The recent Linden Endwonment For The Arts deal for the arts community to be granted the use of twenty sims for a year has once more brought the tier issue to the fore, tier is expensive in Second Life, however there are some cold harsh realities that even a British (Ok Half Irish) lefty like me understands. Linden Lab cannot give away land to all and sundry, they have salaries to pay, bills to pay, development needs, they can’t run the place on free air.<\/p>\n
However, it is about time that Linden Lab looked at some alternative means of income, tier is still too large a factor in their business model, which gives them very little wiggle room when it comes to reducing it. Linden Lab’s other means of income appear on the face of it to be transaction fees on Linden Dollar sales, selling Linden Dollars directly and Premium Memberships, Premium Memberships are actually relatively cheap, especially when you take into account the three hundred Linden Dollar stipend a week, older accounts have higher stipends, such as four hundred and five hundred Linden Dollars a week, which basically pay for themselves.<\/p>\n
There was a time when Linden Lab could also generate income from auctioning mainland sims, it was not uncommon for a sim to sell for USD$4,000 at auction, those days are long gone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’ve long maintained that Linden Lab should seek advertising on their website, they’ve played with this from a resident point of view, but they haven’t invited it from others, SLUniverse<\/a> has advertising options for residents but I’d like to see Linden Lab go beyond residents and seek adverts from corporates, some of whom they’ve had here. Why aren’t Adobe advertising on the Second Life website? Why aren’t 3D texture sites advertising there? This is relevant content, these are tools Second Life creators use.<\/p>\n Part of the problem today is that the official site and forum are a tad sterile, they need spicing up. Blog posts are very infrequent, the forums have been moderated into blandness, the screws were applied too tightly early on with the new forums and they have never recovered from it, although there are plans afoot to add new sections. The website needs a bit more razzamatazz and life breathing into it, draw people in, get their eyes on the prize.<\/p>\n The thing with tier is that all is not as it seems at first glance, a mainland region can be USD$195.00 a month, however often it generates more income than that because people with small tier holdings share the resources, tier has a sliding scale, a mainland sim can generate more income for Linden Lab than a private region at USD$295.00 because of the sliding scale of mainland tier. However no matter how you look at it, a full sim, mainland or private, is expensive.<\/p>\n Lowering tier prices without doing anything else is unfortuantely, a recipe for disaster, there needs to be some sort of trade off to reduce with one hand and raise income with the other, I’d love to see lower tier prices, but it’s not going to happen unless Linden Lab can find other income streams, ideas for other income streams from the community would be useful here.<\/p>\n However some sort of stimulus would go a long way here, people are struggling to make ends meet, the rise of the marketplace will obviously impact on people who would have previously paid for land for their inworld store and stores are how people have funded roleplaying sims and communities in the past, by renting space to help subsidise the roleplaying experience, it’s not only artists who find it difficult to come up with a decent economic model to offset tier costs and tier costs do need to be offset in the main.<\/p>\n One idea that was floated around in the past was that of allowing premium members to apply their 512M of free tier to private regions, another idea may be to allow people to donate tier to private regions like it can be done on mainland but again, both of these suggestions would mean Linden Lab are likely to lose income with no balancing the books on the other side.<\/p>\n Some may suggest that lower tier would bring in more users, this in theory would be the ideal solution, but theory and reality are a long way off here, although Lord Of The Rings Online claim they generate better income now than when they charged a monthly fee, they sell inworld items or more choice of characters, they aren’t really options for Linden Lab.<\/p>\n Another idea would be to introduce new fees in other areas of Second Life, say for example the marketplace where instead of listing for free you have to pay a fee in USD$ to have a store, maybe they could give people one free store and then charge a fee for having a customised store, this may appeal to people who would like to be able to split their items into different areas, for example a creator may want to have a clothing store, a furniture store, a script store, the sheer number of items in a some marketplace stores means people won’t browse them, but if stores could be split and better categorised, this may appeal, although any new fees would be met with resistance, a fee to enhance your options, rather than a fee to replace the current allowance, would be more palatable.<\/p>\n I’ve also mentioned in the past that I’d pay Linden Lab for hosting (if the price was attractive), this would help with some scripting projects when it comes to using databases and HTTP for scripts, but Linden Lab say they’re not a hosting company.<\/p>\n I’d like to see Linden Lab taking a wee bit more of a proactive approach here when it comes to new forms of income and working on the balance between creative experiences and fees. They were ahead of the curve when it came to the free to play model, many online games are following that model now, even new ones, Neverwinter<\/a> will be a free to play MMO<\/a> when it comes out in 2012. However other worlds have their own stores, a Linden Lab store would go down like a lead balloon, unless it was based on say discounts for Adobe products etc, inworld items would cause a furore if they were sold from a Linden Lab store that’s for sure.<\/p>\n There are no easy answers here, it’s easy to shout for Linden Lab to lower tier, it’s more difficult to suggest how they replace that lost tier income but with some creative thinking, it’s surely possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The recent Linden Endwonment For The Arts deal for the arts community to be granted the use of twenty sims for a year has once more brought the tier issue to the fore, tier is expensive in Second Life, however there are some cold harsh realities that even a British (Ok Half Irish) lefty like … <\/p>\n