Where will Mainland prices be in three weeks?

I agree that LL will charge a fee for server hookup, and it won't be small - however it will be a huge cost reduction for LL - which means more of that money will be available for other things - if they eventually divest themselves of the costs of server upkeep and community maintenence, and spin that out to estates. I believe that LL had to hike the rates because they could not keep up with the growth in private island orders last year, and not for the reason stated that the islands were underpriced - the hardware itself was not - it's infact a lot more than you would pay for an equivalent game server rental, exact hardware, colocated in a similar facility.

Let's throw out as a figure, 200 dollars a month for hookup to the grid with your own hardware, and LL will be completely divested of all the costs of that hardware. 200 a month split between four sims is a significant reduction in fees. 50 dollars a sim. Now you have to add your hardware and bandwidth fees on top of that - but I really see that 200 a month per sim as a not unrealistic figure for having your own sim run on private hardware from a private company.

Also, if LL goes this direction to open up the simulators to allow private hookup, that we'll see the ability to order your sim right away, with little to possibly no money down, directly from a game server rental company. Or even as far as to rent a whole server - one server is four sims - for prices that are significantly less than currently for private islands. That kind of liquidity in the market is surely going to have a downward effect on land sales. I think it will reduce costs for current large private land barons and usher more into the biz - yes I do. But I also see a lot more choice hitting the market, and people deciding that its just as easy to have a bit of a colocated server dealing with a real life company, with real life support - and that could put a downward pressure on mainland prices if we see the rise of more private continents with significant area, with privatised welcome area new resident spawn points and the like.

The costs of running servers seems to drop also.

Ten years ago I used to run Pongo.com, a then-popular Auction Web (early name of ebay) tutorial & image hosting site that used to cost me a bit over $125/month or so in hosting fees. Unfortunately I can't now recall our monthly bandwidth usage, just that it was fairly high as we were very picture intensive.

Now I'm running a fairly popular WoW hunter pet site (Petopia) that used 295.64 GB of bandwidth in July (probably close to what pongo.com used), and my cost has dropped to .. $7.77 a month.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if prices of land ownership + tier fees in SL drop over the next 2-4 years, maybe eventually to $25 startup and $25/month for your own island. Heck local ISPs might even offer a 512 plot as part of your normal connection fee, and like local ISP free 10MB mail/web packages, most of those might go unclaimed.

Not this year, not next year, but at some point.

I completely agree. Something that I keep stressing here - is that the money down is probably going to be the first thing to drop or fall away completely in a fairly severe fashion. That's what the land biz is all about in SL (at least on the mainland) - the "money down" to start renting your piece of 3d heaven When that falls on its face, and I believe its a matter of time that it *will* ... the land biz will become more of a "biz" for large established land barons with communities, and game server rental companies who will appear on the scene - and I think its only a matter of time before they do.

Well tier reductions would be better even if land purchase went up a bit. I seen so many good builds deleted because they can't pay form themselves by just looking good. And people refuse point blank to pay to use them.
If I had to pay $5L to enter a good club or RP sim I would and if people can't afford or are too tight to pay 1.8 cents US, that's their problem
I and I suspect many others could afford $2-3k to buy a sim tommorrow, but can't justify $3600 per year to keep it.
Imagine buying a block of land for $2k and having the local council charge you $3600 in land tax per year.

tier reduction would be nice indeed, but if one ownes a full sim, and does not get any revenue from it , they should rethink their strategy ?!



btw in 3 weeks : 7.5L$ or even lower !!