Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reports a net loss of 106 sims this week in her awesome survey post over at SLUniverse. Linden owned regions increased by 16 this week, but private estates were down 122. This makes the year to date loss of private regions from the grid 2,863, which is 12% down for the year.
The increase in Linden Regions comes from the arrival of 18 Linden Realms staging regions, so it looks like we may get some new fun sims to explore. However amongst the losses are sims owned by Dell, IBM, The US Army and The British Council. However the vast majority of the 122 losses are not corporate sims.
The good news for Linden Lab is that the size of the main grid still stands at 28,097, of these regions 20,994 are private regions with the other 7,103 being Linden owned. This means there’s still a very healthy amount of usage, but the trend remains downwards.
By my estimates private region ownership is somehwere around the level it was at in June 2008, although in June 2008 we had seen some large growth during the year.
It’s difficult to get a full handle on what’s happening here, other than the tier being too damn high. However to get a little perspective on this, when Tyche first started reporting these figures over at SLUniverse in March 2008 the grid stood at just 17,709 sims, so even today with the downard spiral the grid is still over 10,000 sims larger than it was in March 2008. However the boom in region ownership was boosted in March 2008 by the Openspace change in policy. Prior to that Openspaces had to be purchased in packs of four and could not be placed anywhere you liked.
However those of us who were here back then and watched the rise of the Openspaces, then saw that it didn’t end well. I won’t go into a rant, but I went to office hours where I pointed out they weren’t being used as intended, and commented on blogs in the same vein. However they were selling like hot cakes and nobody seemed to care. Anyway, the end result was Homesteads, which could be used for more than light use.
So the meteoric rise in sims in 2008 was largely due to the Openspace issue. This was also back in the days when Linden Lab could bring online mainland sims and auction them for a few grand, so 2008 was a year of growth on many fronts. On the 20th July 2008 Tyche reported:
666 new regions this week. About average resulting in a net increase of 539 regions . This brings the Main grid up to 26433 regions (21464 private estates).
So hopefully you can see the sort of growth I’m talking about, from 17.709 sims in March to 26,433 by July and private regions going over the 21,000 mark, meaning there were more owned then than there are today. That number would continue to rise, on October 26th there were 31,687 sims on the grid, of which 26,605 were private regions with 5,082 being Linden owned. That was pretty much the peak of private region ownership, the Openspace fiasco got into full swing at that point and land ownership started to decline for private regions.
The end result of the Openspace fiasco was summed up by Tyche at the end of 2008:
Total regions is 27880 of which 22699 are private estates and 5181 are Linden owned.
Since the Openspace annoucement at the end of October the Grid has shrunk 4076 regions . This is net shrinkage, in total there were 1821 new regions added, with 5897 regions removed (649 were renamed). This is about the same Grid size as seen at the beginning of August of this year.
So we’d arguably had a false boom but figures were still healthy. Growth would return to the grid during 2009, although not quite beating the peak of 2008, after decreases in the early party of 2009, the grid size grew again, pretty much for about a year until June 2010, by the looks of it 13th June 2010 was the last peak. Then Tyche informed us that there were 31,988 regions on the grid, of this 25,436 were private regions and 6,552 Linden owned regions. The Linden homes regions had arrived, which accounted for some of the increase in Linden owned regions.
From June 2010 private region ownership has been in decline, although the number of Linden owned regions has increased. A look at Tyche’s website; http://www.gridsurvey.com/ shows some graphs, which will help you to see that the curve is downward and accelerating downwards too.
I have no idea what Linden Lab can do to halt the decline, the tier is too damn high, but we know that, they may have no wiggle room on tier fees, but they should be looking into how they can generate revenue in other areas, we’ll have to see if Second Life moving to Steam helps in any way, if that ever does happen.
I’ve been through the tier issue before, in this day and age the fees are very high, entertainment, arts and roleplaying have been hit by the rise of the marketplace, in the new year the Lindens really need to get their thinking caps and address the tier issue. Income is still very healthy for Linden Lab, so they have time to come up with a viable plan, plenty of time really, but a plan should be in the works.
Seduce Me is one such game that’s fallen foul of Steam’s terms of service, and has subsequently been banned. If you go to the game’s Greenlight page, you’ll find the following grim announcement.
“This item has been banned for either violating the Steam Terms of Service or the Terms of Service for Greenlight.”
Basically, as Valve says, “Your game must not contain offensive material or violate copyright or intellectual property rights.” So, you’re probably wondering: just what does Seduce Me contain? Well, to be terse, naked bits, sexual acts, and fetish play.
Think SL will make it in LMAO
I agree that there are challenges for getting Second Life accepted on Steam and I do wonder how they’re going to avoid the issues you highlight with Seduce Me. However Steam must be aware of the reputation of Second Life.