This morning I had a look at SL's main page and saw that the registration number had topped 1 million. Congratulations!
I know it's not paid users, and the concurrent user numbers are still below 10,000, but this is still a significant milestone.
« Tooling Around | Main | Chains of Contract »
Oct 22, 2006
Comments
The comments to this entry are closed.
Congrats to Cory, Philip et al.
Posted by: ren reynolds | Oct 22, 2006 at 11:32
Isn't this a bit like celebrating that a candy company gave away one million promotional chewing gum samples, when actual sales do not increase?
Posted by: Thomas | Oct 22, 2006 at 13:45
Isn't this a bit like celebrating that a candy company gave away one million promotional chewing gum samples, when actual sales do not increase?
...and there's no limit to the number of free samples an individual can take.
Posted by: | Oct 22, 2006 at 14:38
Why is it a significant milestone exactly? Is it not significant when other virtual worlds cross 1 million registered users? Is the presumption that Second Life is inherently exceptional and thus it crossing 1 million is de facto more important than other virtual worlds crossing 1 million? I am not being snarky. I know all of the TN authors are sophisticated enough to recognize the general lack of utility in using registered users as a metric, so I'm genuinely wondering why hitting a million registered users is somehow important and news-worthy for this particular virtual world.
I mean, I didn't even consider it newsworthy enough to issue a press release when we hit a million registered users, because it just means nothing. It doesn't mean that "text MUDs are on the rise." It doesn't even mean that our specific text MUDs are on the rise. It just means that one million accounts were created by an undetermined number of individual people.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Oct 22, 2006 at 15:17
1M visitors is signficiant for any virtual world, and here's why:
- I can create a MMORPG and post an entry on MMORPG.com for free. I'm just about guaranteed to get 100K visitors. (Pulling a number of of a hat.)
- With a bit more work, I can post on a few other sites (for free, but with a little bit of legwork) and get to 250K visitors.
- Then I need to start advertising. At first, I can put cheap banner ads up in MMORPG/game sites, and get to 1M visitors. (Number pulled out of a hat.)
- Once I've tapped the MMORPG-playing market, I need to branch out into other markets. More ads, but in non-gamer locations, and more importantly, more expensive per visitor!
As Richard Bartle pointed out in Designing Virtual Worlds, all worlds need new players to come through the door. Once players pass through the door, they're unlikely to come back a second time. (Unless something REALLY important changes about the world.) I don't, however, recall the book mentioning that new visitors get more and more expensive to attract.
Not only do the new visitors more expensive to attract, but they're less sticky. (Picking semi-arbitrary numbers) Of the first 100K through the door, 5K (5%) stick. Of players 900K-1M, maybe only 1K (1%) stick.
Thus, the cost of acquiring a player (not just a visitor) probably hits a J-curve. By a world's N-millionth visitor, it no longer pays to advertise. Certainly, a world will find it very difficult to have more than 6 billion visitors.
Note: The cost-of-aquisition is offset by (a) an exceptional product that gets many friend-to-friend recommendations for free, (b) a 30% per-year growth in the MMORPG market.
From the limited numbers I've seen, SL has had 1 million visitors. About 100K are currently sticking. 20K (?) are landowners = paying customers. 10K concurrent peak. They have certainly gone through the standard VW market, and must now "advertise" to new markets. Instead of advertising, they're doing lots of press and other PR. I understand their PR work. (I think the "1M population" that keeps getting published is very deceptive, although I don't know if the fault lies with the reporters or not.)
Posted by: Mike Rozak | Oct 22, 2006 at 17:31
What did the Millionth user get?
A free car?
Posted by: ren | Oct 22, 2006 at 17:40
I'd guess free virtual sex is more likely. :)
Posted by: snarky | Oct 22, 2006 at 19:47
Assuming that some significant percentage of that million was different people (ie, that it wasn't one guy that created a million accounts), what is pretty astounding is that a (million/X) people took the time to download a 26 meg (on the Mac a 57 meg) file, install it, spend a bit of time farting around to learn the interface and geshtalt, and remained long enough to generate the 20,000 - 100,000 that are currently "sticking." That's different than just visiting a web site and poking around. There's a bit of a commitment, and it's a different enough experience that, although the difference itself may account for some of the interest, it's also a fairly big time commitment from a pure curiosity standpoint.
God that was a lousy sentence. I do appologize.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Oct 22, 2006 at 21:04
Did Philip steal all your women or something? Boy you guys have an axe to grind.
This is good news for us. SL is a bonafide virtual world (not some silly mouse clicking heros quest).
It is a massive cauldron of creativity. Have you seen the stats on how much LSL code is written per minute? How many 3d objects are created every hour? It's HUGE.
Try joining the SLED emailing list and count the huge thruput of PHD students chatting about SecondLife.
I mean really folks, why are you so angry at something we've all wanted for so long?
Posted by: [email protected] | Oct 22, 2006 at 21:41
That's a very good question, Blaze.
I think some of it is backlash over the PR. There's a lot of PR, and often for events that seem significant but aren't always. (For example, the band appearances in Habbo Hotel, which has far larger audience overall, are skipped over, but SL's get big press). Particularly when numbers that aren't that useful for comparison get tossed around, the backlash can have some merit. Statements that minimize the importance of other worlds with higher populations will just make these folks even more frustrated.
And I think some of it is sour grapes; there have been many attempts at a successful social world, and SL is being reasonably successful, though not yet dramatically so. It doesn't accord with the vision of what this successful social world should be, to a lot of folks' minds.
In the case of the million registered in particular... it really isn't a very good metric, for all the reasons mentioned, That says nothing about SL's merits, it's a complaint about the metric. Getting to a million registrations over the course of three years isn't even a particularly dramatic achievement; UO reached a million registered in around the same time, and it cost money to register, which is a far higher barrier to entry than a free download.
Posted by: Raph | Oct 22, 2006 at 22:08
Blaze wrote:
Did Philip steal all your women or something? Boy you guys have an axe to grind.
Never met Philip. I leveled the same type of criticism at Project Entropia four or five years ago when it was making outrageous claims about its world as well. One of their big claims was that the next web would be inside of Project Entropia.
This is good news for us. SL is a bonafide virtual world (not some silly mouse clicking heros quest).
It's good news whenever any virtual world gains actual users. World of Warcraft is as much a virtual world as SL, I think that there are many virtual worlds that out-world SL in the sense that SL isn't a coherent world at all. In any case, as easily as you dismiss the thousands of virtual worlds out there, someone could easily dismiss Second Life as nothing but some silly and ultimately pointless sex-filled graphical chat room. Both of those characterizations are unfair to the respective products.
It is a massive cauldron of creativity. Have you seen the stats on how much LSL code is written per minute? How many 3d objects are created every hour? It's HUGE.
No doubt it is, as are many other virtual worlds. There are some awfully creative people doing some awfully creative roleplaying within overarching stories in some virtual worlds. You'll no doubt dismiss that kind of creativity as pointless, but I would suggest that it is no less or more pointless than 99% of the creations in Second Life. It is entertaining to the user.
Try joining the SLED emailing list and count the huge thruput of PHD students chatting about SecondLife.
Great! I think that's cool. Of course, academics also study many other virtual worlds. Our humble little text MUDs have been part of PhD theses and a high school is currently talking to us about using one of our text MUDs to help teach kids how to use basic scripting languages. There are associate professors, professors (including the inventor of virtual worlds), and even a judge on this very site that have spent a lot of time studying Everquest, World of Warcraft, and the other virtual worlds you deride (which happen to account for over 99% of virtual world users). Second Life is not exceptional in having academics interested, nor is the interest of academics important (with all due respect to many of the authors on this site!) to the success or failure of a virtual world.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Oct 22, 2006 at 23:05
A million is impressive by any metric (well, maybe not Entropia's). It's like the Dow hitting 10,000 or 12,000 or something. Purely psychological. Nevertheless, the media loves it, and I'm impressed. Don't knock the power of basic psychology.
And it matters because that's 1m people in a world they create, not someone else. Take the long view here and consider the Western history of modern media. After 60 years of broadcast media with a group of people deciding what others will consume, this really matters.
/looksatquarter
Posted by: Dmitri Williams | Oct 23, 2006 at 00:20
I agree with Dimitri. These psychological numbers are big stuff to normal people who don't fret about the appropriate metric for gauging whatever it is you all want to measure.
It's precisely these kind of milestones that push phenomena over the popular edge. Once that happens, it's not long before Google will buy them and we can get the beginnings of a virtual world wide web standard.
Posted by: monkeysan | Oct 23, 2006 at 00:50
Matt: It's good news whenever any virtual world gains actual users. World of Warcraft is as much a virtual world as SL, I think that there are many virtual worlds that out-world SL in the sense that SL isn't a coherent world at all.
The physical world isn't coherent either. On the other hand, are WoW/EQ etc actually great worlds, or are they great gaming scenes? I think you are wrong. Just think about why people stay and play. World-qualities: variation, the unexpected, social events, subcultures, mutability...
On the other hand, SL appears to be a "better" Active Worlds, and that software claimed 1.5 million downloads over 5 years ago... Is SL getting more press than its share? I think so.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Oct 23, 2006 at 03:48
Matt Mihaly>Second Life is not exceptional in having academics interested, nor is the interest of academics important (with all due respect to many of the authors on this site!) to the success or failure of a virtual world.
What's important about SL is that some of the people who have an academic interest in it aren't academics: they're revenue officers and lawyers and social workers and journalists, who could extrapolate what they see in SL and apply it to virtual worlds as a group. The wrong "we must protect our children from this evil" or "geeks evade $6bn in taxes every year" headline at the wrong time could affect us all.
This isn't as way-out as it seems: I've read plenty of magazine articles and academic papers that made generalisations concerning all virtual worlds based on the authors' experience of a couple of hours in LambdaMOO (or a couple of hours interviewing people who have spent much longer there).
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Oct 23, 2006 at 04:13
I don't see why something has to be exceptional to be worth commenting on, it just has to be on topic and of *some* interest? Big round numbers (lots of 0s) seem as good a reason for a couple of paragraphs on one day as any other.
As to one counterpoint objecting to the coverage- I never paid much attention to text MUDs/MMOs etc, so discovering that one or several have a million (or two or three or six million) subs is actually interesting to me.
I think a lot of SL users roll their eyes at most of the PR doing the rounds. We may drink too much koolaide but we're not blind :). Still, at least with the people I talk with, there's a kind of tacit appreciation of the effectiveness of the PR/hype. There seems to be a lot of goodwill out there (and a lot of jealous looking spite to be fair). In world itself, though, tends to be full of experienced residents ranting about bugs ("Am I missing textures? anyone? rebake? what?"), and new users asking "what is there to do, and how do I make money?". Filling welcome areas with shills more concerned with steering new people to theirs or their friends/employers stores than being genuinely helpful is probably something less than the best option for new user orientation.
So, I think if anything, the hoohah around the million registrations should do one thing- galvanise Linden Labs into thinking "ok, we have the headlines, we have all this press goodwill, now it's time to stop mucking about and Make Things Work." It would be a shame to lose all this momentum, because when people see just what a (tiny in real terms) 80 strong crowd does to a sim for a concert, they'll just laugh.
Entering SL now is as free as browsing the web- if a lot of these signups aren't bothering to do that, then that is something worth looking into.
Posted by: Ace Albion | Oct 23, 2006 at 05:23
In order to have a successful business you need to get people walking through the door (or to move away from the brick and mortar analogy) looking at your website.
Linden has just celebrated having the 1 millionth person walking through their door. While that in itself may not be a big deal, the number of concurrent users has been rising steadily. Yesterday when I checked there were 10k users logged in. That means 10,000 people looking around in their store.
SL's business model is based on people leasing land. The primary reason to lease land is to open some virtual store and sell some virtual product. Yesterday in SL there would have been 10,000 potential customers logged in to check out your wares.
There is a lot of hate around SL here at TN and I'm not sure why. But I'm guessing sooner or later you'll be able to read the latest weblog over at the TN stand inside Second Life.
Posted by: dave | Oct 23, 2006 at 13:18
@Andy-
"God that was a lousy sentence. I do appologize."
Its likely from exposure to my bad grammer :)
@Ola
"On the other hand, are WoW/EQ etc actually great worlds, or are they great gaming scenes? I think you are wrong. Just think about why people stay and play. World-qualities: variation, the unexpected, social events, subcultures, mutability"
Bit of a bias there eh?
For a player (gamer) in either type of VW the redeeming quality is premised on enjoyment. Some people like to slay dragons, some people like to visit VW sex clubs, some people like PVP, some people like selling clothes to generate revenue, etc. The only value judgements made are individual gamer/player/person buying in.
What is this space about?
Is this a fun game/space?
Hows the lag?
Can I understand whats going on?
Hows the interface?
How do I get help?
What is there to do?
Compare the login experiances of a level 1 orc warrior in WOW and the login experiances of a new user in SL. Which ones smoother and more playable?
Those are the metrics that matter, Mike Rozak hit on this with his analysis r/t stickiness.
Raph's comment on barrier to entry was pertinent, except I'd add we now live in the era of the 14 day free trial, so the barrier to entry is not digital download time (something that SL has the advantage in)
SL hit a million users registrations, and is full of creative people (the ones who bother staying around) and its meeting peoples needs as specified above. I think thats great for them, it means they can keep it going, improve and meet players expectations even more than they do now. Because right now as a player/gamer/participant in VW's I think they could be doing better and they should be doing better given that they are the VW media darlings of the moment.
I mean when Rueters opens a shop in your VW your doing something right, but its a huge opprotunity for VW's in general. I think thats bigger news than 1m registered users....
Posted by: Allen Sligar | Oct 23, 2006 at 13:25
Well, Allen, can't you say the same things about a webpage? Still doesn't make it a world... My point was: Coherency is an aesthetical quality, not a world quality.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Oct 23, 2006 at 13:44
Ola wrote:
The physical world isn't coherent either.
The physical world is absolutely coherent, I'd argue.
On the other hand, are WoW/EQ etc actually great worlds, or are they great gaming scenes? I think you are wrong. Just think about why people stay and play. World-qualities: variation, the unexpected, social events, subcultures, mutability...
I wouldn't hold up WoW or EQ as particularly great worlds, but they are certainly worlds.
Second Life seems to me to be a a collection of disparate, generally unconnected places rather than a large, very interconnected place, which is another aspect of worldyness. I'm not saying there aren't worldy aspects to SL. I just don't think SL is the most worldy of virtual worlds.
Dmitri wrote:
A million is impressive by any metric (well, maybe not Entropia's). It's like the Dow hitting 10,000 or 12,000 or something. Purely psychological. Nevertheless, the media loves it, and I'm impressed. Don't knock the power of basic psychology.
Sure, but again, lots of virtual worlds have hit a million. I hesitate to use the word routine, but just off the top of my head I'd be willing to guess: Dragonrealms, Gemstone, Achaea, UO, Everquest (I think at least), WoW, Lineage, Lineage 2, Runescape, Habbo Hotel, Puzzle Pirates, Knight Online, Ragnarok Online, Final Fantasy Online, Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds. I am quite sure I'm missing -many- of them, particularly in Asia. And as Raph pointed out, the barrier to entry for some of these is far higher than for Second Life.
And it matters because that's 1m people in a world they create, not someone else.
Second Life allows people a particular level of control over what they create, though it is far from allowing you to create "whatever you wish." The same can be said about Habbo Hotel (though granted, Habbo allows for significantly reduced creative expression compared with SL), which I believe has crossed 50 million registrations, but I don't notice it being hyped here.
Ace Albion wrote:
As to one counterpoint objecting to the coverage- I never paid much attention to text MUDs/MMOs etc, so discovering that one or several have a million (or two or three or six million) subs is actually interesting to me.
The misunderstanding here illustrates my point well. I said that there are text MUDs that have had a million registrations. Indeed there are. On the other hand, there are not, and never have been, text MUDs that had anything approaching a million active users, much less subscribers. For instance, Achaea has had over a million registrations, but has never even broken 1000 simultaneous players. Steady registrations, year in, year out, for 9 years. LOTS of users creating multiple registrations. The million just doesn't mean anything.
Allen Sligar wrote:
I mean when Rueters opens a shop in your VW your doing something right, but its a huge opprotunity for VW's in general. I think thats bigger news than 1m registered users....
Now that I totally agree with. Reuters embedding a journalist in SL is one of the few stories I've heard out of SL recently that didn't have me rolling my eyes. It's downright cool.
I'm not anti-Second Life, though it's got no appeal for me personally. I'm just for a realistic view of it within the larger context of virtual world development (and Linden Lab's arguably deceitful marketing tactics are pretty annoying as well).
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Oct 23, 2006 at 14:34
Matt said: Second Life seems to me to be a a collection of disparate, generally unconnected places rather than a large, very interconnected place, which is another aspect of worldyness.
Sounds like your complaining that SL is beginning to resemble a multiverse of very small virtual worlds rather than a single, very large one.
Now you might that may just be semantics, but I actually don't think it is. It's the difference between a virtual world that is singular because of developer fiat and a virtual world that isn't singular because its users are have access to the platform.
To me it's like the difference between an online forum system and myspace, e.g.
Posted by: monkeysan | Oct 23, 2006 at 15:12
Monkeysan wrote:
Sounds like your complaining that SL is beginning to resemble a multiverse of very small virtual worlds rather than a single, very large one.
I'm not complaining at all on that front. I don't see anything inherently better or worse about that vs. any other scheme. I just think it's less world-y than it might be. There are things that can't be done in a developer-created space that can be done in Second Life, and there are things that can be done in a developer-created space that cannot be done in Second Life.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Oct 23, 2006 at 15:34
Well, Matt, so argue then...? Where's the argument?
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Oct 23, 2006 at 16:22
SL, There.com, Active Worlds, IMVU, MultiVerse, Croquet and some up and coming other systems are virtual worlds.
World of Warcraft is a virtual game. I mean, if WoW is virtual world, then you can call this telix salt script I wrote back in 1991 for multi user chat a virtual world.
Posted by: blaze | Oct 23, 2006 at 17:43
Well, even with the hype, a million people tried it. That's what it counts. Even allowing for the alts. It's something -- it isn't even so important that it be TRUE, it's important that big businesses have already reacted by showing up. Reuters has a new bureau there now.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Oct 23, 2006 at 18:02
Well, even with the hype, a million people tried it. That's what it counts. Even allowing for the alts.
If the number of registered is slighly above 1,000,000, then with any significant number of alts, the number of people that have tried it is significantly below a million. Given that Linden has publicly stated "around 20% of accounts are alts", then we're looking at a minimum 200k shortfall in accounts before we could even begin to entertain the notion that "a million people [have] tried it".
Posted by: Tom | Oct 23, 2006 at 18:14
I don't even like the game and have at least four avatars registered. More if they didn't wipe after beta.
Posted by: Kathy | Oct 23, 2006 at 18:23
World of Warcraft is a virtual game.
Do you want to restart the discussion on what a virtual world is?
Well, even with the hype, a million people tried it.
Just to split hairs, a million people have registered for it. Registration, as far as I can see, does not necessitate having tried it. (Whereas in an IRE game, e.g., it does. IIRC, your character does not get saved unless you try the game out.) It is entirely possible (though admittedly unlikely) that people created an account and never downloaded the client. I'm just pointing that out.
Oh, and the reason I came over here to comment... I just read this in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Professors can learn a lot from Web 2.0 enterprises like Digg, the technology-news aggregator, and Second Life, the fast-growing virtual world, Ms. Wagner said." [source]
So, Second Life has been classified a Web 2.0 thing. =P That's official enough for me.
Posted by: Michael Chui | Oct 23, 2006 at 18:24
Well, um, Tom, stay tuned another few weeks. 50,000 sign-ups alone the other day. It really is knee-deep in newbies. It will reach the 1.5 million mark soon enough, and even allowing for the officially-stated 20 percent alts, it will be a million.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Oct 23, 2006 at 18:49
The influx is newbies, anyone can tell that by hangning out in welcome areas for a bit.
LL wasn't really prepared, as has been said, not enough truly helpful people in the welcome areas to help integrate the newbies. Which means they might not stay. But maybe LL will start hiring some actual residents to do the SL equivalent to the newbie quest givers in WoW, EQ, FFXI, EQOA, etc.
Posted by: CronoCloud Creeggan | Oct 23, 2006 at 23:44
Many of those newbies will last exactly as long as it takes for their parents to look over their shoulder one evening when they should be doing homework but are actually get a virtual blowjob from a purple werecat.
I'm one of those million - the exact progression was; installed, intrigued, bemused, approached, propositioned, revolted, bored for two days, uninstalled.
If Linden showed us how many of those "users" have not logged in for over, let's be generous, six months, they would almost certainly burst their own hyupe bubble. So people tried it? So what? What counts is how many liked it compared with how many thought it sucked.
Billions of people have been to Frankfurt Airport if you count repeat visits. That does NOT make it a tourist attraction.
Posted by: Cael | Oct 24, 2006 at 05:19
I'm one of those with a couple of free accounts too. There are clearly many people who fall into that category. The number of "actual" users remains highly obscured by the presence of free accounts, as it has for many earlier MMOGs (e.g., many doubted Lineage's claims to 2M users as opposed to 2M accounts for the same reasons stated here).
But I think Linden Labs is to be highly commended for their transparency in posting login and economic data on their site. How many other virtual worlds do this?
It's true that many clueless statements are made about SL in the press and even here (the "one million residents" type being most common, others made in posts here by SL fans predicting tens or hundreds of millions of users are among the more ludicrous), but for anyone who wants to look, at least some of the actual numbers are there -- and are often not as rosy as the official PR and unofficial comments would lead someone who doesn't look too closely to believe.
For example, more than half of those with accounts have not logged in in the past two months. The real-world economics of SL are often discussed in glowing terms too. But using this trailing 60-day login number (459,062 residents), 97.74% of SL residents did not make any money in SL in September, and only 0.32% made $100 (USD) or more in September. I have to wonder if Reuters or Wired or whomever looked at the actual numbers, whether they might be less eager to champion SL's broad significance. OTOH, more universities and charitable groups are experimenting with SL, so there are other non-economic applications too.
It's clear that SL is growing, has a much longer tail in terms of login frequency than MMOGs, has significant churn in terms of dead accounts, has gained a terrific spot in the media spotlight, and represents an important part of the virtual world space right now. It remains entirely unclear, IMO, whether it will have a long-term positive effect on the adoption and use of virtual worlds. Time will tell.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Oct 24, 2006 at 12:04
A million people walked through SL's door...and only 10,000 were interested enough to actually stick around. That's a very telling number, although it's probably not what LL is trying to point out with this press release.
Lets see...SL is currently a money sink for investors and has an anemic user growth rate, which is probably a good thing because the servers couldn't support any kind of significant growth. Dress that all up with a clunky interface and outdated graphics and you have a really winner. Or not.
Color me unimpressed.
Posted by: fester | Oct 24, 2006 at 12:54
@Michael
"So, Second Life has been "Positioned as" a Web 2.0 thing. =P That's official enough for me."
Corrected for (2.0) accuracy :)
@Ola
Related to subsequent comments and yours:
"But maybe LL will start hiring some actual residents to do the SL equivalent"
And this points to: How is a live avatar in SL any different than a NPC quest giver in the valley of trials (noob zone)in WOW? Whats the mean quality of thier ability to assist someone logging into a virtual space?
Does SL then become a virtual game rather than a world in this instance? Or is there really no differance at all?
"say the same things about a web page?"
Yes in fact I do, Myspace to me is a VW space, a commercially viable (for now) user content driven market place for ideas and increasingly user created products. I dont differentiate between MySpace and SL, they both bill themselves as "the place to be" by certain segments (of the long tail?) it would seem the segment working on the teen angst tip has more value to Mr Murdoch though but maybe he does not understand the suttle refinement of SL, and perhaps the heavy press coverage is meant to convince News Coorp or Google of the Web 3.0 value associated with SL.
I'm going to guess that the refined citizens of SL might be a bit taken aback when SL becomes a monetized subsidiary of News Corp or another conglomerate.
They both share a few things in common, bad optimization, unfriendly user interfaces intrusive ad's and a propensity for user generated porn...
I'm not down on SL, Im just calling it like it is.
Im really only interested in quantifying the user experiance into data points. When you look at a space like SL and Habbo and Runescape from a quantifiable data perspective (for instance interface and technical barrier to entry) SL leaves a lot to be desired both subjectively and objectively.
Still grats on 1m registered, they have the currency with the media at the moment to do good things for games and VW spaces I hope they use it wisely.
Posted by: Allen Sligar | Oct 24, 2006 at 16:07
"I'm going to guess that the refined citizens of SL might be a bit taken aback when SL becomes a monetized subsidiary of News Corp or another conglomerate."
Not going to happen. MySpace is far less openly pornographic than SL, which seems to the new player like one huge brothel divided into almost-identical island sections.
No major media player would touch it, purely because of all the dancing penises.
Posted by: Cael | Oct 26, 2006 at 09:40
"No major media player would touch it, purely because of all the dancing penises."
Does this mean that places like SL will be the next internet/gaming issue of the day for the Moral Majority and certain crusading / LFM Senators?
Given all the media attention to SL it surely is just a matter of time.
Posted by: Juan Incognito | Oct 26, 2006 at 21:15
Mike Sellers said: "It remains entirely unclear, IMO, whether it will have a long-term positive effect on the adoption and use of virtual worlds. Time will tell."
I'll agree with that. To be frank, right now SL is like Paris Hilton, famous for being famous.
The problem I worry about here is that the backlash could be ugly. A million registered users and they can even get 10,000 concurrent users? The press will wise up eventually and start talking about that; that's a huge pin aimed at VWs, as distinct from MMOs.
On the good side, it shows that there is interest (even after you weed out the inevitable duplicates and people who download but never log in). If someone came along and outdid SL in ease-of-use, it seems credible think they could retain a couple-three hundred thousand active users.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Oct 27, 2006 at 10:15
"SL is like Paris Hilton, famous for being famous."
Post of the day.
Posted by: Bill Ashbless | Oct 27, 2006 at 12:55
Hey now, I want credit for the Paris Hilton analogy!! ;)
http://forge.ironrealms.com/2006/10/20/what-do-paris-hilton-and-second-life-have-in-common/
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Oct 27, 2006 at 14:27
Jessica, Bill, Matt, it's a wacky world. From Chartreuse:
Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World)
"I’m amused by Paris Hilton.
If Madonna was Marketing 1.0 then Paris Hilton is Marketing 2.0.
She’s a real life version of what value is and how it is created today.
Every web developer should pay attention to her.
..."
Every MMO developer? :)
Posted by: Jerry Paffendorf | Oct 27, 2006 at 17:58
I can sum up the correct answer in one word. "Bollocks."
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Oct 28, 2006 at 13:58
Non-hype statement providing a data point for actual user base information.
A http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/26/amazon-s3-for-the-win/>quote from Linden Lab's official blog detailing the number of client downloads following a mandatory upgrade:
"...for the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far- which I’d estimate to be around 30,000-38,000 downloads."
Upgrade day is considered a big deal and most of the frequent users are clamoring to get in. Upgrades occur roughly every two weeks, and the noticeable bandwidth spike due to client downloads subides after a day or so. This information suggests there are fewer than 50,000-60,000 true individuals consistently using Second Life.
Posted by: | Oct 30, 2006 at 10:36
This information suggests there are fewer than 50,000-60,000 true individuals consistently using Second Life.
Which may not be all that significant. If SL has regular (specifically, paying) users who check in only once every few weeks (15-60 days), then they may have the makings of a sustainable long-tail business model. We shouldn't assume that only those dedicated users who show up in the first couple of days are consistent users of SL.
OTOH, the ~50K number may be significant for businesses reading the "one million users" hype and seeing dollar signs in their eyes; we may see a backlash from such businesses feeling burned, much as they did from investments in "online community" via forum services in the 1990s that didn't yield strong returns (entirely apart from the other potential sources of media backlash in the core SL community of users).
I don't know if LL is going to publish the number of client downloads made in the first 30-60 days, but this will be an important number for assessing the actual SL population: users need only one client no matter how many alts they have, and those who don't log in much if at all may simply not get the upgrade. The "core" number may be 50K or so (sounds about right given their 8K-10K concurrent usage), but the question remains, how long is the tail? (And what we won't hear from LL for obvious reasons: how many of those are paying users?)
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Oct 30, 2006 at 11:08
Perhaps some perspective is in order?
In late 1999 (or was it early 2000?), The Palace, a user-generated virtual world system, (then a Communities.Com product) hit 3,000,000 registered users (generated reg-codes that were used at least once.) It typically more than 20,000+ users online at once during peak hours (but that included up to 10% unregistered users, not included in the 3M number above). It had been featured in Time Magazine.
Sound kinda familiar?
It is widely considered by the industry (and the company that owned it) as a commercial failure.
It's been two years since I penned The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds and I'm still skeptical. Second Life hasn't even cracked the user penetration of The Palace in the same amount of time. Sure, they may be at/near break-even, which may give them lots of runway, but I still don't see a way for them to generate enough income to get airborne.
Randy
Posted by: F. Randall Farmer | Nov 01, 2006 at 17:18
How about some more perspective:
SecondLife has over 4000 simulators, and terrabytes upon terrabytes of user created prims, LSL code, textures, and animations.
The sheer amount of bandwidth and powerconsumption coming out of the Linden Lab colo must be incredibly immense.
It counts as its money men, the founders of Amazon, Ebay, and Lotus Notes.
SL is something different than anything that has come before it.
Posted by: blaze | Nov 05, 2006 at 18:05
Joshua Linden says the code is "nearly organic," too. I understand they have to feed it sticks of kolbasa now to keep it from going on strike.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Nov 05, 2006 at 18:12
Blaze,
Oh, please.
The number of servers is a metric of success? By that measure, SL is doing much better than say, World of Warcraft! Oh yeah, so was The Palace.
Server count a measure of burn-rate, not profit.
I don't need to dive deeper into the server argument here, Daniel James already did that, months ago.
As for the money list - I could do the same for Communities.com, which included: Founder of Broderbund, Former CEO of Creative Labs (who became the Communities.com CEO), Lotus, SoftBank, and other big names. But, what does that prove? People with money take chances. A lot of those bets crap out.
Posted by: F. Randall Farmer | Nov 05, 2006 at 18:23
Randy -- I've long admired your work. You are one of the founders of our field. But your dismissal of SL is somewhat surprising. Have you spent much time in the world lately? One doesn't have to be a mindless booster of Linden Lab to see that something unprecedented is happening here.
SL is in the right place at the right time, and I'm sure that many of the people involved with that project would agree that luck had much to do with this.
The difference between Palace and SL is enormous.
But this is really just a question: Have you spent much time in SL lately?
Posted by: Question for Randy | Nov 05, 2006 at 21:09
BTW -- that previous question was from Aaron. :)
Posted by: Aaron | Nov 05, 2006 at 21:12
Per Prokofy's comment (which made me laugh so hard I spit tea... thanks):
Don't eat the kolbasa! SLyent Green is avies! It's avies!!!
Posted by: Andy Havens | Nov 06, 2006 at 07:33
I've not dismissed SL at all - I'm just attempting to set a historical context for excessive hyperbole surounding the product.
Have you even read The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds? If you had you'd immediately notice that the subtitle is: Or, why I really like Second Life, even if their business is most likely doomed.
I did design work for Linden on the SL UI three years ago. I still visit the world periodically. I track the goings on there pretty closely. I am, and have always been hopeful that they will make a solid business out of it. I just don't think that the Hype Machine is the solution to broad adoption.
Simply put: History has shown that 1mm (historical) users does not indicate broad adoption in any way.
That's a pretty strong statement. I hope you are right, but why do you say that?
For the record: I only spend this much energy critiquing something if I want to see it succeed and think it even has a half a chance. Cory and Philip understood this and it was one of the reasons they asked me to work with them on SL.
Posted by: F. Randall Farmer | Nov 06, 2006 at 11:40
This evening 2nd Life made it to the top evening German news in a 60 second feature (just aired). For those of you who understand German, the streaming version should be up in a few minutes ("Tagesthemen" at 22:15 - http://www.tagesschau.de/sendungen/archiv/0,1198,11-7-2006,00.html)
Posted by: Neven | Nov 07, 2006 at 16:46
Here is the exact link to the German Newscast: http://www.tagesschau.de/sendungen/0,1196,OID6074974_OIT6075000,00.html
Posted by: Neven | Nov 08, 2006 at 09:05
Randy,
I'm embarrassed to admit that I have *not* read your book. After hitting "post," I'll be moving on to Amazon to order a copy.
Regarding the "right place at the right time" statement, it's hard to remember another point in recent history when virtual worlds received this much attention in the mainstream press. My comment is also based on the reaction of colleagues, university administrators, students, and family members. I haven't seen this much enthusiasm for a "fringe technology," since the wave of attention that attended on-line communication and the earliest web browsers.
Like you, I have my fingers crossed about this working out.
Look forward to reading your book.
Aaron
Posted by: Aaron | Nov 08, 2006 at 19:07