Linden Lab – Page 182

October 18, 2012October 18, 2012

Rod Humble Moves Linden Lab Forward, But He Shouldn’t Leave Second Life Behind

I’m seriously having to drag my mouse away from add to cart on Steam where Football Manager 2013 is seductively glancing at me… well it’s more than a seductive glance, it’s winking, fluttering its eyelashes and licking its lips … I must resist, I mean it destroys your social life, it’s too time consuming these days … wait they’ve introduced a new classic mode which makes gameplay quicker, like in the old days, beta will be available any day now if I pre-order and resistance may be futile …

Now when I was a lad I knew more about the people behind games, people such as Paul and Oliver Collyer, whom brought us Championship Manager and are still part of the team now that it’s called Football Manager. Going back further into my childhood I knew who Kevin Toms was, he wrote a game called Football Manager for the Sinclair Spectrum, which I loved, the speccy game is not related to football manager 2013 in any way, shape or form.

Then there were people such as Ron Gilbert, Peter Molyneux, Jeff Minter yadda yadda yadda. However I had never heard of Rod Humble when he came to Linden Lab, by the time Mr Humble arrived my days of reading magazines such as Computer & Video Games, Crash for the ZX Spectrum, Amiga Power for umm, The Amiga or PC Gamer were long behind me. However those in the gaming world do know Mr Humble, when an article appears in gaming related sites, you see comments from people asking why is Rod Humble is at Linden Lab.

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October 17, 2012October 17, 2012

Tier, Not Land Barons, Will Undo Second Life

There are a few posts over at New World Notes during the last month or so regarding Land Barons, the damage (or not) of the SL Marketplace, tier prices, entertainment and roleplaying. I’m not a Land Baron, I do have an interest in roleplaying, entertainment, tier pricing and the damage or not of the SL Marketplace. There are links between these subjects.

Desmond Shang kicked things off back on September 27th with a post about whether land barons matter anymore or not. They do, love them or loathe them land barons do work that would otherwise fall upon Linden Lab to do. Linden Lab are not Blizzard Entertainment, they don’t have the resources to deal with lots of individual customers day in, day out, they have a product that is chaotic in nature, Land Barons fill a gap.

Masami Kuramoto then inspired a post from Hamlet Au regarding themed mainland, and Masami makes some reasonable points but misses the point that the chaotic nature of Second Life is also one of its biggest draws. Masami is quoted as saying:

“SL has the largest map of all games, but the content is messed up. Imagine entire continents of adjacent regions featuring the same theme. Sort of like the Linden Home areas, but without the prefab buildings. Imagine Nexus Prime, Suffugium, S.I.C., The Next Day, Insilico and Hangar Liquides side by side and The Wastelands somewhere nearby.”

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October 16, 2012

Kitely Offer Unmetered Regions

This much needed rest from Second Life blogging is going to bugger up my end of the year review, I think I’ll just have to raid Inara Pey’s blog and take it from there! So a lot has happened, which I’m not going to cover, much … it’s time to look forward not back but something has been happening over at Kitely.

One of the big criticisms of Kitely was their pricing structure,which was pretty much based upon how long you, or your visitors spent in Kitely. This meant folk with popular venues would baulk at the costs, whereas those who wanted to spend a small amount of time there could get a whole region, or multiple regions at low costs. Swings and roundabouts and all that. However, during my absence Kitely have not only changed their pricing structure, they’ve also introduced a new unmetered option too.

Kitely developer Oren Hurvitz explained the new unmetered option on October 3rd in this blog post. This is in my view a big plus for Kitely and they now offer options for users to work out what deal suits them best, the pricing for unmetered monthly access is as follows:

1 Region $40 per month.
4 Regions $60 per month ($15 per region per month).
9 Regions $80 per month ($8.89 per region per month).
16 Regions $100 per month ($6.25 per region per month).

As you can see, the more regions you pay for, the lower the cost of each region.

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October 16, 2012October 16, 2012

Linden Lab End Affiliate Program

So I go to Majorca for a holiday and whilst I’m away topping up my tan and enjoying Pina Colada’s on the beach followed by seeing way too many replays of Nicki Minaj singing about starships in bars, all hell breaks loose and Linden Lab decide to end their affiliate program!

I don’t know why they’ve done this, it may be to do with the Steam connection, or it may be that it wasn’t very successful, either way you have until the end of business today to remove those links, LL sent out a nice email about this:

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June 18, 2012June 18, 2012

Kitely v Second Life And Finding A Happy Medium

I think it’s fair to say that Kitely’s pricing model rubs some people up the wrong way. People look at the pricing plans and feel that a metered based world is not a good place to socialise, and perhaps they’re right. Kitely’s pricing plans look like this:

Monthly Plan Cost Minutes KC Free Worlds

Free Plan Free 120 0 1

Bronze Plan $5 1200 300 2

Silver Plan $20 5000 1000 10

Gold Plan $50 12000 3000 30

Platinum Plan $100 Unlimited 5000 100

Now compared to Second Life, this looks both great and bad, depending upon which end of the spectrum you’re coming from. Social users on a premium plan of just USD$72 a year can use Second Life unlimited, have a small plot of land, for free you can use Second Life unlimited anyway. However people who like to build, well the Kitely Silver Plan gives you 10 sims, 100,000 prims each sim, costs less a year than sim in Second Life does for a month and there’s no upfront purchase cost. Ok you haven’t got unlimited access on that plan, but it’s still over eighty hours a month.

Ideally, I can see the Kitely model complimenting Second Life, rather than competing with it.

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