Free Accounts Pricing & Policy Changes

In 2005, we announced improvements to our Second Life Membership Plans. Not long after this, Free Accounts became available, which led to an enormous improvement on user signups. As a result we have seen tremendous demand for Second Life Avatars - with many thousands of them being ordered. We’re delighted that so many of you have found them to be a useful addition to your human form.

For those that don’t know, a Free Second Life account is a type of Second Life membership that we made available for light use such as occasional virtual intercourse, griefing an event or stalking someone with an alt. We figured that if Governor Linden may do that, we should let our residents have the same. But free accounts differ from premium accounts in one particularly significant way; unlike normal premium accounts, we often don’t have those peoples credit card numbers.

So Free Accounts have been incredibly popular as a perk for avatars, but sadly there is a twist. Unfortunately most of the Free Accounts are being used for much more than light use. Based on analysis performed in August and September, Free Accounts are being used about twice as much as we expected, in other words being loaded with double the inventory load and user hours than we’d expect for an account that is supposed to be light use.

Rather than being used for an occasional inworld presence, the majority are being used by residents looking for the full immersive experience. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Free Accounts has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing. So higher traffic and concurrency numbers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld.

We need to therefore take some steps to improve performance and better reflect their actual usage levels in our pricing so that we can maintain the best performance level for everyone. As a result, we will be implementing a pricing change effective January 1st along with some policy changes effective immediately.

Beginning 1st January 2009

We will increase the monthly membership fee from USD$0 to USD$20 per month. This price increase will apply to all owners of Free Accounts on January 1st as well as new purchases after that date. There will be no grandfathering of Free Accounts membership fees.

Of course, a huge uproar arises and many residents threaten to abandon their Free Accounts. A week later, Linden Lab’s CEO Mark Kingdom responds with a Letter to the Second Life Residents.

A Letter to Second Life Residents

M Linden here. Many thanks to everyone who responded constructively with their concerns and suggestions about our Free Accounts announcement. We’ve listened carefully and your feedback has led to some amendments to our original plan.

Before I jump to the policy amendments, I’d like to provide some insight into our decision and then recap what we’ve heard from you. When the Free Accounts membership plan was originally launched, Linden Lab offered you the opportunity to explore the virtual world occasionally –- such as a visit to the CSI sims or a quick peep at SL5B. But we didn’t build in and enforce specific, quantifiable performance limits on the Free Accounts. Why? For two simple reasons:

1. As you know all too well, many things affect performance of the grid in complex inter-related ways (i.e., scripts, prims, avatars, media). We were reluctant to limit the overall experience and your creativity by posing specific limits on all these variables – partly because Linden Lab has always been pretty free-form and believes in the innate goodness of Second Life Residents and partly because imposing limits require that we hire staff to enforce them.

2. We wanted to get this product to market quickly. Free Accounts were wildly popular. Some went to the CSI sims and had a shallow encounter with an SL escort, as intended but many built out their avatar persona – improving building & scripting skills, gathering tons of freebies, camping and having other great immersive experiences. Since Free Accounts co-habitate with Premium Accounts on the grid, if one Free Account adds something to it’s inventory, the shared Asset Server gets overloaded. The avatar only logging in for occasional griefing who followed the original intent suffers and we are called in to resolve the conflict. Second Life is much too large to do that.

When we sorted through the good and bad in the many conversations, comment cards, emails, and calls, you shared many things but there were three consistent themes we can work with:

1. Those of you who used the Free Accounts as originally intended — for griefing, SLex and trade demo’s — want that product at the original price point and are willing to accept clear restrictions on usage.
2. Some of you have built businesses with your Free Account avatars, are renting land or a member of groups and although you acknowledge you are doing more than was intended for a Free Account, a large and rapid price change is too much for you to absorb.
3. Some of you have activities that were between an quick visit to an SL escort and a great immersive experience and want some kind of “Premium Account Lite” product – a lower price point than a normal membership subscription but with the ability to build out some kind of ‘Second Life’ experience.

We’ve launched 3 membership products in the company’s history: Beta Account, Premium Membership and Free Account. Because we have complexity everywhere else, we’re loath to add a highly complex pricing structure. Nevertheless, it’s clear we have to build a product mix and pricing structure that offers more flexibility.

Here is how we are amending the price change:

1. We are going to retain the Free Account product at its original price point and its original intended use (escort visits, trade shows, … ). We will have technical limitations to help regulate their use, initially ‘inworld time’ and inventory capacity restrictions, eventually group membership, friend list, land rights, prim creation (building) and attachment points limits. Those of you who chose to use the Free Accounts as intended may stay at the US$0 rate, but will need to contact the concierge team to do so.
2. If you want more than a Free Account, we will offer you the choice of moving to a new product called Basic Account that is intended for light use such as having an orgy with two or more SL escorts. For existing Free Account owners we will phase in the price increase for this new product over the next 6 months. Basic Accounts will also have technical limits for group slots and prims, and eventually friend list and inventory capacity limits as well.

* January 5, 2009 – non-compliant Free Accounts will transition to Basic Accounts and the membership fees will go from $0 to $10 per month. We will offer an educational discount to qualified educators on the new Basic Account product. The discount amount will be the same as on land tier, roughly 30%.

* July 2009 — the membership fees for Basic Accounts will go from $10 to $20 per month

For detailed information on these changes, please go to the Knowledge Base.

We believe this is fair. Jack and I will join you in the forums throughout the day today to discuss this. Comments are closed on the blog, not because we want to limit dialog or free expression but because this is a conversation with Residents and the forums require log-in. This is a policy we are going to follow moving forward with all major announcements. Blog the announcement, express and discuss in the Forums.

One thing I learned and others were reminded about in this process is that we have a very connected, passionate Resident base and we need to bring you into the dialog earlier, before putting forward these decisions. The input we received after Jack’s announcement was prolific and by-and-large very, very constructive. Second Life is at a size where 1:1 conversations are difficult and the forums are inadequate for full dialog. Office hours come up short, too. We have some thoughts on how to bring Residents into the dialog earlier which we will cover in a future blog post and Forum discussion.

I’d like to close on this thought: An area of concern for Residents over the past year has been platform stability. Through the hard work of many, many people, including Residents, we have made great strides that are very well documented. Crash rates are down. Substantially. Period. And until this price change, we were riding high in user satisfaction so we know you have recognized and appreciated the improvements we’ve been making. Our breakthroughs in stability improvement are particularly noteworthy because our users base increased enormously over the last three years. And, a good part of that increase was from Free Accounts. However, the original plan was to up the concurrency numbers but expand at a much lower rate. But, Free Accounts — in many cases — have been overloaded with inventory content, scripted attachments and prim hair so our very substantial stability gains have come even with the unplanned load increase. We are deeply committed to making this the best virtual world platform in the world and we are making great strides. We’ve also demonstrated we can deliver on our promise of continual stability improvements – even in the face of unanticipated growth.

I look forward to hearing from you in the Forum. Thank you for your candor, patience, restraint and willingness to work with Linden Lab and the Second Life community at large. Second Life is the wonder that it is because Linden Lab has always worked together – albeit sometimes imperfectly – with Residents to build this magnificent, bigger than life world we all love so much.
Thank you.

Knowledge Base on Membership Plans


Full Size on Flickr (CC Attribution)

As inspired by Jack and M. Linden’s writings on the Official Second Life blog and LL’s history of downgrading the functionality of existing products whilst at the same time upgrading the price. If this text sounds familiar, this is nothing but a lucky coincidence. ;) This is NOT an official Linden Lab blogpost. Here are the LL’s official membership plans, where strangely enough, ‘additional basic’ still reads “One-time fee of $9.95 each”. No snow man were harmed during the writing of this parody, English spelling & grammar suffers from a slight concussion though. Oh, and T Linden is enquiring about Premium Accounts and what to offer them.


Tags: linden lab, parody, premium account, second life


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