Crap Mariner has a good blog post about Circle Brooms Laurel Arts Isle succumbing to the tier conundrum and having to close down. What’s good about Crap’s post is that it delves into why places are special for people.

Daniel Voyager on the other hand has a post about The Cartoonimals sim not closing down after it was purchased by Ima Flanagan.

Hamlet Au, in his disappointingly named Sim Deathwatch series has recently been talking about the International Space Flight Museum Sim closing down, but now being saved, for a while at least, which you can read about here. Betterverse Non profits has more information on this, in this blog post, which links to the International Space Flight Museum’s official blog, where there’s a post on the subject, and where they point to how you can help to fund them via donations.

Prior to this we had news that Bryn Oh’s Immersiva was closing, but a crowdfunder on indiegogo appears to have saved that for now. All of these issues highlight the problems of keeping experiences alive in Second Life, but the big issue, the issue that needs to be addressed by Linden Lab, is that of Tier.

There is one big problem with calls for Linden Lab to lower tier, that is that they need to find other revenue streams before they do that and I see no signs so far that new revenue streams are being introduced. I have sympathy with Linden Lab here and some would argue that the sheer number of sims still on the grid is evidence that users will bear the costs of tier, it’s a rather decent argument but in the long term, it’s one that creaks at the foundations, tier simply has to come down.

Linden Lab’s recent developments with Pathfinding, which will help to improve the usability of NPC’s and help people create better experiences for people, will be neutered due to tier costs, a game sim doesn’t generate money like a store does, but then we come to the issue of stores inworld anyway, the marketplace and the soon to be delivered, direct delivery, make having an inworld store less of a necessity, with a shop link in the viewer it’s silly of merchants not to have a marketplace presence, Linden Lab promote the marketplace very well, but at what cost?

Stores used to help to subsidise art sims, they certainly help to subsidise roleplaying sims, but if the traffic is going to the marketplace, that subsidy starts to fragment and those sims start to struggle to exist. This is a vicious circle because with less experiences to enjoy, Second Life becomes less appealing for a wider audience, the opportunity to attract new people looms large with new features being developed by Linden Lab, but tier prices undermine that appeal.

However, we come back to me having a lot of sympathy for Linden Lab here, it would be economic suicide for them to cut tier by a large chunk without developing new revenue streams, so what options do they have? Well one thing they might like to consider is charging people by the day for having a sim, rather than by the month. The pro-rata daily rate would be higher than for daily rate on the monthly plan, but if an art venue only wants to exhibit at certain times and is unusued for other parts of the month, put it into hibernation. This of course would mean work on Linden Lab’s part to enable this sort of billing and allowing users to shut their sims off from the world, but it’s something they should consider. This could work not just for arts venues, but for clubs too.

However this wouldn’t address the issue of roleplaying sims or art installations that want to be open 24/7, honestly, what can Linden Lab do to make tier more enticing so that these ventures can thrive? One idea I guess would be to make it easier for groups of people to be billed for a sim’s existence, there is currently no option for more than one person to pay the bills on a private sim, or maybe Linden Lab could go back to the idea of allowing people to donate their tier free allowance to private sims, this has been discussed, yes it would cut into Linden Lab’s profits, but it’s an option that allows people to contribute to the sim they love, without Linden Lab having to cut tier dramatically, I think this may be the way forward although long term, tier simply needs to come down.

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