Sims too expensive?

Ah, one more thing to get off my mind...the price of Sims. I understand that a Sim is ran off a server, and that costs money. But...I believe the price is just outrageous. You pay atleast $1000 to start the sim up, and then an additional $175 a month...in 1 year alone you are dropping $3100 for one piece of land. And thats only if you use that one piece. There are many people that have amazing ideas for things to do with a Sim, but cant because of the ridiculous price of one. I propose an idea...

Let's make it one way or another. You either pay straight out for a sim, and don't pay for it again, or you pay a monthly fee. And lower the prices from that. The game is about the people, not the money. I know many people that run modded servers of full games (but I wont say who or what kind so I am within legal rights) and they paid under $300 for what they use as the server. If you can run a whole game off a server, a sim shouldn't be much different.

The fact is that even though people are getting rich off SL Real Estate, but for those that come and just want to enjoy the game, its very hard to. A tiny piece of land that would rival to a living space in downtown chicago (the bad areas) costs almost the same as a full months subscription to another game.

Having the prices as expensive as they are seems to limit the freedoms of the game. Only those with alot of money on a continuous income seem to easily be able to pay for a sim. And these low prim sims are still a joke...less than 2000 prims for a price that you could buy a huge chunk of land for, and still get more prims...

So, lets see lower prices...lets see those people that have the dream of running a sim do what they want...that way, the game can be more enjoyable for those of us who can't invest so much into a program/game like SL. Bring down the insane price of sims, and add to the enjoyment of the game.

YOu could just rent...

At $300 for a full server per month...thats still ALOT of money.

I agree with you eric i've been complaining about this since i came to SL. I would love to have my own sim but with the current pricing i will never have that. Instead all i can do is be hired to admin already existing ones... The prices do get rediculis. It starts out fine at first. 512m being 1k Linden, 9000m being around 50k, but somewhere after that it just goes nuts... I know those void sims are cheaper but i think you gota already own a real sim to get one. :/

Im late lol. (Was doing a search for something and found this thread)


I do think they are expensive, and a big risk at first (as 1,250 USD isnt pocket money to many)


Also to clarify, its actually 195 a month, not 175. So depending on any profit you make off your sim (IF you make profit)..you are struggling to gain back the 1250 WHILE paying almost 200 a month.


I think they could stand to drop the intial "set up fee"..... If they did im sure more would look into getting an island of their own. I guess islands are just for people who either have the money and use it for fun, or have a stable "business" to where they can both afford the 1250, and make tier each month.


and yes, the open void sims can only be attached to a pre-existing sim.

It’s a balancing act for LL. If your looking at just the server for the sim, then the price to set up plus tier is looking like a huge price. But dig deeper. The server has to run an OS, virus protection, have a rack to sit in, an network that’s very complex, electricity to run, heating/cooling, floor space, backup power, backup systems and so on. That’s is just the physical stuff. Add to that the costs of people servicing them, resolving issues, programming, etc., It all adds up and think what it takes to support 1575 + sims. The number of servers to support that, plus there are more that do the support services like the asset servers, web servers, domain controllers, etc.

Yep, for just a sim, its very pricy. But if you look at what it takes to support that sim past what is strictly in that sim, its likely making some nice incomes for those working but not some one you will see in a Fortune listing.

Just my $0.02

Sim startup cost : 1250 US Dollars.
Sim monthly cost : 195 US Dollars.

Yes, this is *very* expensive for a completely virtual asset.

That said, there is one simple reason why the price is so high : that 1250USD of land can be subdivided and sold to net 1500USD or more. Quite simply, I think it is economic forces at work, in that the price of sims was raised this high because there was demand for the land.

I suspect this might also be the reason the prices remain high.
If LL dropped the price to say 500 USD for a sim.... then TONNES of people would buy sims, and the amount of land on the market would skyrocket.... and the land market would collapse.

Now the price has been set this high (possibly to fuel LL's growth and progress to being 'in the black') it can't change quickly because to change it quickly would rock the land market and MANY land dealers would become very unhappy, very fast.

Or perhaps there is some technical reason why setting up a virtual server (sim) is so expensive. Or perhaps it has something to do with paying people to monitor them... I really don't know why it is that expensive.

Perhaps you should ask a question in SL answers..... "why are sims so expensive, given that they're virtual servers which are easy to set up, given that they probably run on standard rack hardware which takes little maintenance, and given that the number of ones you set up mean that you get quite considerable economies of scale? Surely the price of islands should over time be going down, not up?"

Well. Each sim gets a dedicated CPU, not its own dedicated machine. So other resources like hard-disk, RAM, etc, are shared with other existing sims. At least this is the way I understand it. Up to four CPU/Sims per device. That said, I do feel like the initial setup fee is high. But I think Angel is right... Its a balancing act. The same as why it costs you $100 USD to have a sim moved, or the name changed. If it wasn't cost-prohibitive everyone would do it all the time and LL wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand. There would be no consistency to the islands, things constantly changing or moving. People wouldn't know which way was up.
Setting prices where they are curbs that considerably.

There is, in fact, a freeze on new sims at this time because of a shortage of hardware to run it all on. So there must be an aweful lot of people with too much money in their pocket Just a little bit to consider.

Renting a Island is also unsure........rather buy..............

Then again there is Open space sims where you have groups of four on a cpu and only 185? prims. 195 per month and youabe to own a island to be allowed to buy......

If I recall correctly that 195 a month gets four "open space" sims.

I believe it's been said before here that when they first started doing islands, they offered a choice, of having an island be US$395 a month, or US$1350 startup and US$195 a month and people went for the second option.



AFAIK most islands I've seen are owned by groups of friends who've split the cost because when split, the land areas are cheaper than they are on mainland or on their own.

Even the islands named after "big names" (Bare Rose, Curious Kitties etc.) are often in fact split between friends; the friends get space in the store and get to trade under the name of the "big name", and the "big name" gets cheaper land and extra traffic.

But some businesses can go it alone.. for some the cost, around L$50000 a month, just isn't a big deal. (Insert Pareto argument here )

thats what i said

Check out pricing for co-locations.

SecondLife sims are like co-located servers. You first have to buy one. To go newegg or something and check out how much it costs to get a Dual Core Dual Processor Opteron, add around 8gb of ram to it, two decent sized SCSI drives and a SCSI controller, then figure out if it's cheaper than what LL is offering to purchase a server from them.

Then go out and look at how much it costs to co-locate a machine. You'll need a HUGE amount of bandwidth for a SL sim, mind you. Probably unmetered. The cheapest co-locations I can find are around $120/month and that's not even for high bandwidth or good datacenters.

Oh and then also, LL manages the server completely for you. Rackspace and many other "managed" hosting providers easily charge $300-$400/mo for managed hosting. Granted you don't pay the initial fee of the server itself, but it's roughly the same idea, you just end up paying for the dedicated box you're using through rental fees instead of all at once up front.

I think it's pretty reasonable. I hosted a NWN server for a few years. Cost me about $130/mo just for a very crappy server machine that really was just filled with desktop-class hardware (P4 3.0ghz hyperthreaded, 80gb IDE drive, 1gb ram). When I went to build a machine for it similar to what LL likely uses for their sim servers, the pricetag for it was around $2000.

Plus LL has to pay for things like datacenter space, which is growing VERY increasingly expensive. Even if they have their own datacenters, which they might, it's still expensive because you eventually run out of space. You can only have so many servers crammed into one building. By keeping the prices reasonably high, they keep a buffer in there where they won't totally crowd out their datacenter with user sims, so that they can expand the mainlands.


Hope that puts things into perspective.

its not like you are getting 'virtual fun' or seeing 'virtual images' or hosting 'virtual friends'... Its a hobby, or a business, RL, that just involves net based 3d stuff.. Its not more or less real than other hobbies honestly, and isn't really that much more expensive, see what a car-jock spends to pimp his ride a year and SL servers are a bargain.

LL has to buy the box, and thats the setup fee, and LL has to continually support/mantain/host/power/etc the box, and thats yer monthly fee. If they 'sold you one up front' and never charged again, they'd go broke in several years when that initial money rush went out and suddenly they couldn pay people's salaries. If they just charged per month (like say, a cable company does with its' boxes) you'd be gettin RIPPED OFF (like say, with a cable company)

Overall its not for everyone. If yer jus buying land to have fun, If you cannot justify $200 a month of your personal cash on what may be your main personal hobby, then you shouldn't buy a sim.

If yer tryin to start off a business and you can't afford $200 a month with it, and cannot budget for a time when you can, then you shouldn't buy a sim.

Its not like every single person in SL needs their own sim... a public sim routinely holds say 15 people on average (roughly averaging land sold in it and people hanging out in it) so if FAR MORE than 1 in every 15 people in SL owned a sim, chances are something would be very wrong. in fact if you really do the math its far less, say roughly 250,000 'active' accounts, and 3500 sims, thats only about one in every 60 on average, prolly one in every 200 if you discount a few top bulk land holders.

Have you seen the recent announcements? There's now a delay on new sim orders, and First Land is unavailable, because Linden Labs cannot keep up with the demand. They've run out of physical space at their colocation facilities. According to basic economics and the law of supply and demand, they should be raising their prices, not lowering them.

It may be too expensive for you, but apparently there's a great number of people who think these prices are a bargain.

What`s the Tier playing % of the total populus 5%

It'd be great if there were more options than buying/renting a small chunk of land or buying/renting an island. There are projects, like the Terminus project, that are really cool but don't need a lot of sims. Also see the recent thread about wilderness. One thing that really bothers me about SL is that there are very few open or empty spaces. Or large, well-designed, uncluttered places.

There must be many people with great ideas that require less prims and less hardware than a normal sim, who just can't afford it. What if LL gave us the option of buying cheaper land with less prims and a stricter limit on avatars, and stuck more of them on a machine. I'm sure it'd result in many more amazing, spacious places to visit.

It's all very well if people are snapping up sims, subdividing, and reselling for a profit, but what do you get out of that? More cluttered little lots full of really boring private houses and bright flashy abandoned malls. It doesn't make SL more exciting or attractive to new users. If LL is happy with that because they're making money and selling sims, they are taking a short view. We need more Svargas and Bonnydoones and Tusks and Terminuses.

They do offer those - "sparse sims" I think - and they run four to a processor instead of one. But LL have to sell them in blocks of four because if they add a processor, they add a processor and it costs them a certain amount.. unfortunately their supplier will not sell them a processor at 1/4 of the cost because they will only use it at 1/4 capacity. I think it's LL's usual strategy.. minimise their risks and create opportunities for in world business at the same time.



They're both parts of the same thing. Many users I've met find the idea of being able to build their own house or shop or something to be very interesting and exciting.

Hey thats what we've been trying to correct, we have now 3 fairly light usage sims next to the original ahern welcome, and slowly growing

I strongly suspect this is a "bubble" caused by the new ability to autonomously rent land on private islands.

And I am a bit worried about what could happen if it bursts..

Coonspiracy is growing a pretty open area on Noonkkot, and we're always happy to welcome new neighbors interested in the same kind of area.

Apparently you can't get them unless you already own a sim. They don't need to sell them in blocks of four ... just don't sell them all at once. If they opened them up to people who don't already own sims they'd probably get snapped up and there would be no worries about half-filled sparse sim servers. Even if there was an underutilized sparse server for a while, they'd be making SL a nicer place to be, which attacts more people, and earns them more money that way.




Yeah. I guess so. I think we just need more balance. It tires my eyes to travel around through all the clutter.

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is a company, not a non-profit organization. It reminds me of the complaints about the company I work for. Some say the price is too high, but we sell out regularly.

And at the risk of sounding snotty, all things aren't meant to be afforded by all people. If we could easily attain the things that were more expensive, we might not work as hard. Besides, it was also my understanding that even at these prices LL isn't making money hand over fist. So there would be no advantage to arbitrarily lower prices without regard to covering costs.

I think one of the main problems with simulators is that there is no longer much of a mechanism for sim owners to cope with the payments. Do we even get dwell anymore? Because dwell was a nice thing because it helped simulators that were set-up just to look pretty and be nice to hang-out in, and while it isn't a huge sum of money, it's SOMETHING to help with the cost. Currently lots of people have to really try hard to get vendors and renters into their simulators, which means that more and more of the sim is lost to do what YOU wanted to do with it.