Kristian

The Volkwagen is a much better investment.

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LoganBauer

It's funny, I was thinking last night that I was in about the same boat as Luc - IF they lower tier back to $195/mo I'd probably get an island.

But then all morning I was thinking, Well if they raise and lower these prices at the drop of a hat, I don't really want to buy an island... I mean, there is no guarantee that once I got it... then a month or 3 later say the tier for it jumps back up to $295 or $395, ect... It definitely boils down to faith in LL, and them slashing prices by 40% in one sudden chop doesn't reassure me that they are keeping anything stable...

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Wildefire Walcott

That is exactly the case. In fact, more than one Linden openly observed that corporate suiters laughed at how cheap sims were at the old prices. They raised the cost/tier because they knew people would pay it. They are not lowering the prices now to "pass the savings on to customers." No one does that. They're lowering them because they're not selling sims as fast as they want at the current rates.

And no, they're not going to lower tier. They make far more money on tier than they do on setup charges, believe me.

I'm also developing a theory about LL directly, intentionally competing with in-world content and service providers, but I haven't put all the pieces together yet.

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Ray Figtree

Crossposted to Resident Answers:

I don't have an issue with the fact that they lowered prices. My issue is that they lowered them so drastically overnight. It makes for an unstable economy. It undermines consumer confidence. It evokes fear for the future. And it comes during a period of extremely poor performance for the platform.

It makes it seem like they are desperate. Personally, I am looking at it now as just the start of prices being slashed. The first real indicator that virtual land in SL won't be worth much and won't cost much in the coming months. Of course, they will keep tier high.

They should have lowered it 20% at most, not 40%. In my non-economic expert opinion.

The bottom line for me is that I have NO trust in the people who manage SL. They make one poor decision after another and they can't fix the Grid so that we can enjoy it, let alone run a business on it.

$1000 is way too high. I would not invest in this company at any price. From Logan's post above, I can see I'm not the only one who is a bit gun shy right now.

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Dnate Mars

What would ever give you that idea?



Oh, yeah, the long history of doing just that.

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Kristian

I wish they'd stick to being a 'content company' or a 'platform company' because this huming and hawing is a pain in the ass.

(It's been a while since hey announced the public works stuff -- anyone know if they've picked up the great wall project?)

prinţesă nină

hasnt that been going on for years already?

Briana Dawson

Well LL has *always* competed against in-world content and service providers. They have done it surreptitiously as well as directly since 2004 with the start of the Luna Oaks Galleria which the made in direct competition to my the only existing mall of that size, my Aqua Galleria, and my Galleria City sims.

Here is something i sent Philip:

2004-08-16 16:34:59 note card
LL also deceived the residents with the very first "island sim" auction that led to Rivers Run Red / Avalon, coming to SL by letting everyone think they had a chance at winning the auction when in actually it was already predetermined that Rivers Run Red would enter the final "winning bid" to get the island (which is really the only island that is part of the mainland).

And then we had the issue of Lindens owning businesses - which some still do have a strong hand and influence in popular businesses in SL today.

LL does this competitive thing to 'trail blaze' and stir competition i think. And i strongly dislike it.

WarKirby Magojiro

That's not true at all. Now, when I want to buy an island. I have $600 less to pay for it.

Anyone else who wants to buy an island. has $600 less to pay for it. The upfront fee is one of the biggest obstacles. And while $1000 is a lot, it's been severely reduced. Anyone who wants to buy an island now has to make less of an investment to do so.

The whole thing has become more acessible to everyone.

you're still going to get people renting who can't afford their own island.

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Wildefire Walcott

To be more specific, with the Public Works project, or whatever it's called, they're developing community sims again, and malls as well. Every person spending time/money in a Linden-owned sim is someone who'd have spent that time/money in a user-developed sim otherwise. So that's content competition, and it hasn't happened for the past couple of years.

The fact that so many residents have ditched their Premium accounts so they could rent from resident-owned estates has not gone unnoticed by LL. By lowering the bar of entry into estate ownership, they are, I believe, intentionally inviting competition into the island rentals market. It will ultimately lower rental profits as competition heats up. The thing I haven't figured out yet is how LL benefits- unless it's simply to get more people locked into paying $295 a month instead of paying $195 for full-sim ownership on the mainland.

The thing is- LL makes significantly more money, monthly, on mainland, even when it's unpopulated! (If it's yellow, someone's paying for it, and we've all seen the posts about how they've gotten serious about recycling abandoned land.) Whereas they get $295 a month tops for a private island, they can get around $700 a month off of a typical mainland sim (I.E. not held by a single owner) when you factor in Premium subscription fees. So, they've made it cheaper to acquire mainland, but done the same thing for islands, where they make far less money than they do for full mainland sims. Why make island ownership more attractive (for anyone other than prospective landlords)?

Wildefire Walcott

I was thinking of exactly that, actually, because they've recently begun revitalizing Luna Oaks, in addition to adding more content elsewhere.

That thing about the auction you mentioned is extremely sleazy.

Khamon

"Database outages have nothing to do with hardware costs" - Robin Linden, 4-8-8

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mAlice

woah--I just use my land, but I'm kind of irritated by this as well. Because, you know, someday I might actually want *different* land, and they just made it so I will not recoup even a small part of my cost. So you know what? When I finally sell, I will leave SL, because my total dollar loss is going to be way too much for me to even think about dumping any more money into it.

This isn't a game--LL promotes it as an economic platform, and buying & selling "land" is a big part of that. However, they treat it like their own personal college economics experiment, and I personally don't remember signing any release forms for that.

Tier won't be going down. If they were really interested in getting more people to own larger parcels, they'd have lowered tier instead of lowering the initial cost. (ok, ideally they would have lowered both). Lowering the initial cost & then making ominous statements about how nice they've been in keeping tier levels grandfathered makes many people suspicious that they're just trying to up the number of land owners before /raising/ tier.

Plus, this huge drop all at once--that just destabilizes the market. Again, this isn't Zee's personal college economics experiment. LL is the only entity (well, maybe Anshe as well) who can completely destabilize the economy with a stroke of the pen....and that's exactly what they've done, once again.

I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it does smack of irresponsibility. If/when tier raises occur, I may just abandon my sim. Why would I want to intentionally sucker someone else into this fool's game?

BEARintheMorning

Gee, LL doing something seemingly incomplete and without addressing issues.

I'll try my best to hide my shock.

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Wildefire Walcott

Well this is the thing: They market it as an economic platform, but they run it like a game.

In February of next year, the United States federal government is outlawing analog television broadcasts. Every analog TV in the country that doesn't get some form of cable will be rendered inoperable without additional digital-to-analog hardware. While the reasons behind this change might make the blood boil, the government knew it couldn't just say "Okay folks, in the next couple of weeks all your TVs are going to break" and expect business as usual. They have given broadcasters and consumers YEARS to consider and prepare for the upcoming change.

Information and lead time allow industries to adapt to change. I'm not saying that LL should give us years of lead time before making any decisions- but announcing such a significant change just two weeks before it goes into effect- and not even bothering to answer the obvious questions up front, like "What about Openspace pricing?"

There's also the way that LL sort of arbitrarily decides where to get user input. Linden Lab did a great job in handling the Havok4 transition. Seriously. They were very responsive to blog comments and jiras and emails all though the feature's development. They exposed it to users early on to have as many real-world tests as possible before releasing it. This is how big changes should be handled.

Contrast this with the new Land Store. Until yesterday, all any of us knew about the Land Store was that they were working on a new one. No hints as to what would change, no requests for comments. (If you've never used it, the Land Store is HIDEOUSLY difficult and frustrating to use, mostly resulting from the grid's current size and some very bad implementation oversights.) There are so many problems with the current Land Store that I'm concerned they're only going to fix a couple of them and call it a day. I really would have liked a chance to know what they were up to before they were about to go live.

Kristian

More DBs aren't going to mean squat, it's the very architecture that's broken.

Lordfly Digeridoo

Your real life car doesn't appreciate year after year when you decide to sell it, so why should a piece of virtual real estate (of which there is, literally, an infinite amount of)?

I don't get this "I demand proper value of my land!" business. It's a tiny piece of a poorly-run digital simulation, guys, not a real life house. The proper value of something of which there is essentially "infinite" of is "zero". Why you're expecting it to balloon in value when there's 1000 servers more of it put online every month is beyond me.

Virtual Products are a bit different because there's some design and creativity involved. Virtual land is just cutting up pieces and reselling it. Labor intensive? Sure, I guess. Creative? Not really.

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Steve Mahfouz

my L$2: when I read the blog post, I was astonished and also felt kicked in the groin. Yes, in RL land can go up and down in value, but here it's artificially fixed by LL. So, overnight LL devalued my portfolio by 40%. That doesn't matter a whole lot except when you want to sell, I suppose.

The post just made me want to quit the business totally, but I'm a stubborn goat, so I won't. I'll just have to cut costs to the bone and tweak my business model a whole lot. Maybe this doesn't faze Anshe and the other really large landowners much, but it fazed me a lot. It wasn't easy to make an honest buck/linden/euro before, and now it's even more difficult. I know people like me get almost no sympathy, but we do perform a service for those who cannot buy or do not want an entire sim. I think making a reasonable profit (if possible) is ok. I thought in all honesty we had plenty of competition in the markets before, but now we have hyper-competition. IMHO.

Good luck, sincerely, to all other sim owners. BTW, I think Kristian nailed it and this discussion is very enlightening.

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Ciaran Laval

6.8 now!

Sarah Nerd

Shit, I don't know if I should lower my pricing again to dump more, or fill tier back up.

Ciaran Laval

LL management are rather bemused as to why anyone is complaining about cheaper land being available. They sent someone thanks for supporting them on the blog entry.

Dnate Mars

I would tier up with cheap land, LL has proven they can't keep the mainland stable at all. Once this wave is over, because they are actuations, I still expect land to be going for 1750-2000 a sim. At least for the short term.

mAlice

I'm not really sure why anyone thinks the people who were upset were expecting the value to "balloon". I certainly never did. However, I also didn't expect LL, with very little thought, to do something that is obviously going to destabilize the economy and make what I had nearly worthless. I have not ever cut up a piece of land and sold it, so please take the straw man elsewhere. That's not what this is about.

They can't claim this is an /stable/ economic platform on the one hand, and then play capricious economic gods on the other, and not have people somewhat upset about it.

My car does depreciate, true--but not because one day Honda said, "Ha! Just Kidding! Those Hondas we said cost 25K now only cost 13K!" Cars depreciate for an entirely different reason, and the analogy doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

And for the last time: I am not a land dealer and I'm still irritated by this. As I said, someday I might want different virtual land, and now it's pretty much a guarantee that I won't get anymore unless I dump a whole bunch more of my cash into SL, because what I "own" just got devalued immensely with the stroke of a pen (well, maybe if I cut it up into little bitty lots I can make close to some of my money back....but wait, that would make me one of those evil uncreative land dealers...oh, I'm so confused.) I also own a real house, and while I know there's no guarantee it will go up in value, I also know there isn't some guy in a room somewhere deciding "This week it's 7.5/sqm." then next week saying "This week it's 2.0/sqm." The factors that determine the value of physical real estate are numerous and complicated. The virtual real estate? not so much.

However, since there's obviously nothing that can be done except wait and see if LL survives the next 6 months (and I really do think that the next 6 months or so are critical from a business perspective), here's a random string of smilies:

Beebo Brink

I'm in the same position of being stuck where I am. I bought 8k of land for L$17/m and considered myself lucky at the time to get an attractive mainland parcel for that price. Prices did indeed go higher, although not for much longer.

The degree of devaluation is disheartening. I never expected (or even was interested) in making a profit; I wanted the land for my use, not as an investment. But now that it's worth perhaps 1/2 what I originally paid for it, I would take a substantial financial hit to buy the equivalent amount of land elsewhere.

Some people enjoy the speculative aspect of land ownership in SL and derive entertainment from their dealings. I don't. I just want to live somewhere attractive, and I've been willing to pay a fair amount of RL money for that value, but it's not an indulgence I can justify more than once.

Even if I never recover a cent of the RL money I spent, I'd love to be able to move from one parcel to another, still riding on that initial investment. Then, if the lights on SL were turned out someday, I could still walk away feeling I'd gotten my money's worth of entertainment.

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