Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au has made a series of posts about lost revenue regarding sim losses and a couple of posts on how to introduce revenue streams to try and help the situation. The discussions have been somewhat heated, but I welcome Hamlet’s ongoing discussions on the tier issue. I can recall (although unfortunately can’t find any old posts) Hamlet quite some time ago posting that the tier model was too large a plank of Linden Lab’s revenue and that long term it’s unsustainable, so Hamlet is not a Johnny come lately to these discussions. He also posts the awful sim deathwatch series, of which I’m not a fan, but hey, these sims are disappearing.
Now two recent posts were on ideas for new revenue streams:
Now I personally disagree with both premises, in the first case with The Marketplace, the horse has bolted. This is the sort of thing that needed to be there from the start, introducing it now would be chaotic and bad PR. However I’m still not convinced that people should be able to list items via Direct Delivery to infinity and beyond, people should need to relist, but you don’t need to charge fees for that, although maybe a fee could be introduced if people want to list to infinity and beyond, but that wouldn’t be a long lasting fee.
The latter post I disagree with because the horse has bolted on inventory limits, they needed to be introduced from the start and how on earth would this be introduced. People would not want landmarks or group notice notecards, they wouldn’t want textures advertising new content, they wouldn’t want free gifts in case they went over limit and most of all, people would be miffed that their purchases were in peril, this would hit the economy.
However, although I don’t agree with the ideas, I do welcome the widening of the discussion. Unfortunately the comments tell a pretty sorry tale of blame games.
Continue reading “The Tier Discussions Need To Cut Out The Blame Game”