Linden Lab Continues Shifting Second Life Economy Base With New Tier Discounts/Transaction Fee Increase

Linden Lab just announced a new pricing deal that’s great if you’re a landowner, but something of a hard pill if you transact in Linden Dollars quite a bit:

In recognition of our upcoming 20th anniversary, we are making additional changes to land ownership to enable Second Life communities – great and small: Dropping the monthly price of Full Regions by $20 for our 20th anniversary – effective immediately, Full Regions are now $209/mo.

[We’re also a]ccepting Linden Dollars for land payments – a convenient new option for Premium Plus members. If you are a creator earning L$ inworld, you now won’t have to sell on the LindeX to pay for your region!

… We decided to absorb many of the costs and distribute some by making a change to Linden Dollar buy and sell fees. Effective today, we are changing LindeX fees as follows: Increasing the buy fee to 10% with a minimum fee of $1.49 and a maximum fee of $14.99USD per transaction Increasing the sell fee to 5%.

Emphasis mine on the key point: This is yet another nudge to get SL users to sign up for a Premium Plus, as the company slowly moves the Second Life economy away from virtual land as the company’s key revenue source, toward monthly subscriptions and transaction fees.

Unsurprisingly (as this Reddit thread attests), some people who don’t own SL land are pretty pissed:

They are raising money from everyone who buys and sells L$, to pay for a benefit to only those who can afford to own private regions. The article specifically says that.

How is it not ‘reverse Robin Hood’?

I will see no benefit whatsoever from the change, and instead it will cost me about $30 a year extra for the benefit of the rich.

There’s a kernel of truth here, but it misses the perspective that sim ownership keeps eroding, as high tier costs are unsustainable. 

On the other side, a shift toward transaction fees seems to be benefiting the creative community:

Back in 2014, Linden Lab’s then-CEO Ebbe Altberg (RIP) announced that the SL creator community cashed out USD $60 million for the year. So while the active Second Life user base has not significantly grown, the creator economy grew by quite a bit.

Linden Lab confirmed to me that Second Life’s content creator community earned $86 million from their virtual content in 2021 — a $24 million increase from 2014, even though the SL user base did not grow significantly. (The “COVID bump” was primarily increased activity from longtime users.)

All that said, the number of Premium users is still not large enough to be a truly sustainable core revenue source.  Last I checked, the number of Premium and Premium Plus users is around 50,000. It will probably need to be at least double that to truly shift the entire economy away from a virtual land model focus.