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It may be obvious that I rather like SL Go.
As I’ve written, it allows me to enjoy Second Life the way it should be enjoyed in all its visual glory and even on my 6 year old MacBook.
Not to mention that it revitalized my love for virtual photography.
But it costs money, of course it does, there is no escaping that, but well, money is money and as a Dutch person, spending even a cent breaks my heart.
Yes we cloggies are cheap penny pinchers.
Something else that costs money and that doesn’t make me very happy is my Second Life premium account.
I have one, I think because I once needed one to buy land, but it has never been very rewarding.
Now and then I get a gift which, if it isn’t 1920s themed (and it never is) is of no use to me, I get a Linden home, which I’ve never even visited and that most people don’t seem to be very keen on, etc, etc.
I’m sure some people are very happy with it, but it doesn’t do much for me.
The only things I like(d) about the premium account is the live chat support (until they decided to drastically cut the opening hours) and getting some land, even though I of course no longer needed that once I got my own region.
Premium account costs about $9.95, you get a dollar in Lindens back each month, so its roughly $8.70 a month.
SL Go costs $9.95 a month.
And I know it is probably a bit of a silly idea, some wild plan, but I’ve been wondering about combining SL Go with the SL premium account.
Hear me out.
What if… the SL Go team and Linden Lab had a long chat and made a nice deal;
Every one in SL with a premium account gets SL Go for free, or with a huge discount.
I think it would make getting a premium account a lot more interesting for a lot of SL users and although it is not a huge source of income for LL, it is a regular and steady monthly income.
Of course it would also cost money, but I reckon SL Go might be willing to give LL a discount, after all they would be very happy with such a huge amount of new users.
I reckon that some SL Go users might also get interested in other Onlive services and thus create a new source of revenue.
Now I am the first to admit that I have no idea about the business side of how SL Go works or what the premium accounts actually mean to LL, so none of this may make any sense.
The money and business people at Linden Lab have to look at this and see if there is something here or if crazy Dutch woman is dreaming again.
But at this moment, Linden Lab has to host several regions full of houses for premium account holders, houses most of us are not that excited about.
This costs LL money or at least some recourses.
Not to mention the ‘Exclusive Experience’ they build and host for premium users, the gifts and activities.
Premium accounts cost LL some money.
By replacing all these extra’s with one actual useful gift of free SL Go, I think most premium account holders would not only be very happy but it would become very interesting to other SL users to actually get a premium account.
And if I am totally wrong about this, there is one other option that would work for both Sl Go and Linden Lab; The SL Premium Plus account.
In stead of paying $9.95 a month, you pay $15,- and for this you get SL Go on top of your premium account.
So nothing really changes with the premium account, but for 5 bucks extra you get SL go on top of it.
SL Premium Go!
SL Go Pro!
Again, this is just a crazy idea, I have no idea about all the facts and figures, the economical and financial parts of this idea and what kind of deal would make this beneficial for both SL Go AND Linden lab… and us users!
I just think that it would be an interesting idea to see if we can somehow combine these two things.
Making both the SL premium accounts more attractive and allowing more people to enjoy Second Life the way it should be enjoyed, with full ultra graphics, on mobile devices and with next to no lag.
This in the end will also help Linden Lab with improving Second Life’s reputation because us SL Go users are uploading a lot of really amazing screenshots… and who knows, in the future we may even be able to use SL Go to upload video or perhaps even stream it.
Can you imagine the impression all those videos made in SL with ultra graphic settings and almost no lag will make?
I can…
So what do you think?
Crazy and silly idea or is there something interesting here?
Perhaps you have a better idea?
Let us know, share your suggestions in the comments section below!
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
How about not changing the monthly Premium fee (which is a luxury for most subscribers, I imagine) but tacking on a modest SLGo bonus of an hour a week? It that is too generous, then maybe two or three hours a month? Personally, I’d rather have double-prims as part of a Premium account or double the amount of free land (1024 square meters rather than 512 square meters. The latter would help fill up the barren Mainland.
Or, since The Lab has a habit of buying up successful 3rd party Second Life services (that’s how we got the dysfunctional MySecondLife.com and The Marketplace), they could buy SLGo and grab the technology behind it to stream Our World to us instead of using the decade old idea of using a Viewer in the first place. I can imagine how that would save Customer Service costs and the cost of making sure Viewers work with a variety of hardware. Then they could easily pass along streaming costs to Premium subscribers.
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It costs $6 monthly for premium if you pay annually.
SLGo is $10 a month.
It stands to reason then that $15 for both isn’t much of a discount at all.
However, I would be willing to pay $10 a month for the two together. Linden Lab can keep their weekly 300L stipend. Onlive would have to surrender $2 or $3 at most to Linden Lab but the increased volume of subscriptions should, in theory, make up for the slight profit loss per individual subscriber. Linden Lab could sweeten the deal further by offering an additional option to choose between a 256m parcel on mainland or a Linden home.
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Ever heard of Lumiya? I think that may have cost too, but it may have been a one off. Maybe this SL Go is more robust, i’m not sure – 🙂
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Yes, SL Go is quite a bit more robust.
It allows you to stream a (nearly) fully functioning LL or Firestorm viewer with the graphics set to Ultra (all the light effects, shadows, etc) on old computers, portable devices, etc. with next to no lag.
It offers more than Lumiya.
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It would be an awesome idea. Actually the benefits of premium membership, asides of better support, are not interesting at all. The little home you can get its useless, ugly, small and outdated. And for 9USD month you can rent a small land with better features. Having SLGo for free or with some discounts would be a nice incentive to keep premium membership or to get new ones surely. In fact, I was talking about offering SLGo to premium membership with my partner some weeks ago.
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Great idea! I am sneaking around the SL GO since a while, but for using it once in a while it is just too much. Would be a great chance for Lindens to become more popular again and to give Second Life a better reputation again.
And it might bring back some drifting away users like me.
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Though I talked to SLGO guy on SLGO island in world, due to IP blocking, I can’t even test the application. They said they don’t have any plans to extend their service to non-USA, Euro areas (they’ve been telling me this for ages actually). In that case, solving that issue should come first or SLGO should be just an extra option for the premium account.
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In no way i will trade my Desktop computer for sl go.
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Why would you?
I use my alienware laptop for SL and now, thanks to SL GO I can also run SL on my 6 year old macbook and you can run it on mobile devices.
If you only use SL on your desktop computer and can very easily run SL without any lag and with graphics set to Ultra, then SL Go is probably not for you.
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I’m a premium member and for sure i would rather see other options then SL Go membership, that does not even works for My Country.
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But do you like any of the things the premium account offers now?
What would you rather see?
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“What would you rather see?” that is the real question!
What the Lab *could* do, at little or no cost to them is to increase the land allowance. 1024 sqM would be make for buildable plot. There is plenty of land available (land allowance is almost exclusively a mainland thing).
As with anything there are pros and cons but I think on balance it would increase the number of premium accounts.
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Your proposal is interesting, though don’t have much of an opinion on SL Go. There are a lot of ways to look at premium accounts as valueless, and I’m not impressed by the houses or gifts or special areas either. But, let me crunch some numbers to show how they can make sense financially.
For a premium account, I pay US $72 per year, or a combined $144 for the two premium accounts I have. Each account is given an allowance of 512 sqm in mainland land use. I combine them into a group and use them toward a larger parcel. 1024 sqm normally costs $96/year in land use fees. That leaves me looking for $48/year more value in the membership to break even. ($144-96=48)
My 5 year old avatar gets a weekly stipend of L$300, or L$15,600/year (I think this is the current premium stipend)
My 9 year old avatar gets a weekly stipend of L$500, or L$26,000/year
Combined at today’s exchange rates, that’s the yearly equivalent of $167.75
So, having 2 older premium accounts “earns” me almost $120/year ($144 fees – $96 land use fee equivalent – $167.75 refunded as stipend = $119.75 overage to me). Of course, that benefit is contingent on my planning to use mainland and spend L$ anyway. If I had 2 new premium accounts and not an older one, I’d come out almost $78/year ahead in the same situation.
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