Actual Islands Lost so Far/Economic impact

Slightly faster losses of islands the last three days compared to earlier average.

Updated with today's figures. Total islands lost so far = 921, or 3.45% of peak island count of 26,665 on Oct 29th. Rate of loss = 5.4% per month based on losses so far. At this rate 44% of islands will have been lost by Jul 1, 2009, when the final price increase takes effect.

As I understand it, LL was/is losing money on the OpenSpace sims - perhaps around $50 per month per OS in operating costs, so.... the more OS sims that close down, the more money they are saving. They said that it was costing twice as much as they expected so I am surprised they didn't ask $150 instead of $125 tier. If they lost all of the OS's at the current tier, it is to their advantage...

Just for the sake of discussion:

In and of itself, this would be a given. However, it's mitigated by the influx of new "citizens". What do those figures look like? Anybody know? How about "returnees"? Any idea? Anyone?

Eventually true if the number of new citizens and returnees isn't great enough to offset the number who have left. With less businesses, new "citizens" may fill the void (if it ever comes to pass) by creating new businesses.

Again, true as far as it goes. Again what actually happens will depend upon the net population change in SL . . . and the ability of new citizens to fill any void that starts to develop in the economy.

Things, I suspect, won't be that simple. This kind of reminds me of the "domino theory" that was used to stir up anti-communist sentiment a few decades ago. (I know it's not the same; but "death spiral" theories, no matter what they are, tend to remind me of this)

Let's hope LL sees the error in their most recent decisions and makes a further revision that helps rather than continues to agitate the current situation for those who've been hit hard.

Well, since OS announcement I've has a lot of new people asking for mainland shop rentals and rented all my stores out at higher prices, and most of my recent tennants came from shopping malls etc on OS sims. 2 even had the sim dissappear overnight on them without warning, telling me the people running some of these places don't give a cr*p about their income source or reputation.
And I'm only a small fry mainland "baron" wonder what the big boys are seeing?
In a lot of ways condensing the world is going to be better for sales. The less yellow on the map the better.
LL have handled this badly, from he start when they bumped up the prim count. But it has brought in a 3rd sim choice which is a good thing. Now if only they could join sims in a server to make 512x512 sims it would be better yet.
There were people abusing them, you won't see many of them admiting that of course.

So if you are a resident on a an abandoned sim, what happens, does the sim and your content literally disappear, does your stuff get returned to inventory, what happens?

Send in a ticket to LL and request that they respawn the island so you can recover your stuff.

Wow, you really think it costs more than $1,200 (16x75) per month per server rack to maintain the openspace sims? I don't think we'd have an Internet if that were the case. It might cost them more than they were expecting (in infrastructure and support costs), but they weren't losing money. (If they were, they had much more serious internal problems than mere openspace abuse.)

Ive heard that LL is sympathetic in these cases as well as long as you do it quickly. Its just a shame the landlords are not more honest and upfront with their customers.

um, it didn't happen to me

I just wondered if that's what happens, so, is that what happens when a sim is abandoned, people living on lose all their stuff?

Yes, everything on the sim is deleted.

That's why it's important to get in touch with your landlord

What I don't understand, is why are people abandoning their OS sims already ? Surely you might as well wait until your first billing date after Jan 1st, because that's when you will be charged.

Which leads me to beleive that the number of abandoned OS sims right now is just the tip of the iceberg. The majority of them will be abandoned late december/early jan.

And I agree with Ann, the biggest harm done isn't financial. It's the destruction of peoples dreams, those who spent time, money and creativity in building their OS, as well as those who visited such places. This is hugely demotivating for everyone, even those who are not directly impacted.

Only thing I can think of is that many estates are badly run and losing money anyway so this is just the final nail in the coffin. If they're losing money now there's absolutely no hope of making anything in a few months so might as well shut the whole thing down.

If you do not run it for profit, there is little point in working on something you know you're going to delete come January. It is simply a waste of effort and money to keep it alive for the next two months. That is at least one explanation for abandoning them now.
But yes, I too think the bulk of conversions and abandoned sims is yet to come.

Some people (I know some of those) came to the decision that they don't want to send one single more dollar to a backstabbing company like LL, and therefor they gave up immediately.

A company that has money problems stops recuriting and looks at laying staff off,

Linden are not laying staff off and are actively recuriting staff.

The share holders would not allow a company to make a stab in the dark call regarding price rises, the CEO knows that all price rises will have been carefully considered and models ran to determine the optimum price level.

RL economies are shrinking thus why we are looking at a world wide recession, its only natural SL economy will shrink as well

After reading this, I've ascertained that the original post is a longwinded way of saying the author doesn't know, and can't know, and thusly, has said nothing.

We had an ocean sim just used for that and as you say it was hardly worth putting anymore money into it when we would have got rid of it anyways. Saved us 150 USD

Because the sim itself is a creation, as well as the objects on it.

Having already spent many hundreds of hours working on it, we didn't have the inclination to do any more work on it. Best to just up-sticks and get on with whatever the next chapter brings...



Exactly, and this answers the first part of your post

Zee Linden gave some hard numbers on island count, and some indication that a lot of the recent change was conversions of four open spaces to full islands. So I redid my economics in the original post.

The short version is if the total number of islands drops around 2750 by Jan 1st, or around 5200 by next July, then Linden Labs takes in less total money. The reduced number of islands paying tier would be more than the price increases.

That covers the *income* side of things. They will save an unknown amount by shutting down server boxes, lower network/database loads, etc., for which we have no useful information.


Given that they have already lost 1091 islands in three weeks, they are well on the way to losing 2750 by Jan 1st.

I think Daniel is right. I have deleted one of my Open Space sims already because I do not want to pay the Lindens anymore than I have to.

The second one will go before July - by then I will have either moved its essential contents to my main island, or have left SL.

A 66% price rise is not reasonable and I no longer trust them. How do I know they will not double the tier on my main island etc?

And keep in mind a lot of people may have less than 4 OS, and cannot afford to both spend 250 to 750 dollars to convert the OS to a full island AND the jump of 75 bucks to 300 bucks a month in tier cost to keep that converted island. Not now with major layoffs, and the start of the Christmas season. LL is going to see abandoned OS, and will have severely burned the very people who were committed to long term money input into their product. Sure they could get twenty lookie loos for every person they lose due to the OS backstab... and they will be exactly that, people who come in, look around, and even those who stick around will be less likely to buy land or premium memberships. LL is burning it's premium paying customer base, and this will affect how new customers will spend as well.

Bliss

One problem with part of this approach is that it does not take into account the number of people eliminating Open Sims because they are ready to, and not as a result of the price change. It also does not take into account the number of people that eliminate their Open Sim and go to the Mainland...and not just as a renter (well, we all are basically renting space whether we say we own it or not).

Perhaps we're unique, but I tend not to think so. We have one full prim island with an attached Open Sim. Initially, we thought we would surround the full prim island. Our intent was not to rent or have much on the Open Sims but to have some additional water nearby that we could do a few things with.

We have changed direction on what we want to do in SL over this next year. Not because of the pricing policy but because we also wanted to have have some Mainland and do some other things. The net effect, we may decide to eliminate the Open Sim before January, especially because it becomes redundant for our purposes. The decision really does not have anything to do with the pricing policy, it's just what we want to do over the next year.

Of course there are such people - but they were there in october already, too. Still LL added more than 1,000 regions in october.

BTW, looking at income loss for LL because of less regions being around is only half of the package. We can't just compare todays region number to the number from oct 31st - we have to compare to the region number that *would* be here today without LLs street robbery. Today is nov 19th, calculating with the same growth rate as in october, today there should be some 650 *more* regions online than on oct 31st. So the real loss isn't the 965 regions less today than on oct 31st, it is more in the range of 1,500-1,600 regions.

They actually lost more than -1105 islands so far this month as of Nov. 21 when you take into the account that they could have added 1045 islands (in Oct) in their projected trend.

In other words, instead of gaining 35 islands/day, they are losing 50 islands/day, a net loss of 85 islands/day!

It's irrelevant low for LL. Given that I can buy similar server hosting in the open market including full service for 100$/month they still make a lot of money. Four Openspaces share one server and that currently still goes for 75$x4 = 300$. 5$ more than they charge for the same platform in a single island configuration. Both still a rip off at a nice 200% margin for LL. And they can not get their mouth full. Greed is a harmless word in this context.