Sim Deathwatch: Second Life's Beloved Recreation of Mont Saint Michel Soon Leaving SL for "Economical" Reasons

This truly sucks: The painstaking Second Life recreation of France's Mont Saint Michel is disappearing at the end of September due to "economical" reasons, creator and owner Moeka kohime recently announced. Ms. kohime is also the owner of SL's popular *Edelweiss" Japanese fashion brand, which she reports is still going strong -- but apparently, not strong enough to continue supporting the much-visited, much-photographed virtual landmark. Destination guide below - visit in the next nine days!

Mont Saint Michel

Visit an in-world recreation of the beautiful French landmark, Mont Saint Michel.

Visit in Second Life

 

Hat tip: Kenji Tammas.

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Comments

[Mark Y]

I wonder why SL doesn't have a Landmarks Preservation Program. What's good for the culture is good for business, isn't it?

[Luann Phillips]

Agree. LL should preserve it. Or the creator should donate the content to someone who will keep it up.

[Lali Balfour]

Are there any groups that can help with grants or as was pointed out in a previous post an SL preservation foundation?

[Sinead McMillan]

Edelweiss should go for mesh-bodies accustomed stuff. It would attract many people - as Moeka Kohime's style is just top notch and "different" ;-)

A pity to sea the best place poooff.

[Sinead McMillan]

places, plural

[Ilsa Hesse]

Horrible news. I love this sim... its amazing how many things are slowly disappearing from Second Life. often taking pieces of it's soul with them.

[Amanda Dallin]

Second Life is like live theater. It's performance art that might have a long run but is never permanent.

[Ana Lima]

I'm seldom going inworld. Places I like disappeared.
For-profit... for-profit politics.

[A.J.]

It's too bad that there isn't some kind of program where popular builds couldn't be donated to one of the many mainland wasteland abandoned lands where they could be absorbed by the Governor for public use and help uplift the dreadful decay.

So much waste.

[Littlewing]

Almost all 15k count used up 'if she would mesh the build it would only be 6500 at most possible and then take 7000 prim's and rent as 7 sky stores with 1000 prims at L$3500 a week times 4 =L$14000 X 7 =$L98000 thats $375 dollars more then enough to cover tier.
+
Sorry if the owners are tired or cannot keep up with times then it's understandable 'but looking at over 25 vendor's that's a damn healthy market and it cannot be said was no other way.loyal vendors like that are lost treasures.
+
you could set that whole sim to convex hull then set all needed walkways & walls to physics' while gaining back 7500 Prims if not more while you slowly change it all to lighted shaded mesh.

[Littlewing]

The issue here might not be the sim so much as the Asian Communities are pulling out of SL 'just as the Arabs & Brazilians have done while the whole east European/Russian community's have all died out due to real life sanctions.
+
A Lack of diversity in Second Life will do more damage then anyone in the control room understands' not only to SL but Sansar as well.
+
Combined with poor timing to close third party currency exchanges with too much land and not enough people to rent it.

[hum]

When Linden Lab would not have been so greedy with their marketplace Month Saint Michel would have a bunch of happy shop renters and merchants who would gladly pay more than enough to allow this sim to function and make it worthwhile for the owner to maintain the region.

That sim takes work to maintain and costs the french owner around 360$ a month including VAT to keep online.

This is just a result of greedy Linden who has to put their paws into the in world economy to extract extra money. Now it all gets killed one at the time.

WE LOVE YOU EBBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[hum]

*Mont Saint Michel - Typo

[Carlos Loff]

Contact sinwave.space, they will probably embrace you guys, it will be a safe tight flexible Virtual World, already with millions of users waiting because they were registered on their previous world, Gojyio, or something like that

[Littlewing]

@Carlos Loff

You people in open sim seem to want to dismiss or ignore high fidelity and if there was any place outside of second life for Mont Saint Michel 'it would be there.
+
Or she can just re-imagine it in Sansar if land will be 50% cheaper.
+
"it will be a safe tight flexible Virtual World, already with millions of users waiting because they were registered on their previous world, Gojyio, or something like that"

Prove this million users that rivals SL Population LoL
+

[Littlewing]

@hum

Agreed..'If they really wanted to keep SL alive after Sansar opens they would have lowered tier by 25% plus eaten the vat tax themselves like they once did.
+
It only costs server & energy costs of $5.00 a month to keep a region online running smooth 'the rest is overhead/development costs then the costs of inventory/server side baking/runs into millions a year to keep online so the greedy part is not true..almost ever feature we use in SL has a dedicated sever behind it with that costing real money to maintain.
+
They could not lower tier because they needed the money to pay for Sansar that's an unfair burden on residents 'when they wasted so many millions in the past.
+
They will not even change terrain textures after close to 15 years.
look at this photo its 16 regions empty on mainland just in one direction right next door to my region it's a shame ..
http: // tinypic.com/r/34q4th5/8
+
Most of land abandoned a year after Ebbe was hired so what is there excuse.
+
Liking Ebbe & His New linden lab is no excuse for overlooking accountability' we depend on then to make the right choices that effect each and every residents daily lives.they must be held accountable or we rise up against them & restore Philip to the throne.

[irihapeti]

@Littlewing

nobody is going to pay 3.5L a prim for a skybox

people were paying that much to rent the shops on the sim

now they aren't. The shops are pretty much not tenanted anymore. And what tenants are left don't have any new stuff in their shops

lots of people still go to the sim. Nobody hardly buys anything anymore in the shops on the sim. Mostly bc the shopkeepers what rented the shops got stuck in time. Their stuff got dated and stale. When people stopped buying bc dated and stale, then the shopkeepers packed it in. And the owner stuck with paying more and more of the tiers

+

is beautiful sim tho. I love going there. I don't buy anything anymore tho. I already buy all there was to buy. And none of the shopkeepers ever made any new stuff. So I just watch them leave

+

is a zillion big brands would die for that sim, is a marketers dream. It sells itself does the sim. Just needs shops that continually put out new stuff, which the big brands do

and that the thing. The owner is a creative and talented person. They just not a marketer. Never were. So down the plughole it all goes seems like

[Iggy]

All things must pass. For a year's tier, I could afford a really nice off-season holiday at the RL site.

Data storage is cheap, yet LL cannot base their revenue model on that reality.

All things must pass.

[Shockwave Yareach]

It's simple to know why. Three reasons:

SL costs too much
SL costs too much
SL costs too much

Name any other collocation service where a 1/4 slice of the computer is 295$? Anybody other than LL trying to foist that off on anyone would be laughed into bankruptcy court. Then the judge would laugh too.

[Littlewing]

@Everyone

Well i can give my advice with that being like everyone else.'what i would do well for me to keep running my gums then i must offer a solution as well ?.'To be proactive then i think maybe we should set down with linden lab while finding out since they are building Sansar while already owning blocksworlds how much would it cost to do a crowdfunded buyout of Second Life?
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We could raise enough to not only buy the IP and systems running but data rooms with employees if they would spin it off in a buyout.
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It's not a crazy idea' i've lived about 5 minutes from Hy-Vee headquarters for years were my aunt has worked 20 years.' its employee owned with 300 stores and 8.5 billion in sales.'
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why can we not have a resident buyout while hiring some past lindens to help not only keep our world going but make the needed changes the lindens are holding back so when we get to sansar those features are already there.'but nothing else we owned or earned over the years is.
+
A crowdfunded resident buyout unless i am mistaken has never been offered to the lab & is it crazy to think that they might not have a number in mind?' they had no trouble getting rid of Rods other toys in his mini-EA project.' while getting rid of SL would allow them to create the 'clean world' without the tarnish of the 'dirty worlds' history.
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There are thousands of past lindens that might not only help donate to get the crowdfunding off the ground but having a deep interest in overseeing day to day as volunteers until a stable management can be elected.
+

[Malaika]

Again this discussion here leads to the fact about the imbalance in tier fees in world.

I hear whoo 3.5L$ per prim what an expensive amount.

It is not expensive. A small shop with 300 prims would give a rental of 1050 Linden per week to have a medium size store on this big traffic sim that is attractive to have a shop on.

Is that expensive 4 US$ a week? You need to sell only 2 dresses to cover the rent for the week and everything else is profit. With 300 prims you can stuff a shop full since you use a lot of 1 prim panels to display your goods.

Have you even looked at Google adwords? Have you checked what Hamlet charges for a tiny ad here on this blog. Compare that with what you get in world on a custom made sim like this.

Stop all the whining about land that is expensive. Start to think instead about all the hours of labour that went into this sim and what you get for such a small rental.

People who claim it is expensive should start looking at rental space in RL and rental contracts for stores in RL. Then compare the cost versus the profit margin of both. Once you go through these numbers you will see that rent in Second Life is CHEAP it is very low cost for what you receive.

Again Linden Lab is to blame here because Linden Lab does charge 1 Linden per prim per week to one guy and 2 Linden per week to the other guy and 3 Linden per week to the other guy.

This makes it that the customer does not have a clear vision anymore on the pricing model of the product and becomes suspicious. Than the customers goes screaming how expensive every rental is until they find something offered way below the actual cost of the land tier costs in world.

THIS IS WHAT YOU GET LINDEN LAB WITH YOUR SLEAZY UNDER THE TABLE SELLING OF SIMS AT DISCOUNTED RATES SCAMMING ONE CUSTOMER TO BE FRIENDS WITH THE OTHER.

No matter how you turn this it is happening in Second Life on a large scale and is a direct result of Linden Lab their management over the years.

Step 1. Invite people to come to Second Life and set up businesses and invest in regions and land.

Step 2. Watch how people create an economy and try to manipulate customer their efforts to your advantage to squeeze for extra cash next to the large revenue already made from collecting tier fees.

Step 3. Once you wrecked everything enough let it crash and burn, hire some extra staff and commence to code the new platform of the future. Create enough buzz around it and put enough effort in to manipulate userbase to go to the new platform. Announce there will be new opportunity and cheap land on new platform and that the company will now focus their efforts on the new virtual world instead of the current one.

Step 4. After creating all kinds of panic during step 3 announce you will keep the old platform running as long as you can squeeze enough money out of it. This way userbase knows it is only temporary and has an extra incentive to move over to the new platform, call it using soft force. It also avoids userbase doing difficult and starting lawsuits against you.

Step 5. After you got userbase crazy enough to come to your new platform where you try to look sympathetic to them offering them land now at a massive reduced price you do forget to mention how you will be making money from them now. In your old world you learned how users hate to pay tier fees so you got smarter and figured out that using a soft manipulation approach by charging 5% tax on everything would bring your revenue source more in balance. When real world governments do it for decades this might work for you as well. Since the suckers (excuse me, your dear valued customer base) have no objects or inventory because you tried to make them believe you were unable to transfer their assets from the old world to the new world (haha you are so clever to get away with all this) your userbase is now forced to start again from scratch and you can immediatly start deploying your 5% on everything tax model and rake in your profits.

I think for the first time in a decade Linden Lab is going to have a hard time in the next years.

Good thing they got such a great captain to steer the ship.

*** Last sentence is sarcasm for those in doubt.

[livio korobase]

Where is the problem? Rent a server, install OpenSim and Mont Saint Michel is back for 6 euro month...

[irihapeti]

dunno what SL you live in Malaika

nobody is going to pay 3.5L per prim for a skybox when the going prim rental rate right now today is 1L a prim and less

thats the market rate today in the real SL. yanno the one owned and operated by LL

[metacam oh]

Still amazed they charge 295 a month. Highway robbery

[Graham Mills]

@livio Yadne Monde already did an OpenSim version -- sadly I can only find it on YouTube.

[Malaika]

@Irihapeti

Here is some math for you Irihapeti

295 US$ x 257 L$ = 75520 L$ per month tier cost for a sim. This is tier without VAT

75520 : 30.5 days x 7 days = 17332 L$ per week cost

17332 : 15000 prims = 1.155 L$ per prim per week base cost.

According to your theory the normal rate per prim in Second Life is 1L$ per week per prim. What strange numbers since the actual base cost for the tier alone is 1.15 L$ per prim per week on a private region.

Now this particular sim above has been purchased for 1675 US$ in the year 2008 which is an investment.

Most likely this owner also needs to pay 20% VAT or more which makes the cost for her 1.39 L$ per prim per week.

The idea for this owner to make some revenue on her sim is by charging a premium on top of her base cost after investment so charging 3L$ per week per prim is a very normal profit margin in this case for a themed sim.

People like you are a problem Irihapeti expecting everything for below market price at retarded rates. That is also what I did mention above, people do not have a clue anymore about price and costs because of Linden Lab their behaviour. I will quote myself on this.

"Again Linden Lab is to blame here because Linden Lab does charge 1 Linden per prim per week to one guy and 2 Linden per week to the other guy and 3 Linden per week to the other guy."

Two posts later here you are confirming what I wrote:

"Irihapeti:

dunno what SL you live in Malaika

nobody is going to pay 3.5L per prim for a skybox when the going prim rental rate right now today is 1L a prim and less

thats the market rate today in the real SL. yanno the one owned and operated by LL"

You Irihapeti are a classic example of the confused consumer victim of Linden Lab their practices over the years.

A normal clothing shop Irihapeti in RL takes a profit margin of around 70% on their goods so they can offset the costs they have to run the store and buy lunch so they don't starve from hunger.

Now you know that 3 Linden per week per prim is a normal profit margin. At 3 Linden per week per prim that owner is still not making a cent on her sim in actual profit.

With a mindset like you have Irihapeti everything in Second Life runs on a deficit and that deficit will make the entire platform evaporate.

Linden Lab is the entity to blame. Linden Lab sets the rates and bills the customer. Linden Lab tends to bill customers in a random manner, some pay a little, some pay a little more, some pay a lot, some pay a lot more and VAT on top of that.

When companies get accusations for cheating customers, fraud, running a scam, fleecing the customer, using predatory business practices, bait and switch techniques and so on, one would expect that any decent company would take action to rectify the situation to save their face if they want to remain in business in the future.

With Linden Lab this is not the case, they remain silent, not a word, not a single word of denial or initiative to put a stop to the scam they run. They just keep pulling their crap milking the cow for every drop of milk. The victim is the consumer and the ones who did invest in Linden Lab their virtual world.

People are not stupid, they know and are aware. Company reputation and consumer confidence are the most important factors when you want to stay in business.

Perhaps the CEO wants to come in here to explain what this is all about. I am sure the CEO his customers would be very interested to hear him explain his randomly distributed pricing shemes from which Mont Saint Michel is now a victim.

[zz bottom]

Ceo's are no example to nobody, See latest on Wv.