This much needed rest from Second Life blogging is going to bugger up my end of the year review, I think I’ll just have to raid Inara Pey’s blog and take it from there! So a lot has happened, which I’m not going to cover, much … it’s time to look forward not back but something has been happening over at Kitely.
One of the big criticisms of Kitely was their pricing structure,which was pretty much based upon how long you, or your visitors spent in Kitely. This meant folk with popular venues would baulk at the costs, whereas those who wanted to spend a small amount of time there could get a whole region, or multiple regions at low costs. Swings and roundabouts and all that. However, during my absence Kitely have not only changed their pricing structure, they’ve also introduced a new unmetered option too.
Kitely developer Oren Hurvitz explained the new unmetered option on October 3rd in this blog post. This is in my view a big plus for Kitely and they now offer options for users to work out what deal suits them best, the pricing for unmetered monthly access is as follows:
- 1 Region $40 per month.
- 4 Regions $60 per month ($15 per region per month).
- 9 Regions $80 per month ($8.89 per region per month).
- 16 Regions $100 per month ($6.25 per region per month).
As you can see, the more regions you pay for, the lower the cost of each region.
Compared to Second Life those prices look eye wateringly decent, however we have to remember that Kitely is not Second Life and doesn’t have a development and support team anywhere near the size of Second Life. However, I do like Kitely offering options, time based billing is still very much an option as can be seen on their pricing page, so for those who prefer that option, it’s still there.
I would like Linden Lab to look at options such as these, they certainly aren’t for everyone and if Linden Lab had a region differential for large sized estates there would be a hoo-ha of rather large proportions, well that is if you don’t include the rumoured hush hush deals and secret handshakes clubs that apparently exist, but reductions in pricing for larger purchases are common practice, the issue with Second Life is more to do with how their pretty much always on architecture works, moving to cloud based hosting could be a way forward for Linden Lab but they’ve spent a lot of money on their current infrastructure and I fully understand they will want to maximise value from that route.
However maybe Linden Lab will introduce cloud based functionality if they introduce more worlds, as Inara Pey has highlighted, multiple worlds are something Rod Humble has hinted at. The idea is not new, I blogged almost a year ago on the concept of multiple virtual worlds, which is something I possibly lifted from an old Tateru Nino post on the subject back in March 2009! I like the idea of more virtual worlds too, but Second Life already has a large existing world to look after.
Worlds like Kitely and Second Life can happily branch off in different directions, but I do think Linden Lab should take a look at the pricing structure and options Kitely offers, there’s always room for more choice in pricing.