Business

The inner workings of Second Life businesses.. the highs, the lows and the Amodica

Creative

A display of work with contributions by Prad Prathivi in Second Life

Humour

Because sometimes, we all need a laugh and a smile

Musings

Thoughts, Feelings, Ponders and Reflections. The Thoughts of Fifi

Tutorial

Tutorials on various aspects of Second Life industry to help you grow your own talents

Home » Musings, Second Life

The Death of a Dream

Submitted by Prad Prathivi on Tuesday, 28 October 20089 Comments

When Linden Lab first announced they were making openspace sims available to purchase individually, on their own tiers, I thought “Great! A whole new world of possibilities!”. Finally, a who new band of Second Life’s residents will be able to afford their own sim and be able to expand the wealth and breadth of talent in the metaverse. I don’t pay into the opinion that an island is just pixels and people are just after pixel water.. there’s an attachment in Second Life that people yearn for things which the can’t always have in real life. A beachfront property is such an unafforded luxury.

The fact that the Lindens increased the prim count available on these sims to 3750 when they released the good news said that they were encouraging the use of such sims.. not just to sail or fly through. Actually to develop and use them.. heck, the Lindens themselves have built and fully developed Opensims. Why the rest of us are suddenly not allowed is beyond me.

I can appreiciate the argument that some people are using too many resources, but I fail to see why limits can’t be imposed. Or even a third tier system that limits prims at the original 1875.

I don’t buy into the whole Nautilus issue at all.. I don’t think this decision is related to Linden Lab trying to sell off their auctioned mainland plots. The fact is that the openspace sims were overused by several residents in various stores, clubs and script heavy regions.

The residents have suffered because the entire SL land economy is set up to work against them. The market doesn’t influence land sales anywhere near as much as Linden Lab does - a simple decision like this throws the entire real estate world into disarray, as land barons suddenly find themselves with land that they can’t sell. The result out of this situation will be that residents will return to estate island sims, which will see a turn up in their economy.

I can say now that an early casuality of the new pricing will be my Scorpio sim. It’s no longer sustainable to produce sim-wide art installations in Second Life for me, so it’s a project which I’ll no longer be able to turn. It saddens me as this was a venture in which I challenged myself to be low prim and high impact, which to me was what the concept of openspace sims was all about.

And so it is. I believe Linden Lab have really dropped the ball on this one, and what was already a fragile Second Life economy will suffer even more now. More designers will drop out of selling their wares in Second Life, land barons will get fed up and leave and we will generally see spending by residents drop as a result of the increase.

And that’s before you even consider that we can never really trust Linden Lab again. SL residents have no power against the Lab to protect themselves from such decisions, as Linden Lab hold the monopoly on everything that is done within the metaverse.

These are volatile times, and Second Life is going to take a while to recover from this most recent setback. I fear it could well be another nail in the coffin.. a coffin close to being sealed when a competitor comes to give residents what they want.

9 Comments »

  • Chris Moran said:

    Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.

    Chris Moran

    - 28 October 2008 at 3:09 pm
  • Bailey Longcloth said:

    Well said Prad. I’m sad to see Scorpio go. Your art has always been an inspiration to the rest of us to be better than we are.

    - 28 October 2008 at 5:16 pm
  • Mildred Murakami said:

    It is completely outrageous that Linden Lab just increased the tier fees with 67% in Second Life, now many people who bought an openspace sim will not be able to afford it anymore and will lose the money that they paid to buy their openspace sim. It’s a good thing fortunatly that new virtual worlds like http://www.virtualworld.sl are coming online offering an alternative to the extortion partices of the Lindens.

    - 28 October 2008 at 7:22 pm
  • Natalya Homewood said:

    Oh no :( It’s really sad that Scorpio can’t carry on, it was a brilliant place, really nice to have somewhere specifically for your art installations..

    - 28 October 2008 at 7:42 pm
  • HellSpawneD Xingjian said:

    I just got through writing something similar to this post in BL’s blog.

    Moves like this from LL are going to be the death of SL.
    There is economic chaos going on in the real world right now..people are prioritising where to spend thier money and ONLY spending it where they feel thier investments are safe..ie, they can make sustained payments. LL’s decision to suddenly raise the prices after getting everyone hooked on the lower, is strike one for the obvious marketing ploy. But of course, these are the people that already took the leap and got sucked in by LL, what about those that would buy in the future? Strike two, how can you trust them not to do this kind of thing again?
    In a time like this, making radical moves like this…they might as well hold the bat the other way around.

    - 28 October 2008 at 9:06 pm
  • stephen venkman said:

    agreed!

    - 28 October 2008 at 9:20 pm
  • Es rumort in Second Life®! | Cyberwelten said:

    [...] Metaversally Speaking: The Death of a Dream [...]

    - 28 October 2008 at 11:50 pm
  • This was supposed to be fun « Ahuva’s Blog said:

    [...] announcement itself Bailey Longcloth: Sigh Prad Prithivi: The Death of a Dream Crap Mariner: has interesting comments as well as links to other articulate posts. NPIRL: Should [...]

    - 29 October 2008 at 1:38 pm
  • Micky Lancaster said:

    Bang on the nail Prad.

    The saying “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely” Springs to mind here.

    I wonder, with the state of RL, maybe the Lindens are following their RL ‘power brokers’ who have already wrecked the US economy.

    - 29 October 2008 at 4:16 pm

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.