Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Here's the results of my New World Notes survey last week, asking SLers what's the most they would be willing to pay for the new Project Zero option of streaming Firestorm/Second Life on a browser.

As you can see above, a strong majority aren't interested in any option, even one that's free with advertising. About 15% were willing to pay $.50 cents/hour to $2/hour, but the most popular "paid" choice by far was the ad-supported, free version. (The Patreon member version of this survey garnered pretty similar results, with 32% preferring free with ads.)

Which is somewhat surprising, from one angle. Rather than pay, say, $2500 for a high-end gamer laptop that runs Second Life pretty well, why not get a low-end $500 laptop and stream a highly optimized version of Firestorm by the hour? Even at $1/hour, this would be more cost effective for most SLers.

However, from another angle, these results point out another reality: By and large, Second Life users are core gamers and/or power users who already own and prefer a high-end PC for many other applications beyond SL.

As promised, I showed these survey results to Linden Lab:

My impression is they're close to the company's own expectations of what the users are willing to pay for (or not). An option that's $1-2/hour is probably sustainable to cover most of the streaming costs; but even if only 5% are willing to pay that much, that'd still be some 25,000 streamers.

I do think Linden Lab will eventually offer a free, ad-supported version, but only when it's feasible and cost-effective for the company.  If it was an advertising feed of mostly or only SL brands — think AdSense, but only for the virtual world — most users would be totally fine with or even welcome an endless stream of ads, since it'd basically be a feed of new SL content/events to consider.