Kitely – Page 6 – Ciaran Laval

December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fifth in a series of annual posts, the other four look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab not being as active in their blog as they once were. This was also a very difficult year for me personally which meant I took a large break from regular blogging between April and September, with only sporadic posts appearing, so I’ll have to delve elsewhere for some information for the year, fortunately there are plenty of resources such as Inara Pey, Nalates Urriah, Tateru Nino and New World Notes amongst others, as well of course as Linden Lab’s underused blog, it still has some useful posts. Also a special mention for Tyche Shepherd and her awesome surveying which provides so much useful information.

I’m also doing things a bit differently this year as these posts are getting pretty epic. This is the full post but as it’s pretty TLDR, I’ve also broken the post down into four quarterly posts elsewhere, the information will be the same other than this initial commentary, but it may be easier on the eye to read in smaller chunks. To read the quarterly reviews go here.

2012 brought us viewer improvements, Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Direct Delivery and a lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects. Some of the issues can be summed up in the following photo:

However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.

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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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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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April 5, 2012April 5, 2012

Kitely Adds Teleports And Additional Viewer Support

A couple of weeks back I was in Kitely, when CEO Ilan Tochner arrived to say hello to me inworld and we had an informal off the record chat. However, some of those off the record features that Ilan told me about have already been implemented! Oren Hurvitz blogged at the end of March about the new features, including world to world teleports and making the choice of viewer you use a less scary feature.

Oren blogging is nice to see because Ilan is the person most recognised by people outside of Kitely and nice as Ilan is, it’s also worth pointing out the amount of work that Oren Hurvitz is putting into Kitely, Oren is the VP of R&D as well as being a co-founder of Kitely, meaning he’s a very important person! There’s a team behind Kitely and it’s good that their work as a team is recognised.

The new features have already been covered eloquently by Inara Pey, indeed Kitely added a choice of viewers for Kitely based upon Inara’s excellent viewer reviews and roundups. I’m not eloquent like Inara, but I have taken a dabble with the new features and they work rather well, although one does need to remember that Kitely is very much in beta still and in many ways the publicity for Kitely arose earlier in the process than they would have liked, having said that, I’m sure Oren and Ilan aren’t complaining!

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April 5, 2012April 12, 2012

It’s Still All About Tier

Ah Thursday, not just any Thursday, but the Thursday before the Easter Holiday weekend, where I can now put on my slippers, sit back, and not worry about my day job until Tuesday. This also means I’ll be blogging … unless Football Manager 2012 hooks me too much again. Hopefully I’ll talk about Kitely later but for now it’s the Second Life shoppers paradise that I’ll write about.

The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

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