Cthulhu Can't Cover the Rent! Beautiful Lovecraft Tribute Faces Deletion From SL If Not Saved by Supporters in Time

Innsmouth, a very beautiful (if ungodly horror is beautiful) Second Life sim-wide tribute to the works of HP Lovecraft, is in jeopardy of leaving Second Life, according to the blog of the HP Lovecraft Roleplay Group (HPL-RPG) in SL:

On September 15th, Darmin Darkes, the owner of the Innsmouth-themed sim announced the following: “Innsmouth sim is for sale. I’m giving first dibs to you folks in the hopes that someone will want to keep some of the build. Worst case is having to flatten it and sell it. I just can’t afford it any longer..." As a result of this notice, a number of Second Lifers have been working together, through a group called, “The Innsmouth Preservation Society,” to help with the upkeep and potentially to purchase this sim, then maintain it.

Emphasis mine, because it needs emphasizing. Go here to get involved. And, of course, click here to visit Innsmouth while there's still time.

Hat tips to Kara Trapdoor and Governor Marley (from whence the above pic of fearsome malevolence came), both of whom have many more comments and pics.

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[Veritable Magic]

wow, Just wow. I have loved this sim for ages. I hope whomever buys it keeps it going.

[Amanda Dallin]

It's a shame when Regions like this one go away. SL Regions are art like a stage design for live theater. They can be beautiful works of art but they are destined to go away. It's a temporary art form that lives on in the memory of those who interact with it whether as actors or audience.

[Ilsa Hesse]

will be sad to see it go :-(

[Chuck Lorris]

Use prim conversion tool to turn into mesh.
Rebuild scene in unity3D
Build website for project
Convert unity scene to webplayer file and put online

Sim saved forever.
Cost per year 8$ domain name and 24 Dollar hosting. Total cost 32 Dollar per year.

Anyone can visit and walk around on sim even using Oculus Rift

32$ compared to 3600$ to have it on Linden their grid.

Solution 2

Put it on an opensim grid if you want more public interaction. Decent grid charges 60$ for a sim per month.

Again 720$ per year versus 3600$ to have it on Linden their grid.

Even Linden Lab employees ask themself why they are still in business. They do not get why people keep paying them all that money. Check the glassdoor reviews of the latest months should you be in doubt.

[Ezra]

Something something the tier is too damn high.

Yadda yadda Linden Lab should have backup and recovery tools for sims that need to go away for awhile.

Deaf ears Linden Lab. Minus thousands of private regions in a few years and a new CEO.

[cathartes aura]

The main reason Second Life is dying is that Linden Lab is killing it off...
Linden Lab has created an in-world economic system so tilted towards folks receiving Tier Subsidies - Grandfathered Tier, the Atlas Land Program, Free Tier to "pets", etc. that other land owners not getting these subsidies are unable to compete. As an example, Grandfathered Tier subsidy land owners can price their prims 30% lower than non-subsidy land owners tier cost(what it costs you for you land) and still have a 3.3% advantage over you. ; )
The numbers are worse for the Atlas Program and for those "pets" getting free tier. Non-Subsidy getting land owners have absolutely no chance of fairly competing under these conditions...
Beginning in 2006 with Grandfathered Tier these favored "pet" tier subsidies have been responsible for the loss of thousands of regions and thousands of former region owners. And most importantly, millions of dollars in revenue to Linden Lab. Why would Ebbe continue land programs that are abject, absolute, appalling failures? Just who is in charge at Linden Lab? And who makes the final call on in-world policy like that?
The Linden "pets" will argue that these are "volume discounts"... And that is pure BS... And I get why they do it... It's been very profitable being a Linden "pet" the last 8 years... ; )
These "smarter than the average bear" morons managed to turn what was once a beautiful, thriving, ever expanding, example of true free market capitalism, where anyone who worked hard, sacrificed, had talent, had creativeness, and gave good customer service could be successful. We were all on a level playing field... And then the greedheads took over and the rest is history...
And who is responsible for this...
LINDEN LAB... ; ) I don't blame people? who benefit from these very corrupt business practices. They are what they are... ; ) It's Linden Lab and the VC's that I hold responsible for it. They are the ones who have created this nightmare of a freakshow by allowing this nonsense to happen.
So, to anyone currently holding private estate land or mainland who are not getting tier subsidies from Linden Lab this has been a wake up call for those that haven't sat down and crunched the numbers.
For those competing against Grandfathered Tier receivers... It amounts to $600.00 US per year that could be in your pocket. That's right... If Tier was lowered for you and raised for them until equal, then you would see that much more income in your pocket. The numbers for Atlas and the Freeloaders are even worse... AND LINDEN LAB WOULD NOT BE OUT ONE DIME IN CURRENT INCOME... ; )
The threat is that the land barons will bolt and run if their tier is raised... Where are they going to go? According to the land barons there are no alternatives to SL... ; ) Ebbe(CEO?) and the VC's are not honest businesspeople.
To this day no mention of Grandfathered Tier, Atlas, Freeloader Tier, etc. is on Linden Lab's Land Sales page. Those good, honest, decent folks who have no idea that all these things exist SHOULD be given warning by LINDEN LAB BEFORE they purchase land. It's called DISCLOSURE... And for LINDEN LAB to go on now for almost 8 years doing that kind of slimy shizz is beyond sleazy... ; )

[Mazy Longswitch]

LL is a business and they like making money. If you can't afford your sim, pack it up and go. Simple as that. Nothing lasts forever, not even in Second Life. Bye!

[Iggy]

I've a plan: grab the Necronomicon; the John Dee edition can be downloaded at Amazon, so you need not burglarize Stanford's Rare Books Room. Pulverize a mummy to make a good batch of the Powder of Ibn Gazi (this will, alas, involve some law-breaking).

Then you will be ready to summon Yog-Sothoth directly over Linden Lab's headquarters during the next meeting of their Board.

In exchange for Yog-Sothoth's paying tier on the the sim until the sun dies, promise him that He can suck Linden Lab's Board into "Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws."

That'll show 'em; the next board will lower tier OR ELSE: Deep-One raid from Fisherman's Wharf straight to Linden HQ.

[Joe]

That sim isn't going anywhere. LL fools builders into creating great sims, waits for them to go broke paying tier, then they basically foreclose on the sim, storing it in their library so they can sell it at a later date.

Then the actual builder can pay again just to visit his own sim.

I mean, that's what the TOS is for.

[Leo]

Awesome sim, really hope it will stay! :(

[Patrick Frimmond]

I have to agree with @Joe here in these comments. This company Linden Lab tends to lure people to their platform, inviting them to come and build their projects set up stores and build a business. Asking a steep investment to establish such project on Linden their grid only to be deceived later finding out you wasted a lot of time and money and got very little in return.

With the new platform under development which will lead to the closure of the current one many will lose massive amounts of money. This goes beyond running a business to make profit when you fleece your customers for every dime you can.

I wonder how this Ebbe character can even look at himself in the mirror.

[A.J.]

I had a sim that I shared with a partner for 5 years. It wasn't a beloved destination because we valued privacy over attention. It was a great build.

One day we just decided that it was a ridiculous amount of money to be spending and decided to buy a new car instead.

Sometimes you just gotta get real. The good news is that it's liberating. Say goodbye.

"You can’t take a picture of this – it’s already gone" - Nate Fisher in Six Feet Under.

I'm not really sure what the quote means, but it sounds good. I know that Nate wasn't real, but none of this is.

[Patrick Frimmond]

Also worth to mention is that the Bora Bora islands have been taken offline this week. I mention this because those were very nice regions who have been visited by tens of thousands of residents, if not hundreds of thousands over the years. The creator Mathieu Basiat a very good builder with a lot of talent still has his store sim. Mathieu Basiat did build fantastic waves with prims back in the day and also made surfboards which people could use on the Bora Bora islands that were an extention of his store. Anyone could visit and surf or windsurf and people did enjoy doing that a lot. Again Altberg strikes and damages important regions in Second Life that were a landmark for many residents. This blog puts up posts week after week of the sims online and fashion while Linden management happily keeps gutting Second Life like a fish without any care or concern. Than they expect residents will flee to their new platform once it is ready. For what? Rinse and repeat?

[2014]

nice sim, visited it a few times, nothing last forever.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Places come and places go. New places replaces them. Sometimes there are less. Sometimes there are more.

TV is dying - Perry Mason was cancelled. I hear they also stopped making new Episodes of the Cosby Show. TV is dead. Hollywood killed it.

[Iggy]

@Pussycat: despite reports of its demise, TV is alive and well. It is also doing much better drama than one finds on most big screens.

Hollywood puts out the same darned superhero flick again and again. AMC gave us Mad Men.

Dead Cthulhu, however, waits dreaming in his house at R'lyeh.

[Ezra]

@Pussycat

Sims don't come and go at an equal rate in SL. More private regions are lost than gained every week by the tens.

So Second Life quite literally is dying, if you'd agree revenue is the lifeblood of a business.

Businesses and their product come and go, and Linden Lab doesn't look long for the world unless they reverse their revenue woes in the next few years.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Its always funny here how I can be like the 4th or 5th person to say the exact same thing as people above me, and yet the focus for the "you are wrong" sentiment goes for me."

Of course I know TV isn't dead yet. After all, Dr. Who has yet to be cancelled. :)

Used to be I had to make a choice between Apple, Tandy, DOS, Commodore, Texas Instruments, and a half dozen others. Now its basically Windows, Mac, Linux.
- Computers are dying.

Or they're just shifting. All these mobile devices driving activity now.

Kinda like Marketplace - which is a massive revenue stream, that 'small cut' taken out of every sale adds up really fast.

[Ezra]

@Pussycat "Kinda like Marketplace - which is a massive revenue stream, that 'small cut' taken out of every sale adds up really fast."

Has Linden Lab released any numbers backing that up or is this just a gut feeling on your part?

[2014]

oh lord, this turned into "SL is dying" again! It's a sim, you visit it a few times, and there is no need to go back, because well... nothing changed from the last time. Although a pretty nice sim, it had become dated, and unchanged, and when stuff becomes dated and unchanged, people stop going.

[cathartes aura]

@2014. Excuses.. Excuses... It's the viewer... It's windlight... It's Zindra... It's the giant spaghetti monster... LMAO!! Always excuses... The morons responsible for SL's problems are Linden Lab and the VC's... They screwed up... Royally... And refuse to admit that they are incompetent morons. They rigged SL economically and have managed to run off thousands of former region owners.

Instead of admitting their "mistakes(deliberate actions)" and being honest business people they just keep digging their self-created hole. LMAO!

Ebbe is just one more in a long pathetic line of losers... Losers set up to fail by the VC's... One look at Mitch Kapor's hairdo is enough to tell you that these morons are not playing with a full deck of cards. LMAO!! ;)

[zzpearlbottom]

The only think im noticing is that now it takes forever to see all rezzed and that are a lot more available spots of land on mainland near ll water, some that was sparse, rare and highly costly a few years ago.

[Pussycat Catnap]

"Has Linden Lab released any numbers backing that up or is this just a gut feeling on your part?"

L2Math:
http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/when-does-it-become-more-costly-to-sell-on-marketplace-than-inworld/

- That blog is in a different direction, showing why having too many sales on Marketplace actually loses you money. In it I briefly go over the numbers.

Just look at those numbers, and then look at how much shopping occurs on marketplace, and you can reach some pretty obvious conclusions.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Here's a short reverse of my math.

Marketplace takes 5% out of every sale.

Lets say you're a merchant who pays rent on a small studio apartment in RL through SL Marketplace. So US $2000/month is your minimum.
That is 95% of $2105.26 - this is how much in sales you have to make. And that is just pretending for a moment that there was no fee on cashing out...

That's L$522,104.48

LL's takes $26105.23 - US $105.26

Now that might seem absurdly high. Especially for me - my shop gets about 1 sale a month because its not really a shop, but a space I enjoy.

But lets say you make skins, at L$1000 each. Plus 3 kinds of appliers for them for 150L each - that about a third of your skin customers buys.

So each sale averages L$1150 - rough 454 sales a month, or about 15 people per day.

Its pretty easy to find a lot of brands that have more than 15 sales a day.

Now if you also have a fashion line... and sell outfits at 300L each, or a combo-pack for 900L... and only a third of your customers buy the combo (I suspect most people buy the combo)... average sale of 500L... so now you need about 30 purchases a day.

But that is just me talking about people who make a living off of SL.

LLs doesn't care.

If I make about 1 sale a month, for about 150L. LLs still takes 8L from me. Consider that I am probably the rock bottom of merchants - because I'm not a merchant. Anyone who tries can likely do a lot better. Multiple this out by the number of shops in SL - it will start adding up very fast.

This is a much better economic model for LLs than land...

They could lose a thousand people like me and not care. But lose one Anshe Chung and the CEO's going to be in a very uncomfortable meeting with the board...

And as Marketplace has become successful - the revenue stream from it... logically exceeds anything that has been lost from land over the last few years.

Eventually Marketplace will hit a point of profit that LLs can safely ditch some of the land barons that have about 1/3 of what Chung has... and that is when tier might start dropping.

But also, the purpose of having land is not the same as it was before marketplace...

The primary purpose now is more or less the linden home or estate equiv.

Art venues - have no role in SL anymore. They are unfundable vanity projects. And sad as that might be - the low traffic on them morally justifies this as well: the actual people using SL day in and day out don't care about the loss of these places.

They filling other kinds of places now.

[Franny]

Cthulhu looks a bit like the giant spaghetti monster.

Some guy on reddit claimed Linden would be only making 1 million US$ actual profit per month after all costs. So that might not be enough to satisfy the likes of Kapor, not worth VC's their time for a couple of million per year.
Second Life was not profitable when it had about 9000 sims online back in the day. Those were all full sims then at 200 US$ tier per month. That is 1.8 million US$ per month. Since then which was 2007 the company did expand and grow so their costs might be even more today.

Linden wasted a lot of money on foreign offices.
Linden wasted a lot of money on Viewer 2 & 3. Linden blew their firewall solution.
Linden blew possible console game deals.
Humble wasted a lot of time, money and resources with his games, I doubt Desura and the kiddies at blocksworld generate much profit.

And now we have the icing on the cake, Altberg I'm not even going to talk about that one.

[Ciaran Laval]

LL can't bank marketplace commission unless it's a Paypal sale. In Linden dollar form it's a sink, Linden Lab need other shoes to drop to make money from that, it's an indirect revenue stream, not a direct one.

The Marketplace is a free listing service, you only get charged commission if you sell something, merchants will build that 5% cost into their pricing, it's not an actual cost to the merchant. There are plenty of costs a merchant incurs but Marketplace commission really isn't one of them.

[Iggy]

Ciaran hits the financial nail squarely on the head. Unlike MP commissions, paying tier (or buying Linden Dollars to pay for anything) puts real money back into Lab coffers.

Linden Dollars resemble company scrip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Cue "Sixteen Tons" y'all.

[Ezra]

@Pussycat

What Ciaran and Iggy said. I admire your optimism, but basically no, any sort of L$ fees isn't going to replace a real actual money revenue stream. There's reasons why Linden Lab doesn't accept L$ for tier and premium. Marketplace fees like other L$ based fees Linden Lab charge are sinks and rate limiting factors more than anything else.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Its a sink yes. But a sink that serves to drive a constant need to buy more L$s. As well, the cashing out fees.

As for merchants taking a hit from MP commissions...

If I sell you a prim cube for L$100 inworld, I now have L$100. If I sell it to you on MP, I now have L$95. LLs now has L$5 in 'sink money'.

- I make less through MP than inworld. After a certain point, the amount less is enough to have paid for a plot of land inworld and not had that 'less', and anything after that is MORE I would make if I sold inworld.

The 'sink'...

Those L$5's add up fast across many transactions - and every $260 (exchange rate depending) is US $1 somebody has to pay LLs to buy lindens.

- THAT becomes a massive influx of revenue in the form of a constant high demand for more L$s.

And then LLs charges whatever it charges to cash out (I have no idea what this is, I've never cashed money out of SL).

[cathartes aura]

As I perch on top of my latest carrion feast, picking at its bloated eyeball, thoroughly enjoying the deliciously putrefied jelly, I begin to ponder many things...

Who benefits from the current state of the rigged SL economy?

Why would Linden Lab pursue policies designed to run off large numbers of land owners, builders, creators, designers, etc,?

Prior to Fall 2006, huge numbers of folks who had never done textures, 3d builds/designs, animation, scripting, etc. etc. suddenly discovered that they could do it and were very good at it. Who would be threatened by those folks taking work... Taking work both inworld and out... Follow the money... ;)

[Carlos Loff]

I had several SIMs on SL and finally had the courage to change to a Professional OpenSim Grid - Kitely.com - Im very happy with almost one year of flowing service and excelente customer service

We have almost weekly meetings where the Grid CEO shows up to help and brainstorm - I pay 100$ for 16 Full SIMs melted on a single world, with 100 Avis allowance and 100.000 prims allowance - No setup fees

The only problem that is being solved is we are all starving for merchants and more goods to buy but besides that - Who the hell needs SL ???

[RULosingHair]

Linden Lab Black Box Fallacy Ahoy!

Where is your ICT Continuity + Risk Management Planning?
1. Export the Sim Builds and its Inventory as a Harddrive Backup on http://simonastick.com/
2. Import the Sim Builds and its Inventory for the Public on http://www.Kitely.com/

Business Continuity Planning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity_planning

Check the Chapter "Transferring From Second Life"
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/where-to-get-content-for-opensim/
It's a bit farther down...

[Spiral Silverstar]

Kitely also has Full sims for $14.95 a month, 15K prims, No lag, and can hold 10 avies at a time. As Carlos said, all that is needed is some more content. Kitely also has a growing Marketplace itself. Check it out people! :-)