Or you know.. could always give people the option to run their own regions...

I 100% agree with this! I am giving up my land this weekend because it is just too expensive. While I love to keep it and redo different themes I just can not anymore.

SL feels like its dying because the cost of land vs the return of owning land is too high. Most people want land just for hobbies and to have fun with their communities, not to make money.

Lowering the cost of land would allow the communities to regrow and in the end they'd be able to profit off that, as it is right now the chokehold with sim costs is actively killing the RP community. So many people are leaving for other platforms because theres no longer any variety in RP sims, because no one wants to shell so much when it is not a money making endeavor.

If they outsourced to some server companies for some sims they could have more competitive pricing for lower costs.

I have to agree. While I doubt the Linden Lab "money comes first" mentality will even consider this request, one has to understand that sometimes "less is more".

Currently, the lowest cost private sim is $209 a month. This is sheer profiteering... and perhaps is why Second Life isn't growing and is even losing mainstream popularity. However if private region price were dropped to $95... how many more people might be able to afford sims. Might SL be more profitable in the long run?

Forgive my being blunt: Reader's Digest once called SL residents some of the "dumbest people on Earth" for paying the price of leasing a new car (at that time) on a piece of "virtual computer pixel grass". While they didn't see the whole picture... they weren't wrong either. Prices on SL are ludicrous.

COMPARE SL prices to the closest competition, Opensim. Professional, for-profit grids on Opensim typically charge $20 per region, or FOUR regions joined together (no sim ilines) for $40 a month. And those grids are making enough profit to pay their employees and more.

I am not suggesting that Linden Lab meet those low prices, but the company certainly could drop region costs to less-insane levels. $95 a month is plenty for a region. In truth, $49 a month is probably enough, but we know that's never going to happen. Even $95 a month is a pipe dream. I'm sorry to say this, but LL has long put $$$ ahead of customer welfare.

But in this case, by dropping prices to kind-of-reasonable levels, Linden Lab just may realize a growth surge like they've never experienced before. Sure, there will be an initial profit drop. But in a year, who knows?

This is REALLY something that should be considered. Server costs have never been lower. There is no reason users should still be charged over $200 a month for a region and frankly, users should consider if SL regions are really worth an expenditure of $2,400 a year. Seriously, that kind of money could buy a killer computer, every year.

Please Linden Lab, give this some serious consideration. Sometimes LESS IS MORE. Wal-Mart and Amazon didn't get where they are by charging ridiculously high prices.

I also have to say that Tier needs to be adjusted badly.

I have often wondered, and been envious of, people that have multiple sims. How on earth can they afford that?

As a content creator, i'm not sure i could ever justify the cost of a full region unless i was heavily monetizing it with a store or rentals..

Honestly the price of renting or buying a single region is not worthwhile to me otherwise. As badly as i want more square footage just to have more room to landscape or to escape the clutter of a rental sim, i'd rather just live in a skybox and stay off the ground to save costs as paying more for extra space adds very little other value to my SL aside from added LI capacity which i've learned to manage.

I strongly believe LL needs to rethink it's stand on putting everyone online on the same persistent, interconnected map at all times, a lot more could be done with the current server resources if they were allocated more intelligently instead of brute forcing everything in real-time as the current architecture does.

You have my vote to cap the height ceiling at 2k and quadruple the horizontal square footage, that would be a good start. c.c

oz stated before he left LL that aws costs more to operate than their data center did and he did not expect prices to change to much. was in one of the lab gab videos.

Yes please!!!! We need this!

Linden have reduced the cost to own a server, the owner of the server sets the land rental price, NOT Linden. btw premium cost is about $8 a month on a year sub, that is peanut money'. Also cloud is very costly so expect higher land prices if fully implemented. Linden are only doing testing to evaluate the cost.