1. It's not an advertising ploy - it's an attempt to force up land prices again. A prim-ploy?

The more items you buy, the more prims you use, the more land you need, the more land you buy or rent.

She's trying to offset the ban on gambling, the Linden land glut and sculpted objects prim-efficiency....and she seems a bit desparate to me.

If she cared about making SL better then start a 10Linden LAND project, she has enough of it - rent land to startup businesses for L$10 per week until they get going. But what is she doing instead? Chopping the legs off those same businesses.

Posted at 8:36PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Hal

2. Well, I think THAT low of a price is a mistake, but I have to say my business doubled when I cut my prices in half on a lot of my stuff.

I really do think there is something to selling quality items for super cheap. Maybe not for the SL "economy" but to make SL look nicer. There are pretty questionable corners of SL that are fueled by lame freebies that would easily look decent if some of us made our prices more reasonable. Do you want to get paid and have a ton of people know what your product is? Or do you just want to get paid considerably less and seem important?

You make the call.

Posted at 4:02PM on Sep 13th 2007 by SqueezeOne Pow

3. Well personally I think she is on to something here, a lot of the problem I have always had with Second Life is the fact that anything really of good quality always costs an arm and a leg, maybe even your first born as well. Sure I realize that it took the creator time and effort to make the item and they want to make a profit for their efforts, but I know enough about marketing that sometimes selling for less, ends up making you more in the long run, because more people will spread the word about you if your items are priced right.

Posted at 5:35PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Jack Pitts

4. Jack, could you give an example of "costs an arm and a leg and maybe your first born too"?

I've been in SL over three years, I've bought one item that cost more than L$10,000 (Starax's wand), and relatively few that cost over L$5,000 (a dragon avatar is one that springs to mind).

There's relatively little I've spent over L$500 on in the last year, and that includes buying furniture, clothes and toys.

Whilst I'd be happy to pay less for a dragon avatar, and I sometimes think carefully about clothes that cost more than about L$300, there's a lot of quality merchandise out there that's impulse buy priced as far as I'm concerned.

But, maybe my expectations of prices are just wrong, or abnormal.

SqueezeOne, lowering prices is a classical way to increase turn-over. The trouble comes with the play-off between quality and price. If Anshe really produces high quality goods at that price, she will doubtless flood parts of the market. If she produces stuff of a quality that's worth L$10, will people that are in that market cough up the L$10 rather than getting something free? There's a lot of reasonable quality freebies out there as well as bad ones.

There is, doubtless, a lot of overpriced stuff too - someone I know of sells a slideshow screen for L$2000 or tries to. The fact that there are at least 3 other manufacturers that sell them for L$1 or 2 seems to have escaped them, and unsurprisingly their sales numbers are terrible...

Posted at 5:46PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Eloise Pasteur

5. Anshe is just trying to do the nearly impossible: Undercut Bare Rose.

I can't count how many times I've seen a really nice outfit and asked someone where they got it, and received the same answer "oh, I got it at Bare Rose, it was really cheap too!"

Anshe's move to sell stuff dirt cheap *might* change the economy a bit, but it depends on the quality of the products. If they are quality products, and if a lot of other stores follow suit in order to get a piece of the latest craze, I think it will open up a huge market for Limited Edition and Unique items.

Posted at 6:26PM on Sep 13th 2007 by neural

6. Yeah, I've stayed away from this for the most part myself.

On one hand, some products are overpriced - but most of the products can easily be made by someone else. I've looked at ACS Lindens stuff on SLExchange, and was somewhat amused. They're *overpriced*, as far as I'm concerned. Those should be freebies *or* maybe 1 L items.

Pretty weak, actually.

As far as 'Anshe Is The Center Of The Universe' stuff - well, I don't think she is. I believe that her land is overpriced and overvalued, I believe that she's just trying to make a buck like many other people, and I know she has the capacity to make it cheaper.

But quality and cheap do not go hand in hand.

Posted at 6:58PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Nobody Fugazi

7. I took a look at her stuff, and well, it is all pretty standard noob stuff. With the right know how I could build all of the stuff.

Posted at 8:28PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Adia Clary

8. I've already said that Anshe was desparate soon as she made rule changes on her rentals shortly after the Gambling Ban.

Her mistakes are in EU banking license and allowing so many Casinos renting such large lands from her.

She's gonna bankrupt at lease by May 2008 is my best guess. That is unless if she come up with a different idea by then.

Posted at 9:34PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Nacon

9. Let's see, L$10 is about 3 cents. This isn't the Wal-mart market: anything you can buy at Wal-mart is going to cost a couple orders of magnitude more than that. These are essentially freebies. Anything under L$275 is sub-dollar-store; anything under L$100, one has to wonder why one is bothering to charge anything for at all.

For Wal-mart prices, check just about any store in SL. You're hard pressed to find anything at all in SL that isn't cheaper than 99.44% of merchandise at Wal-mart.

Not sure where Jack is shopping. I buy clothes at one of the most expensive stores I've found in SL, and the most expensive thing I could buy there I could buy three of and still not spend as much as I spent on a cup of coffee today.

Posted at 10:19PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Gaius Goodliffe

10. I just loooove how she announces this just weeks after rubbing elbows with us lowly content creators at SLCC.

Impressed? Not terribly, no.

Posted at 10:43PM on Sep 13th 2007 by Coyote Momiji

11. I also think Anshe's plan is to do with land, but not based on prims but on price. If she forces all the prices down to 10L$ then we can buy all our stuff for next to nothing (dresses, cars, houses, etc). So her hope is that then we will spend money buying land off her or rent from her. Its like the old Free Software promo, if you pay less on software you can afford better hardware. The problem with Ansche's plans is Linden Lab. There is no way they are going to let one resident take all the money while LL struggle with profitability. If it looks like Ansche is becoming the equivalent of General Motors or Microsoft, LL will start introducing anti-monopoly rules. Because SL can survive without Ansche but it cannot survive without LL being profitable.

Posted at 1:28PM on Sep 14th 2007 by Mercia McMahon

12. I don't know why everyone went all "ZOMG CHICKEN LITTLE!" on this one. If Anshe wants to sell stuff for $10L, let her. It's not as if she's taken over all of the designers and instituted a law against any prices higher than $10L.

It will just be yet another almost-freebie area. Let her do it. You wouldn't be able to stop her anyway, and it won't affect anything.

Posted at 4:46PM on Sep 15th 2007 by Tenshi