linden lab has “re-organized” their income stream by increasing/decreasing revenue they receive from different parts of the sl economy. and as expected: from various different quarters of the community we hear various recommendations for ll employees including executives of shoving things, checking heads or simply stopping to ruin/rape/destroy me/you/the world/the metaverse … jo and drax discuss, not without contention and NOT without humor. enjoy:
more facts/humor to watch/read:
- the original ll blogpost about the pricing change provides a good basis for discussion because you know … facts?
- grumpity linden responds on the forums [and i love her for it!]
- this sl/downfall meme video looks like it was made yesterday:
- this petition is apparently for real:
- drax’ dg video this week? all about rfl in sl
- next dg video? take a guess …
- and to wrap things up: a wonderful video by amelie marcoud:
the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley] is a weekly production of basicdrax entertainment.
the show is supported by media-sl, sinespace, fabeeo breen, ragvr, vinyl, masoom, delacruz industries, journey by debi baskerville, zero-one heavy industries corporation, aeros avatars, utilizator mode, time portal, slartist, hextraordinary fine magical goods, bay city you know for kids, botanical, strawberry singh, abranimations, kahruvel design, {what next} and landscapes unlimited.
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Joe hit is dead on. If they tax the producers, then the producers will create less and Linden Lab will make less. They recently had a spike in premium, yet they did not pass that onto the users. No, instead they decided to double the tax on the creators. So, we, the creators did our job, in making SL more attractive, leading to an increase in premium, yet we got punished for doing this. Do you think we will continue, or find more ways around LL? I think LL better start treating it’s creators better, or they won’t make anything off them.
I don’t own a full region but “Full estates get ~$20/mo reduction in price” sounds quite significant. As a new user (not quite 1 year old yet) one of the things that saddens me (apart from people disappearing) is seeing interesting places disappear. I have about 10 hours of SL time a week and I have a big list of landmarks I want to go and visit. Maybe I will manage one a week. And I keep finding out I was too late when I TP there to find myself dropping into the sea.
I hope this price reduction means people find it more sustainable to run a sim (is this the same as a “full estate”?) I would think this will help to retain new users because there are more cool places left to go and explore.
In addition, premium membership to me feels like a great deal. I only have to pay an additional $7 US a month tier and with the included tier I get to share 4096 square metres with my partner. And now I locked it in at the old price by paying annually, I don’t have anything to pay till September 2020. If they didn’t increase it before now in like *forever* then they would have been making a loss because of real world inflation.
The fact that you can use SL for free AT ALL is pretty unique is it not? But people will always complain when something is taken away. Even if right before that they gave you five new things for free.
I agree with you 100% & I refer to what I stated on the show = if you are a fan of SL & want to see it thrive = go premium! Subscription based services make sense to me. An ad-supported model where your data is the product is NOT a good model. But I digress because this is a slightly different issue than the one at hand … in any case = companies are forced to pass on fees & let us remember: LL has no say in what PayPal and other international payment providers demand in compliance! I hope to have Grumpity on the show in a few weeks to discuss in detail!
…and they just hired Strawberry Singh. Huge amount of followers. Someone has to pay her salary.
THEY DID WHAT???? NoooOOooooo BERRY WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME ……
Draxtor, I’m more of a capitalist than you are, and I totally get that LL has to be a business and make money, but you can always criticize *how* they do this money-making. The idea that you “have” to give up the land model is just heavily ideological — and it’s actually a socialist idea, devaluing land and devaluing its importance to human life. Linden Lab doesn’t want to have the expense and headache of running servers — but in fact they don’t have a headache with private islands and homesteads because owners can run them themselves — re-set them, find lagging scripted objects, etc. It’s mainland that doesn’t have these options but Mainland is only a tiny fraction of their land stock. They don’t have a way of cheaply renting, say, an Amazon server and much less cost, and then hooking that up to the SL platform. So until they have an easy and cheap way to do that, they have to be wedded to the land/server model because this is the only way they REALLY make money. And really, with economies of scale, I have to winder why a server farm with 30,000 servers, let’s say, is so different than one with 40,000 or 50,000 — and the revenue for them in tier costs is enormous — and nothing like the rest of the server rental business.
All the other models involve gouging the faithful users You have to take into consideration several issues. One, many people in business have more than one premium. I have 6 now for the simple reason that originally, you could not control grouped land without separate owners due to “officer recall”. While that is long gone, you still can’t have one big land group — they lag terribly after about 300-500 members — and even with the ability to have owners now invite other owners, if you have buildings and furniture owned by that owner, even with giving all perms to that alt, it’s just a chore. Moving everybody and all the content to a new group is a chore. Nevertheless, I may do this because the increase in premium cost isn’t trivial when it’s times 6.
Except…it’s handy to keep alts with 1024 m for the simple fact that tier has such steep levels. If you needed 8192 tier, and now have sold land, you can *only* tier down to 4096. If you need just another 1024 up from 4096, the only option on one account is to tier up to 8192. So that extra premium, annoyingly expensive to achieve the job, is required. Everyone complains about the steep tier levels, but despite their avowed interest to move away from the land model, and their decrease in the cost of land, they don’t do THIS OBVIOUS THING, make it possible to tier up at increments of only 512 at a time. If for some reason this is too hard-wired in their system, they could even create Tier Rental Linden and his group filled with tier, and then you could pay a much smaller fee online, and invite him into your group to fill it with 512.
I don’t worry about creators. They have always been privileged, they have always been feted and still are. The only thing I think would be reasonable is to give them — and amateurs like me who do a lot of it — is a cheaper texture upload. There could be some way of providing this even with the premium accounts. They could also simply institutionalize their FIC system and make “creator’s accounts” that have $5 texture upload fees — or no fees.
If I make a simple little one-prim Tibetan table which I can’t sell for more than say $25, if I have to upload 10 textures that’s $1000 that I likely won’t make back for some time, dampening my desire to keep creating at my level.
As for cashouts, here you’re forgetting that people in business like me have Business Accounts on PayPal. And we already pay a fee to PayPal for the right to have people pay us who are not “friends and family”. When I get a RL US $800 translation fee, I only get $864.50 of it due to *PayPal’s* fees — the same with a Linden Lab transfer. So now I’m going to get whacked at both ends — and BTW there’s also the fee from selling the Lindens. It’s being taxed twice.
I was amazed that when a few creators put out the petition, immediately thousands of people signed it. That’s quite something.LL is not likely to back down. But they need now to add another things to reduce the pain of SL business, like texture uploads for free or half price, or tier step-ups that aren’t so big.
I hear you on the supporting of the hobbyist/amateur. I believe there must be a nuanced solution that does not throw all creators into one category = the big volume vendors/brands, land barons and the small mom/papa folks. In re international compliance though = for LL it is in fact ALL one thing. I hope to have Grumpity on soon to respond to some of these comments!
In regards to the land model: I don’t say this out of any ideological reasons but simply practical. There has been much written/discussed. And I am happy to engage you in a discussion if you like to come on but bottom line = LL needs to diversify their income stream PERIOD!
Sorry, I only get *US $764.50 out of $800* from a PayPal business payment. So to get money out of SL, I’m paying three times: once, to convert Lindens into dollars; twice to cash out dollars made in SL; and thrice to get the payment from LL to my PayPal. Then if I want to transfer it into a bank account for free, I have to wait at least one day, if not three.