Autor: Bartholomew Gallacher

I’ve taken a look at the Land Auction page from Lindenlab today for closed auctions. Seems they’re adding eight new regions per day at the moment, most appear at the new continent in the east, I guess.

The average prize a new region is sold for is around 3.000 US$. Now 8 regions auctioned off per day makes 24.000 US$ income per day and for the tier-fees later 1.560 US$ safely per month. Not bad, he?

And all that for a dual CPU machine which can host two regions alone.

Well, and if you convert the price into land values and the owner wants to make some profit with the region, this means high land prices. Of course.

A region has 65.336 square meters. So, you can buy 270 L$ at the moment for 1 US-$. This means already that you need to take about 12 L$ per square meter only if you want to get this investment in. Now take the tier-fees into account, too, makes around 0.80 L$ per square meter in the first month. Let’s say if you want to sell the region without loss in the first month you need at least a prize from 13 L$ per square meter.

But many want to make big profits, so 13 L$ is not being seen so much on the regions, quite often you’re going to see higher prices. Well, that’s the reason still why land prices are high and not going down, soon, I suspect. Since it’s also LL main income source they’re going to milk the cow as long as its being possible and in the end we’re all paying the price for it. Well, all that want to own land on the mainland.

Well, and because of missing covenants at most mainland sims, the housing can be real terrible.

Well, seems the Lindens are clearing their backlog and delivering today (!) about 300 islands.

Let’s calculate a little. For normal users (non educational) reserving a region costs 1.675 US$ and the monthly maintenance fee for an island is 295 US$.

So alone on reserving costs 300 new arriving islands mean: 300 islands * 1.675 US$ = 502.500 US$ income for Lindenlabs. Of course not all of it profit, since they’re using these fees to pay the server hardware, plain and simple, but surely are still making some profit with it.

Then 300 islands * 295 US$ maintenance fee per month and per island = 88.500 US$ income on maintenance fees per month with these islands. Most are surely used to pay the staff and the location, but that’s where the real profit comes from for Lindenlab.

So – not bad, hu?

Packaging&Converting Essentials, a content provider for the graphics and packaging industry, has opened up its in world presence last week in the sim Sede de Marte.

The building is outstanding in regards of architecture; one of the few pentagons you’re ever going to see in world. They’re handing out RSS reader huds and of course you can get in touch with their staff, my good old friend Ludwig "Lu" Stapleton as communication officer. And yes, she’s a female avatar, just being very much in love with Ludwig van Beethoven, hence the name.

Ah and since everybody loves pictures, here’s a picture of the building taken by myself. The building itself was done by Alex Bader.

If you want to listen to nice music or inform yourself about matters of the graphical and packaging industry, just go there and get yourself informed.

CNNmoney.com ran an interesting article about „Second Life’s looming tax threat.“ What stays in world is in world and not interesting for the IRS. But when you’re trying to convert it into real money that’s quite a different matter.

It is about the possibility that you’ve got to pay income tax in the future to the IRS if you’re earning money in SL and other games like WoW and whether it’s possibile or science fiction. An interesting read.