LL Endgame Speculation

Considering the massive changes in land policy recently, both mainland and island, I have to wonder what LL is trying to accomplish. It has to be more than just more premium accounts. If they wanted to do that, all they had to do was drop land prices by flooding the market with new mainland sims. They are doing that, yes, but they are doing far, far more with new auction prices and new island prices, etc. This isn't just a price control measure, or an attempt to woo new premium accounts; this is the earthquake that preceeds some sort of SL tsunami. Something big, gridwise is happening. Something major is changing at LL. I can feel it, but I can't discern what it is, exactly. Anyone have any ideas?

Magellan Linden is going to be eventually found?

Linden Lab's greatest source of revenue is derived from monthly tier fees/monthly island fees. By lowering the cost of entry for a resident to acquire an island LL will make it up (and more) on the backend through more monthly island fee payments.

LL is simply tweaking their pricing models. Companies do it all the time.

The full open sourcing of the simulator code, allowing third-party grid hosting. 'least dat's my bet.

Mari

I don't think that the Lindens will be able to open source the sims like that. They might be getting ready for competition from OpenLife or RealXTend, but I don't think they'll open source their own sim. The problem is that the simulator code has Havok 4 in it - Havok's not open source, and even though (apparently) Havok is going to be released for free for non-commercial projects, hosting a sim isn't a non-commercial project.

Its the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine.

Or we would, if we weren't Ruthed.

Raise prices, people scream. Lower prices, people scream.

This "massive" change is 2 months tier for islands.

Seemed to be the big topic of converasation at Zero Linden's office hours yesterday. Specifically, how to set up "addresses" for people to log into all them grids.

It is all preperation for the "Seccond Comming" of Cory Linden now that the CEO spot is vacant

A persistent confusion ...

LL needs to solve the problem of interfacing to other grids regardless of whether they open source the servers. In the case of IBM, the servers are running the same code as SL servers. In the case of OpenLife or Project Wonderland, the code will be different. But the problems of addressing, firewalling, universal identification and asset tracking need to be solved regardless.

I think LL is tweaking their pricing model in response to several things:

> Their costs have actually decreased with scale, and they do not want to be accused of profiteering

> Competition is becoming real, and island pricing has long been talked about as absurdly expensive

> They want better resident retention ... lower entry prices into land may help; certainly LL has been told by many residents that they did not buy land because it was too expensive.

and other reasons that I don't know. I don't see this as indicative of any major change in direction in the works.
.

Isn't having a customer pay for something and then not delivering considered profiteering? If so, LL is guilty of it every time I can't log on or can't tp or lose inventory or can't make a transaction...

It's actually called Project Wonderland?

Mari

Zee actually said the exact opposite (relative cost increased with SL's growth) during the whole VAT debacle.

(Edited since I got the context slightly wrong, he said the growth of SL necessitated the private sim tier increase... see transcripted quote below)

shady that.

Found it .

That last sentence never really made sense to me... unless LL's business model is upside down, growth should be making them more financially viable, not *less*.

LL want numbers signed up.
They want big concurrency.
They want it so badly that they prefer to cripple SL functions at peak times for a few weeks rather than close any gates on potential live users.


Lowering the cost of entry to island and mainland ownership can help to get more people to buy in to SL.


It appears that they are putting more poke into the database server cluster.
Hopefully they are putting more poke into the internal network.
It is clear that without that investment, SL would be incapable of supporting even current numbers.


I don't think any move to Open Source the server code - to interlink with SL - is on the cards in the short term or even near term.
There is a massive problem with trust on inventory assets and financial transactions.
Forget about hosting your own *SL* sim.

The costs of the racks of sim servers have decreased with scale.
The cost of bandwidth has increased.

SL is bandwidth and database centric.
It is not sim-server centric.

What Elex said. Although it may not feel like a mere tweak to you Joy. They have to do what's best for their business in this ever changing MMO universe. I think they know what they're doing more than we usually give them credit.

The new land store is planned to provide automatic delivery of new sims, thereby cutting down on the manpower required on these transactions, and thus cut costs. Or so thinks me.

My guess it's market forces - RL recession looming plus Open Souce SL clones getting going, including the free downloadable standalone sims.

Anyway, much cheaper islands is surely a good thing as it will encourage more people to buy them.

+1 Makes sense to me - They have lowered their set-up costs and they are passing that along - LL makes money on maintenance fees - NOT setup - get more people paying 3600.00 a year

My guess is that LL's endgame has absolutely nothing to do with resident business models or ways residents have chosen to use the platform. I frankly think they don't really care if they put the entire land flipper sector out of business, nor do they care if they put a bunch of rental businesses out. New businesses will spring up in their place as a response to changes in the market. Markets are constantly changing and any business that can't adapt to changes will wither on the vine.

I think anyone who is convinced that any move LL makes is "out to ruin them" is seriously overestimating their impact on the platform.

/me does a quick Google.... Yep. Sun Micro is one of the companies driving it... So I don't think it's connected... I don't think they even know. (o.o)

I think that's bang on the mark.
The Real World and the Second World do not owe us a living.

Maybe they should change the slogan from "Your world, your imagination" to "Caveat emptor: Let the buyer beware."