Why does it cost serious money to own a sim?

[bigmoe Whitfield]

time to side track!  Jo!  when is the next open house?  I'd like to visit, but we know i'm one of those silly cute furballs and normally can not. 

[Fionalein]

25 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

time to side track!  Jo!  when is the next open house?  I'd like to visit, but we know i'm one of those silly cute furballs and normally can not. 

They do that stuff? I just ignored everything outside the shopping area so far due to that rule.

Edited November 25, 2018 by Fionalein

[Jo Yardley]

We have our open day in 1920s Berlin every year during the anniversary celebrations, around the month of May.
However you can also visit with an invisible avatar or as a realistic animal.
As long as how you look and act doesn't distract from the immersive time travel experience of others.

BUT that is only in 1920s Berlin.
My other sim Time Portal is open to everyone and you can come as you are.

[animats]

On 5/27/2018 at 8:23 PM, Ceka Cianci said:

I'm willing to bet the bulk of a full Sim's price is server space.

Probably not.

Second Life region pricing

 

Kitely region pricing, for comparison.

What you're paying for on SL is access to the user base. SL may seem empty of users, but OpenSim worlds are far emptier.

Edited November 25, 2018 by animats
Formatting

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes, the inevitable (false) comparison to OpenSim pricing ....

[Garnet Psaltery]

What I pay for on SL is all the stuff that other grids haven't got.

[animats]

10 minutes ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

What I pay for on SL is all the stuff that other grids haven't got.

Yes. The point being that it's not mostly hosting cost.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

3 hours ago, animats said:

Yes. The point being that it's not mostly hosting cost.

LL has a whole floor in a data center, kitely is a different product used on a different infrastructure setup.    one is HUGELY expensive the other is time based.

I have my 2u in a data center in indianapolis,  just the space I rent from a company wihtin it to hold my physical hardware is 250 a month,  this includes power thankfully,  but does not include access to the backbone aka the internet, so that is 150 onto of that,  now their mark up is 75 dollars, so actual cost is 325.  so I pay 400, they pay 325 and they make 75 dollars profit. 

 

hopefully this helps explain more.

Edited November 26, 2018 by bigmoe Whitfield
I cant math.

[Fionalein]

4 hours ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

What I pay for on SL is all the stuff that other grids haven't got.

like vanishing gift boxes

Despite their bad reputation LL has the LDPW and the AR team... usually both do great work. Show me another grid with similar services.

 

[Phorumities]

On 11/25/2018 at 12:50 AM, Blush Bravin said:

Since the adoption of mesh (well the new SL mesh, since everything has always been mesh) there's been a substantial move toward more realistic sizing of avatars, buildings and furniture. I for one am very happy that people are changing. I haven't used the default camera position for years and years. I fixed that problem even before mesh was an issue. I never liked feeling as though no matter how high a ceiling was I always felt like I was going to hit my head. Fortunately, I read an article explaining the issue and how to fix it with the debug settings. That one improvement made my SL so much more enjoyable. 

I really have to chuckle when I see super tall avatars these days. It's typically someone who just can't drag themselves into the present but tend to live in their memories of the "good old days".  Now if I offended you with that remark, I'm sorry, but maybe it's time to reconsider why you really want to be a giant.  

I'm personally about 6 ft tall in my bare feet (flat foot form, I totally cant stand barefoot girls with permanent Barbie feet) but since most guys are still 7 ft or taller I feel I'm a realistic height, almost petit. Theres one guy me and my partner hang out, he's the same height as me but I can't help thinking hes way too short.

 

[Vanity Fair]

I am late to this conversation, and I haven't read through it all yet, but here is my take on why sims are so expensive:

Land rental is the main source of income to Linden Lab. They are now, very slowly, moving away from that model, with a recent slight lowering of sim setup fees and monthly costs, and a corresponding slight increase in other fees (e.g. buying Linden dollars). When they move sims to "the cloud" (a project that is currently underway), they will be able to lower sim prices even more.

And, if you think Second Life is expensive, you should look at one of the newer planned virtual worlds, Decentraland: https://ryanschultz.com/tag/decentraland/

In Decentraland, the current MINUMUM price for a 10m-by-10m plot of virtual land is 9,000 MANA (their cryptocurrency), which works out to US$456.19. All year there has been frantic speculation by land flippers and investors, driven by greed, to the extent that major news organizations like the BBC have reported on it. AND the kicker is, you can't even VISIT it yet!

Edited November 26, 2018 by Vanity Fair

[HushDivine]

This thread would have been a far better read without the three pages on build sizes and camera movement...

 

I will continue to wait for this whole moving to cloud thing to become a reality. In my opinion sims becoming more affordable to the more casual user will boost land sales dramatically as more people would decide to buy their own private sims just for their own enjoyment, to build, create, and live on. Making less on a product is not always a bad thing if it means boosting your sales dramatically. I know lots of people who would love to have their own sim, but there is no way they could justify spending that kind of money. Making land more affordable to the average user will also without a doubt boost marketplace activity, as most of the new land owners will immediately have the desire to fill up their new slab of land with all kinds of pretty things. I think the move to cloud servers and more affordable sims could be the best thing that could happen for second life.

Edited December 17, 2018 by HushDivine

[Ethan Paslong]

8 minutes ago, HushDivine said:

This thread would have been a far better read without the three pages on build sizes and camera movement.

it's quite normal for long threads, in special boring ones as this one, to derail a bit.
Yes, boring, because we as users have no clue nor any real part in anything LL decides about landholding.

8 minutes ago, HushDivine said:

. In my opinion sims becoming more affordable to the more casual user will boost land sales dramatically as more people would decide to buy their own private sims just for their own enjoyment, to build, create, and live on.

you as many others seem to think LL will go to Open Sim or related, sim prices, some go for 16 usd a month... thát will never ever happen. Land on SL is a income source for LL, OS and the related worlds don't have such organisation with share holders, offices, employees, maintenance /development teams, support, billing systems and many more...
LL is a company, not some hobby- ist group.

Edited December 17, 2018 by Ethan Paslong

[HushDivine]

1 hour ago, Ethan Paslong said:

you as many others seem to think LL will go to Open Sim or related, sim prices, some go for 16 usd a month... thát will never ever happen. Land on SL is a income source for LL, OS and the related worlds don't have such organisation with share holders, offices, employees, maintenance /development teams, support, billing systems and many more...

LL is a company, not some hobby- ist group.

I never said as low as Open Sim prices. I said more affordable, and the fact that hosting sims on the cloud will be much cheaper for LL makes that possible. You stating things so obvious as "Land is an income source" and "Linden Labs has offices" in that pseudo-condescending manner, as if you're assuming nobody realizes LL is a business, brings nothing to the table.

Edited December 17, 2018 by HushDivine

[Ethan Paslong]

1 hour ago, HushDivine said:

 the fact that hosting sims on the cloud will be much cheaper for LL makes that possible.

it's for car makers also possible to make the same cars instead as 20k for 5 k...but guess ... they don't and will not.
LL's offer  service that needs to be paid, and they make the price for that, no matter you think to know how much their price to pay for it is.
It's a strange thing users think to be able to discuss such thing.

And yes it sounds condescending and i'll add patronizing to it for you. Businesses make their own plans to create revenu, how and why is not the users concern.

Even if they half the prices for sims it won't lead to enough compensating for income, 75% of all residents still won't be able to buy it or pay the maintenance fees. People with a premium 1024 plot, n renters at 50L skyboxes or 512 sqm parcels will not en masse go buy sims for (example) 100 dollars...with monthly maintenance for also 100 dollars. If you think that, you should dream on.
 

Edited December 17, 2018 by Ethan Paslong

[HushDivine]

49 minutes ago, Ethan Paslong said:

it's for car makers also possible to make the same cars instead as 20k for 5 k...but guess ... they don't and will not.
LL's offer  service that needs to be paid, and they make the price for that, no matter you think to know how much their price to pay for it is.
It's a strange thing users think to be able to discuss such thing.

 

The idea of passing on the savings to the customers after the move to the Amazons cloud service has been stated by LL themselves in the past. These are not ideas I have pulled out of thin air. And I quote...

"It turns it into less capital expenditure to have to buy all the equipment and doing all the maintenance on that. You kind-of pay for what you use; with Second Life [right now], once we’ve bought a piece of hardware, we have to sit on it whether it’s being utilised or not, whereas you can kind-of dynamically scale your consumption as necessary when you use something like AWS … which we believe will reduce costs for use and then ultimately, we hope to pass that on to customers."

- Ebbe Altberg, VWBPE, March 15th 2018

I can easily post more similar quotes.

 

49 minutes ago, Ethan Paslong said:

Even if they half the prices for sims it won't lead to enough compensating for income, 75% of all residents still won't be able to buy it or pay the maintenance fees. People with a premium 1024 plot, n renters at 50L skyboxes or 512 sqm parcels will not en masse go buy sims for (example) 100 dollars...with monthly maintenance for also 100 dollars. If you think that, you should dream on.
 

 

Are you joking? I would run for a full sim for $25 a week maintenance with a fairly big smile on my face. Imagine how cheap that would make a homestead.

Edited December 17, 2018 by HushDivine

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, HushDivine said:

I will continue to wait for this whole moving to cloud thing to become a reality.

Once they iron-out the kinks, cloud-hosted sims will be a win for availability and yeah, some cost reduction, but I sure wouldn't recommend delaying any moves in the expectation that pricing can be all that much better just because of the cloud migration.

For one thing, a big share of SL processing is already done in the cloud, with just the simulation the only big thing remaining to migrate.

Getting that all working is a very big deal -- this is a major change from an architecture that's been baked deeply into years and years of sim code. That's actually a significant part of the potential savings: by shifting more processing to on-demand, sims could better load-balance and use fewer resources even if they weren't moving to the cloud at all. (That's good, because large, efficiently run datacenters can still outperform margin-loaded cloud services in raw computing cost, ignoring other efficiencies.)

That ability to swiftly scale capacity when loads fluctuate is also likely to eventually enable new attractively priced products. A private sim that's used a few hours a week shouldn't need to cost as much as a constantly busy commercial sim, and there's already some selection of different land products for different demands, but more diverse offerings should be ahead.

It's possible that more folks will be willing to pay for some cut-price on-demand sim capacity who wouldn't be able to afford an always-on sim, and some of those folks will buy stuff to furnish their new sims. It's not all fresh revenue for the Lab, though: some of them already rent from Estates or own Mainland, so displacing one lower-cost option with another isn't such a big win.

Edited December 17, 2018 by Qie Niangao

[HushDivine]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Getting that all working is a very big deal -- this is a major change from an architecture that's been baked deeply into years and years of sim code. That's actually a significant part of the potential savings: by shifting more processing to on-demand, sims could better load-balance and use fewer resources even if they weren't moving to the cloud at all. (That's good, because large, efficiently run datacenters can still outperform margin-loaded cloud services in raw computing cost, ignoring other efficiencies.)

 

Some good points made. Making the processing on-demand is definitely the biggest part of this picture. There would also be the savings from the physical hardware that they would no longer need to purchase for new sims one would assume. I'm under the impression new sims are not being rolled out in very large numbers these days, but I think that could change if eventually the "new attractively priced products" you go on to talk about actually come to fruition.

 

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

It's not all fresh revenue for the Lab, though: some of them already rent from Estates or own Mainland, so displacing one lower-cost option with another isn't such a big win.

 

Even if the residents making the transition are not bringing a huge win in turns of profit, this is a win towards lowering the cost burden on potential sim owners, which is something LL have expressed an interest in doing, thus why they did the last price drop coupled with the marketplace and exchange fee rise.  Also, it is of course a  big win for us the consumers.

 

Edited December 17, 2018 by HushDivine

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, HushDivine said:

Also, it is of course a  big win for us the consumers.

I just worry about expectations. Just spitballing, but I might guess a 20% reduction off full-time sims, and a year or two later maybe half-off for an on-demand sim with some form of usage-based up-charges. I mean, it might be more dramatic than this, but I wouldn't expect it.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Costs for what LL has will come down when they shuffle to aws,  some of the items are there,  some of our tiers pay for that,  some of the tiers pay for the physical machines in the data center, some of that pays for employee's at LL offices,, ect ect.   Do not forget there is more to this, so what LL charges they have a science for,  to make sure all things are balanced to make sure they can keep the lights on and people fed.   "we want cheaper sims"  do not forget about the bigger picture.

[MoiraKathleen]

4 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Costs for what LL has will come down when they shuffle to aws,  some of the items are there,  some of our tiers pay for that,  some of the tiers pay for the physical machines in the data center, some of that pays for employee's at LL offices,, ect ect.   Do not forget there is more to this, so what LL charges they have a science for,  to make sure all things are balanced to make sure they can keep the lights on and people fed.   "we want cheaper sims"  do not forget about the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is important.  I don't think we will ever see region prices comparable to OpenSim and I don't think it's realistic for people to think that we could.  There is a company of employees and contractors keeping up the broader infrastructure, so to speak.  I'm also not sure if people would really like an on-demand model if it meant that often you had to wait for the region to be started up before your TP to it could finish.  Kitley has a "waiting area" region that they send you to when necessary, while a region is started back up. I seem to remember that changes in support hours not too long ago upset some people.  On demand real person support doesn't come without a cost either. 

I do think there will be some savings in moving to "the cloud" and not having LL owned data centers and servers with their associated costs, but that's not the only cost that LL has in keeping SL running at a level that we are used to. 

[iamyourneighbour]

Short answer

Because it shows you have commitment and wont just buy land and let it sit there with your creation abomination for the next five years. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

11 hours ago, iamyourneighbour said:

Because it shows you have commitment and wont just buy land and let it sit there with your creation abomination for the next five years. 

Except for all the places that do exactly that...