Desmond Shang

Regarding LindeX and what I call.... "LandeX" ~ the printing and reselling of land... I don't think they *can* balance anything until supply and demand are balanced for both $L and land.

Land is limited only by sheer monthly tier price; that's a pretty good limiting method, but also kind of suicidal as we have seen. There's *no* equity to ever be had in land. If anyone wants more, they can get as much as they want printed by Linden Research... or more easily by buying a used region for next to nothing off of someone selling one. The value of regions now is "can't give 'em away" and it took a lot of time to create that situation... in fact there is still pressure in that direction.

Meantime, the value of the $L is assiduously propped up, because even an idiot realises that if $L value is obliterated, the grid is history.

Oddly... land equity isn't propped up AT ALL. Someone failed Econ 101, no? What's the point of $L equity maintained on the one side, when the other side of the economic ship has a huge, gaping hole in it?

Even worse, I think they missed their junior high school introduction to basic supply, demand, and trade. There *has* to be a LandeX, with the number of regions on offer capped. This was the situation due to technical reasons for many years on the early grid ~ in fact it was capped too hard due to those reasons, and that's the painfully obvious thing that Anshe and others saw, and built empires with.

Conclusion: there is no way they will ever stabilise the grid economy until controls are put on land. As it is, the 'tier' lever is jammed into a permanent growth hammerhead stall, the availability lever is jammed into permanent BUY ALL TEH REGIONZ YOU WANT!!!111 and as such, the value of 'owning' a region is essentially a net loss for everyone.

Thus, the economic logic they have designed for everyone is: Use the cheap marketplace, ditch the platform and go play Diablo! This isn't how it has to be, whatsoever. It's the economic logic that they *engineered* with great effort.

It's sort of like trimming the stabilisers on a jet plane into a permanent stall ~ for fear of "going down" the stabilisers are all jammed MAXIMUM UPWARD... meanwhile the jet slips backward, even as its nose is pointed at the sky. There's only one way to correct it: get out of that stall, lose a BUNCH of altitude while your economy picks up speed, get some land equity built up and make the grid a place of opportunity again, rewarding participation. Duh.

The only reason nobody does this? I suspect the board would fire a few CEO's if they pointed the nose of the plane downward, even a little bit. Instead, I think they are trying to build new airplanes before the one they are in hits the ground backward. Maybe that will work, but... I think the next major platform advance will come from someone's garage, not their offices, unless there's a dramatic strategy change.

* * * * *

As for mixing the virtual with reality ~ I do believe this is coming sooner than most people think.

I've said my piece on this over at Hamlet's blog a while back, and yeah, am 'up to something' ~ but it's too early to talk about. It sucks to tease people, and I'm guilty of that plenty enough, so let me do this instead: Once I have an alpha version of something cool working, everyone's invited to play with it. But until then it's time to go dark on the subject.

Ann Otoole

I don't think LL gives a flying shit about SL. LL moved on. When SL dies they will simply turn it off and not look back.

Kick Frenzy

Second Life 2015?

...


...





LOL KEWL!!!1!


(But seriously, that is pretty cool to hear. )

Ciaran Laval

Or even better, go play Diablo III and engage with their real money marketplace if it ever takes off. That's something to keep an eye on, not just for Diablo III but other game worlds too.

Joshua Nightshade

I'm pretty convinced that Diablo 3's real-money auction house is a beta test for eventually adding it to WoW.

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Loraan Fierrens

Over the years, I've seen a companies that do everything right yet still fail miserably; and I've seen companies that make about every mistake in the book yet still manage to survive. Linden Lab has certainly struck me as being in that second category. I don't think they've ever really understood what they had built in Second Life, what people see in it, how to sell it and improve it, or even how it works (and I don't me technically). Yet, here the damned thing is, still bumbling after 10 years and still making money. That's good in one sense: we still have this unique place to play in and make fake drama about whatever. But it's bad in an other sense in that they really seem to be surviving just on luck. At some point, that luck is going to run out. It also doesn't fill me with confidence that they're going to be able to get another product out the door that's going to work. If they don't get the dynamics of their own product they've had for 10 years, how are they going to get the dynamics right on a new product?

Well, they say even a clock that's stopped is right twice a day. Maybe twice is a charm for the Lab?

Taco Rubio

I'd like to point out that you have a 3 year perspective, and apparently live in Canada, which is like a fairy land of good dreams and high hopes, Nova Scotia lox and decent bacon. There have been a lot of SL financial disasters.

Abdul

I don't believe that SecondLife will no longer exist in 2015.
I'm one of those residents who doesn't mind paying the tier that LL charges. Why would i want to pay such high price? I look at it this way; is there another virtual world that offers a better experience then Second Life? No. I've tried many other virtual worlds and all have failed to keep me interested.
Now why would i pay lots of money to own mainland land? Because I CAN afford to pay for it. If someone can't afford to pay for a mainland land, why did they get it in the first place?


For the marketplace, it's no wonder that content creators are moving to the marketplace...maybe it's because they can no longer pay for tier of their sims? It just seems logical, that if the content creator has a business...he is looking to minimize the cost while increasing the sales...what better way then to drop your land which costs tons of money and move to the marketplace which has no cost.

That's my 2 cents.

Zaida Gearbox

In 2015 I will still be little and cute!
(and apparently running away from feral breedables roaming the mainland)

Ciaran Laval

Yup, I'd say the same, if it works out they are sure to move it to WoW, then others will surely follow, Eve-Online seems ripe for this sort of thing.

Argent Stonecutter

I can't see how they could make it worse, unless they eliminated text completely and forced everyone to voice.

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Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

Walker

Is Second Life really in trouble?

I was shocked when I saw the Quantcast traffic graph for secondlife.com.



Mainly because LL have implemented Quantcast Measurement which means the data is verified by Quantcast. If it wasn't there would be a message above the graph saying, "This publisher has not implemented Quantcast Measurement. Data is estimated and not verified by Quantcast. Get Quantified!™".

Argent Stonecutter

How often do you go to secondlife.com, the website?

I go a couple of times a month to check on tier and stuff.

Walker

I don't go there at all Argent. I'm just guessing that most social oriented online services require a steady stream of new users to remain healthy.

Ron Jorgensen

>Marketplace

Yes, I don't see the Marketplace going away. It generates profit for LL and is so much easier to use then shopping in SL. I've been buying a lot of stuff lately and it would have been impossible to find most of it in SL and would have taken forever teleporting and waiting for things to rezz in SL.

I recently purchased several animations in SL and it took forever just for the graphics to rezz on all the boxes in the store. Not to mention two of the sims where I wanted to visit a store were offline. It was so much easier to search for and find what I wanted in the Marketplace.

Ron Jorgensen

I go there almost every day to check for friends on line, check my sales and linden balance. Look for destinations to explore.

Argent Stonecutter

I'm not sure what the relationship between that graph and new users of the service is.

Walker

Five times fewer visitors are passing through the main registration portal than during the same period last year, Argent.

Or are you going to suggest that most new users come through some RegAPI portal or other these-days?

Siggy

Hmmm SL in 2015?

Hard to say really - under the yoke of M Linden my prediction would have been 'Welcome to RegisterMe! - this domain name is currently available! Would you like to purchase it?'

But I think the current man at the helm actually has more understanding of what SL has become than its founder and certainly more than M. I also believe they are trying hard to turn it around and make it a viable place once again.... They have the experience and the desire to do it, but the world is a fickle beast - if they can or can't remains to be seen.

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And as it was in the beginning, so too shall it be in the end. That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names.

BJ Tunwarm

Well it's a year after Desmode did the OP and I think it's clear LL will never drop tier or do anything about the mainland. Not sure why, it might be the Lindens are painted into a corner with the land barons. A tier drop messes with the Land Baron's 50% discount they make their money on. But that's really LL own fault because they crowd sourced land management to the Barons.

Personally I suspect that LL views SL as a legacy product now and they are using SL to pay for the development of new games. That or LL BOD still thinks IBM will come back and make SL serious again.

Creating an artificial Land shortages: LL doesn't monopolize land anymore. Make it to hard to own land in SL and suddenly InWorldz and Open Sim become attractive for all their problems. And let's face it, paying for SL "land" is just a marketing scam.

Getting people in game more: That's an almost evil thing to wish for. Living at a computer kills people. I had a friend who had a heart attack in her 30s because of it. It's very likely they in game only 2 hours because their families and doctors are on them to limit their computer use for their own good.

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"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Whole sims on fire off with griefer particle spam off the shoulder of Nautilus . I watched bling glitter in the shadows of Kristen Viewer. All these moments will be lost in time, like posts on an IM chat... Time to log off.“ Botrunner.

Argent Stonecutter

There's a lot more than the registration portal at "secondlife.com". This could simply be a sign that people are getting sick of the stupid "dashboard".

Walker

So even though the secondlife.com website is more integrated into the various viewers than ever before, fewer Second Life account users must be visiting it.

OK then.

Argent Stonecutter

Are the viewers accessing the host secondlife.com at all? They're going to search.secondlife.com and other servers like that, but that wouldn't show up on stats for secondlife.com proper.

Walker

According to Quantcast, 27% of the traffic is passers-by, and the rest belongs to regulars and addicts. That ratio has been more or less static for the past eighteen months. So if you're saying the drop in unique visitors is down to fewer second life users (regulars and addicts) visiting their dashboards, the Quantcast data would seem to disagree.

Argent Stonecutter

So why didn't you say that back in message #69? Trolling?