Just a few days ago Linden Lab chief executive Mark Kingdon was saying that there was no credit crunch in Second Life, and boasting that one day in August had seen more than $L120m of economic activity inside the virtual world (that's more than $450,000, or £280,000).
But perhaps he was a little optimistic.
While most of the land you think of in Second Life is the sort that people can build huge towering virtual creations upon, Linden also offers so-called "OpenSpaces" - tracts of land that don't have much in them apart from grass, trees and fields. Basically it's a way to make your Second Life empire bigger without needing to build stuff on it: virtual estates that you can lord it over.
But even open land has a cost - and Linden now says that people are hanging out too much in these areas, which in turn is using too much processing power, and as a result the price has had to go up. And not just up a little bit, but - as pointed out by Eric Krangel - it's rising by 66% from $75 to $125 a month.
(yes, a month. I still find it almost impossible to bend my brain around the sums of money people will pay for presence there)
So while the evidence there was no credit crunch inside Second Life might have been solid, but it seems fairly obvious that a real-world recession or depression will have an impact on virtual spaces like this. And raising prices won't go down well with money conscious customers.
Kingdon is effectively the head of Second Life's central bank, an analogy pointed out by Wired chief Chris Anderson at Pop!Tech last week. Is this a gamble that will pay off? Will Linden need to be prepared for a bailout of its own?
