The image above is a bit difficult to read here, but it’s a graph of sim losses since January 1st this year, published here with kind permission from Tyche “Statto” Shepherd, for the full sized image click here. The graph is from this post over at SLUniverse, where Tyche updates us regularly on the state of play with the land mass. The latest post (a new one usually appears over the weekend) points out that the grid is lighter to the tune of 2353 private regions this year, which is around 9.9% of the total number of regions recorded on January 1st.
Estate losses are painful, to owners and renters. TheRoyal Properties website currently displays the following message:
“Sadly, due to so many avatars not making payments as promised, Royal Properties has had to officially close its doors. Enjoy your journey… I only wish it would have worked out for me to… ”
A thread over st SLUniverse has more details, and it’s plain to see the pain of renters, as well as a frustrated former estate manager of Royal Properties who is trying to help renters, as are other estate owners. I’ve rented from Royal Properties in the past and found them to be very responsive and well organised, so I’m disappointed it has come to this. However they are not the first rental company to go poof and they won’t be the last.
When things like this happen, it makes people question whether they should rent via a landlord at all, my advice would always be to do a bit of research and not pay too far in advance. The most trustworthy landlord of them all has to be Linden Lab and those lost regions Tyche informs us about, hit their bottom line, so they know about the economic situation.
In another post, Tyche informs us that the number of individual private region owners is down 25% since June 2010. That’s individual who own regions, not the number of regions themself. Whereas back on September 2nd Tyche was informing us that “This weeks fall brings the net decline in Private Estates for 2012 to date to 1979 regions and represents a fall in monthly tier from US$5,006K to US$4,570K (or about US$1.750M revenue down since December 2011).” There have been more lost regions since then, so Linden Lab will be feeling this.
I’ll say it again, even though I probably sound like a broken record, Linden Lab need to look at ways of generating more revenue from sources other than tier, tier is still much too large a a part of their business model and tier is simply too high. Having said that, there were last week still 21,504 private regions on the grid, so a healthy amount and Linden Lab have time to do something, but they need to start acting sooner rather than later. I don’t know what the breakdown of full regions, homesteads and grandfathered regions is. The only real growth area in regions seems to be in the classification of adult sims, which have been rising. This doesn’naturally mean adult activities are on the rise, some people choose to classify their sim as adult so that only people who have stated they are over 18 can visit, the content could be perfectly wholesome.
I expect to see Linden Lab unveil a premium promotion around November 14th, but that in itself won’t solve the bigger worries. The fall in private regions is downwards and shows no signs of changing right now.
For more statsistical goodies from Tyche, visit gridsurvey.com
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