
SL land grid circa 2018, photo by Daniel Voyager
There once was a virtual world that kept growing and growing (and often shrinking along the way), with dozens of new islands and continents suddenly emerging, seemingly from the digital ocean, every month. But then in the real world, a global pandemic caused many to seriously reconsider how they spent their leisure time, and return their attention to that aging virtual world. Which in the meantime, was moving away from the old way of existing, on a network of thousands of connected servers, and go instead into the cloud. And then those two factors coming together at once caused a major interruption, and stopped the world from growing. (For now.)
Or as Linden Lab just put it:
Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.
While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn't expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.
As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.
And so if you want new land, Linden Lab recommends renting it from an SL land baron -- or renting mainland territory from Linden Lab itself. In any case, it is an unfortunate hiccup for Second Life's prospects, which was starting to see more usage and land ownership in the wake of the pandemic:
The Economics of Fifty Linden Fridays -- Or, Why Dozens of SL Merchants Willingly Sell Items for the L$ Equivalent of Twenty Cents
The legendary Fifty Linden Fridays shopping extravaganza, in which top SL brands offer select items for a mere L$50 (i.e. about 20 cents), has been running since 2009. But it only just occurred to me recently: How the hell does this even make any economic sense?
Or as regular reader Patchouli Woolhara recently commented:
Probably a lot less than zero, actually -- surely most merchants must lose money from FLF?
Not exactly, according to FLF creator and manager OMGWTF Barbecue (whose avatar name I just goddamn adore).
"Partly, FLF brings people to their mainstores," she tells me via Discord. "People might be discovering their store for the first time, and checking out their other products, which is super valuable! On top of that, it's a little special treat for people who are already your customers, something to look forward to. The creator might reduce the price to L$50, but it's likely they'll be able to sell more based on the co-op nature of the event."
She's talking about the power of cross-promotion across brands:
Continue reading "The Economics of Fifty Linden Fridays -- Or, Why Dozens of SL Merchants Willingly Sell Items for the L$ Equivalent of Twenty Cents" »
Posted on Monday, July 06, 2020 at 04:52 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL | Permalink | Comments (4)
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