining inventory due to be set for sale on Nov. 1 and not permit one or two single land barons to purchase the entire remaining inventory.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:10 PM
zeelinden Says:
October 29th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
There are no large corporations that receive discounts - and in fact - this increase was in part a recognition that large corporations are willing to pay much more than we were charging.
You increased prices for the masses because large corporations will spend that kind of money? Youve just confirmed what everyone already knows…your cutting us all out so your corporate buddies with thier deep pockets can ruin any chance the rest of us have at making a decent living at this game. Preciate it LLs you rock!!
October 29th, 2006 at 11:11 PM
you said it all zee…
“and in fact - this increase was in part a recognition that large corporations are willing to pay much more than we were charging.”
so,just large corporations matter now?
October 29th, 2006 at 11:12 PM
Okay, if anyone did not notice that the majority of private sim owners have been scamming people with their land rental schemes with covenants, I think you need to see why LL feels justified to charge private sim owners a higher tier fee. Last week I saw someone renting a full sim for $280 USD/month. Obviously, they are doing so to just line their pockets on LL work.
The same way camping chair creators ruined the idea of accurate dwell based on people visiting a location for enjoyment purposes only, large scale estate owners who are paying LL $195/month to rent a sim, then subparceling it and renting it for hundreds more per month and scamming unknowing SL players who don’t know any better have ruined the idea of private sims for private usage.
LL is having growing pains but don’t blame them for what a few big scale communists or otherwise unscrupulous people have done to SL.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:15 PM
Will you confirm then zee that the new price means when you purchase a newer island sim (after nov 1st), it will always be hosted on a class 5 server…
October 29th, 2006 at 11:19 PM
Will those of us that currently have a private sim be required to pay the $295/month fee as well?
October 29th, 2006 at 11:19 PM
Don Kingston Says:
October 29th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
“Okay, if anyone did not notice that the majority of private sim owners have been scamming people with their land rental schemes with covenants, I think you need to see why LL feels justified to charge private sim owners a higher tier fee. Last week I saw someone renting a full sim for $280 USD/month. Obviously, they are doing so to just line their pockets on LL work.”
That’s a reason I’d understand. But… on the other hand that tells me, the fees and prices are just raised for this reason and not because the new class 5 servers would be so much better or *giggles* more expensive in the long run. It tells me: hands off class 5 servers, they just cost more and don’t have that much more performance.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:20 PM
you are kidding right? well so much for buying two more sims… not gonna happen now I was renting out land for 400 a week for almost 500 prims.. if i ever buy another island that will most likely have to change or im making minus…
October 29th, 2006 at 11:24 PM
man this is so stupid, i was just going to buy a sim and start my own land business but now i can’t because this just ruined everything! I even went out and bought a domain, started designing a website, but thanks to LL for messing things up again. OOH How linden angers me so much. WTH do they think? DOn’t you think you should give us the option of older servers for lower tier prices? pfff!
October 29th, 2006 at 11:26 PM
October 29th, 2006 at 11:26 PM
“Okay, if anyone did not notice that the majority of private sim owners have been scamming people with their land rental schemes with covenants, I think you need to see why LL feels justified to charge private sim owners a higher tier fee. Last week I saw someone renting a full sim for $280 USD/month. Obviously, they are doing so to just line their pockets on LL work.”
Charging someone $280 a month for a whole sim isn’t that bad to be quite honest especially when you’re trying to pay off your initial investment. Sure you can go out and spend the (at the time) $1250 for your own island or spend hundreds of thoughsands of lindens to purchase an entire mainland sim just to pay $195 a month or you can pay $280 a month and get a whole new sim right then and there without a huge upfront fee. Yeah Don, they’re really out to scam you when you can pretty much rent out the entire sim in smaller pieces and turn a profit yourself before they even earn back their initial investment.
But anways Zee, what about those of us purchasing already existing islands on the grid? Will we be subjected to the new fees or the grandfather clause?
October 29th, 2006 at 11:28 PM
I don’t think customers in the developer program (by which I guess you mean people in the Developer’s Directory?) should really be getting any insider tips.
Nor is there any legitimate reason why they should.
coco
October 29th, 2006 at 11:28 PM
Linden Lab has always done the exact oposit of what i would see in a company. I do not support LL on this decision. But as i have witnessed in my 2 years being a resident, nothing i say matters… Lets just see how far they can handle what their digging themselves into… I know i won’t be buying a sim and i wont recomend it to anyone who asks me if its a good idea…
October 29th, 2006 at 11:29 PM
> this increase was in part a recognition that large corporations are willing to pay much more than we were charging.
So this is supposed to make us feel better about this increase?
I’ve been using SL for about two months, and was getting close to making the decision to buy an island. But this price increase has certainly destroyed that idea. As for corporations coming into SL, I suspect there are far better ways to make money. If SL goes down the route of becoming an advertising hell, it will become difficult to distinguish it from RL, and therefore, make the reason for using it vanish. After all, most of us like SL because it is an escape from the endless barrage of RL commercialism.
Ironic ain’t it?
October 29th, 2006 at 11:29 PM
Trying again:
October 29th, 2006 at 11:29 PM
Zee, there’s been a lot of confusion about what the “Developer Program” is and how anyone who considers themselves a “developer” can get on this insider’s list. It doesn’t seem to be the process of application here: http://secondlife.com/developers/registration.php It doesn’t seem to be the inworld groups of SL developers. So where/what is it and is it true that invitation is by Linden discretion only?
But why couldn’t the Concierge Group, which merely has anyone who owns more than a sim in it, be a logical place to discuss this price increase or give the first news of the increase? The concept that your difficult decision to raise prices is something you “kick around” in an insider’s group merely to get “freedback” and not to give a real advantage isn’t a persuasive one.
The idea that this is a normal practice — letting a privileged special list of customers know something that not only gives them a discount but profit advantage — is one you and your supporters keep invoking. If you were merely a software company or a widget company selling some discrete piece of software or a widget, everyone would understand that sure, old, loyal, wealthy, etc. customers get on the platinum list.
But SL isn’t a widget. It’s a world. Constantly privileging an insider’s list gives these people and companies *political* advantage, too. They get to shape features outside the voting process. They get to lobby their interests directly with you without struggling to be heard through a thousand blog entries. It’s a very different sort of process than what people used to democratic procedures under the rule of law in real-life countries expect — especially when the stakes are high and the costs great — a sim purchase is like a month’s rent on an apartment or a car lease.
Rather than create apprehension and anger for months to come, I urge you to develop a normal, rational, and openly publicized time-table for the following inevitable things you’ll have to be doing, given your desire to have millions of free accounts but only a small percentage of prosumer developers to shoulder your increasing costs:
1. Increase in mainland tiers
2. Sale of former Governor Linden land
3. Removal of 10 percent tier bonus for mainland groups.
4. Creation of planned first-land premium account communities with houses
5. End of mainland sim production.
6. Closure of mainland and move of mainland customers to private islands
7. End of single island sales.
8. Sale of Linden Lab
October 29th, 2006 at 11:36 PM
Firstly, yiffyyaffle et al, thanks so much for equating people who happen to be recent arrivals (like me) with pests and griefers, instead of realizing that any increase in population swells the in-SL service providers’ potential market, regardless of other effects. Thanks, pal. Yeesh.
Now, I haven’t been around long enough to lament the loss of some of these features that I’m sure were FANTASTIC, but I don’t find anything going on here that’s unexpected. Prices go up. Maybe you’ve all been playing with nearly fixed-rate funny money so long that you’ve forgotten about this simple rule. Media attention + major commercial customers + provider’s discretionary control over the rate of production (availability of new land) = higher demand for land translating to more competitive pricing. This is high-school economics.
For those of you complaining about SL’s cultural richness suffering, doesn’t it also suffer when the influx of free account holders have nothing to do but shop, bump into walls of red script, and stare into other people’s houses? Taking the best user-created content in SL off of the mainland just creates a slightly different sort of stratification from what you’re all complaining about now. Hiro Queso and Dragon Keen both touch on a point that some of the elitists on here couldn’t have concieved of: this price hike makes it more financially attractive to keep good new ideas on the “continental” grid.
This is an opportunity. Every economy has tough periods where only the shrewd will prosper. Your competition now includes new SL bootstrappers are starting out with these price rates and are unencumbered by woe-is-me sentiment. We just know that there are costs, and that we’re going to have to work damn hard to offset them.
See you at the top.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:38 PM
Well thank you for at least revealing to us lower classes what the elite were told a few days ago, but I do have to agree that this really is a bad move.
I have been sitting, waiting, hoping that the “low prim sims” would eventually be sold individually, but I guess that this kills that ever happening.
Linden Lab must never forget that it is the individual who makes the success of Second Life - all the large corporations that are coming here frankly contribute nothing, except a bit of revenue. It’s just cheap advertising - a couple of thousand dollars a year against a multi million dollar package for one run, they’d be daft not to.
You also must never forget that, the more you pitch SL towards “come here and make money”,
For individuals, who have little thoughts of turning to bland commercialism to cover their costs, you’re removing more and more of the point of actually paying to play. But then again, the vast majority of accounts are paying you nothing, which people like me are subsidising, and it’s only going to head more and more that way, making SL even less financially viable than it is. I do wonder sometimes if you really do understand that a lot of people play your GAME simply to have FUN.
Face it. You’ve been in existance for seven years, and the fact that you aren’t making money yet is nothing to do with ‘cutting edge technology’, it’s simply down to plain incompetence and poor management.
Lewis
October 29th, 2006 at 11:47 PM
can someone confirm this for me? Before this post, for a private island that i could set my own covenant too it cost US$1,250 and then US$195 /month for tier?
October 29th, 2006 at 11:55 PM
Thank you LL for solving my problems in trying to get money your way.
Seeing what has happened the last few days, you do not appear reliable enough to actually deserve my money, so I won’t need to bother about that anymore.
I will hang around for a while, but in the meantime, if anybody finds something like SL but not yet commercialized, let me know.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:03 AM
I smell a rat, and that rat smells like “selling out.” I will not be surprised if people begin demanding for a competitor, and before long, they will probably make one. I would like to see that. I downgraded my account from premium to free a couple of months ago. I do not regret making that choice.
Second Life is becoming more and more frustrating as Linden Labs is becoming more and more amusing, all at the same time! Do you see a correlation here? Does that meet your business needs?
October 30th, 2006 at 12:09 AM
Same here lynn thats what i been doing lately. i hang around to stil be with the friends i made here when it was a good place to be. Soon as they all leave or LL hits that final straw, its sianara… However i would like to find something like SL used to be 2 years ago.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:13 AM
Somebody out there is creating a new platform. Now would be the time to unveil it.
This is another step in the de-evolution of second life.
So many times I’ve heard that this is a platform, the proof just keeps pilling on that this is anything but a platform.
I hear the tolling bell on the life of Second Life.
Congratulations on finding yet another way of sucking the life out of this product.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:18 AM
Ok Zee, I’ll try and ask as professional as I can:
I ordered an island at the land store 16 days ago. 16 days is already quite a long time for an item that is practically in stock. How much longer will I probably have to wait, and will my island be on one of the newer class 5 servers?
October 30th, 2006 at 12:19 AM
This is a message being typed on behalf of Vx Shaw who has been moderated out of the response. Since LL refuses to publish her valid and much less volatile comments then others that I’ve seen, I will post for her…
How interesting…since when did SL become an experiment in socialism?
I suppose that I, as a land owner, have too much (I lose about L$10K per week), and so I have to subsidize LL’s support system for the 1 million free accounts that aren’t losing money every month to build a viable business model here (and I’m not talking about land speculation).
What you don’t realize is that my business pumps more than 50,000 lindens through the SL economy every WEEK. I employ 10 residents an above scale wages, and I have hundreds of satisfied customers that spend a minimum of 2,500 lindens per sale.
Just when I’m on the verge of turning a tiny little profit, after investing THOUSANDS OF REAL DOLLARS HERE - despite the irresponsible actions of your staff in stabilizing the platform, you decide to kill the economy.
Thanks for nothing, Phillip & company!
October 30th, 2006 at 12:21 AM
“Increasing monthly fees by 50% for a product with this history, and doing it to the island owners who make SL more then the buggy chat app that it is, unbelievable.”
Forgive me if I am mistaken, but all that private island owners do is provide a setting, it is the content creators who make SL what it is. Without them we would be without good clothing, scripts, attachments, acessories, buildings, vehicles, decorations, landscapes…
Just because you pay the most money for something, does not mean that you are responsible for making it great.
It is my personal belief that Private Islands have actually damaged the climate of SL, which used to be a continuous free-flowing world it is now nothing more than a bunch of isolated unrelated sites, the majority of which recieve little to no traffic, and the ones that do consist almost entirely of either casino or gambling activity traffic, contests, or rather unpleasant “club” atmospheres filled with nudes dancing among over-exaggerative bling scripts.
. . . But that’s just me.
(Note: There are exceptions to this belief and there are private islands out there which are rare bastions of creativity among the otherwise deserted sea of uncreative environments, and I will not list them here, nor pretend for a second that I have visited them all.)
October 30th, 2006 at 12:31 AM
THIS IS A GOOD THING!!!
The broad customer base for SL is NOT sim owners: sim owners make a profit renting land in general, and most do not contribute content (or token content). Land barons make a profit, and guess what? That money would otherwise go to Linden Labs.
Why LL over Land Barons? Simple: LL makes this game. They pay employees to create new features and fix existing fees. Linden Labs ultimately exists as a business, and the rightously indignant here miss this.
Land barons have the squeeze put on their growth, while Linden Labs moves towards profitability. For the AVERAGE person in Second Life, this is great news.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:38 AM
So lets get this straight, open registration… bad.
New group rights… good.
Push controls… very good…
Increase in islands costs…. without class fives having more prims… and not even getting promised a new server? you just cut the games throat.
Investers are going to flee from the game now, the tech bubble burst because the FDIC and government killed the businesses ability to expand and research since they could not future cast or work down the line…
This is the same thing.
And the worst thing my fellow SLers? these class fives only ever got bought because the old crap servers are no longer made by dell… and even when they were being sold, and their prices were going down… we still got charged the same rate.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:43 AM
Well well well, what a shame this will be. I was going to purchase a sim in the next upcoming weeks. My friend and I had planned to purchase one sim and sell it with our own tier, covenanant, etc the whole lot. We had a website started, domain name purchased, paypal reoccuring subscription buttons ready (those cost money but you pay paypal), and we were in the works and going to release within the next coming weeks.
But now guess what, we aren’t going to purchase a private island anymore because LL decided to jack the initial price and monthly tier through the roof. It isn’t the inital price that shoots me down but the monthly tier increase of 50%. How can they justify something like that? Unless they are going to do an even match by increasing tier on mainland to the same price, they just made a big “woopsie doo”. If new mainland and private island tier were matched to $295/month for tier then that’s not so bad.
Will mainland and private island tier ever be matched again? Nope, “Prices on the mainland and for qualified educators and non-profits will remain unchanged at this time”. Second Life really needs to consult their users on issues like this. Why can’t land buyers have the option of purchasing Class 4 or 5 servers? Class 4 servers seem to do the trick anyways so what diff should it make? LL really should impliment polling for issues like this. If they allowed the people that create the game (us, we create the content of SL) to vote on things then maybe the world of second life would be a bit of a nicer environment.
What ever happened to Second Life being built and created by its users? I guess we can build and create all we want but what LL does with what we build and create is a different story.
- Jasmin Summers
P.S. Some of this post was on behalf of another resident that attempted to comment in a less harmful manner compared 2 some posts that made it through. Unfortunately a moderator wouldn’t post the comment because LL believes in strong censorship and doesn’t allow a free speaking environment.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:54 AM
Dougal Jacobs Says:
October 30th, 2006 at 12:21 am
“Increasing monthly fees by 50% for a product with this history, and doing it to the island owners who make SL more then the buggy chat app that it is, unbelievable.”
Forgive me if I am mistaken, but all that private island owners do is provide a setting, it is the content creators who make SL what it is. Without them we would be without good clothing, scripts, attachments, acessories, buildings, vehicles, decorations, landscapes…
Just because you pay the most money for something, does not mean that you are responsible for making it great.
It is my personal belief that Private Islands have actually damaged the climate of SL, which used to be a continuous free-flowing world it is now nothing more than a bunch of isolated unrelated sites, the majority of which recieve little to no traffic, and the ones that do consist almost entirely of either casino or gambling activity traffic, contests, or rather unpleasant “club” atmospheres filled with nudes dancing among over-exaggerative bling scripts.
. . . But that’s just me.
(Note: There are exceptions to this belief and there are private islands out there which are rare bastions of creativity among the otherwise deserted sea of uncreative environments, and I will not list them here, nor pretend for a second that I have visited them all.) ”
———————————————————————–
Well, the few nice spots that I often visit in SL are on island, while on the mainland I find exactly what you described as typical island content: clubs and casinos, moneychair traffic and giant malls.
I own a mainland sim now with a huge garden and park area around my shop and view myself as a content creator. I have good reasons to relocate to an island; here is what the mainland lacks:
- Concierge service in addition to the regular customer service
- Terraforming changes of +-100 meters, versus +-4 meters in my mainland sim
- Fast terrain changes by importing terrain files
- Region controls like terrain texture changes, water level, sun position, max. number of residents etc.
- Advanced script & performance monitoring
- A beautiful coastline, while coastal mainland is quite rare
- No huge buildings and malls all around the borders of a mainland sim sim that ruin every landscape
- No bad performance due to rotating logos and flashing neon signs in the adjoining sims
- No weird effects when accidently flying accross a sim border
- No more trouble with linksets and trees that reach over the border, but can’t be returned or deleted since they originate in another sim
And with all those advantages it’s even cheaper - I can downgrade my account from premium to basic and pay $195 monthly instead of $205. I’d have to be mad to stay in a mainland sim. Well, now that I think about it, I can almost understand the increase in price (almost).
October 30th, 2006 at 12:54 AM
Regarding “Corporate customers are willing to pay a higher price”: No doubt about that!
I just wonder, how many of the 200 sims going through the land store per month are being bought by corporate customers - and how much will be in the near future.
If the assumption, that every business in RL will want an island in SL is true, thats fine and the model did succeed. If not … lets see, what happens to the bottom line. “Predictions are hard to make, especially when the are about the future!”
What is total BS, though is the assumption, that with this price raise the “fat land barons” will get what they deserve. Nobody with some basic skills in addition, subtraction and multiplication can believe for long, that it is possible, to get rich quick (or “line the pockets”
within the old pricing model. There may be a very few exceptions where economy of scale works, but for most of us in the private estate business this is a labor of love.
This is even more valid, when you look at projects like our OTHERLAND Archipelago, where we DON’T focus on fast selling, flat, rectangular plots but on beauty and a natural landscape (just like the mainland). This leads to occupation rates of less then 100% of course - yes, we even have protected land to preserve landscape and waterways.
Dougal, you are free to come by and search for the “bunch of isolated unrelated sites, the majority of which recieve little to no traffic, and the ones that do consist almost entirely of either casino or gambling activity traffic, contests, or rather unpleasant “club” atmospheres filled with nudes dancing among over-exaggerative bling scripts”.
The new pricing model will make it very much harder to compete with mainland. A possible solution would be, to create exactly the sims, which some are lamenting as being typical for private estates (which are not): 16 rectangular islands of flat white sand, optimized to sell quickly for an occupancy rate of 100%. You can still make an easy profit with a project like that. For residents, who want this kind of land, this is all fine, of course. And I dont’t deny anyone the right to want or sell this kind of land.
But for those residents who want something else and the land developers who want to create such different projects, this looks like an attempted “squeeze out”.
But there are some, who are definitely hurt: small resident-based businesses, who dream of their own sim for a project and now have to cope with prices, which went 50% up in ONE TALL STEP.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:54 AM
SHAME on YOU!!!!!!
Linden Lab does not care about the ones who work and build. They want more griefers and alts.
Listen to customers. That is a laugh. <