Why is Second Life expensive?

[Bagnu]

On 9/23/2020 at 6:15 PM, Bagnu said:

I was cheated out of about $50 CAD by a charlatan selling empty boxes in a fake store my first few days here. I think I put in about another $20 Cad to get some clothes. That was the last time I put RL money into SL, and I refuse to again!!!

I simply have to laugh at myself for ever having said this!!!

[Randall Ahren]

SL is expensive because it takes a freaking supercomputer to run it. 

[pizza7]

7 hours ago, Randall Ahren said:

SL is expensive because it takes a freaking supercomputer to run it. 

not at all true, mine is less than 1000 including a 24 inch monitor.

[PheebyKatz]

14 hours ago, pizza7 said:

not at all true, mine is less than 1000 including a 24 inch monitor.

So THAT'S why we have lag! Hey everybody, pizza7 hosts the grid! This explains everything!

On a more serious note, define "expensive". I haven't paid for anything in SL with real money for nearly 2 years. And I only spent real money before because I had it to spare and felt like it. Nobody HAS to spend anything on SL.

On my old account, my avatar cost me nothing but 1L$ for her hair. Sim owners often offered to let me set my Home spot on their sims, people who made cool stuff gave me things because I said how cool their stuff was, and I never had to pay a penny for anything.

That said, I'm grateful so many people DO pay for things like premium accounts and land, because if SL poofed because nobody thought it was worth supporting, I'd not have a world to go play in and a place to build cities and ride my bike.

I've seen people blow gigantic amounts of money on utter wastes of time and throw it all down the toilet without ever complaining at all, they buy the most expensive processed food they can find and then throw half of it away, and would rather see it rot than let someone else eat it. Then they complain about how expensive things are that they can get for free. It makes no sense to me.

These guys give us a whole world to come and play in, and offer perks to get people to pitch in and support it, and all anyone does is complain about not being treated enough like royalty in exchange for amounts of money they would throw in someone's face if they expected that kind of treatment in exchange for it.

It's as disturbing to see as people complaining about imperfections in something someone spent 8 hours making and that they paid the equivalent of 80 cents for. While drinking Starbucks. And having a 3-dollar biscotti that they're going to discard half of.

[Coffee Pancake]

On 1/14/2023 at 12:59 AM, Randall Ahren said:

SL is expensive because it takes a freaking supercomputer to run it. 

SL will run on just about every potato pretending to be a computer going back 15 years.

It takes a decent computer to run it well, and is capable of bringing an exceptional computer to it's knees for technical reasons that have been explained here dozens and dozens of times.

[Flea Yatsenko]

How SL runs on your computer has nothing to do with the cost. Simulators are expensive because they can't be suspended. If you have an empty sim with a pet walking around, and no one enters the sim for a week, LL still has to pay for that server or virtual private server or whatever they are running. Existing content makes the assumption that things will always be running. LL could offer cheaper sims and land if they came up with different simulator software that could be slept and hibernated, frozen in time, when no one is there, so they could put more land on the same amount of hardware as most of it would be suspended anyways. But last I heard sims were given dedicated hardware, and they are always running no matter what's happening on it. In fact if you just buy a sim, leave it completely empty, and have no one ever enter it, it still takes up hardware and still runs the simulator, even if it's not really simulating anything. This made a ton of sense when SL was created and it's how everything was done. But with virtual machines and virtual private servers the cost of hosting websites dropped massively. LL has to run their simulators on dedicated hardware (even if it's in "the cloud" it still has dedicated resources).

A dedicated web server is usually around $125 for an alright spec server (when not discounted). People who make web sites for hobbies and stuff can't afford that. But you can get a VPS for $4 a month because it's shared, can be suspended, etc. LL is still running a dedicated hardware model for their servers when most places have moved to VPS.

Look at Minecraft, you can run a server on a VPS for $4 a month because it's not dedicated hardware, it's a VPS for a world that can go to sleep when no one is in it. People would be paying $100+ a month for a minecraft server if it required dedicated hosting. But because of VPS they aren't.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

I've found Second Life VERY expansive!

[Istelathis]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

A dedicated web server is usually around $125 for an alright spec server (when not discounted). People who make web sites for hobbies and stuff can't afford that. But you can get a VPS for $4 a month because it's shared, can be suspended, etc. LL is still running a dedicated hardware model for their servers when most places have moved to VPS.

I wish LL offered us cheaper servers, not connected to the mainland that could be shutdown when not in use or they exceeded an hourly allocation so as to avoid people taking advantage of them (if necessary).  With that said, I can rent quarter of a region in a skybox for relatively cheap, although it doesn't have a high Li to play around with, I have made a variety of scenes of which I can rez depending on my mood.  It really comes down to us to find inexpensive alternatives.  

I've said it in the past, I haven't a clue how LL keeps their lights on, I imagine land owners play a significant role in it though.  I don't expect VPS with a suspended when not in use option to be available anytime soon because so many people would move over to it.  Who knows what sort of impact that would have on LL.

As for expenses though, LL could have made it so much worse for us all.  We could have limited inventory, for example, max bandwidth for another, voice could have been an expense, max avatar complexity set to an expense, there are so many things they could charge us for that they didn't so I try not to complain about it too much.  For everything that SL has to offer, in the grand scheme of things, I am appreciative of that - especially considering I am not plagued with a ton of ads and my personal data as far as I know is not being sold to advertisers.

Edited January 15, 2023 by Istelathis

[Sid Nagy]

15 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

 

As for expenses though, LL could have made it so much worse for us all.  We could have limited inventory, for example, max bandwidth for another, voice could have been an expense, max avatar complexity set to an expense, there are so many things they could charge us for that they didn't so I try not to complain about it too much.  For everything that SL has to offer, in the grand scheme of things, I am appreciative of that - especially considering I am not plagued with a ton of ads and my personally data as far as I know is not being sold to advertisers.

There is a point where people will start to say:"Enough is enough" and walk away.
One can't keep charging more and more and even a bit more for all kinds of everything. There will be a tipping point somewhere, when revenues  will go down hill fast.
The trick for a business in general is to find out where that tipping point for their product is and than stay close to, but on the safe side of it. In my view LL mastered that strategy very well so far.
 

Edited January 15, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Harper Held]

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It takes a decent computer to run it well, and is capable of bringing an exceptional computer to it's knees

I've always used my home sim as a torture test for graphics cards; but under the latest version of Firestorm I'm regularly getting 60fps even with ALM turned on.

The previous version I was getting 30 or so (more or less) without ALM. This is on a 2022 "gaming" desktop.

I'm not sure what they're doing these days but whatever it is, my hats' off to them!

 

[Lewis Luminos]

16 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

There is a point where people will start to say:"Enough is enough" and walk away.
One can't keep charging more and more and even a bit more for all kinds of everything. There will be a tipping point somewhere, when revenues  will go down hill fast.
The trick for a business in general is to find out where that tipping point for their product is and than stay close to, but on the safe side of it. In my view LL mastered that strategy very well so far.
 

I agree.

As a hosting service, SL is expensive, but only when you're comparing it with hosting for other things like a website. But in SL you get so much more than that.

As a form of entertainment, when you compare it with a TV streaming service, or Amazon Prime, or your weekly cinema visits, or meals out,  or an Adobe Photoshop subscription, it's actually really good value.

 

[Modulated]

26 minutes ago, Lewis Luminos said:

I agree.

As a hosting service, SL is expensive, but only when you're comparing it with hosting for other things like a website. But in SL you get so much more than that.

As a form of entertainment, when you compare it with a TV streaming service, or Amazon Prime, or your weekly cinema visits, or meals out,  or an Adobe Photoshop subscription, it's actually really good value.

 

Good value is subjective.

[Lewis Luminos]

3 minutes ago, Modulated said:

Good value is subjective.

Also agree. The people who think that SL is not good value would (or should) not pay anything for it. 

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

I confess to not having read all the replies to the this thread. That, said, SL is only expensive if one owns considerable land. In my case, about 85 percent of what I spend in SL goes to expenses associated with my land. The rest goes for avatar components and enhancements, clothing, and miscellaneous expenses. I can easily earn that much from tips for dancing. Therefore, if I didn't choose to own a considerable amount of land, I would never need to spend any RL money on SL.

During my first year, January 13, 2007 through January 12, 2008, I challenged myself to be self-supporting in SL. At the beginning, I bought $20 worth of Lindens so I could buy what I needed to have a nice avatar (It cost less then, but the avatars were not nearly as nice.). I considered that a loan. At the end of the year, I cashed out $23. I had earned enough to pay for everything I bought plus $3.00 extra. I felt that I had accomplished my goal, and then bought my first land, since when I have never been self-supporting again.

I view SL as a hobby, and compare the cost to other hobbies. It is less expensive than some and more expensive than others.

I get more than my money's worth from SL.

[EliseAnne85]

I have a weird question so didn't want to start a thread because I know nothing of what LL makes in profit yearly.

My question is if we all could have our own say half region for free, do you think that would make SL a hit and bring in all kinds of new people?  Would the spending increase as people bought items for their region make up for the loss of the land revenue?  

Or, maybe even some kind of game where we could win land and move up to more land as our score went up for example.  

What I'm wondering really is would the revenue generated from the spending to decorate land offset the loss of the revenue for the land directly?

Edited January 18, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Polenth Yue]

58 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

What I'm wondering really is would the revenue generated from the spending to decorate land offset the loss of the revenue for the land directly?

Outside of the issue of people abusing free land for every account by making twenty accounts, I think it's unlikely that people would spend enough to cover giving everyone free land. But they use a similar principle with the premium accounts, by giving people land or a house for a set subscription cost. People do go out and buy stuff as a result, which helps the economy keep going. There are genuinely new people signing up for this, because it's easy to sort out and the cost is realistic.

Which moves on to whether a request is really for starting land or not. Half a region is the sort of thing you'd expand to later once you have building projects, rather than being a newbie thing. Owning a Blake Sea region is not a regular newbie thing either. Expecting them to be free or cheap is not going to happen, because there are costs (and for things like mainland sales/auctions, other residents set the final price).

[EliseAnne85]

32 minutes ago, Polenth Yue said:

Outside of the issue of people abusing free land for every account by making twenty accounts, I think it's unlikely that people would spend enough to cover giving everyone free land. 

Couldn't this one be solved with PIOF?  IOW, only payment info on file people could get a big ol' plot of land of whatever hypothetical size that is for my hypothesis?  But, not all the alts of the same PIOF account could get land, only one name could.  I mean there are ways to make sure only one big ol' hypothetical plot per person by just using ID needed.  

I was really just wondering if this would be a hit to bring in a lot more people to SL if there was some kind of free land offer bigger than the paid for accounts.  Land where people could build whole cities.  But, yeah, once those are built, people could tire of them no matter how big the land.  So, could be a dead end once people have built.