For a virtual home that would actually work for me quite well. If LL gave me 512 prims on a private region with upto 4 avatars at one time, Id be happy as. I could make a nice home and garden for myself with that many prims.

LL could charge me $US15 per month as as a Premium Homeowner for this, and I’d be happy to pay it. I wouldnt have to worry about nosey neighbours, nosey scripts, ugly builds (except my own =)), adfarms or nothing.

Yes I maybe sharing server and bandwidth space with other avatars (more even) but not visual, chat or scripted space, not at home anyway.

Bit like Rooms on other sites I suppose, but I would also have the ability in SL to buy/rent other larger parcels for out-of-home stuff. And still be able to shop and club and explore in the world open to me whenever I step out my front door.

Regarding the real estate crisis, I had decided that putting more land to sell. It was without many expectations due to speculation on this crisis. But to my surprise, two weeks almost all sold, even with prices a little above the market.

Sorry for mistakes, my english is not very good.

While I would be happy to share my thoughts on this, I fear this would go beyond the scope of a blog comment, since I’m such a chatty guy… If you are really interested, let me know and I can send you some notes.

Understanding the reasons for it might also help LL target their product better. For instance, those numbers above are actually a bit “arbitrary”. A sim could theoretically be 1024×1024 in size; or it could be 64×64 but have 15,000 prims! Or, like LL does with the OpenSpace sims, you can get one much cheaper, with the same 256×256, but far less prims. I can imagine sims being offered with 512 prims, 256×256 in size, but only for as low as L$20 — running, of course, 128 sims on the same server, and allowing as little as 3-4 simultaneous avatars per sim…

While there is a theoretical limit on the combinations, I think that LL could effectively tailor one combination that allows them to get an extra-low price, trading off on the features.

And there is a HUGE market for having 256×256 islands with 60,000 prims and allowing 400 avatars, for US$1200/month. It’s such a pity that Linden Lab does not wish to offer that service, because it would simply be *awesome* — imagine what you could do joining four of those super-sims side by side, and get events attended by 1600 avatars simultaneously!

See, if I simply value owning a virtual island with not more than, let’s say, US$20 per month, but LL is not able to make me an offer at this price level, then I don’t buy an island.

And if I’m a casual user that spends only a few hours in SL per week, I might not feel to waste that time searching for any land whatsoever. Also, with plenty of quite decent free content around and enough places to visit, I might not even bother to go to the SL website and update my account information with credit card or Pay Pal information. Etc.

And this might exactly be what we are currently seeing in SL with a large number of users.

So, my take on this: Unless LL offers a kind of easy “click-to-buy” island directly from e.g. the land store at low monthly costs, SL is likely to move sideways being stuck with a limited group of early adopters/hardcore users and plenty of “freebie residents”.

And what are “low costs”? Well, if you look around in the industry, you will find that Blizzard or CCP Games have probably figured out the most attractive basic pricing level that people are willing to pay per month: approx. US$15.

Real economics, so to speak