Second Life private island fees going up to $1,695 setup, $295 a month

Setting up a private island sim used to cost $1,295 setup fee and $195/month USD. The existing mainland tier rates are being left alone “for now” in this post on the Linden offical blog:

Due to ongoing investments in developing and maintaining the underlying technology of SecondLife, Linden Lab is increasing prices for new Private Island sales

Would be nice to see HTML on a prim at some point in the near future. Will these increased fees get this added by year end? It’s seems like the maintaining part of SL is taking up more money than the research side, but that’s coming from a resident, not from somebody in the know.

Eric Rice seems disappointed, but not discouraged over the increase:

Slackstreet’s Saijo project is being affected, since the cost to do business in Second Life just increased greatly–and our expansion plans are temporarily shelved. We already run 4.5 sims. Luckily, we’re a content shop, and the Saijo project can exist in an medium, any game world, anywhere. And both my wife and I have emergency plans in place if the pricing changes for the existing franchise of islands.

It’s software you pay for. And yes, pricing goes up. And it also goes down. As a paying customer I have to make decisions. The entire Firefox/Linux/Open Office franchises are responses to having had enough. The metaverse isn’t far behind.

Would an open source SL client mean more attacks or less? We’ll have to wait and see.