Tuesday 11 September 2012

SECONDLIFE GRID LOSES OVER 1000 SIMS IN 11 WEEKS


Sad to report more than 1000 private sims lost in the last 11 weeks. The losses seem to be slowing up a little but what's more alarming is the lack of interest and the low number of new sims coming online since July 2012. See graph below
 
 
 
There does seem to be a deep lack of energy and interest in Secondlife, even within the core community. Obviously the situation is that we have all been worn down by excessively high tier costs.
 
Current tier costs are a crime against an emerging technology. If it cost 300USD per month for a web site, there would be no Internet as we know it. In reality Secondlife has not properly been tried or tested as a mass market product as it has never been priced for real growth and success. It's only a niche product because of the high price.
 
Linden Lab are losing more and more money by not lowering tier costs and not believing in their outstanding product.
 
The fact that Linden Lab has not changed their land offerings (sim types) or lowered their prices in several years is the reason why we are seeing such losses and such poor concurrency.
 
We all hope that Secondlife on Steam will have a positive effect on concurrency and sim ownership but it really is a lost opportunity. Without lowering tier costs and offering new sim products, marketing Secondlife to Steam users is kind of crazy, a massive business error and probably a potential loss of millions of dollars and thousands of new sim owners.
 
Even in this gloomy atmosphere there is still a very passionate user base, still putting on events, creating new content, supporting the grid and community in a thousand different ways. Just a little back up from Linden Lab in the form of new cheaper land products could easily provoke new growth, new money for LL and a much needed boost to the SL community and economy.
 
Come on Linden Lab , Help us to help you !
Drop set up fees
Let anybody buy any land product without a full sim
Introduce some new sim types
Reduce tier costs
And we will SHOW YOU THE MONEY

9 comments:

  1. http://hosoi-ichiba.blogspot.nl/2012/08/sad-news-closing-down-sims.html

    http://hosoi-ichiba.blogspot.nl/2012/08/where-story-ends.html

    http://hosoi-ichiba.blogspot.nl/2012/08/a-possible-solution-and-new-start.html

    http://hosoi-ichiba.blogspot.nl/2012/09/the-big-merge.html

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  2. Thank you for posting the links to your blog Amiryu. Everyone interested in Secondlife and virtual worlds should read your experience. It's exactly what should NOT be happening. Brilliant content and beautiful places to visit, that actually helped Secondlife be more than a glorified 3D chat room, having to downgrade. It should not have happened. The current SL tier costs are destructive. Your sims helped Secondlife be something special

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  3. If nothing else, Open Sim clearly demonstrates that region pricing for builders is not sufficient to create a thriving metaverse, if it was Gridology wouldn't need to rant about Linden Lab pricing.

    There is also the small point that in real terms Linden Lab have reduced the cost of a region year on year. Yes the price has stayed the same. But inflation, the number and complexity of objects you can have at the same time, the scope and reliability of the service have all gone up.

    Case in point, the new mesh land impact calculations can be applied to prims, a little knowledge and a couple of hours re linking and your could dramatically increase your prims on your land by up to 50%. The actual saving in practice is more like 30% but still, that's 30% more stuff for the same money and same land.


    >Rez 4 cubes. Link them. Edit one of the linked prims and set it's physics shape to 'None'. That single prim of the linkset will now be phantom. Look at the land imipact. 4 prims - 2 land impact. Busy Busy!

    >(Caveat .. cubes or variations of work ok, more complex shapes / sculpts will send the land impact the other way in a BIG way. Experiment in a big sandbox !)

    So .. same price for more of the exact same content. I would call that more for your money, better value even, a saving, perhaps even lower prices. ... and that doesn't even start to look at what you can do if you actually build with mesh in the first place...

    In a virtual world where you can be anyone or anything, you only have yourself to blame if your experience sucks.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for your comments Trinity, I can tell that you love Secondlife.

      Open sim is not thriving because it does not have the massive selection of content which is Linden Lab's greatest asset and also because Secondlife residents are not able to migrate with their much loved inventories. If Hypergrid teleport was allowed from the main Secondlife grid to Opensim and alternative grids, there would be a mass migration to get cheaper land. Hypergrid teleport is not allowed because Linden Lab knows full well it would destroy their virtual land business.

      Clever use and linking of prims does not actually make sims cheaper. And in a world wide recession, the perceived value of Secondlife land is dramtically more expensive than it ever was.

      'A virtual world where you can be anyone or anything' is an exciting thing indeed, but that's not Secondlife. High tier costs stop people creating, developing, experiencing their dreams. What we have right now is people living in skyboxes, people squashed in to cookie cutter slum sims.

      This is not the dream or potential of virtual worlds. High tier costs take power away from the user and that's contrary to what virtual worlds are really about. No wonder Secondlife is failing. It's a story of lost dreams and lost potential.

      Everyone should be able to afford their own sim. That's the real virtual world product.

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  4. "Everyone should be able to afford their own sim. That's the real virtual world product. "

    Says a land baron.

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    Replies
    1. Land baron or no, what he says is still true. When even the land barons are feeling the economic pinch caused by the Second Great Depression (the first was really multiple large recessions back to back) and are leaving for other grids because of excessive land tier, that should be a signal to Linden Lab that its pricing model is not keeping up with the real-world economy and that in order to survive, tier MUST be lowered to something that can compete with other grids.

      It would also help if LL increased the "physical" land area and doubled or tripled the prim allowance rather than continue with the cockamamie mesh-cost model that forces builders to go through extra work trying to figure out how to cut prims. The severe limitations imposed by Linden Lab, combined with the extremely high cost of virtual land on the grid, is what's killing Second Life, and since SL is LL's main revenue source and no others appear to exist for the company at this point in time, sticking with the existing pricing model and in-world limitations is just plain stupid from a business standpoint.

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    2. Thanks for your comments Archangel.Agreed

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  5. Yep, sad to see that LL and their product hasn't really matured like it's customer base / community has over the years. Been on & off the grid since 2006 and while I've seen a fairly big change in the mentality & maturity of the core community i cannot say the same for LL. There's not been a sufficient amount of advertising & not enough incentives. Not by a long shot.

    Too much focus on shiny surfaces, voice chat and what not rather than trying to acknowledge that many content creators are businesses and should be accommodated as such. Perfectly run micro businesses on the grid permanently struggled because LL just had their priorities wrong. I remember from 2006 to 2008 how much downtime there was & how much lag that prevented people or entirely put people of from spending money on said businesses.

    Furthermore & as this article points out LL has been focused on tier costs way too much. Indeed 300 USD has always been too high and if LL can't do any better after years of technological advances then something has gone totall wrong there.

    To be fair. Looking back to 2006 to 2008 it is now possible to put bigger prims on a parcel. I remember the 10x10x10 limit which was a joke. Although they've always been megaprims.

    Anyways even now where there's a lot of competition growing out there I would still think that SL has a lot of potential if the right management was put in place. Been seeing reports like the one above since 2006 and guess what the platform is still alive. Just not so much kicking anymore.

    My 2 cents worth

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