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Almost a week ago Linden Labs raised the cost of the popular Openspaces by 67%. This made the users unhappy and they protested in their own ways and also threatened to quit the game. Realizing the situation, the company announced to either restore the previous prices or deduct it to a satisfactory level. The Openspaces areas in the Second Life saw the price increase from $75 to $125 which is an extraordinary increase.
Though the company has confirmed the layoffs, they are still hiring. According to the company:
We’ve had to make some hard decisions about resources and as a result we eliminated four positions out of our headcount of nearly 300.
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It is incorrect to say that Linden has restored the previous prices. Open spaces came with 3,750 prims (the basic building units) for $75/month. Now, the company is saying users can use only 750 prims on the same spaces for $75/month. If more than 20% of the prims provided are in use, then the price will rise to $95 in January and $125 in June. There are also new limits on occupancy, access to communications, etc.
Many of these sims are currently rented by third parties, and Linden is also imposing rules that will disrupt those businesses — one of the main uses of these spaces!
See the details of Linden’s policy. They have placed it behind a link to their “Knowledgebase.” Isn’t it funny that they hide their rewritten contract under a place that sounds more like positive technical support?
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=5650
You can see some of the places users have worked on over the weeks and months here. Many of these will soon be lost, now that we are told open spaces were supposed to be bought at $250 each… and used for nothing.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/openspacevoid/
If you make a free account at secondlife.com, then you can follow the link below. There is a long, heart-breaking discussion of how the announcements from Linden have affected the projects of so many customers.
http://forums.secondlife.com/forumdisplay.php?f=354