Mont Saint Michel in Second Life is a region that is so beautifully picturesque that even Linden Lab use it in their promotional materials. Unfortunately being beautifully picturesque is not enough to keep paying the bills and Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has blogged; Second Life’s Beloved Recreation of Mont Saint Michel Soon Leaving SL for “Economical” Reasons.
Hamlet’s post links to a Flickr post from Moeka Kohime, owner of the region, which has a caption with the word “close” and 2008-2015 on it. That Flickr post simply says :
Le Mont Saint Michel SIM 2008-2015 CLOSE
Schedule at the end of September 2015.
Economical reason.*Edelweiss* is immortal forever 🙂
I intend to consider the temporary Main store to be Akiba SIM
So fans of the inworld fashion brand Edelweiss need not panic, but for fans of Mont Saint Michel, it is indeed sad news.
News such as this make it even more obvious as to why plans for Project Sansar involve lower land costs and higher sales taxes. One of the greatest obstacles to people who wish to create regions of beauty or something to do in Second Life has been the oft repeated issue of the tier being too damn high.
I will add here that I have not spoken to Moeka Kohime and therefore do not know if the economic reasons for the closure involve the tier being too damn high, but in a general sense, Second Life has been hamstrung for many years due to the tier being too damn high.
Having said that, and in fairness to Linden Lab, discussions regarding the tier being too damn high often fail to come up with the sort of concrete plans to address the issue. Linden Lab simply cannot afford to slash tier to the levels whereby people would no longer say that the tier is too damn high because, to put it simply, the risk is far too great.
Whereas many people suggest that lower tier would result in more people owning land, at this stage in Second Life’s life, would enough people take advantage of lower tier to keep the ship steady? I remain unconvinced because owning a region is about more than the costs, there’s the development time to be taken into account too.
As for Mont Saint Michel, whatever the reasons for its closure it’s a region that is well worth a visit. The beautiful pictures of the region don’t capture the wonderful narrow alleyways and nooks and crannies as well as actually visiting the region does. This really is a beautiful region and it’s a great shame to hear that it will close, visit it whilst you can.
Mont Saint Michel
Visit an in-world recreation of the beautiful French landmark, Mont Saint Michel.
Visit in Second Life
SLURL To Mont Saint Michel : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mont%20Saint%20Michel/104/29/21/
Another score for CEO Altberg. Boy boy do we have a winner with this CEO. Linden Lab lost 50 sims previous week and is going below 18000 private sims soon.
Now get this:
of these 18000 sims half are homestead islands and about 90% are grandfathered homestead islands which gives Linden Lab an average of 100 US$ per month income.
9000 x 100 = 900000 US$ or less than 1 million on homesteads
now the full sims:
we can suspect half of the full sims receive special friend prices or grandfathered prices as the estates own masses of them. Some are old grandfathered sims but most are sims that got “sold in secret under the table”. There are also educational sims at 150 US$ and openspaces which only net 70 US$.
4500 x 195 = 877500 US$
4500 x 295 = 1327500 US$
This gives Linden Lab a total income of 3105000 US$ on private regions per month
we need to add about 600000 US$ mainland income per month (it might be less)
Total land income 3.7 million US per month for Linden Lab
Profit from currency exchanges goes to paying for credit card processor costs.
5% marketplace income goes to creating Linden Dollar sinks to keep the economy intact.
Linden Lab has below 4 million a month income more likely 3.5 million gross income.
200 staff including management salaries should be around 1 million including office space, catering service and so on.
Then there are 7000 servers that need to be maintained, cost for datacenter, voice servers. This might be about 500000 US$ a month.
3.5 gross income
1.5 costs
Linden is still making 2 million a month profit or less for now. At the current dumping rate of private regions and mainland I do not think that Linden Lab will be holding out for a long time unless this stops.
When the company only makes 1 million a month in profit will it still be worth it for them? Will it still be worth it for investors and the board to keep it going. They will get rid of Ebbe and pull the plug and call the product outdated.
It is now they need to address the problem with Ebbe Altberg.
I Wonder if many the ones that host these regions did not find much better appeal to host them on open sim hypergrid enabled worlds.
One thing im sure of, regions nor connected to mainland or a private group of sims in any way of access but via teleport are doomed in Second life.
Tell that to the thousands of Adult sims with their private sex clubs and spanking areas.
Also private sims have a much better performance when not connected to mainland and people pay extra for that performance and privacy aspect.
Also opensim has no traffic, is full of stolen content and you are at risk of getting copied.
The idea is that such places can sustain themself by offering an attractive place for merchants to set up shop. Of course the genius management at Linden Lab decided to get extra greedy buy up XstreetSL to rake fees from the marketplace. To further spice their income Linden Lab spammed the marketplace as the place to shop towards residents for years.
The result is that Mont Saint Michel could no longer fill their shops with renters to sell their goods and had to pay the tier bill themselves or a part of the tier bill because of the reduced income.
So Linden Lab slaughters people their income to fill their pockets (why only collect tier if you can have the tier + 5% income on the sales = this is the greed segment). The end result is the entire thing vanishes because of economical reasons.
This is just one project, you have no clue how many roleplay environments got shut because they could not rent stalls to merchants, all the merchants did focus on the marketplace instead for their sales, no need to pay rent and all the buyers are there anyway.
How many community rental places with small houses and cottages got destroyed on the mainland because of Linden homes. Now all that mainland sits empty, communities dried up. Again a brilliant act of Linden Lab who wanted more income from premium memberships and have more control over their users.
Grab for control, grab for money and as a result you get places like this that get shut down. This place could still perfectly sustain itself with income from shop rentals if it were not for Linden Lab their intervening.
Sorry to disagree, the control system of Kitely marketplace regarding copyrights is much better then Second Life.
And stolen content on grids that don’t have currency is warm full while we can not say the same about the ones in second life.
Btw many of the adult sims still surviving are hosted on Zindra.
Linden should just keep the sim running in perpetuity themselves.
Perhaps they could move to InWorldz where the damn tier is much lower. I believe it’s 75USD, which is what I pay for just ofver 16k of mainland in SL. Very sorry ot seethis beautiful build go.