SL Expansion, Is the End Near?

Any predictions? The coast lines on the new continent look relatively complete to me. There certainly is more land then there are residents to buy it at this point and I have to wonder about the man power requirement on the LL side of things.

The land market has actually held up fairly well considering the huge supply increase. A few more months of this though and the $1000 minimum bid for a sim won't have any takers when land prices fall below 4L per M. That may sound crazy, but it is all supply and demand and when your supply is increasing exponentially, the price has to plummet. On top of the excess of supply is the fact that buying any land creates a monthly fee, thus driving down the value even further.

If the cost of holding land as an investment is prohibitive (which it is already) then there is incentive to continue to dump land before tier comes due again. Any substantial amount of land will have to generate enough income to pay its tier and I would hazard a rough guess that barely a 1/3 (and probably a whole lot less) of the mainland generates enough income to support its own tier.

So is the end near?

Not even close ...

Add up all the surface area in SL - all of it - And you still don't have enoiugh land area to properly simulate a single large city in RL. Around the start or the year the entire land mass of SL was smaller than Easter Island.

They can expand the edges all they want. No reason to stop, as long as they have people willing to buy.

Ceera, I don't think he's referring the size of the world map

Noooooo. I was talking about the new continent. They could build a hundred new continents if they wanted. My point was that at some point, the supply gets to be so big that it isn't worth even taking the land for free since you have to pay the tier on it.

Wont Linden Lab only provide as much land as necessary?.

The population size will probably determine how much land they provide.

I'm under the impression that SL has reached a technical limit and can't really support more than 40000 residents. But this may change soon and the population may start to grow again. Or it may just be that there's only 40000 people that like roleplaying and building. But that's highly unlikely.

First off, I'll bet if some mainland land prices came down there wouldn't be nearly enough land to satisfy demand.

That's the resident answer, really, right there.


Second... in some places there is anything *but* too much land. I'll leave the details of that as an excercise for the studious reader... grins

Can't support 40,000 residents? Obviously you're not online when there's 36,000 residents....You're lucky if you can see 10m in front of you. *chuckles*

I doubt that Linden Labs is going to go and make giant land masses if there aren't the user base to "suck them up" It would be suicidal on their part to have more land than residents.

I wonder if the new viewer will allow us to go past 40,000

The new viewer is a step in the right direction.

The new viewer is a step in the right direction.

As for more land. As long as there are people willing to pay for the new land, it will continue to be auctioned. If at some point people slow down on the bidding then the land release will slow down in turn. But we are not at that point yet, nor are we close.

No it won't, the limit on what causes SL to start getting sluggish and TP's failing etc. is unrelated to the viewer. What large population does is hammer the backend database which is something that is sorted without a viewer update BUT is not an easy fix.

Hmm more likely if tier came down, who wants to own more than 1000m for personal use?
Maybe 4000m, but once you start paying $40US per month you have to start asking your self why?

Business it can make sense if you have enough sales to support it. Rentals perhaps, but there are only so many people looking for land, half the available land is for "sale" or rent.
I love to own a whole sim to landscape, I could whip out $1800US to buy ok, but how would I justify $295US per month? Hmm that's nearly my repayment on my RL house. Could certainly payoff a new car with that money if I wanted to.

What would you say to buying RL land if 65562m cost $486,000 to buy and was going to cost you $79650 each month on a "forever" loan agreement that you land might just cease to exist too some time in the next 5-10 years? Land seems cheap actually, the repayments/tier are what crush you. Hmm a 1024m block costs $6000 to buy yet will cost you $2700 per month as a premium member or if you owned island land the share of the tier is $1244 then add the landlords recovery of purchase outlay and profit.

Sale price of land is cheap but tier fees are way too high LL buy a server thingy for whatever charge someone $1800US for it recoup another $300US PER MONTH for it then reposses it when it's not kept finacial, and auction it for $4000USD

The prim ratio per meter is not enough for the average user obviously, and maybe this is good because it does limit lag, but when someone else sets up a grid with similar features and 10 times the prims & land for the same LL won't stand a chance, especially if they set up a road/rail system that works.

Good points Tegg,

Sure, wouldn't it be great if we each had our own sim to play with? Lets say I were to give you an entire sim for FREE...... but with a restriction that you couldn't sell it for one year. Would you want it? Would you be willing to pay LL over $2,000 real american dollars to keep it? The price of land is irrelevant if you plan to hold onto it in the long run. Its the tier that is the killer.

If you notice, it is the same 4 or 5 people that keep buying sims at auction. Eventually though, they aren't going to be able to sell anymore land because everyone that wants it will have bought it and no one will want to incur more tier.

I know this tier debate has raged here before, but my point is that we are going to run out of buyers at some point and I doubt there are hundreds of people out their willing to carry $195 US dollars a month in tier "just for fun"

Right now, the guys buying at auction for 2000$ or more are making a profit of 50 to 100$.... Thats a hell of a risk for $50.

I can only pray that prices drop like a rock. Me, I'd love to buy about 1/4 sim with good waterfront. In fact, it's my dream. But the prices right now? Impossible.

I thought maybe the new veiwer would streamline user requests and whatnot...but I am far from an expert in the area.

Oh well.

You seem to be assuming that the population of SL isn't going to grow.


Everything could change soon anyway. Linden Lab are planning on releasing the server code and then everybody may have the option of hosting their own sims on servers rented from some other hosting company. Although it will still cost you $200 per month, because that's the standard cost of a dedicated server. So you can't really escape the tier, and Second Life has been designed in such a way that it needs a powerful server to run a sim.

On the bright side, it may be possible to run a sim on your own machine if you have a multi-core CPU. But I doubt many residents will be able to join you in your sim because you wont have the bandwidth to feed them. As I'm sure you're aware, basic broadband connections have a very low upload rate.

Thats $75 a month in tier. You can easily rent that much space on an island for that much or less. Still, $75 a month is a lot of money. I am just not sure how many people will be willing to pay $75 a month.... forever.... until you either forfeit the land back to LL or try to sell it to someone else that will pay $75 a month. Even if the land was free, $75 a month is like another cable bill.

Some pretty good points there... I personally rent about 11,000m2 for personal use, but only because I rent from a very fantastic person who charges reasonable rates and is fastidious at keeping the lag on the rest of the island down. Of course, the single biggest reason that I rent so much is the atrocious prim/m2 ratio you mentioned. Without that, I certainly wouldn't need that much room to spend hours staring at teeny tiny prims.


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Do you really think SL will ever run out of buyers? I think it will be quite the opposite. SL is still in its infancy and it is only now starting to get more coverage in the media. I think what happens is that we, as residents, become so involved in the day to day operations of SL and all the issues that we forget that most people in real life haven't even heard of SL.

Remember how excited we were when we first started to realize the scope of possiblities SL offers? Well many more people will realize that too and will want in.

LL is setting the stage for a much larger world...even larger than you and I can imagine at this time. As far as competition--good luck catching up to what LL has done so far. Issues will be rectified eventually and that will make SL stronger and better.

Get in, hang on, and get ready for the ride of your life.

are we nearly there yet?

are we?

are we nearly there?

You've pretty much just described a well-maintained, privately managed continent.

And you are right about your conclusions, too.


My point was a little simpler. I think it's the one time cost-of-entry that's killing mainland land sales, not tier. People trying to recover their sim investment. Oops.

High tier has a slightly different effect. It heavily favours existing, known operators and harshly quashes anyone now getting into the land business, especially private sim land.

Even worse, with the glut of mainland, unless you are established you are fighting an incredible uphill battle.

I can't imagine the number of competitors that have been suppressed, or utterly stillborn due to the 15 Nov 2006 price hikes.

My reaction, as a known operator, was simple: if I open more sims, I'd simply have to charge more. I really wondered if I was 'done' in Dec 06. Turns out I wasn't done, not by a long shot, and demand is higher now than ever it has been. I quit advertising in the metaverse newspapers and the land forums - I had to. The last sim prebooked solid in a sneeze, and the next one up will do the same.

That's with conditions of high tier, an incredible mainland land glut, and some of the most consistently terrible grid performance of all time.

So... does that mean I'm a smart guy? No, because there was no way to predict the present that we see now from late 2005 (that I knew of). I think I'm just damn lucky to have an established brand, i.e. started when I did. Very lucky, insanely lucky.

That luck could turn on a dime, too... maybe a dirt cheap 'class six' server will come out that I can't get; maybe a competitor to the Company will open next week. Maybe I'll say something profoundly moronic in this forum post and scare everyone out.

So... peak concurrency, late 4Q2007, call it December... any takers?

I'll guess 50,000 with grid problems.

What do you guess? Open question to anyone.


Adapt or die, respond properly to a strong market - and be graceful should you fail.

I'll agree with the grid problems part

Hmm only trouble is other rollercoasters will be running soon not held back by 2005 hardware & software and mistakes. It sems to have levelled out there seem to be only so many people that can afford to own big here and they can only stay there as long as the non premiums keep renting their land. If a lot of the userbase suddely all shifts to a competitor over a month or 2 then land will drop, to nothing possibly and still be unsaleable.

Very possible.

Any competitor will have very good hindsight, that's for sure.

But also, this tragedy presumes a few things.

First, that the competition is competent. That's a big, big presumption.

Second, that they really do have an economic advantage. 2005 hardware, as any private island owner can tell you, has been paid for several times over. Also, bandwidth isn't cheap, no matter who you are.

Third, that the fickle wind of fate blows only one way. Any real business plan has contingency plans and a small war chest to back them up. Any real competitor will be met with a response, certainly.

At any rate: interesting times ahead.

Sorry say 2004 hardware then though I suspect some 2003 servers are still on the grid too

Competent competition? Megacorps have the experienced teams just itching for new projects like this, capitals not a problem either they could probablt start day 1 with a grid SL size if they wanted to, and set sim tier at half of what we pay per month. And would longer term residents here be itching to try a newer system with vehicles that work & real customer support from ground zero with the chance to really make some money or a name for ourselves, you betcha we would.
And the way Lindens handle running SL normally, how well do you think any "warchest" would implemented to cross swords with a real corporation? I suspect they would hastily implement new stuff & drop tier prices and dump more land on the grid. Probably screwing up the servers economy and remaining uncdecided userbase in a couple of months.

The grid is still a ghosttown now with 30k online, how will it be when we get back to a wonderfully lag reducing 10k ?