EOTB: Linden Lab To Raise Premium Account Price, Lowering Linden Dollar Buy Fee, Sim Monthy Fees

 

Yesterday on Monday June 8, Linden Lab announced some price changes. Good news if you keep buying Lindens or own one or more sims. But if you're a Premium Resident, some bad news. 

 

First the bad news, which the Lab called the reason for "adding more value to paid membership plans." The cost of Premium will be going up from $11.99 USD a month to $12.99 a month. If you pay by the quarter or year, the price will be a little less. If you pay every three months, the price will be going up to $11.99 USD a month or $35.97 per quarter. If you pay by the year, the rate will be going up to $9.99 USD a month or $119.88 annually. There was some fine print at the bottom of the announcement saying that the option to pay quarterly is no longer available "for new purchases."

 

The last time Premium accounts went up in price was over seven years ago from $9.50 a month, in May 2019, which the Lab then called "the difficult decision to make our first Premium price increase in over a decade." Their language back then was more direct than the wording in Monday's announcement. 

 

The price increase is not immediate, but will take place thirty days after the announcement, on July 8, 2026.  

 

The costs for Plus and Premium Plus level accounts. $5.99 and $29.99 USD a month respectively, which were introduced after the previous price increase, are not changing.  

 

Not all of the news was bad. Linden Lab announced that the minimum fee to purchase Linden dollars would be going down from $1.49 USD to 49 cents. 

 

But, there was a catch. The Lab would announce the ceiling rate, the maximum buy fee, was going up from $14.99 USD to $29.99.  The benefit of making fewer purchases of more Linden dollars instead of more smaller ones is being reduced. 

 

The fee changes Linden Lab wanted to emphasize the most is what will likely affect the smallest number of residents (albeit so much of the Grid as we know it depends on them).  The price of maintaining a sim will be going down from $209 a month to $199 a month. Sims whose prim capacity has been expanded to 30,000 will drop in monthly maintenance from $239 USD to $209. For a sim with an education discount, the monthly rate to maintain it drops from $129 USD to $105. This is a decrease of almost a fifth. So good news for those paying for education areas. The setup fee of $349 USD will not change. 

 

Linden Lab would justify it's increase in Premium accounts by saying they were "adding more value to our plans. In the past month alone, we’ve added two valuable new benefits - exclusive early access to some of the hottest shopping events in Second Life and at least 12 exclusive gifts monthly, which is the largest collection of exclusive paid membership monthly gifts ever!" They also stated they were offering "Expanded access to Linden Homes, Premium customer support benefits, more subscriber-exclusive virtual gifts than ever before," and "New partnerships offering early access to some of Second Life’s hottest shopping events and experiences."

 

A thread opened in the official Second Life forums on the announcement.  While there was some praise for making land more affordable, most of the comments were grumbles about the greater cost for Premium accounts. "They're getting greedy again and want to milk Premium a little more if they can, or push more people to go for (Premium Plus)." "'Expanded access to Linden Homes' ... so what, in fact, what does that even mean?" "Given that just about everything in real life has gone up a lot in price in recent times, it's hardly surprising that LL has put its fees up."

 

To see the blog post in full, Click Here.

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Grid Statistics Show Slight Increase In Total Sims, Slight Drop in Private Sim Numbers

 

 With Second Life having recently turned 20 years old, one might wonder how have the sim numbers been lately? According to an article by Daniel Voyager, based on statistics from Tyche Shepard, there's been an overall increase in the number of sims since January. But the rate different kinds has been going up has been uneven.

 

According to the article, the number of private and Linden-owned sims combined, as of July 2, is 27,690. This is 31 sims higher than the figure of 27,659 on January 1. The growth was due in part to more Linden-owned sims, notably the ones in Bellisseria, from 9289 to 9360, an increase of 71. The number of private sims shrank a little from 18,370 to 18,330, a decrease of 40.

 

Of the numbers of people getting online, there's been a slight drop. In March, the concurrency averaged from a minimum of 28,000 to a maximum of 52,000. In July 2, it had gone to an average of a minimum of 27,000 to a maximum of 49,000. Daniel commented this was no reason for worry as this fit typical tends each year of fewer residents in the summertime, and more coming in for fall and winter. 

It was stated since the start of the year, 200,000 new accounts have been created. How many are alts and how many new people stayed is unknown.

 

Source: Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan

News and Commentary: Logins Slightly Down, Sim Numbers Slightly Up Over 2022

 

 During the Coronaviris/Covid-19 Pandemic, the number of people using Second Life rose. Linden Lab stated in April 2020 that signups had gone up sixty percent since it started. In June 2020, CEO Ebbe Altberg stated the number of active users, those who were logging in at least once a month, had gone up to 900,000, a one-eighth of an increase over the previous year. 

Since then, the Lab has been quiet on just how many are coming in and staying in. There has been some speculation that with the Pandemic over, people have been leaving once more. In an article by Daniel Voyager, he stated that the daily peak has gone down slightly, from 55,000 about a year ago to about 48 to 53,000 this month. Checking the Second Life Grid Survey, this was the case. 

So it seems some people are leaving, though it appears to be a smaller number than those who joined during the Pandemic. Some who came back are sticking around, at least for now.

Of the number of sims, things looked more encouraging according to Daniel. With the growth of Belisseria, it should be no surprise to most that the total number of sims has continued to go up. He reported the total number at 27,659. This is an increase of over 2000 from two years ago. What will surprise some is that the majority of these, at least from two years ago, were private sims, from 17,024 to 18,370. But it should be noted almost all this increase was in 2021. The number of private sims didn't change much in just 2022, an overall increase of thirty-eight. But the number of Linden-owned sims grew at almost the same number, 378 more in 2021 and 380 more in 2022. 

 

So the number of private sims is still growing, but it appears economic troubles such as inflation causing the prices of everything from food and energy to rise and cut back on the amount of cash available for entertainment is resulting in fewer people getting new ones. 

So what do things have in store over the course of 2023? Difficult to say. If inflation drops and the global economy avoids a recession, we may see a few more people logging in and more people getting private sims. But if we end up with 1979-1980 style "stagflation," the news over the next several months may have some sim closings.

Source: Daniel Voyager's Blog

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of The Day: "That First Step"

Taken at May 2016
 
By Bixyl Shuftan

 

News and Commentary: Second Life Revenue Reportedly Down By Half In Eight Years, Number of Sims Drops Below 24K

Some troubling news was posted on the SL Universe forums by Tyche Shepard, and passed on by Hamlet Au. In Tyche's private estate survey in January, she estimated that the revenue Linden Lab makes from Second Life sim tiers had dropped to just under three million US dollars a year, or 36 million a year. Hamlet Au when seeing this information calculated that as the Lab makes about 80% of it's money from Second Life through tier payments, the rest through premium accounts, Linden dollar purchases, and fees, their total income from the virtual world was about 50 million US dollars.

While that is a lot of money, consider that in 2009 Linden Lab's income was estimated to be about 100 million dollars. This represents a drop in income of fifty percent. The Lab is making only half now what they were eight years ago.

This drop in revenue can easily be seen as an explanation for certain actions Linden Lab has taken over the past year and a half, such as reducing the set-up fees for getting sims, lowering sim tiers for a time (in exchange for a fee), and increasing the prim capacity for sims. It's also a partial explanation for why Linden Lab is making a gamble with Sansar. They're not making the money they used to.

But according to Tyche's statistics from January 2, despite the moves Linden Lab has made, the overall slow decline of the number of sims in Second Life continued throughout 2016. In the first quarter of 2017, the total number of sims dropped below 24,000. Linden Lab may very well conclude Sansar is their sole chance for stopping their revenue slide. Hamlet's earlier observation that Sansar was starting to remind him more and more of the old Blue Mars virtual world, which after less than two years was pretty much on it's way out, is not exactly an encouraging sign.

While Sansar may not be "do or die" for Linden Lab as Hamlet also suggested, it's failure would be a huge blow as it would mean a significant investment in resources would get no return, and limit the Lab's options. In the short term, it might mean more tier reductions and more advantages for premium account members as Linden Lab takes more steps to try to stop the decline. In the long term if the decline continues, the Lab may decide to let some of it's members go in a "restructuring," reduce customer service, and other steps to reduce their overhead. And if that doesn't work, well, that may be best left unmentioned.

Sources: New World Notes, SL Universe, Second Life Grid Survey

Bixyl Shuftan

Number of Second Life Users Down to 800,000, But ...

Earlier this month, Backchannel Magazine wrote about the Creations for Parkinsons area, a article that Barbie Alchemi mentioned in a press release. The article gave it's population, or user base, estimated to be at 1.1 million in 2006. In 2013, Linden Lab claimed an active user base of one million. And today, Backchannel stated "An estimated 800,000 users are active on a monthly basis," saying they were told by Linden Lab. While there are a total of almost 50 million accounts according to Daniel Voyager's Second Life Statistic's page, it's not clear how many are alt accounts.

Eight hundred thousand seems small compared to Facebook, which Backchannel stated as having close to two billion users. World of Warcraft, which came around about the same time as Second Life has sometimes been used as a comparison as to how virtual reality hadn't quite caught on the same way as massive multiplayer online games, boasted a total of 100 million accounts (in 2014) with up to over 12 million active players. But it didn't last, and it's numbers of active players dropped to 5.5 million in late 2015 when it's owners announced they would no longer be publishing reports of active numbers. It's probably safe to assume it's dropped further.

Hamlet Au suggested recently in New World Notes that this lower number of active users may not be what it seems at first. Talking with Peter Gray (Pete Linden), he was told, "We've made a number of optimizations to our user acquisition efforts to get more qualified traffic ... As a result, though the total number of monthly actives has come down, the number of paying SL users has held steady."

In layman's terms, Pete Linden says the Lab has changed their advertising to get people more likely to stay and spend time and money in Second Life. Hamlet went on to say he's felt it's more active users numbered closer to 600,000 for some years, "So most likely, dropping from 1,000,000 to 800,000 reported users isn't so much a loss of actual people as a trimming of marketing fluff."

What do you the readers think? Have you noticed fewer people coming in, or has the number of those people leaving been replaced by new users coming in?

Sourcres: Blackchannel, Daniel Voyager, New World Notes

Bixyl Shuftan

Pokemon GO Numbers In Decline

Pokemon GO was the game of the summer. The number of users of the mobile ap augmented reality game skyrocketed since it's release on July 5th to close to 45 million in about two weeks. But that's as far as it's numbers got, and it late July and August was steadily getting smaller. More than 12 million have stopped playing, "Data from Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia," stated Luke Kawa in Bloomberg, "show that Pokemon Go's daily active users, downloads, engagement, and time spent on the app per day are all well off their peaks and on a downward trend."

So why the decline? Over the weeks there have been a number of cautionary stories in the news about careless Pokemon players getting into accidents or getting robbed. But the real reasons for the decline appear to be shortcomings in the game itself, not much you can do with critters once they're caught, no quests, no way for players to duel, the gameplay seemed to be centered on capturing "gyms" that were held by monsters that were of a level unrealistic to reach by casual players. There have also apparently been server issues that have been quite irritating to players.

Hamlet Au predicted that eventually the userbase will settle to a dedicated core of about fifteen to five million. Certainly not a bad number for a game, but he felt Pokemon GO's decline would have a negative impact on the augmented gaming market that it had earlier sparked interest in, To succeed in a truly massive way, an AR game needs to be linked with a massive, well-established brand that has a 'fantastic, invisible parallel world' premise well-integrated into its branding."

Kawa suggested that over the long term, the augmented reality market would remain smaller than the one for virtual worlds, citing one analyst, "The Google Trends data is already showing declining interest in augmented reality, whereas interest in virtual reality remains high."


Sources: New World Notes, Bloomberg, Yahoo, PC Mag, Arstechnica 

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye On The Blog: SL Go Drops Price To $9.95 a Month

Last month, Linden Lab and Onlive announced the launch of "SL Go," its new application which allows Second Life to be played on tablets, as well as enabling fast rezzing on older computers. Those trying it out liked it, but there was one problem: the price. At $3 US dollars an hour, most were saying they wouldn't use it if they had to pay that much, or do so only for emergencies.

A few days ago, Linden Lab announced the price was going down, a lot.

Since launching the beta of SL Go about a month ago, OnLive reports they’ve seen a very positive response to the Second Life® Viewer for Android™ that allows users to access Second Life over wifi or 4G LTE4G LTE on tablets and laptops. Today, OnLive has updated the SL Go beta with new pricing ...

Users had the choice of paying 1 US dollar an hour, or paying $9.95 a month for unlimited use. The 20 minute free trial remains. SL Go is also available in more countries, much more of Europe, plus Canada, Russia, Turkey, Cyprus, and Israel.

For the Linden blog post: Click Here

For the announcement by Onlive: Click Here

Jo Yardley also had a few things to say about the price cut ( link). There was also this thread in the official forums (link). The SL Universe forum thread began discussing the price drop here (link).

Second Life Statistics Show Continued Slow Decline

For some time, the total amount of privately held land in Second Life has been in a slow decline, and the most recent statistics from The Second Life Grid Survey show the trend continuing.

The latest numbers show the number of private sims to be 26,403. In the SL Universe forums, Tyche Shepherd stated this was a loss of 1568 since the start of the year, or 7.5%. While not as big a decline as last year's 2500, it's still not good news. Daniel Voyager estimated at this rate, the total would drop to about 24,000 in a year.

Hamlet Au had two things to say about this development. One was that the declining tier revenue was being partially made up by Blocksworld and other aps owned by Linden Lab outside Second Life. Should tier continue to fall, the Lab will depend more on it as a source of revenue. The second was a reminder to readers not to expect tier rates to fall, and that was no solution to Second Life's shrinking land area. If for no other reason most virtual property was in the hands of a handful of land barons, whom are doing fairly well. A drop in tier, Hamlet felt, would just mean a severe drop in revenue from Second Life. To stop Second Life from shrinking, Hamlet argued, the Lab needs to find a way for it to attract more new users. Hamlet got a number of suggestions from readers about how the lab could, though they were skeptical about the Lab's willingness, and competence to do so.


So can Second Life turn around, or will the slow shrinkage continue?

Source: Second Life Grid Survey

Bixyl Shuftan

News & Commentary: Second Life's Declining Sim Numbers

Last week, Daniel Voyager published some statistics from the Second Life Grid Survey. The results were disappointing, if not disturbing. The number of places across the Grid is dropping, the number over the past year having fallen over 11 percent, and residents not staying inworld as long. So why is this happening and what can be done about it? There's been a few opinions on the issue.

Read more in Extra.