Will the SL economy go up, down, or stay the same during the next 6 months ?

Your vote and your thoughts, please

Steve,

Turn this into a poll to vote!

Could be another of those interesting threads you start..LOL

Edited: posted my post, went back and viewed again and theres the poll, Good Work, I'll be the first.

if the last 6 months is any indication .. it will go down.

I say it will go down. I sincerely hope I am dead wrong.

I say it will remain around this level and go up slightly.

Once the VAT element has passed, the dust settles and publicity remains positive it should slowly improve.

Yep. The explosive growth from last year is very much over but it's going to overall-trend upwards, I think.

Yes, especially with the dollar continuing to suck worse and worse every day.

I think some aspects may go down, depending on chaotic variables such as LL's management and policy decisions. Other aspects may go up though. What I'm thinking is that land may continue to waver or go down a bit more, but that in turn may help those who rent (either mainland or islands). I also think (hope) that retail sales will be on an upswing again. I don't know if these would balance each other out or if there would be an overall effect to bring the economy up or down. I do hope it goes up, I will be satisfied if it remains fairly stable, and I'll survive if it goes down.

In other words, I like cake more than I like pie. Although cheesecake seems to be more closely related to the pie family than the cake family, and I believe it's misnamed.

-Atashi

And anyone who can answer this question, please tell me who will win the 6th race today at Santa Anita.

It will go up, overall across the period, in terms of volume, leading economic indicators and so forth.

But it will be falling at the 6 month mark because that's spring 2008 - spring is always a 'dry season' comparatively speaking, to January.

That's my guess, anyway, barring some huge second wave of publicity that I don't forsee.

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However I'd put a big proviso on this: the economy will go 'up' but not necessarily for users. I expect the Company to be making a lot more mainland tier, and taking more profits. But will we?

As time goes on, the bigger percent of the pie will be going straight to our service provider as they shake out the inefficiencies that make room for the rest of us.

That's the unasked question here - sure, there will always be a market for residents, but the big percentages will go more toward the service provider and the deeply established businesses. Think: market shakeout.

That's what happens to emerging markets every. single. time.

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I see two *really* incompatible things.

a) talk of open-source for all, and free grid software for everyone!

b) high tier charges, competitive 'auctions' and other return-maximising strategies

Does anyone *honestly* think that the Company will commit business suicide by allowing us to compete with them far more cheaply with its *own product*?

It's not gonna happen, folks - not intentionally, anyway. Expect licencing, expect a bigger economy, but expect less of it in your hands.

It went down due to closing the casinos.

If they close down the sex trades next, it would go down again, but I doubt that will happen unless the US or EU passes a law making credit card companies culpable for funding it. (That's what killed gambling -- no specific law about gambling, just the threat that major credit card companies and paypal would no longer be able to forward funds to SL.)

Barring something major like that, the biggest obstacles to the SL economy is the stability and growth of the 'platform'. Stability is always an issue, and too many more foul-ups like the recent "bug fix" that broke scripted av movement when sitting would NOT be good. Scalability (allowing many more folks ingame at once) is a serious challenge, but one that SL has so far been excellent at managing -- of course with plenty of hiccups.

I predict that the number of people ingame will grow more slowly, for technical reasons, but it will continue to be exponential and substantial and the economy will grow with it for at least the next year or two. Now, how long it will take to recover to pre-gambling-ban levels, I have no idea. I also don't quite know how to measure it, since IMHO, gambling inflated the stats. (With gambling, money changes hands back and forth a lot, but it's the net flow that matters.)

By the way, to give you an idea of how incredible Sl's growth of players in-game at once has been: if it were to continue for 9 more years, then by that time, on average every person on the planet would be spending over 40 hours per week ingame. So, obviously, this level of growth can't continue too much longer!

(No telling how many hours we'd be spending waiting for the grid to come back up or recovering from crashes, though! )

Other:
The economy will implode, dropping to near nothing, and then in a strange last second move, it will spread amoeba like, sending arms everywhere and grow to a massive size. Then pop. And then Hugo Chavez will nationalize SL.

Desmond, I expect they'll open-source the server but find a way to charge for those servers to be connected as part of the grid. LL will still provide the core services and databases (e.g., $L management, inventory). They just offload the simulation part, to companies who can compete to do it more efficiently -- better server farms. Frankly, I think that is an interesting business model for LL, since they'll be paid more for doing less.

I did not want to mention that.

My thoughts are that LL could/should/may consider if this is even possible to charge residents in local currency, that may help and prevent any major impact to the SL economy when RL currencies start to move in the oppositte direction.

If that option is not viable then SL would become a Non European Service as the increase might not be sustainable for many EU players.

Just my long term thoughts..

It was going down before that.

Maybe someone could plot the data but it think the LindenX activity has been flat for a good long time. In spite of an increase in the user-base.

True, got my vote on that one.. I woukld say Easter was the start of the so called recession.

Exactly.

Whether LL makes more money does not always translate into a better economy for SL.

I'm certain that the economy will either go up, down or stay the same.

Maybe not directly but if LL is having problems making payroll, you can bet they're not going to be hiring lots of code monkeys to fix bugs and support people and such.

My favourite economist Alan Beaulieu from ITR (www.ecotrends.org), predicts a RL recession in the USA for 2009.

My sense is we are seeing the front edge of that with the collapse of the housing bubble (2008 will be much worse than 2007 in that respect). As such peoples incomes will be squeezed and the SL economy will be affected as a consequence.

As the SL economic statistics show most people pay RL money into the economy. This is discretionary spending which is one of the first things to be cut back in a recession.

The only way I see SL avoiding this is if they are able to grow the numbers of active participants from outside the USA sufficiently to compensate. I think this will be hard to achieve in the next 6 months. Note I say active participants, meaning ones that contribute to the economy by bringing money into SL.

Of course I sort of hope it is not the case, but sometimes a recession is good for refocussing people and eliminating the excesses of the past cycle. In the case of SL, that seems to have taken the form of large numbers of people comming here based on the hype of making money with the consequences being large excursions in land prices (flipping) and an explosion in BIAB resellers.

If a SL recession causes people to re examine their reasons for being here and elimination of the a lot of the "Make Money" hype it couldn't hurt...

Great point. LL not making more money can hurt the Economy.

They have to be willing to spend that money of course.

SOME discretionary spending is curtailed during a recession. Entertainment, on the other hand, often sees a boost...people are anxious to escape the pressures of reality.

SL could be like the movies during the Great Depression...people flocked to them in droves. In SL, you can live a rich lifestyle for only a few dollars a month. That could be a big attraction.

Good in everything


I think that the Economy will gradually go UP after wobbling for at least another month, and for some very scientific reasons:-
- I'm bored with it going down
- Graphs look prettier and more interesting when they go up and down, especially if they have little fjiord-like bits to make it look like the data is actually meaningful.

Other reasons might be:-
- Even the densest LL inmate may at this stage be aware of rumblings in the force that are loud enough to distract them from feeding the Love Machine. They may actually focus on 'fixing it' to avoid losing their fun jobs.
- The hiatus that we are in at the moment may indeed focus minds and shake out the ones whose unrealistic expectations work to upset realistic price structures
- The ones who weather the storm will provide a sustainable direction for the real community to follow.
- SL is still the best 'game in town' for creative people despite all the warts. Keep the creatives - keep the audience.

I would say it depends entirely on the arrival of decent competition. If something good hits the market during the next six months, many, many people will leave, taking their money and much of their social networks with them.

Otherwise, it will probably stay about the same.

Sooz

I agree basically. Though I think the trend of more signups, but less US$ spent per person will make the economy still decline

I still think if someone came out with a product that was basically a clone of SL in 2005 they would be able to steal a large number of Residents.