The astounding virtual world Secondlife is in decline. The world itself, the islands of Secondlife are slowly disappearing
The current high tier costs are obviously too much to bare for the user base. Nearly 400 private sims lost in the last 2 weeks. That is a very large loss for such a short period of time. And we're going to see bigger and greater dips unless Linden lab addresses the over pricing of it's main product - virtual land.
Cloudparty a new virtual world on the horizon has made an interesting play with its low cost entry point for an island of your own at $14.99 USD and has the potential to gut Linden Lab's residential users/players from Secondlife. We could see massive losses of land and mass migration if good content creators set up in Cloudparty.
Within 12 months SL content creators could fill the Cloudparty Marketplace with an vast array of quality content to entice away Secondlife residential players and socialisers.
Right now Secondlife life is more reliant on the constant flow of content created by the virtual fashion industry and creators than they would like to admit. If these creators turn their attention to Cloudparty there will be nothing to stop a sudden and dramatic migration away from Secondlife.
I'm talking about the migration of content creators to Cloudparty. If creators go to Cloudparty, everyone will follow. It's not what Linden Lab are doing that keeps people in Secondlife, it's the content that the creator community develops that is maintaining interest in Secondlife.
Linden Lab are utterly and completely reliant on the creator community to keep creating and keep interest up, since they themselves appear to be doing nothing. Infact they are working on other projects and of course fighting the war on lag which they've been losing for 9 years.
The Lag is NOT the problem with Secondlife. It's the oppressive and onerous monthly tier costs that are driving customers away.
It's the failure to make Secondlife islands affordable that will be the death of Secondlife