Kayla Whittaker Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 I really wonder if Linden Labs is losing money? If you don't have a premium membership, we are being charged 50Ls to upload a photo now. Is the company that hard up for money? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BriannaLovey Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 The max texture resolution increased to 2048. If you shrink your texture to 1024x1024 or lower, the upload price will be L$10 again. 9 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kayla Whittaker Posted July 17 Author Share Posted July 17 Ah! But really? 50Ls for it? Is it taking up that much server space? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dorientje Woller Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 1 minute ago, Kayla Whittaker said: Ah! But really? 50Ls for it? Is it taking up that much server space? Having servers, or renting servers ain't free. And to be honest ... cost of the electricity bill went up for everybody, including companies. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BriannaLovey Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 5 minutes ago, Kayla Whittaker said: Ah! But really? 50Ls for it? Is it taking up that much server space? They want to discourage the mass use of 2048x2048 textures, and encourage the use of them only when absolutely necessary. If everyone used 2048x2048 textures, the required VRAM for SL would quadruple overnight. 13 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Istelathis Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 13 minutes ago, Kayla Whittaker said: Ah! But really? 50Ls for it? Is it taking up that much server space? It is a balancing act I think. The decrease in expense for property, has to be met with an increase elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
animats Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 The last quote from the owners of SL was that "Second Life is a cash machine". Unlike Roblox (2023 net loss: $1,158,937,000) and Meta Horizon (losses in the billions, but not broken out from Facebook.) The great thing about SL's business model is that land tier and premium house payments are directly associated with server costs. SL's land-oriented server model keeps revenue and cost in balance. For Roblox, "the Company derives substantially all of its revenue from the sale of virtual items on the Roblox Platform". That revenue is only loosely related to operating costs, and it's not working out for them. Even Epic Games is losing money; their game store is not profitable and is eating up the profits from Fortnite. There's something to be said for a conservative business model. 15 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scylla Rhiadra Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 32 minutes ago, animats said: The great thing about SL's business model is that land tier and premium house payments are directly associated with server costs. SL's land-oriented server model keeps revenue and cost in balance. This has not occurred to me. Really great point. 5 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristy Aurelia Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 3 hours ago, BriannaLovey said: They want to discourage the mass use of 2048x2048 textures, and encourage the use of them only when absolutely necessary. If everyone used 2048x2048 textures, the required VRAM for SL would quadruple overnight. Yup, this is correct. And if you're using a 2k texture to replace 4x 1k textures, and you're premium, the cost is 40L which ends up being the same as 4x 1k. And that is one of the main use cases for 2k. It is a bit more efficient for viewer to decode one larger texture than 4 different ones, even though they'd end up using the same amount of memory. And if you really do need extra detail you'll have to consider if that extra detail is worth the extra price and viewer performance impact. Due to density of avatar UV maps, I think BoM is the main proper use case for 2k, which is being worked on, but not yet implemented, and also, with lots of 2k BoM tattoos/makeup/clothes and such, they'll all will still bake down to just a few BoM textures, which will end up being reasonably efficient overall. So 20x 2k tattoos are still just 1x 2k BoM. Oh and 2k PBR terrain also makes sense since the terrain is a very large object. And a side note - To all Creators: please do not upload blank/solid colour textures as 2k... and especially if they're optional. For example, if you're not using PBR Emissive texture, don't make it 2k black texture, just leave it blank, this applies for all material textures. If you do need a solid colour texture for some odd reason and can't just use tint colour, 8x8 is more than enough. 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alwin Alcott Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 2 minutes ago, Kristy Aurelia said: 8x8 is more than enough. in spite of the costs it won't work, many people will think they nééd 2048 textures.. as they did with the 1024 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porky Gorky Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 2 hours ago, Kristy Aurelia said: nd if you're using a 2k texture to replace 4x 1k textures, and you're premium, the cost is 40L which ends up being the same as 4x 1k. And that is one of the main use cases for 2k. It is a bit more efficient for viewer to decode one larger texture than 4 different ones, even though they'd end up using the same amount of memory. For Premium Plus, do 2k uploads cost L$10 or did they end up being free in the end? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zalificent Corvinus Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 2 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said: in spite of the costs it won't work, many people will think they nééd 2048 textures.. as they did with the 1024 About a month ago, I downloaded a custom content mod for a game I play, it was suspiciously large as files go, so I checked and all the textures were 2k or 4kk resolution. One of the textures was called "_black" and was just that, a plain 24 bit SOLID black fill, at 4k resolution, apparently for one small pat of the underside of a boot. All the textures were in .dds format, and ALL were in dtx1 lossy compression, the oldest and lowest quality lossy compression, if the mod maker had used dtx3 or dtx5, for the actual textures, they could have made the thing in 1k and 2 k resolution with BETTER texture quality, and 1/4 of the download bandwidth and vram usage. The type of SL content makers most in need of being deterred from using 2k textures are, ironically, the type least likely to care about paying 40 L$ instead of 10 L$ to upload. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 6 hours ago, Kayla Whittaker said: I really wonder if Linden Labs is losing money? If you don't have a premium membership, we are being charged 50Ls to upload a photo now. Is the company that hard up for money? Here's a hint for interpreting fees: If it's denominated in US$s, it's intended to generate revenue. If it's in L$s, it's not to raise cash, it's what's often called a "nuisance fee", intended to add a little friction to a behavior they think users shouldn't do without thinking about it. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristy Aurelia Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 53 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said: For Premium Plus, do 2k uploads cost L$10 or did they end up being free in the end? They are planning on making it free, but I don't know if that went live yet. I don't have Premium Plus myself. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sid Nagy Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 (edited) 7 hours ago, Kayla Whittaker said: Ah! But really? 50Ls for it? Is it taking up that much server space? If one is in the position to print the L$'s like Linden Lab can, one doesn't really need those 50$. It is only a way to increase demand for L$ (as a money sink) so that the L$ stays stable. And it helps to not get their servers flooded with new texture uploads. Edited July 17 by Sid Nagy 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmeliaJ08 Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 8 hours ago, Kayla Whittaker said: Ah! But really? 50Ls for it? Is it taking up that much server space? Nope. Is it a prime opportunity to make money though? absolutely. Same as charging so much for names... cost is basically nothing, price is ridiculous however. LL clearly believe users have deeper pockets than many of us may believe, they might even be right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmeliaJ08 Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 6 hours ago, animats said: The last quote from the owners of SL was that "Second Life is a cash machine". Unlike Roblox (2023 net loss: $1,158,937,000) and Meta Horizon (losses in the billions, but not broken out from Facebook.) The great thing about SL's business model is that land tier and premium house payments are directly associated with server costs. SL's land-oriented server model keeps revenue and cost in balance. For Roblox, "the Company derives substantially all of its revenue from the sale of virtual items on the Roblox Platform". That revenue is only loosely related to operating costs, and it's not working out for them. Even Epic Games is losing money; their game store is not profitable and is eating up the profits from Fortnite. There's something to be said for a conservative business model. There might also be something to be said for producing a product that adults (with money) might want to spend on as opposed to aiming it squarely at children who can only spend whatever any adult lets them. I always figured the obvious shortfall on platforms aimed at children with limited spending power would be made up with advertising/sponsorships though? I used to think Fornite was just a sort of battle-royale game for children but whenever I see footage of it in the current day it's full of licensed - expensive - custom characters from movies, tv shows etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zalificent Corvinus Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 4 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said: would be made up with advertising/sponsorships though? Thee was a newspaper article here in the UK a few years back, about some mother appealing for the ban on her 17yr old son being lifted as FartNyte was "his favourite". Any sympathy one might have had for the little darling quickly evaporated when one read on, and learned he had been the captain of an "e-sports team" in FartNyte, with a corporate sponsorship deal for his 4 teen team, worth £4,000,000, and a youtube channel streaming his FartNyte videos that generated £20,000 a MONTH, and that he lived with his single unemployed mother in a £4,000,000 house he'd bought for her on a mortgage, that he'd planned to pay off with his sponsorship deals over the next 10-15 years, but now couldn't due to being banned for life, after steaming a video of himself using an "un-detectible aim bot" in a friendly match. There's BIG money in FartNyte, advertising money, pushing brand names at the kids who watch the "champions" on youtube and twitch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arduenn Schwartzman Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 2 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lyric Demina Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 10 hours ago, Kayla Whittaker said: Linden Labs LAB. LAB. Linden LAB. 6 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ayashe Ninetails Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 14 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said: There might also be something to be said for producing a product that adults (with money) might want to spend on as opposed to aiming it squarely at children who can only spend whatever any adult lets them. I always figured the obvious shortfall on platforms aimed at children with limited spending power would be made up with advertising/sponsorships though? I used to think Fornite was just a sort of battle-royale game for children but whenever I see footage of it in the current day it's full of licensed - expensive - custom characters from movies, tv shows etc. It's a mix and really depends on the game. Something like Fortnite has its casual base of players, content creators, and the competitive e-sports side. There are big sponsors as well as pretty famous YouTubers and Twitch streamers who produce seemingly endless amounts of viral content across numerous platforms. Their audiences skew fairly young (kids, teens, low 20s). They can drive a ton of in-game cosmetic and V-Bucks sales with partnerships with Epic - for example, Ninja collabs with Epic and gets his own customized skin, its release/unveiling turns into a big release event that gets streamed by himself and other content creators to multiple platforms with ridiculous numbers of viewers, and that drives sales because to be able to wear it and all the included goodies - ya gotta buy it. That's in addition to the ads played on YouTube/Twitch, the sponsors behind the event, etc. This also happens with the e-sports side - events get sponsored, streamed, ads, lots of hype because the events are pretty big. Add in ticket sales, sold out venues, etc. Brands and big franchises keep filtering in, too, which only makes things crazier. Last I saw, they're getting Pirates of the Caribbean. Then you get games and platforms with a lot less money behind them, but they have other ways. Content creators do still drive a lot of that, though - there are still partnerships, brand deals, sponsors (everything from gaming to car insurance companies trying to get a piece of those audiences), Twitch drops (free in-game cosmetics if you watch sponsored streamers for a set amount of time, which means you're likely seeing ads, too), and streamers decked out in every expensive in-game cosmetic available, which makes their fans want to throw money at the game because they look soooo keeewwwwl. SL won't ever get to that point. It lacks YouTube/Twitch/TikTok content creators with connections to that easily-influenced and impressionable demographic (thank goodness - it really does make free-to-play games quite toxic and obnoxious). I've seen a few SLers making videos, but none with the following it takes to go viral. Animats is right - they're going the land route and that seems to be working fine for its demographic. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fluffy Sharkfin Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 6 minutes ago, Lyric Demina said: LAB. LAB. Linden LAB. Labs... ❤️ 9 1 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 2 hours ago, Kristy Aurelia said: They are planning on making it free, but I don't know if that went live yet. I don't have Premium Plus myself. I managed to upgrade to Premium Plus during the SL21B offer but hadn't used it for anything yet, so I just tried it and indeed a 2048x2048 image uploaded for L$0. The dashboard "L$ Transaction History" page actually lists it as an upload fee with L$0 in the Debit column. 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fluffy Sharkfin Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said: I managed to upgrade to Premium Plus during the SL21B offer but hadn't used it for anything yet, so I just tried it and indeed a 2048x2048 image uploaded for L$0. The dashboard "L$ Transaction History" page actually lists it as an upload fee with L$0 in the Debit column. Well I hope you made the most of every single pixel, they don't grow on trees you know... Actually I guess they kinda do since most SL trees are covered in leaf cards... 🤔 1 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Codex Alpha Posted July 17 Share Posted July 17 16 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said: Well I hope you made the most of every single pixel, they don't grow on trees you know... Actually I guess they kinda do since most SL trees are covered in leaf cards... 🤔 With the formula 196,345 | 2 | 2 | 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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