Originally Posted by Katt Linden
Linden Lab is pleased to announce results for the 3rd quarter of 2008.
Over 357 auctions have closed in the new Nautilus region where property is selling at L$60 per meter or 12x the average cost of mainland property, indicating that some users have a high demand for a more structured experience.
-- Zee Linden
The reason I am alarmed is that it tells me that whom ever produced this report is not in touch with the reality of the way Second Life is running. I get the feeling it has been written by some one who has no active working interest in Second Life and from some one who rarely gets to interact with real people on the grid. Zee may have posted the report and I know that Zee has a reasonable working knowledge of second life.
The sales above, we are told is where land in Nautilus Region is changing hands at a whopping 60L$ per square meter, and the inference is that tenants really want to live there so they are snapping the land up at really high prices. That from what I have seen is wrong. I have seen land barons buying the land at auction and then selling the plots with crazy prices of upto 120,000 L$ per plot. These are not residents moving in, but players trying to sell land at grossly inflated prices. (I am not calling them realtors as realtors that I have met are not as misguided).
These figures we are led to beleive are from a quarter when the Lindens announced a hold on new sims as there was a decrease in the demand for sims. So what is happening? I do not want to write something negative here as I know posts get pulled pretty quick these days if the Lindens disagree with the content. (Thus skewing opinion and creating an untrue bias in perception)
My questions are:
1) What percentage of land sold on Nautilus, has been resold or is up for sale? If residents were buying it to move in and stay, I would expect a low figure. If it being bought and sold, churned, I would expect a high figure.
2) What percentage of land has been reclaimed by Gov Linden in the same 1/4? How are land returns matching up to the new land being introduced, In other words, how much land made available is new, and how much has been owned before.
3) What are the current figures for:-
a) Number of avatars per region as I regularly see clutches of sims with not more than one or two avatars on?
b) Percentage of avatars who pay Tier to other players or Linden labs?
c) Number of daily logins divided between Premium members ( able to hold land) and non premium members (capable of being a bot)
The reason I ask these figures is that I get the distinct impression from your figures that the hundreds of bots we see are actually contributing to the land purchasing, user to user transactions and active daily registrations. Nothing could be further from the truth as at least one sim near my own has upwards of 40 users at a atime on it and they are all camping, many are still ruths. They are bots, not active players, and your figures dont seem to differentiate between them and regular users. That means your figures are being presented wrong, and that Zee, to be perfectly honest worried the heck out of me. If you are prepared as a Company to present figures that are not being shown correctly, what else is being hidden?
warmest but worried regards:
River Ely
I then made a second post to Zee Linden of Linden Labs:
quote
Originally Posted by Zee Linden
I'm not sure if I completely understand your question - but we were selling about 20 to 30 open spaces per day before that time. Is that your question?
I think the user was asking for a graph showing Openspaces sales over a daily basis. The graph would show an incremental increase culminating in thousands of Openspaces.
This would no doubt be an embarresment to you as it would clearly demionstrate that something was wrong way before you as a Company elected to suddenly change the prices by 66%. Zee, can we have that graph the user asked for so that we can see the numbers of sims being sold over the 1/4 concerned. I appreatiate your candour but 20 - 30 per day doesnt stack up...
See if you sold 20 a day over 90 days you would have 2240 openspace sims, if you sold 30 a day over 90 days, you would have 2700 open space sims, I got the impression from Mark Lindens figures that we were talking 5 thousand openspace sims, thats more like 60 - 65 sims per day for 90 days.
best idea is to just show the information Zee then we can see for ourselves that Linden Labs are not adjusting the figures to make best sense.
I feel confident you will agree with me Zee
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Zee responded with a throw away line, not what I expect from a CEO:
he said... Yes, we sold many many more than 20 to 30 per day when they were first introduced.
Thats it, in response to my simple questions above?
it prompted me to chance my arm and make a statement.
Zee, you dissapoint me, I asked, over two posts, some very simple, adroit, honest questions. I invited you to not give a throw-away comment about the open space sales, but to deliver real figures.
I tried to do it in a way that could be understood by all players with an interest, as well as some one with ten years internet experiance and a CFO to boot. If you do not have those figures, then admit it.
If you do have them ( and I hope to heck that if you are a professional CFO that you would have them plus a raft of other figures) then show them.
The questions are realy quite simple.
Treating us as idiots with yet another throw away line (above) really does not do any favours for you, it demonstrates that you really might not care as much as you want us to beleive.
Zee, please stop hiding behind quips, and deliver the numbers and the stats we asked for.
Put up, or, admit you cannot.
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comment
It seems to me that Zee Linden, CFO of Linden Labs, may not have the business acumen he claims to have, or is dancing around the points of concern in the hopes that no one actually works out that Linden Labs is in deep water and starting to flounder. I for one am extremely cautious of investing in Linden Labs if the CFO cannot tell the simple truth when so asked by one of their investors.
2 comments:
It seems to me you lack both an appreciation of, and an understanding of, what a free market is. Again, what is YOUR plan for how you would "apportion" land in Nautilus, if you feel greedy middleman and evil land barons "ruin it for everybody"?
I estimate about 25-30 percent of the land in Nautilus is in end-user hands, i.e. store owners, residential users, universities, public parks made by creators, etc. I bought 3 parcels, 2 on the auction, and one inworld. I bought one inworld because I got tired struggling to bet on and watch all the auctions and lose, because land barons are bidding on all of them and deliberately jacking up the price.
I've written on the real problem here, which isn't the existence of land barons, but the lack of transparency, and the floating of loans by Lindens, essentially:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/10/thugs-life.html
You claim that people are "selling plots for $120,000". But...they aren't. Those plots sit there. They may sit there all year. A land baron might only have to sell a few of them to make good on his auction buy, if he paid $50,000 on the auction. I see a few very wealthy residents who have the money to buy premium land paying that kind of money to get some of the better parcels, some marked up as high as $199,000 or more, I even see $499,000 for some of the very best protected pretty ones. And in a few cases, those prices have been paid by those for whom money is no object.
The rest of the lots start to come down in price. I see them drop from $60,000 to $30,000 in a week, so that's what will continue to happen.
I'm not understanding your obsession about banging on Zee here about the numbers.
Jack Linden said at his office hour about a week ago that they sold 13,000 openspaces, half of the land mass now of private islands.
So do the math, calculate how many days went by since the beginning, and see "how many per day". If there were hundreds per day sold initially, what of it? What is you point then?
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