Think of Second Life Items & Land Like Cups of Coffee (NWN Comment of the Day)

On the question of whether people will really miss their SL content once Project Sansar is launched, PussyCat Catnap has an interesting way of looking at it:

I buy everything I buy in SL as if it was a cup of coffee. I will drink it, and then it's going out the other end and the fish get to keep it. It's all temporary goods. Stay online long enough and you need to get used to the idea that everything is transitory. Even the other people.

There are things and concepts I really like about SL, but I don't expect to keep them forever - even though I've spent silly absurd amounts of money on them. Then again if I added up all the lattes and cappuccinos I've bought over the years... that's even more. And I didn't get to keep most of them more than a few hours in my stomach.

So if SL vanished tomorrow -- it would still have been better money spent than my coffee budget. I've enjoyed all those toys I've bought. Even the ones I bought, played with for 5 minutes, and then forgot I had them.

She has this perspective not just about virtual items that cost a few dollars or less, but to virtual land in Second Life, which costs considerably more:

Right now I am still holding about L$140,000 worth of land in SL - the amount that I have put into it and not yet made back from selling it. So that is US$595 worth of 'virtual pixels' that I will just flat out lose if SL is "replaced" by Sansar (rather than existing alongside, as is the actual plan). Certainly if Sansar succeeds, most of that money will be a loss.

Should I sell now and make my money off some other sucker before the value is gone, or just go on enjoying what I have bought with it? I would say that, based on the fact that it took me 6 years to put in that US$595 - I have roughly spent 32.6 cents a day on owning land in SL. My coffee, if I buy one, is going to run between $5-6 because I live by San Francisco and this place is silly expensive.

So... I'm still making out ahead. And frankly I can accept losing that money. SL land is NOT an investment... it is a good that retains value for a limited time, and the people making money off of it are like "day traders" who make that not by holding it, but by trading it at the right time to the right "sucker" that values love, emotion, and experience over money. Kinda glad I'm a sucker. So... Oh well.

May not be the only way of looking at virtual content, but seems like a good way of keeping it in proper perspective. Speaking of coffee in San Francisco, the first office of Linden Lab was Linden Street in Hayes Valley, which eventually became home to the first outlet of Blue Bottle Coffee, which started the whole insane $5-6 artisan coffee trend in San Francisco and beyond. And so the circle is complete, or something something something.

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Comments

[Shockwave Yareach]

Except...

One, when we bought the land we were told by LL that we would own it. When we bought merchandise in SL we were told we would own that by LL. and when we made our own things, we have ownership of that too.

Some things in the digital realm are temporary. Some are not. Tell people they have to buy new engine computers every year and see how many folks are eager to do so. If you want to treat SL land as being without value then it shouldn't have cost 1200$ to buy and 300$ a month thereafter. Paying a few dollars, it is a toy and losing it is no big deal.

But a few thousand dollars into land, and it is not a toy anymore - it is an investment. And telling people to lose all this money again by going to Sansar? Either nobody will abandon their stuff in SL and Sansar will fail, or enough people update and SL will collapse. Neither is a good thing since closing SL turns off all the monthly land fees that keeps LL running.

[Amanda Dallin]

I think of SL as performance art such as live theater. When the show has run its course you tear down the set and start over. Project Sansar is just a new stage.

[Estelle Pienaar]

I love the coffee metaphor. Land and products in SL are not the same as in real life. A little test: Investigate if you can give SL land to your kids when you die. You can't, so you don't even own these things. I feel sorry for folks, if this is still news for them...

[Tulip]

So the guy who bought the Amsterdam sim for 50 K US$ should just write it off as outdated merchandise?

How about Estates who paid Linden amounts that would make your head spin to buy sims which they had to rent out for years just to make their money back?

This is not about Pussycat and her 400 Dollars in land and her 500 Dollar Inventory.

There are people with inventories worth 30000 US$ with objects they purchased over the years. Estates buil from the ground up with 100 K US$ in land buy fees not to mention the value of their business based on their yearly revenue.

Linden Lab will get slapped with a lot of lawsuits in the future. That is why they kinda state they will keep Second Life open.

Do not forget that the one and only Philip Rosedale had to go to congress and explain what exactly his company was selling to people

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/03/mr-linden-goes.html

ow look Hamlet blogged about it.

Linden and their sleazy business practices where they first invite people to come and invest in their sheme, then make changes to their Terms Of Service conditions slowly over the years stating "You have nothing to say, you own nothing, all your virtual goods you did not really buy they are only licences, the virtual money you purchase for real money does not hold any value"

We will see how that will hold up in the courts in the future won't we.

[Hal Renegade]

Important to mention is that Miss Pussycat is a consumer. Second Life only exist partly out of consumers who have limited losses when the platform halts to exist. Next to consumers Second Life is made out of thousands of businesses large and small and people who have worked in there for years to make Second Life what it is.

Observing Linden behaviour and their we could not care one bit what happens to our "Powersellers" (except for Anshe Chung they keep hidden in their offices and pamper her) and merchants will make it so that these people will just walk and spend their time on more productive things.

When you want to see what happens to a platform without entrepreneurs and creators log in to High Fidelity or opensim.

[Guest]

@ Shockwave Yareach

You hit the nail on the head if they want us to imagine our land is cheap then please give me a cheap price.

Under this perspective my mainland region should be priced at under $50 dollars a month.
I should put in a support ticket to linden lab about lowering my tier & refer back to this article...what could go wrong.

[Guest]

@ Tulip

Not too long ago the lindens said we could leave our accounts for the grandchildren if we chose to when death knocks & 2nd life would be here many generations to come.

It was even written in the terms of service for years.

[Skate Foss]

I don't think of my island as a cup of coffee, and either do my tenants that pay real money every week or month toward the real tier I pay Linden Lab. That's not even touching upon my time that I and others spent designing and creating my island sim. Surely our time is worth more then a coffee.
Not including all the upgrades to my computers and the new computers I had to buy just to run SecondLife at a satisfactory degree to be able to enjoy all the creativity, energy and real money I've spent to make my sim
What it is. That's a damn expensive latte.

[Hal Renegade]

So let us calculate the cup of coffee in region set up fees. These are only set up fees without tier. Also take into notice that Linden Lab did devalue the worth of a simulator so much they are now worthless at resale.

The actual amounts are much higher than what I will calculate because of the churn in regions, regions get dumped and other people buy fresh regions again, so the full setup fee is paid again.

Get this:

6000 Mainland sims sold at auction at an average price of 4000 USD

6000x4000= 24 Million REAL US$

Full sims on average set up fee of 1400 US$

22000x1400= 31 Million REAL US$

Keep in mind that the number for full sim regions will be much higher than what I wrote because of the churn over the years, it could be triple the amount.

Homestead&Openspaces

14000x300= 4 Million REAL US$

This quick calculation shows people did pay Linden Lab 60 Million real US$ (actual numbers much higher) just in region setup fees. This is without any tier fees, only the BUY price of a region. Regions that Linden Lab made worthless by flooding the Mainland and lowering the setup fees plus selling regions for free to their friends under the table. Yes larger estates do not need to pay these fees so they just flood the private sim resale market destroying any value.

To protect themself from being sued over this Linden Lab did update their TOS stating that you do not BUY a region but it is only a setup fee instead of property. So that is how Linden Lab did make an amount of over 60 Million REAL US$ go up in thin air.

This is why Linden Lab never cared much, instead of improving the platform they looked for ways to exploit the userbase. Flipping price on products, decimating in world asset value. Putting their claws in the in world economy people did create, exploiting resident efforts to fill their pockets has been much easier over the past decade than actually doing the work needed to make Second Life a viable platform.

Why care about upset customers? Fuck those whiners others will come, pay a new region setup fee, Linden Lab collects again and it keeps the grid interesting with new builds.

What whining creators? Screw them, let them leave it clears competition and allows new meat to enter the marketplace with new content and new ideas.

This does all work find until the day it doesn't anymore, and once that happens it is october 12 2015.

I'm not writing trash here, that is what goes on behind the curtains at Battery Street.

[Cube Republic]

Is it not more akin to a technology product?

[Michaela Simmons]

@Estelle Pienaar

I need to correct you dear. In Second Life there is an estate named Dalliez estates.

The original owner Alliez Mysterio passed away in RL.

Alliez Mysterio did own a lot of grandfathered regions with the lower tier. As by a miracle Linden Lab found it all ok to transfer all these regions at the old low grandfathered tier rate (Linden Lab explicitly states it is not possible to transfer grandfathered tier region fees) to the now current owner.

As you see SL land can be passed on after death even with grandfathered tier rates. Of course it depends who you are and of course this all happens out of sight of the unaware normal paying customers.

These are all shady business practises people are not supposed to know, this behaviour affects the regular consumer and creators in Second Life every single day and is a reason why the platform is getting completely destroyed.

Mister innocent Ebbe Altberg will of course act as if his nose bleeds.

When you are a new guy walking into Second Life and you want to set up a store or real estate business why would you bother when you know others get sneaky under the table deals so they can undercut you both as a creator or a realtor.

Small example: Kirk comes to Second Life and wants to start creating plants and trees to sell. Kirk sees the high tier for a 295$ a month sim but figures he has enough talent to cover that expense. As a new creator Kirk does not have any clients yet which makes it harder on Kirk.

Now to top this Kirk finds out his competitor the plant creator Lilith Heart only needs to pay 195$ a month for a store sim.

Kirk thinks "what the hell?" and does not even bother.

The result is less competition for Lilith Heart but less new content for Second Life users, less content to see for the visitors of Second Life and this then results in less interest in the platform and less sales.

Once you go through all these steps the longer term impact of Linden Lab their actions damage the Second Life world as a whole.

[Guest]

As devils advocate
Well Ebbe has made broken no promises to anyone. almost every single grudge everyone has predates him.he has tried to address a majority of them.
your never charged to store your inventory
1000s of servers
hundreds of employees for data center 24/7
programmers for servers
huge power bill

For each resident logged in you have 9 servers dedicating hardware to that resident regardless if they spend money in 2nd life or not.

Lets give that lab some credit and what did Ebbe do for everyone to think he is such a big liar with a hidden agenda?

[Tipster]

All hail to Ebbe Mister innocent

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/NITEFLIRT-INGENIO-SALESFORCECOM-EBBE-ATLEBER/San-Francisco-California/MARK-BRITTO-CEO-EBBE-ALTBERG-CPO-MARC-BARACH-CMO-INGENIO-NITEFLIRT-System-is-complet-246577

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/NITEFLIRT-INGENIO-KEEN/internet/NITEFLIRT-INGENIO-KEEN-Niyteflirt-the-Rip-off-phonesex-scam-Ingenio-AttT-beta-nite-530664

This guy comes from some little phonesex company software develop firm named Ingenio

Mister innocent family guy until you dig a bit deeper. They sure have a bunch working there, their lawyer got convicted for stock market fraud. The CEO is phonesex line CPO

What is a CPO

A chief procurement officer (CPO) is an executive role focused on sourcing, procurement, and supply management for an enterprise.

What did Ingenio do?

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Phone-sex-firm-s-odd-bedfellows-2618864.php

What did you think Ebbe did do there?

Ahum ahum.

Ow but Ebbe is busy building a platform for the millions right, or was it for the billions?

[A.J.]

Thank You to Shockwave and everyone else who made very convincing arguments against this "cup of coffee".

There is all kinds of investments that residents have made in SL over the years. Money, time, and emotional investments. Most of us had to work at growing into this world and mastering our identity.

There are things that will just never be able to be transferred to a new platform. Our identities are more than just our names.

If your SL experience has been nothing more than a Grande Latte to be slurped up and flung into the trash can, you may have missed a few things along the way.

[Mandy]

If anyone ever thought this platform was going to last forever, I have a Blockbuster franchise and an old VHS player to sell you. Technology changes, and at some point you need to move on to bigger and better things. My dad had a thousand movies on VHS, and he invested a lot of money in them. I am super grateful that he is NOT leaving them to me.

I myself have quite a few movies on DVD. I can't remember the last time I watched one. All my movie viewing now is done though streaming services. It is more flexible, more efficient, and I have access to a greater variety. Am I mad I spent that much on the DVD's and the players for them? No way!!!

Linden Labs has not said you need to give up your land when Sansar opens; the servers will still be on. Whether you have anyone coming to rent your land is another matter, and not really Linden Labs problem. Linden Labs has the responsibility to stay in business. If the experience that you give people on your island is as good as the one they have in Sansar, they will stay. If not, they will move on to bigger and better things. If you are in SL 1.0, be prepared to be lonely!

I myself have spent a fortune on system clothes, but now my body is mesh and my old clothes are no good to me. I probably had 20 fatpacks of prim shoes from a company who's name starts with an N, lol. Do I mourn this? No, because my newer body and newer clothes look a lot better. Any emotional attachment I have in SL is to my friends and the memories we have made together. My friends will probably join me in the new world. The memories stay with me even when my computer is off. I am certainly not "emotionally attached" to a bunch of electrons that can disappear at the pull of a plug!! You do realize that if some larger company bought out Linden Labs that could be the fate of all your hopes and dreams?

Does SL equate to a cup of coffee? That might be a stretch, but so is thinking it will go on forever in it's current form.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Wow I did not expect a comment I left late at night on a thread from last week to actually be seen by Hamlet. In the past it seems like he always fired off the articles and then moved on.

But yeah...

So much in tech is transitory that I feel you have to start approaching it as transitory.

I get that people spend a lot of money here and get attached to things. I tried to convey that by listing out the current value of my land - which is basically lost money.

You will feel a lot better about your situation with SL if you look at the money spent as a 'ticket to an experience' rather than an investment.

Anyway - like it or not it is NOT an investment.

An investment grows in value. SL goods will just simply never do that.

This is why I mentioned 'Day Traders' - they trade on goods that could be worth absolutely nothing minutes after they sell them. They are NOT buying and selling investments. They are buying and selling other people's perception of value.
- The people making money on land in SL, are making it because they're buying it low and selling just a little less low.

Say I feel the need to move my build in SL. I list my land for sale... I get impatient about tier or just about my plans for my new build, so I sell a little lower... the 'Land Trader' comes in and buys it, and then tries to sell it on at a mark up that I was not willing to wait on. Or they try to rent it, and hope that they can recover the cost by renting above their tier bill.

(And the rental end is a very rough gamble because the SL rental market is saturated.)

These are investments - they are goods in a market being traded.

And if you try to attach permanency to them either in a monetary sense or an emotional sense - you are just going to get hurt at some point in the future.

Don't over-value an outdated promise from a former founder of what was a startup SaS company, who has long since left it behind for new shinies. They said you 'owned' your land, that promise is long dead. Clinging to it will just lead to unhappiness because you won't win that lawsuit if you try. And its really not good for the tech anyway if we keep trying to cling to the old pieces.

So the more you can detach yourself from that, the more you can start to think of it as buying a ticket to an experience, the less its going to hurt when you lose it.

Nobody gets out of life with their loot intact, and that's even more true in the fast paced world of tech goods...

[Pussycat Catnap]

"These are investments - they are goods in a market being traded."

Should have been:

"These are NOT investments - they are goods in a market being traded."

And my note about trading in other people's perception of value - is really what all economics is... so it could be read as vague... I'm not sure how better to convey what I'm trying to get across with that. I just tried typing in some other ways to say the point and they read back even worse to me...

[Gilbert Gontola]

Well Mandy your real world bank account is also nothing more than a bunch of electrons that can disappear at the pull of a plug.

Welcome to digital society Mandy where most important things are electronic.

I own a game console from the 80's which I keep and still like. That game console still works and it happens I just plug it in even these days.

Mandy there are people who own 15 level 100 World Of Warcraft characters in their accounts. These are loyal Blizzard customers paying month after month for years into World Of Warcraft.

Blizzard knows this very well and they would not dare pulling the crap that Linden Lab is doing. When you study game communities and how they behave towards the development company you never see the amount of rage or frustration like you see with Linden Lab customers.

I did watch Blizzard their community for a while. Each day I see forum posts like: "Blizzard I love you". Blizzard has a shop where they sell t-shirts and caps with the company logo on it. When Linden Lab would open such a shop they might sell 1 t-shirt to Yo Yardley, the other one they would need to send for free to Draxtor.

Mandy name me 1 company who did build a competitor for its flagship product and let me know how that went.

I have a strong impression that the ones who come in here and say, it is just a game, they are just pixels are the ones paying small amounts in rent or buy the occasional dress with money they do not need.

These people should not forget all the wauw and whoh they did experience when entering Second Life is put there by the ones who did invest time money and resources in Second Life.

Visitors with their bling shoes and mesh dress only consume the efforts of others.
They are the 5 Dollar fun class, they are not what makes Linden Lab their money, they are not what makes Second Life the world it is so they can log in and consume.

When you did all like the Greenies sim so much and went there for hours weeks upon weeks to explore you could do that because one person named RightAsRain Rimbaud did invest over 200000 US$ investing in over 30 sims, hiring staff and workers and top creators to build all these sims for your entertainment.

RightAsRain Rimbaud got the Linden treatment got screwed and left and lost large amounts of money.

A lot of money has been pumped into Second Life and Linden Lab has an obligation if they want to survive as a business to ensure the platform can remain functioning.

Who is going to pay for Linden their salaries, the 1 Dollar hair buyer with the freebie pants? The DJ that pays his expenses with the 3 Dollars in weekly tips?

During the time Rod Humble was CEO he did not even bother to do anthing to celebrate SL10B. The tenth year of Second Life would not even had been celebrated if one of the large estates did not come out and delivered a pack of sims so "the community" could put up builds to celebrate and have events.

It all comes from the ones that invest, like I invest time to write this.

Second Life is made by a couple of thousand people, good luck getting a couple of thousand willing to work when you are known to scam people.

[Estelle Pienaar]

I see a lot of people getting very emotional on the issue. I don't think that SL is going to be shut off tomorrow. It is going to run for many more years to come. I personally have invested a lot of time and money in SL and it was worth it. But I have realised from my humble beginnings in SL in 2006, that this place runs on bits and bytes by one company and everything depends on their business decisions.

To inveat time and money in order to have an income for a foreseeable future is reasonable in SL. but if your time horizon to get a return of investment is very long in the future, then this is simply a very risky bet in the technology sector. Some people seem to realise just now how risky it is. I am sorry for them.

Somehow this is a lot like your real life: It is going to end and you won't take any of your investments with you when you leave this world.

[Roger Dickinson]

These Lindens would be nothing and are nothing without the ones that pay for their services.

A business is nothing without its customers. Linden Lab treats paying customers like filth and has been doing this for many years. And people simply do not put up with that anymore, and that is how you get the decline.

It is not because the platform is outdated, a mesh is a mesh, building with cubes is building with cubes, it never gets dull or boring because you can produce anything you want and keep repeating this indefinitely without restrictions.

You need to look in areas such as the never ending stream of griefers and lack of action. Lack of customer service. Lack of proper management within the company, workers in the company only looking at what they do without working as a team. A CEO named Rod Humble who did not care and prefered to spend his days hiding in his office working on his personal game projects for years.

Does Microsoft suddenly say, "well we are now going to build the OS of the future, we have still 5 guys working on windows but all your computer stuff like JPG pictures or .txt files or .exe files for software will no longer be compatible with out new OS because we are building the future. Yeah folks that's technology for you, always advancing. We need to think about the future."

You know what would happen in the world when Microsoft would do what Linden Lab is doing? I supect Microsoft shares would drop to 2 cents a share and people would go in mass to burn down Microsoft their office buildings and lynch Bill Gates himself.

Linden Lab gives tech a bad name and tech companies a bad reputation.

[Armadillo]

Lindens have amassed so much hatred towards their business by the people that actually made a real investment in SL and that will never see it returned due to the corruption of Linden employee's, the ineptness of the marketing and management of LL. Where does all the negative publicity come from towards LL not by the people that don't understand virtual worlds but by those LL has burned.These same forces will be sure to unleash themselves towards any new grid LL is involved in.

[irihapeti]

@Roger

after 14 years did Microsoft say: Today we killed off Windows XP. And we gunna kill Windows 8.x soon as well. Get Windows 10

yes. yes they do

and 116 million people so far went: thanks

[irihapeti]

@Roger

after 14 years did Microsoft say: Today we killed off Windows XP. And we gunna kill Windows 8.x soon as well. Get Windows 10

yes. yes they do

and 116 million people so far went: thanks

[Mandy]

Gilbert-
Yes, my money is in a bank, which is covered by tons of regulations and an outfit called the FDIC. If it is bought by another bank they will not just unplug the servers and say sorry for your luck. In the gaming that can and has happened. However, it is also possible that due to a large event such as a major war or a catastrophic disaster it could all go poof. NOTHING we make in this world is forever. Sorry to inform you of that. Even the house you own now will one day be gone! Some things you may get recompensed for, others maybe not. If the super volcano under Wyoming blows up tomorrow, I doubt your insurance company will cover you.

There are plenty of companies that build competitive products to their "flagship business". Sony has always tried to come up with the next tech innovation, knowing it would make their old one obsolete. When the Walkman was everywhere did they say, "Whoa, we'd better stop there? Everyone will hate us if we make something that will make all their cassette tapes obsolete?" No, they made a portable CD player and moved on.

Netflix started as a DVD rental platform, and was very successful at that, to the point of putting mortar and brick stores almost out of business. Did they stop there? No, they have invested heavily in streaming technology and at some point till stop doing the physical DVD thing altogether. Will they lose a few customers? Yes, but they have no obligation to continue to serve those few.

I think by building a new platform Linden Labs is hoping to attract the next generation of residents. The old platform is limited, and is a patchwork of fixes and upgrades. Some things in it really can't be totally fixed in it's current configuration. Sim crossings come to mind. They have been working on those for years and it hasn't really gotten much better.

You mention World of Warcraft. That is a simpler platform and is not asked to do as much as the SL platform is. But let's look at that as well. Do you think in 30 years people will be playing characters left to them by their parents on the same platform? I doubt it.

World of Warcraft is also built on a different business model. I believe that is one of the reasons Sansar is in development. SL has the wrong business model. I rent a large Island and buy lots of things for it and myself. I pay a ton of rent. It is easily half of what I put into this game in a month. If land is cheaper in Sansar, it will free up money for me to buy more pixel junk I don't need. I'm happy, the content creators are happy, if Linden Labs taxes those transactions they are happy. The only one not happy is the guy in SL who has an empty island. However, his island will still be there. SL isn't turning off, it will just fade away, until you, Gilbert, are the only one playing it.

[irihapeti]

@Gilbert who wrote:

"Who is going to pay for Linden their salaries, the 1 Dollar hair buyer with the freebie pants? The DJ that pays his expenses with the 3 Dollars in weekly tips?"

"Visitors with their bling shoes and mesh dress only consume the efforts of others.
They are the 5 Dollar fun class, they are not what makes Linden Lab their money, they are not what makes Second Life the world it is so they can log in and consume."

who pays the tiers on the mainland?

who pays the rents on the estates?

who buys all the stuff in shops?

who tips the performers and hosts at the clubs?

who does this, a dollar at a time, hour after hour afer day after week afte year, since the beginning of SL

all these awesome owner mega egos of which you seem to be, or wannabe or neverwas or somethings, have got nothing, nada, zero, without those $1 payments. Including the mindset that thinks is owed a return bc "investment"

+

when did $30,000 become an investment and $3 isnt ??

$30,000 is lunch money. I got $300,000,000 to invest. oh! wait!!

[Estelle.Pienaar]

@ Michaela Simmons: I have to admit that I did not check the TOS before stating that SL virtual goods cannot be inherited. I know that you can't inherit songs that you bought on itunes and I assumed that it would be the same for SL, maybe I am wrong (but again, I am too lazy to check, sorry.)

@ everyone else: I don't understand your rage. There is a new technology emerging and many people will leave SL ANYWAY because there will be better virtual places soon and there is NOTHING that LL can do about it.

What do you expect LL to do? They are doing the best they can to survive and create the best of the upcoming new virtual places. It will be tough for them because unlike in the past there will be quite a competition. Unlike most commenters here I prefer an LL virtual world to a Facebook virtual world or anyone else.

Last but not least a "business management for dummies" advise. If you run a business and make an investment, then always be aware of the period of investment return.

You have had more than 10 years to get a return for your investment and that's incredibly long for the development cycles in digital technologies. The industry which makes new graphics drivers and standards today couldn't care less about a few hundred thousand nostalgic users of a a platform running on a polished 2003 technology.

Sorry, but I can't take anyone serious who is blaming LL for their own failure to asses the environment in which they operate their business.

[Roger Dickinson]

Irihapeti you are a woman that spends a couple of Dollar in Second Life and then you fire up your free opensim when you want to build. You did admit this yourself on a forum so who are you to judge about value or investments made when you do not own land or invest in sims or your time as a content creator.

Buy a mesh dress for a buck and enjoy Second Life and the investments made by others, then run the free version to participate in the creative process.

Then you make remarks like above. Windows costs 70 Dollars and you can run it for 7 years. So it is worth 10 Dollar per year.

When Second Life would cost 12 Dollar a month who would give a damn.

Fact is Linden Lab has gladly received extreme large amounts of money over the previous decade by "selling" land and "opportunity" to people, by "inviting" people to their platform showing how they could start a business.

There are people who went all in on Second Life and have a million Dollar invested, real Dollars.
Even if these people made that money back over the years by working each day they still lose out because of the heavy investments they have made which are about to become worthless.

Invest 100 K US$ in Second Life
Make 200K over 10 years
Net profit 100 K over 10 years

Great you worked 10 years for a lousy 10 K a year.

Invest 100 K US$ in Second Life
Make 600K over 30 years
Net profit 500 K over 30 years

Great you made 17 K a year

Get the point Irahapeti?

Creator start building content for Linden, spend 1000 hours learning 3D software, spend 400 hours mastering sculpted prims. Spend large amounts of time producing mesh content which you need to sell for 1$ a piece.

This creator needs to plan his time and sales often for 2 or 3 years ahead.

Certain creators produce large builds such as castles or expensive houses. These creators need up to 6 months time to produce such a build. They need to sell x amount of copies over the next 2 or 3 years or longer to make it worth their while.

Because of the decline and uncertainty these creators just stop producing. They still have their store but production did stop. I could name several who completely stopped producing new items, who halved their store or more or who completely left.

Certain creators are also glad about the decline and Sansar, they want the same as Linden wants which is to let the fools buy it all over again. Rinse and repeat.

These are very valid realistic complaints and judges will listen to them. Why does Linden Lab asks you to fill their special tax forms?
Why does Fincen monitor Linden Lab you think? Because it is a 5 Dollar online game people play for fun?

[A.J.]

"business management for dummies"

I don't think that LL has ever read that book.

I think they have referred to "business management by dummies" for advise like it's better to fail huge than to succeed modestly and the best way to get new customers is to marginalize your old ones.

[Matthew]

Linden Lab did want to build this large virtual world. They did not have the money to do this. So Rosedale could not buy servers. So instead Rosedale did sell people sims which is virtual land that people would own for the amount of 1675 US$ per sim.

This did allow Linden Lab to buy server hardware for which it did not have money at the time.

So what people did was investing in Second Life and in return people could develop these simulators and build stores on them, resell them or rent them as they pleased.

This was a win win situation because for your 1675 US$ investment (which is a month wages in most parts of the world) you did get the opportunity to make money. Linden Lab did not hesitate to push Anshe Chung forward claiming she did make a million real Dollars with Linden Lab their system.

So Linden Lab did actively solicit people through media to come and invest in their platform. Linden Lab didn't sell people a 30 Dollar video game, no Linden Lab did everything they could to attract large amounts of capital because they did not have any money themselves.

This is similar to a company that would go public and offer shares on the stock market.

Buy Linden Lab stock and invest at 1675 US$ a share.

Then Linden Lab would of course not stick to the regulations and start adding more and more shares to the market so that the actual value of the traded stock would sink more and more. In the real world there is the SEC who would put a stop to these sleazy practices.

Linden Lab did the same as my example above, Linden Lad sold mainland sims for a minimum of 10 Linden per square meter. Then to fill their pockets with tier they kept flooding and flooding with more mainland sims until the value of said land went down by 98% not caring about their investors who they needed in the beginning.

Linden Lab did solicit investors through the news and online media to participate in their revolutionary online platform. CEO Rosedale had to even show up in congress to explain what he was selling to people because a lot of money was involved.

It is just how one places things in perspective, you see what you are dealing with here? That is what is called an investment scam in legal terms.

[Shockwave Yareach]

Irihapeti

What Microsoft did was say no more support for xp. People could still run it fine and the new win 10 was still backwards compatible. Windows was still windows and everything you bought to run on xp still would run under win10.

For you to make that comparable to what LL is doing, ms would have had to say that xp is no longer supported. And that nothing you run on XP will run on win10. And that TXT files are obsolete so are no longer allowed. And that one day in the future all your xp boxes will erase all their hard drives and everything in the computer world will vanish, because it no longer fits with MS business plans and future thinking.

If ms announced that there would be lawsuits. But Microsoft knows that having backwards compatibility is what keeps ms in business. All our stuff is expensive, not simple cups of coffee. And telling customers they'll lose many thousands of dollars in code because ms says so, is a fast track to ruin.

Nobody would mind SL upgrading and turning into sl2 with more mesh support. They wouldn't even object to a tax on old prims, giving a reason to upgrade over time. But you tell folks they must buy all new stuff in the new place before the old one disappears? One, folks generally don't have the means to toss such money around everytime Ll demands. And two, if people are going to lose everything and have to start all over again, they've every reason to abandon ll and go to other grids. Only loss of inventory and groups keeps folks from walking from LL - guaranteeing we will lose it all anyway, just makes the door to inworldz look better than the door to Sansar

[Guest]

@Shockwave

Agreeing with you on most parts but Inworldz is not even an alternative to 2ndlife or the rest of opensim.
It's a mini linden lab but worst.management that takes things too personally and are too involved in residents personal lives.
Linden lab never banned me from speaking in forums or from hearsay in someones drama & that happens often there.

LL has stated Sansar is a new different product unrelated to 2ndlife why is that so hard to believe?
LL is allowing you to take your accounts,groups & friends-list not because its a replacement for 2ndlife no it's so you have one account for all linden products in the future thru one account.
Sansar is not the only new grid linden lab is building. they have a second unnamed grid being built next to it for a world not public yet.
It's called " Project Titan"

[Estelle Pienaar]

I have to admit that I felt very uncomfortable with the Ashne Chung land hype. It was clear to me that many people would lose a lot of money. It already happened with mainland a long time ago.

The problem with mainland was, that too many people had bought it and there was no demand, once people wanted to sell. Again, it was very obvious that this moment would come. But which company has ever told customers about a risk involved in their product? For me this is part of market economy. If your business fails, you cannot blame anyone but yourself.

SL will not close. But SL will continue to lose customers as it has since 7 years. With the new VR technology cycle, the decline will grow rapidly, no matter what LL does. So at one point in the future the same thing that has happened to mainland owners will happen to SL land barrons: There is more supply than demand. It will not be a big bang but one after another will give up, stabilizing the prizes for the remaining ones.

Again: This is market economy. These risks were/are imminent to the product and they should be obvious to everyone, at least since the decline of mainland prizes.

PS: I do believe that Rosedale and LL were cinvinced that SL would become such a big thing with so many hundred of millions of users that the upcoming graphic standards would be developed with SL and OpenGL in mind. Then and only then SL could have been developed with a backwards compatibilty. So they were not lying to investors about the opportunities. And without new VR technology and VR hype, SL could have stayed a successfull niche product for many years to come...

[irihapeti]

@shockwave

yes. Roger overreached I thought. So I overreach as well in reply. Means exactly zero

+

@Roger

my point is point is that without people buying the stuff then there are no customers for them business people

is any number of people doing really well creating and selling stuff in SL. One dress, one hair, one shoes, one house, one tree, one flower, one anything, at a time

if you make one little thing and put it out for sale at a well-organised event in SL then can get $US1000 in sales off it (more even) in penny sales during the event

is good money that is

[Sue Peregrine]

@ Michaela Simmons

I am the real life daughter of of Alliez Mysterio.

I want to state for the record, your facts are wrong and you are incorrect. I don't know how you came up with your "facts" regarding the transfer of dAlliez Estates to me.

Sue Peregrine, Owner
dAlliez Estates