Anshe has gotten out of the mainland and is waiting til prices simmer down. I know of a few others who have started selling expired rental land and not buying new mainland and going to islands. This may be an LL plan to let nature take its course and make the mainland for end users only — those who are rich enough to afford it and therefore keep the blight from it.

But I doubt they actually thought throught the spillover of the island price hikes to the mainland, or that within 30 days, it would turn into *this* — $3300 sims on the auction and $650 4096s inworld.

Watching the land musical chairs right now, I do see it slowing a bit. I see the flipping starting to slow and the end users starting to ebb. It may start climbing back down — unless, of course they double tier in February for the mainland where the tendency might then to be to hang on to tier if they grandfather it — and dump if they don’t.

No matter how you slice it, the reason for the increases is simply: charge what you can get for your product! Multiple millions invested, and of *course* the investors want a return. And they should get one.

Price hikes are sensible insofar as you are not eating your own future. Second Life is hot in the media, hot on the technology forefront, hot in terms of personal use. Kinda reminds me of the radio tech boom. It’s a technology that has its place but it isn’t going to be white-hot forever.

So what happens when the next-best-thing is *not* Second Life?

One look at history, and then the ten year, or often, even the five or two year track record of new technologies, and prices are going go in one direction only. Straight down.

So yes, I think land prices are a bubble market these days. Fueled by a price hike, fueled by uncertainty, and fueled by the stampede of new users. None of these can stick around for long.

Nobody *needs* virtual land, not yet. I see a direct tradeoff to the inflated prices – a selling of the grid’s future, as it were.

High prices being the driving force for one’s own competition, and a deeply corrosive factor on the long term customer base.

If the grid is no longer inexpensive, people are faced with a choice: Virtual dreams, or real dreams.

What would you choose?

I understand what you’re saying blaze, but I actually think they will indeed raise mainland tier in February 2007, just as Zee Linden has already indicated. They didn’t promise NOT to raise mainland tier. Indeed, islands will be bitching that they have to pay double tier and the mainland has half of what they have to pay, etc.

You’re premise assumes the old world, where the Lindens worried about what inworld business, especially on their carefully-watched “leaders’ board” did with each and every change to the grid. But now they don’t care about that. They have scads of new big businesses coming in buying up dozens of sims at a time. They don’t need to worry whether a few dozen of the main island renters are griping that they can’t make a buck when mainland is cheap because people buy mainland instead of renting from them on their nicer islands. They can afford to ignore them completely.

Furthermore, people coming in DO buy this overpriced stuff anyway, as they don’t know it is overpriced.

Not only will mainland tier rise, I suspect they’ll also get rid of the 10 percent tier bonus for mainland groups because they’ll say there just aren’t enough mainland groups really making use of the bonus in some “compelling way” (in their concept of compelling) to justify what is their “loss” (I view it as a legitimate bulk discount and legitimate incentive for the hardships of the mainland which chiefly consist of Linden-indulged blight, griefing, and lag.

With the plethora of 16m2 extortionist signs; club-thiefs who have a veto on your use of the sim and its FPS; and griefing people who even stand on Linden land to grief you from your land you just banned them from, anyone attempting to keep the mainland nice deserves a 10 percent bonus.

I think it’s also more than possible that the Lindens will *not* grandfather mainland tier. They’ll say it’s just too hard to figure out all the book-keeping on a million little pieces; they could do it with the islands because there aren’t as many owners and they own just one server — mainland tier can be spread across many sims.

This seems utterly outrageous, I know; yet it’s somehow my instinct that they’ll do it. They’ve long wanted to flatten tier, and they’ll make it so that people have more granulated tier, and maybe even pay LESS tier as individuals; they will then make it cost more to maintain more a sim.

The doubling of tier of islands was designed to shake loose land-flippers and unstable owners; for some reason having to do with deep-seated ideology, Philip is really very irritated by arbitrage and he only seems to want the most high-end content and larger buyers doing islands; the doubling of mainland tier will also be to force developers and landlords to move to islands.

Anshe is now completely gone from the mainland. Did you notice? I checked and double checked — she has 6 plots — 6! — listed on her website on the mainland, all on those double-priced bulk sims with the names like “Schwanson Schlegel”.

Her staff says they will buy more on the auctions but after the prices die down. Why lose your margins now in bidding wars with baby barons hope for the college break playing the auctions?

At the end of the day, theorizing that the Lindens are going to make more sims to keep mainland prices lower and make more first land for newbies, versus theorizing that they will make more islands for richbies, is all irrelevant. When they have more sims, they’ll make them into islands which sell better and for more money than mainland. And ultimately they care about whatever formula will give them *70 percent of their revenue* if you read Zee’s statements recently (sales and tier on land are 70 percent of the revenue).

So I think they won’t care what happens; they’ll just get what they can for islands and mainland — the absolute top price. They’ll do that because they’ll discover that they *can*.

They’re raising the prices of mainland so you can you still profitably rent out islands, even at the new tier.

This is how they avoid having to raise tier prices on the mainland.

Will it work? Stay tuned..

$1280 isn’t correct. The first 512 m2 in tier is *free*. So the Lindens get 0 tier off that sim. If you are going to start factoring in the price of a subscription, then you’d have to figure it in on other sims, too. At the end of the day, as I explained elsewhere, the sink they have to pay out in stipends, and the gift out of the economy of as much as $20,000 for resale of something that is free and for which they don’t get the tier, is in fact a loss.