I am quite curious what you have against a company attempting to recoup their costs and perhaps make a profit on an online game that they run. Operating SL costs LL in servers, bandwidth, power, and time of the employees to maintain all of the above and develop and maintain the codebase. They have chosen to bear the costs of running their program via charging users for 'land' to build content on, as opposed to the more common MMO model of a monthly subscription to access company-written content. Of -course- the land prices seem arbitrary to you, because they are not based on how much disk or bandwidth an individual creation requires, but rather on an average of the costs and profit margin required to keep LL running. Plus, of course, the profit margin of players reselling such things.
It's really not difficult to understand, when you realize that internet space is not some mystical 'free' stuff floating in the void, but rather the product of hardware and software that requires human intervention and resources to maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
I am quite curious what you have against a company attempting to recoup their costs and perhaps make a profit on an online game that they run. Operating SL costs LL in servers, bandwidth, power, and time of the employees to maintain all of the above and develop and maintain the codebase. They have chosen to bear the costs of running their program via charging users for 'land' to build content on, as opposed to the more common MMO model of a monthly subscription to access company-written content. Of -course- the land prices seem arbitrary to you, because they are not based on how much disk or bandwidth an individual creation requires, but rather on an average of the costs and profit margin required to keep LL running. Plus, of course, the profit margin of players reselling such things.
It's really not difficult to understand, when you realize that internet space is not some mystical 'free' stuff floating in the void, but rather the product of hardware and software that requires human intervention and resources to maintain.