HushDivine

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.