Neo Machina Goes Offline

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It’s hard to believe I built a city in Second Life, and spent months, and months, and months putting together one of my biggest projects, ever. And then it stood for a year and eight months. It was my virtual home, my little piece of metaverse space with which I could do whatever I pleased. It wasn’t just some copy of the older version of Neo Machina that was built by someone else, it was it’s own thing. And I enjoyed spending time in it.

No, it never really garnered some kind of massive community. Truth be told, I have all of the energy in the world for creating, and making, but almost none of the energy for spending hours, and days trying to entice people to gather, and communicate. It’s just not my forte. And, I guess, in a way, that’s partly the reason it’s gotta close.

But really, the biggest reason is because Linden Labs charges 100-200 dollars a month for a personal “server”, and then you foot that bill. Willingly. No matter what happens. Meanwhile, you can jump into Minecraft and get yourself a server for like nine bucks a month. I’m not sure I understand the massive price difference, or what it takes to … host digital items on piece of a server that people occupy by connecting, and mostly AFK-ing. I really don’t get it.

I think it’s a matter of just, a company deciding how much they think a service is worth, and then hiking the prices up so that it’s almost out of reach to people who aren’t swimming in cash.

I apologize to the people who did congregate and live there, though, you know, to get back on topic. Maybe there are other places similar enough, and you can find what you’re looking for there, instead. I said in the Discord and within the Second Life group: Anyone who currently has time running on rentals within Neo Machina can be reimbursed. All you’ve got to do is contact me (my SL avatar is Nova Ayashi).

I dunno, though. It sucks to see something you poured so much work into maybe actually going away for good. Sure, I’ll recover from the financial losses I went through with my car, and things will be relatively normal again. But, can I really convince myself to pick up 100 dollars a month, for the umpteenth time?

Yeah, I shut Neo Machina down a few times, and then brought it back up. This wasn’t some show of erratic indecision, but just solely based on … money troubles. Having troubles, deciding it’s best to fix some of that by not paying Linden Labs 100 bucks a month, and then deciding that I couldn’t let it go. But I think now is probably time to do just that.

I still have a store in Second Life, and now it has a location that’s completely free of charge, and full of space. And it also has a small, secret, back-up location, just in case. So there’s that. And my store has always been the most important part of my time in Second Life. It’s just that … owning my own sim (server) in SL, was like, one of my digital dreams, and it looks like after the shutdown on September 1st, I might have to find another way to accomplish that dream.

Unless I find completely different work that pays a bit more than what I’m making now, or someone decides to sign up on my Ko-fi for like a hundred bucks a month (lol).

Either way, I’ll miss Neo Machina, even if it wasn’t really a hugely popular spot that hundreds of people visited daily (I don’t have the resources to build a massive RP zone with intricate systems hosted on servers outside of the virtual world).

Until next time … maybe?