Wednesday 22 August 2012

SECONDLIFE FAILING - 849 SIMS LOST IN 8 WEEKS

Watching Secondlife right now is like watching a train wreck. It's awful but one can hardly look away.

I'm sad to report the loss of 849 private Secondlife sims in the last 8 weeks. That's an average loss of 106 sims per week. This is very serious decay. The SL economy is experiencing it's most dramatic summer slump ever. Sales are seriously down, inworld shop traffic is extremely poor, sims are closing and concurrency is stagnant and slipping.

How many lost sims will it take before Linden Lab realise the only way to save Secondlife, and yes SL does need saving, is to reduce tier costs and drop set-up fees and release the grid from the tyranny of the land barons and let anyone buy a Homestead or openspace sim without having to own a full sim.

Secondlife's land pricing model is antiquated and destructive. Price is everything. Current land prices in Secondlife are literally driving converted passionate users away. What a brilliant business plan - Drive away, alienate and depress the people who actually want to use your product

 
 
Secondlife is a dream making tool. Current tier costs are dream killers
 
 
 
 
The attrition rate of 106 sims a week is approx. 5 thousand sims per year. That's millions of dollars lost revenue and 5000 places less to visit in Secondlife and thousands of people of who will have a negative experience of Secondlife - losing their virtual home, their store, their art installation, their club, their forest retreat, their beach house, their dream. 
 
These sim losses represents projects not being completed or started because it's just too expensive. It's a question of value for money and current tier costs are not good value for money.
 
Even if Secondlife were PERFECT, people would still NOT pay these ongoing monthly prices for their virtual presence. Secondlife is outstanding technology priced beyond the reach of it's real, actual user base. The decay will continue until tier costs come down.
 



6 comments:

  1. I confirmed the loss of 849 sims in 8 weeks to be true by checking to Tyche Shepherd's weekly tally. Summary of that is here: http://yfrog.com/oe69bfsp
    There is no growth.
    Tateru Nino's concurrency chart continues to show slippage here: http://yfrog.com/kgj6wjp
    I would agree that part of the problem is that prices are too high compared to the rest of the market.

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  2. Thank you for your comment and confirmation Wizzy

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  3. One likely contributor to factor in: the departure of education and nonprofit sims that took advantage of the option to extend their contracts at grandfathered rates when SL eliminated the nonprofit discount. Those contract extensions could have been for up to 24 months (they had to be done before the end of Dec 2010), and would make most sense to end before the start of the new academic year.

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  4. Thanks for the comment Tara. Agreed, the loss of educational sims is a contributing factor. But overall I think it's more of a general loss of confidence in the platform because of the continuing high teir costs driving passionate users away. It's just too expensive

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  5. here's why they won't be reducing any tiers in the near future: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/09/second-life-private-sim-loss.html

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    1. To add more... if it's because of where LL is fed, from only the tiers those major landowners bring in... I can only suggest that what I've felt since I started sl, and still feel this way... is that if LL would make it mandatory that anyone that wanted to create/sell/etc., any kind of business would have to be a paid member... that would generate more lindens. I was a paid member since the first month a started in 07 and continued until this last year when it was renewal, i didn't renew.

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