Revenue Stabilization: Linden Lab Lowers Monthly SL Sim Tiers By $25 & $100 (With One-Time Buy-Down Fee)

Smart move by Linden Lab, offering owners of Full Islands and/or Homesteads in Second Life grandfathered maintenance rates (after paying a "buy-down" fee):

• Full Island: One-time buy-down fee: $600
• Full island grandfathered maintenance fee: $195/month (regularly $295/month)
• Homestead: One-time buy-down fee: $180
• Homestead grandfathered maintenance fee: $95/month (regularly $125/month)

Doesn't apply to Skill Gaming Regions or land in the Education and Non-Profit discount program, which was restored in 2013. Still, a pretty good deal for land owners with a fairly stable visitor/revenue base who aren't planning on going away any time soon. (At least over half a year.) This also seems like a bid to make sure Second Life itself doesn't go away any time soon:

Down 24 #secondlife private estate regions this week to 17491, Linden owned unchanged at 7085 , Total 24576 https://t.co/uJxLSaXF8F

— Tyche Shepherd (@tycheshepherd) April 3, 2016

Private estates have been consistently hemorrhaging (as Tyche Shepherd has been tracking), so a discount like this is a move to make sure longtime land owners stick around, which in turn will stabilize Linden Lab's profits from SL, which in turn will help insure the company can launch and sustain Project Sansar in its first few years, when that project will probably be revenue negative.

I hope someone is keeping a good record of regions on the grid otherwise we'll never know if this is a big success or not @SecondLife

— Tyche Shepherd (@tycheshepherd) April 4, 2016

Question is, is this discount enough of a discount, and just in time?

Pictured: The late Hosoi Ichiba, which could have used this discount sooner.

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Comments

[Nasty Lindens]

Look what they posted.

http://i.imgur.com/0GZk4f6.png

They are fucking around it ain't pretty anymore.

[melponeme_k]

Oh that was an April Fool's joke. LOL

[Nasty Lindens]

ow and we should all laugh?

These idiots are trying to scrape every cent they can in ever increasing more pathetic ways as weeks go by.

Previous week it was the increase on Linden Buy orders and cash outs. Now it is an attempt making long term paying customers pay yet another high fee for something they already paid rediculous amounts of cash for.

Other people like Anshe Chung and a whole series of friends have been receiving these benefits for years which they have exploited to drive rental companies and communities out of business.

Grandfathering crap, the last effort before they choke in their own lies and deception.

Linden Lab fucking the customer for over a decade :-)

[Cyberserenity]

I pay 250$ a year for my own server running Opensim. Or you can run it at home fot nothing.

[JohnC]

Why on Earth can't the whole SL community hear what Cyberserenity is saying here.
It is so very important and should be a subject on the blog all of it's own.
LL have for years been fleecing it's users for every penny, and in return offering nothing more in the way of services than any average server provider would do. So why do people stick in SL?
Because of the user made Content, take away the content and there is nothing much left for people to stick around for.
If every content provider moved to Open Sim then very soon after, all the SL users would move as well.
And all would benefit massively in cost.
And why would the content creators do such a thing?
Because it cost almost nothing at all compared to SL to create and maintain land there as Cyberserenity says.
Do the creators know that it cost nothing to upload content in open sim ? 10 Lindens to upload a texture! that insane.
LL is a massive ripoff in every sense of the word.
But the creators and users of SL are their own worst enemies, there is a place where they can do exactly as they do in SL for a fraction of the cost, but they remain, and maintain the very system that takes them for all they have. Like sheep paying the butcher for the cost of the ride to the abattoir.

[Wolkenreiter]

Yeah, OpenSim is awesome, that's why a good share of its core developers have abandoned it over the last couple of months *coughs*
I would still love to see that happen, just to witness how the OpenSim evangelists finally realize it takes actual talented people who expect actual payment to do all the boring, tedious work to make the difference between "hacking for fun and profit" (quoting the OS website) and developing a product that can work at the scale of SL...

[Carlos Loff]

You can have your own grid with your own full total 100% control om Opensim, including economy and you can bet there are certainly more goid teck folks at this moment improving Opensim than folks improving SL - Only someone who hasn't tried Opensim for real would find negative things on it - I OFFER YOU a Full Region for 3 months - Not jocking - My email is [email protected] - And after those 3 months you come here and tell everyone what you think about opensim

[Carlos Loff]

And unless NWN becomes only an SL exclusive focus I also agree much more stuff should be posted about Opensim, after all there are many many disrnformed folks around here - Just to mention 2 providers, super updated and renowned and 300 times more professional and costmuer care efficient than SL - Try Kitely and Digiworldz - And for a costmized Grid (Like having your own whole SL) connected to sll other grids try Avilabs Grid hosting - Save hundreds of dollars per month - Hundreds

[Wolkenreiter]

Thank you, but I wouldn't have commented without first-hand experience with OS :)
I've had the "pleasure" to work with it for a couple of months, took me about ten lines of script to bump into the first show-stopper bug in the script engine, it's lacking any "land impact" numbers for meshes, to tell how laggy a mesh will get on the physics engine, which has quickly brought down the performance to a crawl with just a few poorly optimized meshes (by which standards do you optimize if OS won't give you a single hint?) and 4 simultaneous users...
As soon as these things are fixed, I may reconsider my stance, but this is exactly the kind of engineering and testing work that will take a lot of boring work, and people have that habit to avoid doing the boring work unless they're getting paid...

[JohnC]

The whole point being that it's a typical vicious circle, no one wants to work on the development side because there are no real numbers of people there to make it worth their while, and no one wants to go there because, as mentioned, it looks like the dev team are abandoning it. And as for meshes working there, for anyone who is interested, I tried some stuff out there last year which I never completed
https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipNrCGsIS3yY54SBx30SCYeaydvOx7KvKnSLzfuX
This was 4 512x512 sims running on the same server.
No upload fees, no land tier fees, no setup fees, Just the cost of the server
It's all mesh, anything like it in SL would crawl till it died because LL sticks its users on old servers, in Open sim you can get your own super server that will run anything you like.Or rent a decent one for peanuts compaired to SL. This was a private project never opened to the public.
BTW I ain't selling land there :) I just think that the average joe in SL is wasting their money for what they get, when there is a stupidly cheap alternative.

[zz bottom]

Im using all days OSgrid sandbox to text my mesh before uploading them to Sl.
For creators, Open sim is a much better place to test then SL beta grid, period.

[Cathartes Aura]

Since fall 2006 they have been telling us "average joes" that they could not make a "profit" off SL if they lowered tier. Were they wrong all those years? Are they wrong now? Is this a desperate move? A sign of health? Inquiring minds want to know??? lol!!

IMO it's a desperation move. As grid residents and region owners why not make a counter offer. LL you pay us all $600.00/region immediately - within 30 days or we all bail on you. And you lower full island tier to $95.00 US/month. Take it or leave it... LMAO!!

And the Turkey Buzzard goes hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssss! ;)

[Clara Seller]

LL is timidly moving in the right direction with this offer. It's pragmatic and calculated. It protects the status quo. But the buy-down costs six months of savings before you see benefit. Asking customers to front load a cash injection to a company in questionable transition smells just a little bit funky. This would have been a good solution years ago when LL customers needed a helping hand instead of the back of one. Times have changed.

Now, the problem is the status quo. Protecting that isn't a solution, it's just a dance. Like everything else around us, bold moves are really what's needed to make it to the future. Baby steps aren't going to move you fast enough out of a downward spiral.

[zz bottom]

A bold and dash full move would be to lower tears of those who matter, the landlords, so they could lower them as well for their clients.
A bold move would be to allow any to invest in mainland, making sure landlords would not be able to buy any mainland parcel, allowing, not only premium, but any that had payment info on their accounts, to access auctions, with the knowledge that neither landlord bots, nor LL friends, would always win the best spots.
LL make sure Land barons can not get mainland but them acess for more land on low prices, to rent them.
LL make sure nay can get access to mainland without fear of seeing all pinned down by some bots.

[metacam]

these rates may have helped like 4 years ago, but today they are still ridiculous considering the shrinking user base, cost of servers etc. $600 one time buy down fee? It costs less for a one time buy down fee on a real life apartment. The Lab has this shit all automated, to even have a setup fee at this point is robbery. $50 a month is the tops Id pay for virtual land these days, with no setup fee.

[pussycat catnap]

@Cathartes: They will suffer a profits hit by doing this. And I suspect they hope to offset it with more land being sold, more people shopping on Marketplace, and whatever the model is for Sansara.

I am guessing that a signifigant portion of LLs revenue now comes indirectly from Marketplace.

The number of people using SL hasn't been shrinking by much for the past half decade. Its fairly constant - though how they use it has changed a lot. With mesh and mesh fashion blogs and such... SL is more or less now a game of playing with virtual dolls. Playing dress up. And a LOT of business goes to marketplace to support that.

Marketplace has caused a massive boost in the amount of commerce in SL. LLs takes a small linden cut from that - that gives them nothing because that's just monopoly money.

BUT it results in a drain on the amount of L$s in SL. It is what MMOs refer to as a 'gold sink'. Except in SL you can only generate more gold one way: hitting the button to buy more L$s.

People constantly have to buy more L$s now - and that is a source of more revenue for the platform.

Even if you are one of the people who never buys any L$s... don't be stupid about this - you get that way because other people pay you, and other people paid them, and other people paid them, and finally somewhere in that chain - somebody hit the button to buy L$s.

As that revenue goes up, the need for tier revenue goes down.

At the same time as the culture has shifted to playing virtual dressup, the need for a lot of land has gone down.

Hamlet has written on the fact that most SL users don't ever go that far from their own sim or a handful of related places. The 'explore a massive world' model has gone down. SL is for many now, the same as IMVU. Sit in a chat room, stare at the virtual doll, and chat.

So the number of sims goes down. And as the number of sims go down, the need to keep it viable gets greater. So there is justification in cutting the price.

Because even though we don't "go anywhere" anymore, we are still a community that values the ability to go somewhere should we so choose. SL cannot handle the 'there is only one sim and it is the sofa your avatar is sitting on' model of IMVU (or whatever it is they do over there).

SL sells itself as a world - and some people actually do quit when their sim of choice closes.

So they want to keep people able to have sims, in a business where there are less ways to fund having that sim. Sims pretty much only have one solidly viable business model now: rent virtual homes. Shop rentals are still all over the place... but a lot of them close up and go MP only, or keep bouncing between sims, or want their own exclusive sim.

##### Random Idea below #####
It could also be that whatever exclusive price point contracts might have existed in the past, are finally up. This being a theory that maybe we were locked into higher tier because others had tiers giving them an exclusive right to a lower rate - and those contracts might have expired. I've NEVER heard that idea put forth, so I wouldn't wager on it. But its possible, as it happens often in some industries.

[Tamar Luminos]

Step in the right direction- but not enough. Personally, I'd love to run a roleplay sim, and I have friends who'd love to run their own roleplay sim as well, in various genres. But the "buy down" fee is prohibitive, and the set up and tier prices are still way too high. Personally, I'd be willing to pay a 100 dollar set up fee, and 100/mo. tier. Should land ever drop that low, I'll jump in and I'm sure a few of my friends would too, but LL's pricing structure is still way too high.

[Cathartes Aura]

@catnip: You can slice and dice it any way you want. The bottom line is LL created the conditions they now face. Every decision since fall 2006 has been disastrous for the vast majority of residents - 99%+.

Just like most real world economic systems - if you rig it completely people will disengage. Most people aren't fools or completely oblivious to their own best economic interests. By rigging the SL economy to benefit only the largest landowners/creators/players they sealed their fate.

Level the land cost playing field again. Create tools for in-world creation of mesh content. For once do the bidding of the vast majority of LL's residents who pay all the bills.

See, it's not about the landbarons, the biggest creators, the marketplace, the developers, LL's board, ole Ebbs, or any of the other things you mentioned. It's about the average joe resident. And they just aren't buying into any of the excuses LL has used or is using about how and why things are they way they are.

A pile of shiz is still a pile of shiz no matter how much perfume you spray on it or how fancy you dress it up. It still stinks, it's still ugly, and no one is buying it. They just aren't buying any of it any longer. Game over LL... ;)

And the Turkey Buzzard goes hiiiiiiiiissssssssssssssssssssssss! ;)

[Issa Heckroth]

Kill the mainland. Pass the savings on to the customers. :)

[Issa Heckroth]

"A pile of shiz is still a pile of shiz no matter how much perfume you spray on it or how fancy you dress it up. It still stinks, it's still ugly, and no one is buying it. They just aren't buying any of it any longer."

Call it I-poop. I bet someone would by it. Especially if it came with a free pair of 3D goggles.

[Lordsirm]

The main objective of a CEO is to increase revenue, not decrease it, or keep it the same, so this is a lateral move made to look like it is a discount. It is similar to the idea of revenue for Project Sansar wherein you actually pay more, with more numerous smaller payments, so that it looks like a good deal. Someone in accounting has already figured out the numbers and shown that it should increase the overall revenue in their model. I predicted at the beginning of the Project Sansar discussion that at some point the two platforms would cross paths on the revenue viability graph and that because LL had thrown their lot into Project Sansar that Second Life would eventually no longer be viable to keep spending their money on and would therefore die. That prediction still holds true, but my guess is that it is dying too quickly and this is one of many to come slow-down moves, so that they can make it to their projected break-even point with Project Sansar (before the company runs out of investment capital and would then wind up out of business completely due to having one product dead and another yet to achieve a break-even and hopefully escalating curve in revenue to lure prospective invesment).