For the people out there that are convinced that Second Life is a game without a purpose--they should consider the ultimate purpose of Linden Lab is to sell virtual land. Seeing the virtual world as a fake land development project helps you understand why LL does certain things and how it prioritizes activities (ie, Land Store, Raising Prices, Seeking better markets)
So there is a lot of noise about SL Entreprenuers making money, there is some foggy notions of cool technology, but all is dispatched by Linden Lab to promote the wonder of buying prims from them on what they call a Region. But face it, there is no such thing as virtual land and as an estate "owner" you in fact own nothing and have no more rights than a free account user. All you are paying for is a monthly service--without a service level agreement or anything in writing from Linden Lab--not even an invoice (unless you really beg for it and pay 6 months fees in advance). More accurately you are getting access to your own prims while subsidizing the functioning and profits of LL--in all of its eccentric machinations.
But what a great business if you can pull it off--selling server hosting for significantly higher rates than a hosting company with less commitment. Godaddy eat your heart out.
I would even suggest that the term "virtual land" is very misleading and confusing to people to convey the idea that they are getting something real. The SL website is littered with tempting invitations to "own land" and be a "land owner". In fact it doesn't even qualify anywhere that land in Second LIfe is not land at all. Hmmm, what is selling land that is isn't really land called...?
Definition: Land = The solid ground of the earth
And the right to own land is prestigious? from the SL website: "To purchase land in Second Life, you must have a Premium account, current payment information on file, and your account must be in good standing (i.e. not delinquent). You may also be required to have a clean disciplinary record. Linden Lab reserves the right to refund your purchase if you do not meet our minimum criteria for land ownership." Actually you don't need to have a premium account to buy "land" as you can "own" a private region without being a premium account.
Sex can be virtual maybe, but can land not be land? I wonder if the UK law would actually consider virtual world "land" to fall under housing regulations? Can you squat on virtual land then? Can a renter have rights to limit abuse by an owner? Or is there simply no such thing as virtual land and people who sell it or rent it are taking advantage of the marketplace?
Now if you were buying land--you would get title, you would get legal protection and rights. Even swamp land is still there somewhere under the swampy stuff. If you were getting a monthly service you would have an agreement that would protect the amount of increase and notice period--unlike the sneak attack on the OpenSpaces. (and if you wanna see some pathetic corporate double-speak check Jack's spew on the "transition" http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/12/19/openspaces-transition-for-january-... . Sorry Jack, but I don't think anyone is feeling too sorry for how hard you and your team are working on this "transition").
No one gets nothing real in the Second LIfe virtual world, all you get is the lie of the land.
Ok, so I hope this is not a relevation to anyone that Linden Lab is about trying to sell as many sims for as much money as possible. But--couple of points to consider:
* Linden Lab was claiming huge growth in 2008--but this was really due to the OpenSpaces that they could not handle (and they even admitted that it was their mistake to market this). So if you take out the entire OpenSpace product--what was the SL platform growth in 2008? Healthy as LL claimed?
* Technology typically gets better and cheaper over time--where Linden Lab is getting more expensive over time. Why is that? er...because they are not a technology company, but a virtual land marketing company that perceives to have a strong market postion (they wrong big time btw).
* Why do education and universities get a lower rate on sims? Last time I check Harvard had a lot more cash than most sim full-rate-paying owners. What do these fine institutions really give back to the overall inworld community more than any other sims?
* ok, it seems SL is a little more stable, but where are the new features since...2006? H4 and Mono? Both of which are not developed by LL, but just implemented. Just what labbing is going on in the Lab? Oh, sorry these new features must be coming in the new roadmap (7 months on the job and Kingdoom still can't release a non-hype/spin view on the future of the SL platform http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/12/29/a-look-back-a-look-ahead/).
* why are sims always on, even if no one is there? Why can't a sim owner manager the sims that are being presented dynamically rather than frozen like some unused gym locker waiting for a specific member to use it? 500,000 active users on 20,000 sims? Ooops, sorry they did say they were looking at improving scalability.
* If OpenSpaces are not scalable--why is a normal region any better? There is still contention for server resources mixed between different "owners" and users.
Perhaps all of this in finally coming back to roost at LL though as now the Land sales figures are "disabled". Maybe LL is hoping all the remaining OpenSpace owners will forget to dump their over-priced prims and senselessly keep paying like some health club membership that never gets used.
Yet, what is the SL story without the land growth story?? Land sales is what has been validating the relevance of SL up to October 2008. What really is the common denominator between enterprises, education and geeky hobbyists? Sure seems like Kingdoom and the new gang of corporate hotshots will need to deliver more than virtual water and flashy first hour experiences to get the momentum back in the land machine.
We have been looking at the opensim software in some detail over the last few months. More info on our test results will be posted soon. Big thanks to all the participants who have been trying to break the opensim software grid we have set-up now.
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Comments
A bit of apples and oranges...
Mon, 01/05/2009 - 00:08 — Shirley MarquezTo be fair to LL, when you "buy" virtual land you are buying more than just space on a server. You are also getting some portion of the asset server cluster (a not insignificant investment -- I think they're up to petabytes of asset data by now) and the login servers, supporting a fraction of the overhead for the public lands like the Help Islands, the Infohubs, and the Linden offices, supporting web services such as the forums (but presumably not the currency exchange, which should be at least self-supporting from its fees), and paying a fraction of the salaries of the in-world team and the software developers. Those are all expenses that a normal hosting company doesn't have. And you're paying for server space that probably uses more bandwidth than a typical web server does.
I would like to see more transparency on LL's part about costs, especially after the recent price increase on Openspaces. People feel, and rightly so given the lack of information, that it's a case of LL gouging them rather than taking a necessary action to recover costs. It's normal behavior for a business to disclose as little of that information as possible, but I would like to think that a company that takes its Tao seriously might do business differently. (The original version of the Tao included transparency as one of their values, but the recently rewritten version changes the wording so that it only applies to internal transparency rather than being open to the world. Once again, the lawyers and the suits have their way.)
expensive fruit salad
Mon, 01/05/2009 - 12:37 — RightAsRain Rimbaudhmmm, well certainly the sim "owners" are subsidizing the user accounts for their services, including assets. Funny actually then that we have to pay to use the classifieds which is really just reaching these user accounts to try to recover costs for supporting their use of LL's platform. But really my point is that while you are paying for some services, you in fact are owning nothing.
Why not make people pay for inventory--or at least put caps on the free accounts? Maybe even supply some better tools to limit inventory explosion on avatar accounts. Er...maybe a petabyte (isn't that a dinosaur?) isn't that expensive when you can get sim "owners" to pay $3,600 per year?
LL is becoming increasingly less transparent also. What kind of a company closes comments on its blog--and moves discussions to the Forums? Why would they make their statistics "disabled"? Fair to LL?--maybe LL should be more fair to the customers and platform users?
ah...lilttle footnote about
Mon, 01/05/2009 - 12:47 — RightAsRain Rimbaudah...lilttle footnote about why the land info is "disabled":
3 Please be aware that the Islands Added figures are not currently an accurate reflection of short term change and are therefore misleading. This is because of the way in which they are calculated and will tend to cause the figures to look significantly worse than they actually are (either by overcounting in some cases or under counting in others). In addition, the many Openspace conversions will significantly drop the total island count exaggerating the change in numbers. We are looking at changing this page to provide more accurate data soon.
er...so the data that we have been providing is not really data--and the numbers while big are not big if they are changing in a negative direction...barfo.
So probably LL will make a Full Sim Equivalent figure out of this--which is what I suggested when they were banging their chests about the amazing growth in OpenSpaces which was very misleading back in Aug 2007.
Stats
Mon, 01/05/2009 - 12:56 — Vint FalkenOn a side note, statistics can still be seen:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/static-secondlife-com/reports/marketplace_stats/...
Just replace the date by your preferred one. Of course, this is not an excellent sollution, especially (if like LL says) they are borked or (if like Tateru says) they are still way behind on processing decomissionings as well as new orders.
More 'impressive' is this "This is a process that will take some time. To give you a rough idea of our current timeline, we plan on finalizing what the script limits will be in Q1, then releasing the Viewer tools in Q2 for possible enforcement in Q3. Once we have more definite dates, we will let you know." So people are ordering & paying for a product they don't even know yet? (but have 6 months of insecurity if they are not going to have to change again, ahead... )
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