Saturday, May 25, 2013

Don't Like SL's expensive land prices? Try Opensim!


For anyone who's on SL and still continuing to gripe about land prices, here's my humble assessment of what to consider, give OpenSim a try!

You can compare the costs between SL, Virtual Highway, and Haven Your World here:

SL: http://secondlife.com/land/pricing.php
Virtual Highway: http://virtualhighway.us/vhweb/land-purchases/
Haven: http://www.havenyourworld.com/index.php/own-land

Just on full region alone, having all the prims available and all that, the prices compare like this:

SL - US$195/month (15,000 prims)
VH - US$50/month (Commercial w/15,000 prims) - US$75/month (Private w/40,000 prims)
Haven - *US$40/month (City Region w/15,000), *US$50/month (County Region w/20,000 prims), *US$65 (Country Region w/30,000 prims), *US$80 (State Region w/40,000 prims)

For Haven, the * is there because it's calculated from Euro pricing, which fluctuates a little and is rounded to the nearest US$5.

 But yes, pricing does depend per grid, but no OpenSim grid asks for anywhere close to the expensive cost that SL has for a full sim.  And at places like Haven, you could have your own full sized sim, with limited prims (Haven's is 1,000prims) for about as much, maybe less than a 16 oz latte (currently about US$3.25).  That beats out even SL's least expensive tier at US$5/month that only allots you 117 prims and only 1/128th of a sliver of land.  You can find 1/64th plots of land in many Opensim grids for free, with a larger prim allotment than that.  So, hands down, on basic pricing alone and prim allotment alone, you get much more for less on Opensim than you do for similar land options on SL.

So yep, I'd suggest that anyone that is having issues with paying for SL land tiers because they are so expensive should give Opensim a serious look.  And, of course, I'd advise them to check out Haven Your World and Virtual Highway first.  And, for those daring enough, they could even try operating their own grid, which, the software is free, and they would have virtually unlimited land for free to themselves, and can explore what land/prim and pricing allotments they would like if they were to put their own grid online. The main cost to a grid owner depends on servers and how they setup getting their grid to be accessed on the internet. But even there, you could have hundreds of sims to your own allotment for the same price, and often less, than you would have to pay for one full sim on SL.