Could the changes be because..

I remember seeing a lot of posts on the older forums along these lines:

"How am I supposed to keep my beautiful/interactive/interesting build up when the costs keep rising and the incentives keep falling, and the build doesn't directly make money?"

Now, this always struck me as a good point. But while I was thinking about the recent changes, I was suddenly terrified at a possible implication. Do people believe it's possible than, when they saw posts like that, LL were actually reading this as:

"This person's current SL business is unwilling to pay the costs to support activities other than their direct sales; presumably publicity usage has proved ineffective or bad value for them."

Burger King and McDonalds have "games" and "fun" sections on their website, which presumably cost them money to host, update, and have programmed. Were LL counting on resident businesses to provide this sort of thing too - and when they didn't, they decided to bring Burger King in?

(And yes, I know that a number of businesses do provide interesting areas and builds as well - Phobos, Devils Moon and Nakama spring to mind - but the majority from what I've seen don't, because only the most successful can afford to.)

An interesting question.

From my own standpoint, it's more "How am I supposed to make new beautiful/interactive/interesting builds when my costs are higher per month than any existing builds?"

Case in point. On Wailele Isle, I have about 20 residential parcels for sale. I also have a beautiful water park, with a swimming pool and water slides. I have a sunken ship people can have fun swimming around. I have observation stations that people can go to so they can watch the sun rise or set, with a fantastic view. I have sections of land set aside to allow for beautiful, natural terraforned areas, which are not suitable for building on, but which improve the view for the parcels around them. I have close to 1/3 of the sim in 'public lands' like this, for the benefit of the residents and visitors of the sim. Aside from the 20 resident parcels, the only way any of the rest makes any money at all is when people make a voluntary donation to a couple of 'tip jars' that are in the public areas. The sim is designed and balanced so that under the existing pricing structure, we can offer a competitive price versus mainland sales, and at 75% or the parcels being sold we will break even on the initial investment and start to make a small profit.

Under the new pricing scheme, if I were to try to do this sim today, I would have to either eliminate most of the public areas, making them into more resident parcels that could be sold; or I would have to charge for access to the water park; or I would have to increase land purchase prices and monthly maintenance to levels 35% higher for purchase and 50% higher for maintanance than land on the mainland sells for, amking the island non-competitive.

Now, Wailele is a beautiful place, and we offer a lot of intangible benefits like beautiful views, and strict zoning to protect your view and to excude laggy clubs. But someone who just reads a land for sale ad may never look into it far enough to see those aspects. They just see land that is priced higher per M2, and they move on.

McDonalds and Burger King and similar corporate sites use those games and contests as advertising, to lure you to their site, and to gain 'brand loyalty'. They write off the expense as an advertising budget line item. My free water park on Wailele is much like that. It's a benefit that costs us money to offer, but which we feel makes people more likely to want to live on our island. But it's only possible to offer that benefit because the monthly maintenance and the land sales for the 20 residential parcels supports the public areas. Steeply increase the maintenance costs, and some more revenue has to come from somewhere.

What really bothers ME is that McDonalds and Burger King (or IBM, Sun, Reuters, and Nissan) get added priviledges that base users are told are impossible. Cheif among these being the "custom last name" *WE* can't buy them.. because there's no press in it for SL.. but Reuters and whomever else can get it just for being a "big name" in RL.

I'd be willing to bet that these "major corporations" are getting price bonuses, no teir, or some other incentives to come to SL and stay.

But I don't see these corporate sims ADDING to SL in any way. I see them coming in, building large "conference sims" and office buildings (adverttising billboards).. and then flooding the market with freebies, driving down market demand for cars and other goods of that nature.

Those are good examples Ceera & Winter. Thank you. Lets see what Revlon does to skin sales and Abercrombie & Fitch do to clothiers...

One of the things that staggers my mind is that a lot of us SL artists-- many of us working for pennies on the dollar & footing LL's bill with our tier-- are at once the ones who the Lindens will use to show off to try to attract the big companies into SL and on the other hand will also be the ones squeezed out of the market with the price hikes. I can't compete with the deep pockets of some of these corporations. I am confident even folks like Anshe can't either.

I think most of us are swift enough to realize that eventually the hikes will hit mainland tier as well, just "not at this time" as was so carefully worded. That just tells me LL hasn't worked out all the particulars yet, considering their track record.

Coming soon to a sim near you-- 100m tall, spining, chat-spamming, poorly-textured, shiny, lit, particle-spewing Golden Arches. But hey-- their rentals are 25% less than in the artsy sims...

Argh.

I think this underscores the belief that SL needs to have a peer to peer option: a smaller server that we can run at home for a few friends and that allows us to host the static content on a web server... anyone who's set up an Unreal server knows exactly what I'm talking about.

If someone DOES create a VR system that can be hosted on a home cable line (in conjunction with web hosting for content), it will simply destroy SL.

at this point, it's actually cheaper to rent a 1.5MB dedicated line than it is to own a private island, and it's certainly possible to build a VR system that would host plenty of people on that 1.5MB connection.