{"id":5509,"date":"2015-11-10T20:20:38","date_gmt":"2015-11-10T20:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=5509"},"modified":"2015-11-10T20:20:38","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T20:20:38","slug":"second-life-may-be-losing-regions-but-its-not-in-betamax-territory-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=5509","title":{"rendered":"Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It&#8217;s Not In Betamax Territory Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;<em>Betamax? Is that still around?<\/em>&#8221; I pondered today as<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2015\/nov\/10\/betamax-dead-long-live-vhs-sony-end-prodution\" target=\"_blank\"> I read news on The Guardian<\/a> that Sony are going to stop creating Betamax cassettes in March 2016. The main reason that Betamax appears have continued long after many felt it had departed is due to the use of Micro MV cameras, which use Micro MV cassettes in Betamax format. However all good things come to an end and over 40 years after its release and almost thirty years since Betamax lost the video format wars, Betamax finally seems to be going beneath the technical waters.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings us on to Second Life. Daniel Voyager recently reported;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/danielvoyager.wordpress.com\/2015\/11\/09\/second-life-regions-drop-under-the-25-000-mark\/\" target=\"_blank\">Second Life regions drop under the 25, 000 mark<\/a>. Daniel&#8217;s blog post was based on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sluniverse.com\/php\/vb\/virtual-business\/8523-new-sl-sims-past-week-93.html#post2205412\" target=\"_blank\">a report by Tyche &#8220;Statto&#8221; Shepherd over at SLUniverse<\/a>, where Tyche announced :<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Well as I predicted , a milestone of sorts was passed this week as the Grid dipped below 25,000 regions for the first time since June 2008.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The scores on the doors on November 8th were :<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>24,985 Regions<\/li>\n<li>17,888 private estates<\/li>\n<li>7097 Linden owned<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The net loss of private regions for this year stood at 712 on November 8th. However let&#8217;s compare this to some previous years to try and get a picture of what&#8217;s going on.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>11\/11\/2012 &#8211;\u00a0Total Private Regions 21,334. Year to date loss of 2,523 private regions (-10.58%)<\/li>\n<li>10\/11\/2013 &#8211; Total Private Regions\u00a019,462 . Year to date loss of 1,530 private regions (-7.29%)<\/li>\n<li>09\/11\/2014 &#8211;\u00a0Total Private Regions 18,735. Year to date loss of 538 private regions (-2.8%)<\/li>\n<li>08\/11\/2015 &#8211;\u00a0Total Private Regions 17,888. Year to date loss of 712 private regions (-3.8%)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Therefore we can see that this year we&#8217;re seeing an increase in the rate of net losses of private regions compared to last year, but the rate of losses is still a lot lower than in 2012 and 2013. Let&#8217;s play about with some more figures.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This year we&#8217;ve seen a net loss of 712 private regions, that&#8217;s 174 more than at a similar stage last year. That&#8217;s an increase of 32.34%. However this year&#8217;s net losses of private regions are 818 lower than in 2013, that&#8217;s a decrease of \u00a053.46%. The comparison with 2012 comes in at this year&#8217;s net private regions losses being 1,811 lower than 2012, that&#8217;s a decrease of 71.78% compared to 2012.<\/p>\n<p>What does this all tell us? Well we can play about with figures all day long (Maths is fun!) but the cold hard fact is that the Second Life grid continues to shrink.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Protest Gnomes\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/ciaran_laval\/8224638249\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8485\/8224638249_522061914e.jpg?resize=500%2C298&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Protest Gnomes\" width=\"500\" height=\"298\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We all know that the main barrier to private region ownership is the tier being too damn high. Customers know this, Linden Lab know this. Last month <a href=\"http:\/\/geekdad.com\/2015\/10\/project-sansar\/\" target=\"_blank\">Derrick Schneider posted an interview with Ebbe Altberg on Geek Dad<\/a> about Project Sansar :<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>So what\u2019s in it for Linden Labs? Altberg says that Second Life\u2019s main revenue stream for Linden was selling plots of land, which equated to a server. In certain situations, they\u2019d make some amount of money from players selling goods, but even then it was five percent. Sansar is more about an app economy a la Apple, Google, and Facebook. If Second Life\u2019s revenue is based on property tax, says Altberg, Sansar\u2019s is based on sales tax. Reduce the barrier to entry, and take a cut from the touch point with the consumer. It\u2019s a big shift for the company, though obviously one that\u2019s worked well for others in the industry.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>However Linden Lab are in a thorny situation because if they were to lower tier by the sort of amount that would stimulate private region growth, there&#8217;s no guarantee they would make up the shortfall in income.Think of it this way, if Linden Lab were to half tier prices, would private regions double? I doubt it, many people would save the money or spend it on something else and that&#8217;s before we get to the issue that more regions, means more server and support costs for Linden Lab.<\/p>\n<p>However we do know, from painful experience, that lower land costs can stimulate region growth. Many of us still remember the homestead debacle. Which takes us back to Tyche Shepherd. In answer to a question regarding when regions peaked in Second Life, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sluniverse.com\/php\/vb\/virtual-business\/8523-new-sl-sims-past-week-93.html#post2205953\" target=\"_blank\">Tyche replied<\/a> :<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The highest I recorded was 31,988 regions in total back on 13th June 2010 , but the Private Estate max was 20 months before that on 26th October 2008 , just before the Homestead Debacle when they reached 26,605.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think any of us want to see another Homestead Debacle, so be careful what you wish for.\u00a0Back in September 2011 <a href=\"http:\/\/nwn.blogs.com\/nwn\/2011\/09\/linden-lab-losing-land-revenue.html\" target=\"_blank\">Hamlet Au over at New World Notes<\/a> was pointing out that around 80% of Linden Lab&#8217;s income from Second Life came from land tier payments. That&#8217;s why cutting tier prices has always been problematic.\u00a0On the other hand, Linden Lab do need to look at stimulating income from other sources. They have been making good progress with their <a href=\"https:\/\/community.secondlife.com\/t5\/Featured-News\/Halloween-Treats-for-All-50-Off-Your-First-Premium-Subscription\/ba-p\/2973926\" target=\"_blank\">Premium Subscription offers<\/a>. At one time Premium Subscriptions were an area that Linden Lab did not pay a lot of attention to, that has changed.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what percentage of Linden Lab&#8217;s income comes from tier these days, I would hope it is lower than 80%. However whereas a lot of this post may sound doom and gloom, a recent\u00a0article by Martin Bryant over at The Next Web painted a rather healthy picture, one that suggests Second Life is a long way from jumping into the boat with Sony and Betamax; \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/thenextweb.com\/insider\/2015\/11\/07\/think-second-life-died-it-has-a-higher-gdp-than-some-countries\/\" target=\"_blank\">Think Second Life died? It has a higher GDP than some countries<\/a>\u00a0:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Fun fact: with a reported GDP of $500 million, that\u2019s higher than Tonga and a number of other small countries.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That is a fun fact and one that suggests Second Life has plenty of life in it. Inara Pey did <a href=\"http:\/\/modemworld.me\/2015\/11\/08\/ebbe-altberg-discusses-sansar-and-second-life-with-tnw\/\" target=\"_blank\">a great job of covering the article from The Next Web<\/a>. The article has a short sound recording of an interview with Ebbe Altberg, which is around ten minutes long but it&#8217;s well worth listening to because it contains a lot of positive points regarding Second Life. I&#8217;ll embed that at the end of this post, which is going to be very soon!<\/p>\n<p>For more statistical goodness from Tyche Shepherd visit\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/gridsurvey.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/gridsurvey.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/232009688&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Betamax? Is that still around?&#8221; I pondered today as I read news on The Guardian that Sony are going to stop creating Betamax cassettes in March 2016. The main reason that Betamax appears have continued long after many felt it had departed is due to the use of Micro MV cameras, which use Micro MV &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=5509\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It&#8217;s Not In Betamax Territory Yet&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,14],"tags":[19,1022,494,645,186,185,259],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6rJUK-1qR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5509"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5512,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions\/5512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}