Real estate (Second Life)
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Second Life, an online world owned by Linden Lab has been operating since 2003[1]. Both Linden Lab and Second Life's Residents make money from Second Life through the trading and use of virtual real estate.[2] Residents use the virtual real estate feature when they require permanent in-world storage of the content they have created or otherwise own.[citation needed]
| “ | How we resell our computing resources is using the proxy of virtual real estate. We sell land. So if you want more of our CPU horsepower, you need to buy more land. | ” |
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—Cory Ondrejka, [2] |
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[edit] Land Ownership
Premium members also have the ability to own land. Landowners pay no additional fees to Linden Lab if they own 512m2 or less. An owner of larger areas of land must pay an increasing additional fee (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from US$5 a month up to US$295 a month for an entire 65,536m2 of land or individual island.[3] [4]
[edit] Land sales
Linden Lab used to sell land in small 512m2 blocks (16 by 32 meters) through its First Land program, but that program has been discontinued. They still sell entire 16 acre (65,536m2) regions.
Residents also buy and sell land to other Residents, often hoping to make a profit by selling the plots of land at a price higher than the original purchase cost. This market can be affected by Acts of Linden.[citation needed]
[edit] First Land
The First Land program was used to reserve small blocks of land for first time land buyers, intending Residents to purchase their first parcel of land below the current market value.[5] This program also served as an incentive for new Residents with free accounts to upgrade to premium accounts. A Resident paid a fixed fee of L$1 per 1m2 for a 512m2 plot.[5] They paid no monthly "tier fees" on this land.
Typically, First Land plots were located on newly-added sims, although isolated parcels on old sims were sometimes resold as First Land after the previous owners abandoned them. These First Land plots are frequently consolidated into larger plots when the original owners sell them to other residents.[citation needed]
The First Land program was discontinued on February 20, 2007.[6] However, Residents who own no more than 512m2 are still exempt from tier charges.
[edit] Regions
- Regions put up for auction are usually accessible from the main continent (e.g. by crossing the simulator boundary) of Second Life.[citation needed]
- Regions purchased privately are not allowed to be accessible directly from the main continent of Second Life, multiple regions can be purchased and placed next to each other creating their own island or small continent.[citation needed]
The high land tier fees (US$295 a month) associated with owning a 16 acre region have resulted in many privately purchased simulators being focused solely on content that can return a profit, reducing the variety available.[citation needed] There are exceptions to this behavior, such as Svarga (an artificial eco system driven by LSL, created by Second Life Resident Laukosargas Svarog.[7]
A region can theoretically hold up to 100 users at a time,[8] but performance can severely degrade at these numbers, and factors such as the amount of prims and active scripts running on the server also factor into performance.
[edit] Openspaces
Whereas normal private islands run on their own dedicated CPU, the Openspace regions run four per CPU: this limits their performance. Each of the four is limited to only 1875 prims. Openspaces only ever share with other openspaces on a server. Openspaces must be anchored to a normal existing Island or be used in a series to create space between islands. In other words, they cannot be used to “float” space on their own.[9]
[edit] Issues and criticisms
[edit] Inter-resident disputes
There are sometimes issues in SL which would be resolved in the real world through the application of local zoning laws and regulations, such as limiting how close a building can be to the edge of a property.
With minor exceptions, Linden Lab does not place any zoning or content restrictions on what land owners can place on their property. This has resulted in a wide variety of architectural variations and buildings of different purposes being fitted into nearby spaces, sometimes resulting in conflict between neighbors. Also, some residents attempt to use all their available space, leading to buildings being placed right up against each other with no intervening access or spacing.
In extreme cases, "land griefing", "vandalism", or "graffiti" has occurred. Residents deliberately place obstructive or offensive content near to others. This has been leveraged on occasion as a low-level form of extortion, destroying the quality of the local view in an attempt to force neighbors to buy the offending parcel of land at greatly overpriced value.
Linden Lab carefully shies away from being involved in these disputes. Also, at this time, no Resident based way to resolve these disputes (such as mediation, courts, or combat) have evolved.
[edit] Budgeting of server resources
The amount of land a resident owns in a region determines how many objects they may place in the region and within what area they may be placed. However, other resources of the region server, such as CPU time and network bandwidth, are not budgeted in this way, creating problematic situations. A typical example is that a person may buy a large area of land in a particular region and build an area, only to have someone else buy a smaller area in the same region and use it to build a nightclub or other popular business. The popular area consumes all the region servers' CPU time and network connections, leading to the large landowner suffering greatly reduced performance on their land or even being unable to access it at all because all available connections to the region are taken up by patrons of the club.
[edit] Land cost
The cost for purchasing an entire private island sim is US$1,675 (not L$) to set up, and US$295 a month to maintain[4].
Sims on the mainland are auctioned off, and usually sell for around US$3,000. They also incur a monthly maintenance fee.
SL real estate is limited in terms of primitive count and parcel size for a contiguous parcel of land, the largest being 65,536m2 (a "sim"), which can contain up to 15,000 primitives.
[edit] Land hosting restrictions
A common criticism of the Second Life land system is that it is a closed network[citation needed]. Currently simulators are restricted in that only Linden Lab hosts the servers that Second Life land is hosted on.[citation needed] Many users wish for Linden Labs to open up the "grid" and allow privately owned servers to run the simulator programs, and be accessible from the grid.[citation needed]
Due to the way the Second Life world is currently designed, with a central secure asset server controlling all of the objects in Second Life, and the way the simulators and the asset server interact, hosting your own simulator is impossible unless a major redesign of the "grid" is implemented.[citation needed]
[edit] References
- ^ Parker, Sam (June 23, 2003). Second Life goes live. Yahoo!. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
- ^ a b Cory Ondrejka, Dr. James Purbrick. User Creation and Scripting in Second Life (WMV). Retrieved on 2006-12-08.
- ^ Land Pricing & Use Fees. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ a b Land: Islands. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ a b Linden, Jeska (November 18, 2006). How to Find and Purchase First Land. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-18.
- ^ Linden, Jack (February 20, 2008). First Land program to end. Linden Labs. Retrieved on 2007-21-07.
- ^ Zonk (May 31, 2006). Playing God in Second Life. Slashdot. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ simulator. SL History Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ Linden, Jack (September 21, 2006). Information about Openspaces (void regions). Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
