How do you pay for a sim?

I'm kinda curious to people's situations for those who are paying for a full sim tier

Is it usually groups that get together to shell out the bucks?

If you're an independent owner, how do you pay for something like this every month?
Do you pay via a burgeoning business? or out of your own pocket?

my activity of designer pay the bill for mine.

erm...

shoter... i sell things

/Some of this are folowing the thread title some are some extra. sorry aboutthat/


I know about sims where 4 people share the costs.. 1/4 of an own sim are some cheaper than same m2 are as a rent... I know about sims where one person pay it all for own fun... in a way a cheap hobby...

If you look at the well known huge brands in SL many has an own sim and the bussiens probably pay the sim price.. plus tier of course.. If I had a succesfull company I prob had one to.. but my EXAKT products are not so often used in SL.. (sob)

At an own sim (or mainland) you are alowed to have a busines runing.. In most of the Dreamland ones you are not allowd to have a business so at that part you cant have a busines running. But pay your tier..

Maybe I am wrong at some points maybe I am al correct..

I myself have sold my smal island.. in Dreamland this weekend... I have to much to do IRL... to take care of it... BUT i already miss it... The new owner will let it stay as i designed it... wow!!

With the knowledge I have today I had rented it for a slightly higher monthly tier.. = more freedom.. easier to leave easier to move...

And I havent loosed money in same way as I did.

Bying for a high price and now sold for lower... as the landlord seams to not work for making lands worth more... They of course do more money of the land are sold back to them (50% of the first price offered) so they can sell them again.. for the higher price...

My opnion in this case.. /Tina

Having a RW job helps

Of the two private sims I'm involved in, one is Neualtenburg, which charges land-use fees. (It's not exactly a rental due to the democratic setup of the city, but it is along those lines.)

The other is a group-project that is mostly supported by our collective shop activity.

I have found (by owning a sim and by chatting with others) that unless you sell most of your land or have a big mall to sell product, it is going to be hard to make your money back. The Developer Incentive is nice now so that if you get a lof of dwell, you get an added bonus. When I ran New Holstice as a Star Wars sim, I would see quite a return from dwell/DI. Of course DI/dwell will probably not be around much longer.

Now that I have rebuilt the sim into something (so far) less popular, I will have to see how things work out. In both runs, I am not selling a lot of land, only renting/selling small portions. So most of the cost is on me. This is good because then I claim complete emperor status (bwahaha). But it is bad because then I dump 200 bucks a month. But for me, it is worth it to provide a sim for the genres in which I am interested and have some fun. Also, I have usually had a couple people helping to pay tier thus far, so that helps.

Ok, I just realized my words are not that helpful. But I typed them all so they stay!

MM

Must be easy for some that can matematic rules and have clue how to use an exell sheet to tell how many Linden dolars you must get in each month to run a sim.. of your own.. so you get a zero cost. ( I am not close.. for sure not)

Then on top of this.. the startupcost of the sim.

That some one is not me))

I've got a sim coming quite soon; the landholders will cover its expenses (I hope).

Failing that, it will be underwritten by West Trade Imports until expenses are covered.

The initial purchase price was also generated from my in-world business.

Because that's the way I play the 'game' and secondly, because I would have no chance of justifying such an expense otherwise...

It's not very difficult: tier on a sim is $180-$195. Depending on the LindeX rate, that's about L$53000-L$55000 a month.

In other words, to pay tier on a sim from sales, you need to sell 3 items a day each costing L$500, or the equivalent.

With my Gloomy Murakami hat on I suggest that reaching that point if you're starting now is unlikely, given that most items that are fundamental enough to achieve that kind of popularity already exist, and in order to beat them you'd have to undercut them, which drives up the required popularity even more. So probably the market is going to move towards single, more expensive items.

It's all a niches market

With all due respect (and slightly off-topic, forgive me please) - I've discovered that there is very little price sensitivity in Second Life and a lot of desire for 'the best' in any given category.

I suspect that if anyone tackles the super-premium market in any niche, they will have a respectible fraction of it rapidly. Definitely requires skill though, as you have mentioned in the past.

If anything, marking an item as low cost seems to imply low value to customers.

And 'branding', as recently discovered with tulips, is far more powerful in Second Life than I had ever imagined in my wildest nightmares.

To run with this sort-of tangent, I myself have noticed that a lack of really high quality doesn't necessarily translate to a lack of sales. Granted, my experience is limited both in time and scope -- I've only been around a few months, and work in the clothing business primarily -- but I've seen some popular designers put out stuff that's... well, really kind of shoddy. Not horrible, but there are things like seams that don't line up well (or at all) and poorly done photosourcing. And these designers still sell plenty of stuff. There may be a market for ultra high quality stuff, but it seems like there's also a significant portion of the (female, clothes-buying) populace that is willing to overlook a number of flaws if something looks cool.

Some seam problems could be Av based. Seams match up on the designer's Av, but not on the customers. The templates, even Chip's lovely ones, are still not "one size fits all".

Nim

Huh. I'd always assumed that the grid on the templates would always line up, even if the distortions in between the intersections varied from avatar to avatar. Good to know!

I believe I have seen close to every situation you can imagine,
I started SL renting a nice little house, no access to Music or Video so I bought some land
then ran out of prims, buy more land got more prims and everythig is great
Nice neighbors beautiful scenary and poof here come BIG BLue Signs. OK Lets move
Oh heck sell land at a loss ( which is ok cause they are still holding THAT land three months later which tier alone made up the diff in price) I moved to Dreamland which was nice and I had a big estate but I was restricted in what I could do, the number of people I had over how high I could build nobusiness and so on AND I had to BUY the land for 60K

Ok lets get an island,

1250 US out of pocket
195 a month tier

If you want to Make money u can divide it up into 30-40 1024 lots or whatever u like and rent it all out but for me, I just divided the land into 10 rental properties with nice buffers and a large public beach and a corner plot for me. The renters come close to paying tier but since Im not interested in making money so much it is ok and I find that I have some nice renters.
Now my friends and people need smaller properties of 2048 and 3072. I think if u want an island you need to have at least one other person to share the costs with or just get an island have fun with it. Much more tools than just owning land and as long as you are only concerned with Tier payments just lease out 2-4 estates to people The land will go fast since your renters have all the tools of owning land and mor imprtantly they dont have to BUY land or Sell it which cuts out the middleman. Im starting to see more and more of these island paradises pop up all over. They are very nice usually low lag and better yet, No Big Blue Signs woot

Sara

lots of interesting answers... any more?