Buy Fee Change Discussion

[Linden Lab]

For details about the Buy Fee Change, read our blog post. 

For further questions, please join the conversation in this post. 

[Reed Linden]

Hi! I'm Reed Linden. I am the product manager for our payments team!  Ask me anything about this. I'm here to help. :)

[Dragon Mommy]

Hey, how transparent can you be about finances? I'm curious what sort of breakdown of the increased fees goes into each effort outlined in the post?

Semi related... Any chance you'll ever offer homestead to people without sims? I would love to be directly paying Linden Labs for my homestead and not a rental company and would happily do so to not have to buy so much Linden every month (the increase in fees will mean I see the cap monthly at least once)

Edited April 15, 2021 by Bitterthorn

[Reed Linden]

Hi, Bitterthorn! 

I can't give an exact dollar value breakdown, but what I can say is that we are committed to reinvesting all of that revenue back into Second Life. The revenue generated from this modest fee increase will unlock and facilitate nearly all of our redoubled efforts to make Second Life an amazing experience for all of you going forward. 

  

[LittleMe Jewell]

Re:  This impacts the least number of transactions and still allows us to offset some of the costs for upgrades to our world.  

Wow -- so the majority of Buy transactions are spending US $19.87 or less (the $19.87 being the amount where 7.5% is $1.49).   I would have assumed, because of the fee, that the minimum would be at least $20-25.

Guess I'll go make a large order now and in the future save up my US $ and do buys of more than $133.20 US (where the fee maxes out at $9.99) to get the most L$ with the least possible fees.

 

Edited April 15, 2021 by LittleMe Jewell

[Jenna Huntsman]

13 minutes ago, Reed Linden said:

Hi, Bitterthorn! 

I can't give an exact dollar value breakdown, but what I can say is that we are committed to reinvesting all of that revenue back into Second Life. The revenue generated from this modest fee increase will unlock and facilitate nearly all of our redoubled efforts to make Second Life an amazing experience for all of you going forward. 

  

Do I smell a Vulkan viewer somewhere on the horizon?

(more money = more employees(?) = more ability to do a meaningful overhaul of the viewer(?))

[Torric Rodas]

Mission statement is to double the userbase.  But this will hit new users the hardest as they enter without any funds.

[Reed Linden]

Just now, Jenna Huntsman said:

(more money = more employees(?) = more ability to do a meaningful overhaul of the viewer(?))

(yes 😉)

[Persephone Emerald]

I suppose if one considers this fee being equivalent to a sales tax, then it isn't so bad. I seldom buy more than $10 worth of lindens myself because I use my Premium stipend for most purchases. Pretty much the only time I buy lindens is to purchase land or a new mesh body. This *will* hit new users harder, which could work against your desire to draw in more new users.  On the other hand, if they enjoy SL enough, perhaps it will also encourage them to go Premium, to get a Linden Home and that nice little weekly stipend.

[RunawayBunny]

1 hour ago, Bitterthorn said:

Any chance you'll ever offer homestead to people without sims? I would love to be directly paying Linden Labs for my homestead and not a rental company and would happily do so to not have to buy so much Linden every month (the increase in fees will mean I see the cap monthly at least once)

Same. Tired of dealing random estate owners. I prefer get a premium if LL can give us "homestead without SIM" option.

[Paul Hexem]

Server hosting continues to get cheaper and cheaper. Why do we keep seeing increased fees and charges everywhere, but still no significant changes to land costs or tiers?

Especially something like Homesteads, which should be ultra cheap and easy to offer now that you've gone to AWS. 

[Reed Linden]

Hi, Paul!  I'd love to share with you the great land cost and tier reduction we released rather recently! 

One of the avenues that we are absolutely exploring going forward is how to best leverage our new cloud based infrastructure to make Second Life more accessible than ever and continually looking for more ways to adapt our revenue model to accommodate more of these types of changes.

[LittleMe Jewell]

 

 

Not to knock the price reductions that were done, but you do have an interesting definition of "rather recently".  I don't know too many people that would associate that phrase with something that happened 2 years ago.

 

Edited April 15, 2021 by LittleMe Jewell

[Nethya Emor]

When are we going to see these server improvements? Lately MP has been having more issues than normal, most of sims are hitting 0 spare time and lagging.

What can you share about the revamped experience for new users, and will UI changes stay in the same viewer or are we going to see some major update?

[Paul Hexem]

29 minutes ago, Reed Linden said:

Hi, Paul!  I'd love to share with you the great land cost and tier reduction we released rather recently! 

One of the avenues that we are absolutely exploring going forward is how to best leverage our new cloud based infrastructure to make Second Life more accessible than ever and continually looking for more ways to adapt our revenue model to accommodate more of these types of changes.

While I appreciate the reply, I wouldn't call a 20 dollar reduction two years ago, on a price tag that's still double the cost of an entire server box, "significant".

Edited April 15, 2021 by Paul Hexem

[Reed Linden]

8 minutes ago, Nethya Emor said:

When are we going to see these server improvements? Lately MP has been having more issues than normal, most of sims are hitting 0 spare time and lagging.

What can you share about the revamped experience for new users, and will UI changes stay in the same viewer or are we going to see some major update?

Hi, Nethya!

 

The server improvements are ongoing. There is no specific date for any given change, but you should be seeing incremental improvement across all of our properties more or less continuously. As we shifted our "hardware" to the cloud, we saw marked upticks in region performance, historically low teleport failure rates, and faster, easier grid rolls. We're confident that we can provide even greater improvement there, and do so to a wider range of products, and these fee changes allow us to continue to tinker with and optimize our infrastructure within the new environment.

 

With regards to the Marketplace specifically, "more issues than normal" is a hard metric to argue with. There have been some hiccups as we are working on all that leveraging of infrastructure that I mentioned above, and I'm sure there will be some more of those in the future (this goes for all of our products) - the marketplace is one of the areas we're specifically focusing on to provide a better, more reliable, more accessible, and more functional experience. We're very excited about the possibilities that new infrastructure, more updated operating systems, etc. will provide us on the Marketplace! 

 

Regarding the new user experience, this is still in the design stage! We'll be attempting to move the needle in as many areas as we can, and running experiments and trying new things in world, in the viewer, on the web - across the board. There's nothing off the table! If you have any suggestions you'd like to make, I encourage you to submit a feature request! 

[Chic Aeon]

So when was the last Buy Fee increase?   Not all that long ago. I never buy lindens so not something I pay attention to.   I bet @LittleMe Jewell knows that date or where to look it up.

I WILL say personally that I am glad that "this time" the increase didn't JUST impact the creators ^^ .   

 

This "could" make Premium look a bit better to some folks that buy lindens fairly often. It still boggles my mind though that people don't seem to realize that The Lab is just giving people back some of the money they paid in for their Premium fee (laughing).  For a decade some folks were just saving their "free stipend money" ( free in some people's eyes anyway) and then using that to pay for their next year's Premium fee. That no longer works and there has been an impact from that change -- no clue how much, only that some of my RL friends are going back to basic or have.   

 

Edited April 15, 2021 by Chic Aeon
spelling - TWICE -- not a good typing day

[Reed Linden]

On 2017-11-02 the buy fee was raised from $0.60 to $0.99.  On 2018-07-03 it was changed from $0.99 to $1.49.

[Nalates Urriah]

31 minutes ago, Nethya Emor said:

When are we going to see these server improvements? Lately MP has been having more issues than normal, most of sims are hitting 0 spare time and lagging.

What can you share about the revamped experience for new users, and will UI changes stay in the same viewer or are we going to see some major update?

On server performance...

I fly and sail. Under performing regions are a pain. Bad region crossings are a disaster and extremely annoying. So, I watch server performance and log region crossings in my flight log (its an automated log). I have noticed the region performance fluctuating, decreasing, increasing... Over the last couple of years, 2019 & 2020, I have seen the Scripts Run %  improve from a low to now one of the better levels I've got to deal with. It was common to lose control of the copter or boat when entering a laggy region. The same with crossings. In 2019 I would strip down to a Classic avatar removing all scripts and maybe make 2 to 10 crossing before having some disastrous problem; disconnect, unseated, stuck on the region boundary, losing control and crashing the copter or running the boat aground, and so on.

Last week I flew my heavily scripted Shergood copter while wearing my 'street' attire (typically ~3MB of scripts) across 122 regions without a problem and landed.

So, in my experience the servers have been improving.

[LittleMe Jewell]

31 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

So when was the last Buy Fee increase?   Not all that long ago. I never buy lindens so not something I pay attention to.   I bet @LittleMe Jewell knows that date or where to look it up.

 

Thanks to @Reed Linden for the info, so that I didn't need to go dig through saved posts. 

I will say that I'm a bit surprised that it has been almost 3 years since the last increase.  I actually have been expecting one for a while.  While it does make sense, in many ways, to go to a percentage based fee, the 7.5% sounds a bit steep to me - almost double the Sell fee.

The Residents will adapt -- we usually do.  I can't see LL really losing folks over this, even though many of us will grumble for quite a while.  And it does give me more incentive to get off my rear and finally getting that store set up that I've been procrastinating for months now.

[Doc Carling]

1 hour ago, Reed Linden said:

Hi, Paul!  I'd love to share with you the great land cost and tier reduction we released rather recently! 

To rent a full region (20,000 prims) from a well known and big land company costs currently about 268 USD for 4 weeks. The other land companies take about the same. Some even more. Looks like the great land cost and tier reduction hadn't the desired result. At least not for common residents. As for the buy fee change that's ok for me. I suppose the fees are the same, if we buy Lindens inworld in our viewers?

Edited April 15, 2021 by Doc Carling

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Not to knock the price reductions that were done, but you do have an interesting definition of "rather recently". 

Is like "Soon"!

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Oz linden explained that costs went up with aws,  which is understandable, I have aws ec2 instances myself,   I guess I can be the voice of reason and maybe help people understand from my point of view,  I off set my costs some with passing the costs some to my customers, so I'm not breaking the bank and actually make a little bit of return on the investment.    

Also the homestead issue I keep seeing popup,  that would be than considered a stand alone sim and would be priced accordingly and not at current rates,  forget which meeting that was years ago that it was mentioned like that,   believe jack was the one that said it.  

[Scott1 Yedmore]

I'm curious Reed... If LL was operating out of your own datacenter(s) then a move to AWS resulted in lower costs to you, already. (I work in this field.) But the blog announcement made this sound like a hardship to LL and, hence, the "reasoning" for fee increases. Help me understand this please.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Scott1 Yedmore

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, Scott1 Yedmore said:

I'm curious Reed... If LL was operating out of your own datacenter(s) then a move to AWS resulted in lower costs to you, already. (I work in this field.) But the blog announcement made this sound like a hardship to LL and, hence, the "reasoning" for fee increases. Help me understand this please.

I wondered the same. Every virtual server I've ever paid for has always been cheaper than dedicated hardware.