Sad to report more than 1000 private sims lost in the last 11 weeks. The losses seem to be slowing up a little but what's more alarming is the lack of interest and the low number of new sims coming online since July 2012. See graph below
There does seem to be a deep lack of energy and interest in Secondlife, even within the core community. Obviously the situation is that we have all been worn down by excessively high tier costs.
Current tier costs are a crime against an emerging technology. If it cost 300USD per month for a web site, there would be no Internet as we know it. In reality Secondlife has not properly been tried or tested as a mass market product as it has never been priced for real growth and success. It's only a niche product because of the high price.
Linden Lab are losing more and more money by not lowering tier costs and not believing in their outstanding product.
The fact that Linden Lab has not changed their land offerings (sim types) or lowered their prices in several years is the reason why we are seeing such losses and such poor concurrency.
We all hope that Secondlife on Steam will have a positive effect on concurrency and sim ownership but it really is a lost opportunity. Without lowering tier costs and offering new sim products, marketing Secondlife to Steam users is kind of crazy, a massive business error and probably a potential loss of millions of dollars and thousands of new sim owners.
Even in this gloomy atmosphere there is still a very passionate user base, still putting on events, creating new content, supporting the grid and community in a thousand different ways. Just a little back up from Linden Lab in the form of new cheaper land products could easily provoke new growth, new money for LL and a much needed boost to the SL community and economy.
Come on Linden Lab , Help us to help you !
Drop set up fees
Let anybody buy any land product without a full sim
Introduce some new sim types
Reduce tier costs
And we will SHOW YOU THE MONEY