Kategorie: Business

Well, after I finished my roundup I’ve found an article from last week in my feedreader run by Infoweek called "Inside Second Life’s Datacenter." It showed up today at Slashdot, so… it should be already very popular now.

But there are some real interesting facts in this article I’d like to point out:

• the monthly growth rate is about 20% at the moment. That’s big!
• The maximum possible number of concurrent online users at the moment is claimed to be at 100.000 avatars. I don’t believe this number, they’ve got already issues when the number goes about 30.000 anytime at the moment, the grid destabilizes and becomes unreliable. But there’s reliability in this unreliability, since you just need to take a look at the online users count and the rule of thumb…
• Are you seated? Really? Better take a seat. Ok. Their goal is – no joke – to be able to support 10s of millions of simultaneous logins! Bwahaha! Sorry, better first fix the existing login count and make the system scale more well before planning such… high… numbers! *coughs*
• Second Life consists of around 2.000 servers at the moment running on Debian Linux with MySQL. Debian… of all of the systems. Arg. Right, that’s the linux distribution that constantly fails to deliver a new version at the planned timeline reliable (3 years was the worst delay ever, the now planned release of last December is still not there) and is there even more worse in this aspect than Microsoft can ever hope to be! No wonder so much are switching to Ubuntu. Besides, some of the packages are really outdated and some of their maintainers have real weird point of views. And MySQL – well, some still consider it still something of a toy database. It still needs to overcome that image and that’s why always so many recommend LL to switch to Postgresql.
• If the server side part is going to be opensourced or not is still in the discussion. Nothing new there. Many possibilities, not all include an opening of the source code.
• They’re looking for an IT guy who can help them scale their infrastructure from 2.000 servers up to 10.000 servers.
• They’re trying to make the LSL-implementation faster. That’s nothing new so far, too, that’s their Mono-Project. Testing of it should start in the second quarter 2007.
• Something new about LSL: it was written in one week back then, and the Mono-Project will enable to script in other languages like Visual Basic or C#.
• Some new measures under consideration to manage growth: limiting logins at the weekends and moving some of the Second Life experience to normal web servers (rubbish, this should be all in the client IMHO, this is Second Life, not Web 2.0), changes in the database infrastructure and the availability of tools that show you how much computing power your avatar needs, especially when it uses much attachments and such.

Some of it sounds nice, other things – 10s millions of concurrent logins – sound more like Science Fiction at the moment. 100.000 concurrent logins are supported at the moment? Well… yes, could be, but the SL experience then is going to be more like lag hell on earth I am afraid.

So the point is: they’re aware of the problems, trying to fix them and planning big things for the future, but hopefully they’re able to fix SL first.

I know Flumm Melendez since some time, comes from because she’s been an avid writer to the group „SL Deutschland“. The first time I saw her profile, Flumm Melendez was a female avatar, earning her money in world as an escort and with making and selling tattoos.

After some time, though, this became boring or whatever, so she started building her own club, I guess its name was „Ice cube“ or something like that. I was there back then and helped her testing a door for the nudie room.

Then after a short while the avatar turned into a male, also showing for some time a RL picture of the player behind it in the profile. 27 years old, male, from Berlin, Germany. Quite a change.

Now I’m hopping to a new sim, Berlin City, and guess who’s the landbaron there? Flumm Melendez, also most of it crowded with buildings and sold. Not far away from this sim is another new sim, Cologne City? Owner? Flumm Melendez. So – the real money in Second Life still is in selling and renting sims and building.

And to sum it up, there’s of course also a web presence about the real estate business of Flumm Melendez: Second Earth Sims.  And here’s a posting about the history of the avatar made by Flumm Melendez himself (Germany only).

If you ask me, quite an interesting career, but not too unusual in SL at all.

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?