Linden Lab lowers prices, estate owners rebel - Massively

For a lot of the things SL residents get upset about, this one is much ado about nothing IMHO. The main reason for this supposed "devaluing" of property is that people have bought into the metaphor that they are indeed buying land, albeit virtual land. Ownership is a great metaphor, but in this case it's causing some harm. When you "buy" land in Second Life you are really leasing server space, so any expectation of recouping the value of said lease on "sell" is wishful thinking. Granted the SL economy has worked like this often, but I don't see any way this is sustainable.

I think you can certainly sustain a model that buys an island and divides it up into smaller pieces to sell for a profit, but this notion that land has a value that remains stable or increases the same way RL land works is just not likely. At least not with a single company maintaining the servers. I'm not sure you would want to anyway, given the dynamics of a virtual economy. For example, new hardware is always going to appear; therefore; the old server will naturally devalue. Linden Lab's move makes sense to me for these reasons. It's just a shame residents can't see past the metaphor in this one case.

Tags: second life, virtual worlds, virtual land, economics

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