Desperation Isle Estates (now about four years old) are shutting down all of their multi-tenant rental sims.
We are no longer going to be operating multi-tenant sims, and we will no longer host any public meeting places or commercial areas. We will continue to offer standalone homestead and full-prim sims to individual tenants until Linden Lab makes it so that’s no longer possible. Also, my business partner, Vivienne Schell, will continue to operate our skybox business, Desperation Isle Productions, for the known future.
Second Life has been a part of my real life for over five years now, and I will remain here for as long as the grid will have me. I’m very sorry to have to end the multi-tenant sim business and shut down my labor of love, New Desperation Isle- but the financial realities of Second Life in 2010 have made it impossible for us to sustain.
Full story here.
Tags: Desperation Isle Estates, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds, Vivienne Schell, Wildefire Walcott
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The newest guest-writer at my blog reports tons of for-rent land around her SL home and the number of parcels sitting vacant keeps rising. I’ve seen it on my road-trips, too.
Could it be that renters find mainland prices so cheap that they opt to buy a little plot and pay tier? I’m doing that now that our university sim is closing. I got the land to park my office and have a little sandbox for next to nothing, and $5 or $8 US monthly is the price of a mixed drink.
But not if you are unemployed.
I suspect there’s more economic desperation in SL than at Desperation Isle. I hope they do well and their business recovers with what may be a recovering economy globally. So many of my RL friends are unemployed or underemployed, however, that “normal” seems a long way off.
Crappy realities for those type of businesses given the large estate tier discounts of a select few and Linden Homes. I feel sorry for the ones that’ve been in business that long and this happens.
I feel this will, or already has, bite Linden Lab in the ass by doing long term damage via stifling competition for short term gains.
Supply and demand, and it’s not Linden Lab Mainland that shrinks. They dare not force people to relocate.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that the big money in SL land was made when the RL property business was in bubble mode.
I’ve been a renter on Desperation for almost a year now. Wildfire Walcott was one of the best landlords I ever encountered. If I can blame her with one thing, it is that there was NO communication and NO warning before the sale, and the new landlord setting a 24h deadline to renew the rent.
SL needs more landlords like Wildfire, and offer a sustainable business model for them.
When I started getting IMs from people who weren’t residents I wondered whether something had been published about the estate changes somewhere, and well, here it is.
Peter, what happened with your sim was an unfortunate communication mix-up. We had to move quickly because tier was due on that sim within 48 hours, but somehow the new owner managed to contact you folks before I did (MAN he works fast). I wanted to be the first one to explain things, I just had no idea how quickly he was going to act. I am sorry about that. I handled the second sim transfer a bit more gracefully.
Also, I’ve just posted some further thoughts about this whole thing on my personal (loooong neglected) blog, for anyone interested in the factors that led to our decision.
http://wildefirewalcott.blogspot.com/2010/12/further-thoughts-on-desperation-isle.html
join the club eh? sorry to hear about this
what is this land discount thing? i never heard of that when i had 19 sims . . .
The largest estate owners receive certain discounts in exchange for various sorts of contractual obligations, under the Lab’s Atlas program. In a sense it’s like a scaled tier system (of sorts) for the very largest non-mainland land-holders.
Which is completely ass backwards sounding to me since remove the abstractions, Linden Lab sells bandwidth and compute time like every other web host on the net.
Oh how crappy the web would be if the only option to host a web app was still either hundreds of dollars for a dedicated machine, or dirt cheap in a shared environment on such a machine.
For all the banter Linden Lab used to get, and still maybe does for “cloud computing”, it really doesn’t demonstrate the efficiencies of cloud computing as we know it everywhere else on the web very well (EC2, Heroku, etc.). At least not on the consumer end, where resource needs should be scaleable based on consumption along with prices.
If a business like Desperation Isles had the option to simply turn off a sim, scale down max concurrency users, prims or whatever else to mitigate costs, it and every other estate in Second Life would have a more flexible range of options other than pay 300 monthly or close a sim.
Little bit of gripe of mine because I find it difficult to see Linden Lab as anything other than a very, very antiquated web host when it comes to how they handle their tier offerings.