Kitely, the 3D virtual world which uses Amazon Cloud Services for delivery has announced its pricing plans:
Free plan – 120 minutes, 0 Kitely credits, 1 free world.
Bronze plan – $5 a month, 1200 minutes, 300 Kitely credits, 2 free worlds.
Silver plan – $20 a month, 5,000 minutes, 1,000 Kitely credits, 10 free worlds.
Gold plan – $50 a month, 12,000 minutes, 3,000 Kitely credits, 30 free worlds.
Platinum plan – $100 a month, Unlimited minutes, 5,000 Kitely credits, 100 free worlds.
Like in my last blog post, this one also requires a calculator! The way it works is that minutes can follow the user, so if you think you’ll only spend 5 hours a week in Kitely, then the bronze plan would be for you, the Gold plan gives you 200 hours a month, that’s roughly 50 a week, whereas the silver plan gives you around 83 hours a month, roughly 20 hours a week. Your minutes get used up as you spend time inworld, except when you visit worlds where the owner decides to pay for the minutes via Kitely credits.
This is where we need the calculator! If an owner decides to have his world set as free access, then he is charged 1 kitely credit per minute, per visitor, so if two users were in world for an hour, then that would cost the owner 120 Kitely credits.
The pricing is important to understand, Maria Korlov has an article over at hypergrid business where she informs us that Rivers Run Red are set to embrace Kitely, however the article doesn’t delve into how the billing system works. Whether Kitely is going to provide better value depends upon a number of issues, not least how busy you expect to be. The bottom line is that you’re not going to get free users to your world as cheaply as you can with Linden Lab if you’re a 24/7 venture, with Linden Lab you get unlimited access for upto 100 avatars every day of the month, with Kitely it doesn’t work that way, either users need to be paying their own minutes to access your world or you need to have a lot of Kitely credits to meet demand and those Kitely credits will quickly add up to more than a sim in Second Life.
Let’s whip out the calculator again and look at a sim in Second Life that averages out at 3 visitors an hour all day long who each spend an hour in the sim, over a month that’s arond 129,600 Kitely credits. 15,000 Kitely credits cost USD$50, to cover 129,600 you’d need to spend around USD$400, although don’t forget on the platinum plan you get 5,000 Kitely credits, so it would be around USD$500 a month.
However you can opt not to pay for the minutes yourself and then only visitors with minutes in their balance can visit your sim, this could significantly alter costs, you could have 100 worlds for USD$100 a month and you yourself would be able to spend all day everyday on any of your own worlds or other worlds come to that.
Then of course say that there are a few friends who spend 10 -20 hours a week inworld, say there are ten of these friends, if they each signed up to the silver plan, for a cost between them of USD$200, they could have 100 worlds to explore, with access only to their group, that makes it sound more appealing, doesn’t it? They’d also be collecting 10,000 Kitely credits a month between their group. There currently isn’t a virtual world economy in Kitely but they do plan to have one.
The big win here for Kitely is the flexibility of options, for people who only spend a few hours a week inworld, Kitely looks appealing, it of course depends upon what you want to do in your virtual world. Kitely’s billing model is different to Linden Lab’s, yet Linden Lab have talked of putting sims into hibernation when they aren’t in use, some users would like this.
The way Kitely bill actually comes from the service they use for their worlds, the pay as you go model is how Amazon cloud services bill customers. Many will find the idea of metered access off putting, others will find it to be a great idea. Pay as you go models can get very expensive, yet they can also give customers more choice on how they spend their money. There’s a trade off. The flexibility is good but for busy sims who are looking to attract customers who want to spend time dancing and socialising, the Kitely model may not be attractive, for users who want to spend a few hours a week with a few friends, the Kitely model could be very attractive.
I can’t really see Linden Lab moving towards this sort of model, the billing model would be alien to too many of its userbase, although having this as an option for say instanced versions of your own sim, it might be appealing.
It should also be noted that Kitely isn’t Second Life, they don’t have the same overheads as Linden Lab, so pricing comparisons that are already difficult, get even more muddied. The reason that I personally haven’t checked Kitely out so far is that you are required to have a Facebook account to login. Ilan Tochner of Kitely has made assurances that they are working on their own login system in a post over at SLUniverse:
“We’re currently working on email/password based logins (they’re our number one priority now that we’ve rolled out our billing). If there are no surprises we should be ready to enable people to login to Kitely without a Facebook account before the end of the month.”
So hopefully some time in March I’ll be able to take a look. One thing that Kitely does highlight, possibly more than Second Life does, is that things need to be paid for, their billing model makes it abundantly clear that there are costs associated with a world and gives people options on how they contribute to the upkeep of a world in terms of financing.
There are pro’s and cons to Kitely’s billing model, some will love it, some will loathe it, I would imagine most people prefer a flat fee billing model as it’s easier to keep track of. Second Life bills users generally on how much land they hold, Kitely bills people on how many minutes they spend inworld, I think the best option would be a combination of both billing models but that’s not possible right now.
Claran —
I also have a longer article about Kitely billing, from when they first announced it:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/02/kitely-starts-charging-gives-one-free-region-to-all/
I think Kitely is a good deal for the following situations:
* You want a lot of land, but expect few visitors. For example, you build stuff for sale on other grids. Or you hold support group meetings that meet only once in a while. Or you’re a school and want each student to have their own regions. Or you want to meet in-world occasionally for collaboration, rapid prototyping, etc…
* You have an extremely attractive destination that folks would be willing to pay 20 cents an hour to visit. (And the first two hours each month are free.)
Kitely is less attractive when you have a region where you want to have a lot of visitors, but you don’t expect folks to seek it out, and any barrier to entry, such as payment, would be an issue. For example, you might have a store but your conversion rates are low (visitors window-shop, or just pick up freebies, instead of spending money, and it takes a lot of visitors to make a sale). Or you have a popular hangout, but suspect that if people had to pay, they’d go elsewhere.
Personally, I think the future lies in a hybrid model, with low-use regions (residential, education, offices) running on-demand, and high-use regions (malls, clubs, plazas, welcome areas) running on dedicated servers.
Once Kitely is hypergrid-enabled, you’ll be able to have both. Keep your homestead, office or school on Kitely (where, as a side benefit, you get very fine-grained access controls) and your high-traffic areas with other hosting providers, where you pay for the land, not the access.
I also expect other grids to start experimenting with offering cloud-based, on-demand regions to their low-use customers, as a way to match Kitely’s low prices.
After all, what’s the point of having a homestead region up 24-7 when the average user only spends 10 hours a month in-world (and spends most of those hours not at their house, but at the nude beach and the dance clubs).
There are pro’s and cons with both pricing models, for people who only use their venue a few hours a week, the Kitely model has pro’s, even for clubs if they are only open for a few hours a week, why do they need to pay for the time they aren’t in use.
For ventures that are likely to be busy 24/7, the Kitely model might not work so well.
I agree with you that a hybrid model is the likely outcome. Linden Lab have in the past talked of taking regions offline when there is nobody on them, this is technically challenging right now.