I haven’t sold land in Second Life for quite a while. I purchased land many moons ago, when you could pay 15,000 Linden Dollars for a bog standard 1024m parcel. Those days are long gone and I knew that the land market had crashed.<\/p>\n
So this week I looked at my bills, looked at the return I’m getting from Second Life and decided it mght be time to tier down. I’m exasperated that Linden Lab seem to have made no obvious attempts to address the tier issue, which remains too damn high. I know I know, cutting tier would be economic suicide right now, it’s better to slowly lose income than cut income too quickly and risk everything, yadda yadda yadda, but Linden Lab need to realise that their pricing model is outdated, that their options, are outdated. There aren’t enough payment options.<\/p>\n
By the same token, my inworld business models are outdated, I haven’t moved enough with the times, the fact that my business models are no longer working is my fault, not Linden Lab’s. I mean sure, it’s easy to say they should lower tier, but they haven’t, so it’s up to me to do something about that in terms of moving on to a new business or pulling out. I’m currently in the middle mode of deciding it’s time to cut back. My decision to cut back is long overdue, especially as Linden Lab won’t budge on the tier issue, but ultimately, it’s my fault that my Second Life business isn’t doing as well as it once was.<\/p>\n
So anyway, I decided to cut some parcels and test the water with selling some, rather than flat out abandoning, as I have tier capacity to hold parcels, it seems silly to abandon without trying t0 sell. However, I didn’t realise how flat the land market currently is. One parcel I cut, is admittedly rubbish, so I decided to sell this 512m parcel for L$120, it isn’t selling! Goodness knows what price the land bots kick in, although I will have time to test this.<\/p>\n
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The thing is I know the land market is depressed, I didn’t quite realise how depressed but now I can see why people abandon rather than sell. I always felt abandoning was silly, as at the right price you would have a bot in a parcel by you rather quickly, but those days are over.<\/p>\n
So we have all this abandoned land, on servers, doing nothing, which can’t be good for overall efficiency costs. Of course Second Life isn’t like an MMO where they’d just announce they were shutting down some servers and merging them with others, Second Life doesn’t work that way, so we have all this abandoned land, because the tier is too damn high and we’re in a bit of a spiral.<\/p>\n
The SL Marketplace has hit inworld sales hard, that’s one of the reasons we have all this yellow land on the map. I’ve been over this time and again but inworld sales helped to subsidise something to do parcels and sims, which in turn meants more parcels were occupied, the disparate parts made up the whole. The Marketplace broke one of those disparate parts rather viciously, and now the price is being paid.<\/p>\n
I’m not saying The Marketplace is bad, but there seem to have been no thoughts on the impact it would make on the whole. Linden Lab have not reacted to this, whereas people inworld have, by moving out.<\/p>\n
I’ve said many times, Linden Lab still have very healthy income from Second Life, they have time to make a plan, but the clock is definitely ticking and the tier is most definitely, too damn high!<\/p>\n