Maria wrote quite a thoughtful article on the decline of Second Life over the last year or two. i had mentioned in a post last june (is the tipping point for virtual worlds here) similar concerns and it’s easy to critique other things and try to predict things, but only time tells (my crystal ball has a crack in it) =)
for me, looking at how concurrency records have not been broken for over two years is a strong indicator that the peak has passed (literally)
i remember when i started SL and there would be 38,000 people on in the evenings. i became excited as those numbers slowly climbed and my little estate grew
Maria points to numbers that Tateru calculated as well as from Tyche and her fab GridSurvey site and they point to what many people already have a “feel” for but seeing the numbers helps frame it a bit better (for me anyway)
what i found interesting were the private estate numbers and the amount of revenue it means for Linden Lab. i know i was small with 19 sims but to me that $3,000 a month covered half an LL person’s monthly salary. in Maria’s calculations, 73% of Linden Lab’s revenue is generated by the top 500 estate owners! holy crap! that is a tiny number of customers to hinge so much on!
communication blows with Linden Lab – they don’t listen to residents, they don’t care about private estate owners, they don’t nurture content creators, and they seem to have communication issues internally according to glassdoor.com reviews. they don’t fix lag and seem to increase it by pushing forward on things that make SL harder to run on “average” pcs
if the CEO of Lifeway Foods can tweet a thank you to me for a $3 product that i said was fabulous (she so rocks), you’d think M could have tweeted me a simple hello when i was tweeting nice things about SL to him (and he had Wally as communications manager, what dorks). you guys know what a frigging spaz i am, can you imagine my reaction had M said hello? and that’s when i was still in love with SL! i probably would have had some ink done!
LL’s lackadaisical approach (perhaps even blasée) toward their customers is no surprise to many. combine that with weird decisions and the lack of communication and does anyone still think it will ever return to those days of big growth? their high dollar business model has been broken by OpenSim
i do depart from Maria’s perspective when she mentions that she hopes SL sticks around. i thought that until recently because of the viewer. OpenSim is big enough and continues to grow and viewers will likely continue to be developed by passionate and talented people
many are just discovering that OpenSim offers great options. if LL did go under, there would be an influx of people to OpenSim simply because many Second Life residents really enjoy their time in-world
OpenSim won’t have any massive media frenzy or explosive growth like SL did but i think (hope) it is here to stay for a long time =)
The 73% of revenue from 500 estate owners is VERY misleading. Obviously there are thousands of users who rent land from these people, and those 500 estate owners are not just forking over the money without actually making it back in land rentals. If 100 of those estate owners just decide to pack it in, there will be 100 to replace them if all factors remain the same, because that’s where demand sits. If regular users who are renting from these landlords start leaving, then that is when you will see problems. This revenue is actually more spread out then it seems, but obviously just as fragile. Some people, the middle men in this case, need to at least make some money to make the land development and user coddling worth it, I think that is more of an issue then just how few percent of total user base are the ones actually handing money over to the lab.
Metacam Oh
26 Apr 11 at 5:50 pm
good point but if 100 leave, it won’t be 100 to replace them. when i left i sold my sims – of the original 19, only 3 remain
some of the biggest land owners, like Anshe have grandfathered sims
also, new owners will need to buy new sims at $1000 a pop (many can be bought at less from people getting out like me)
also, of my 101 residents at my peak, not all bought land again or as much land. they took the opportunity to downsize or simply did not want to start over
i don’t disagree with you but i don’t see it as a one for one swap, maybe more like 100 out – 50 in? but even so, i have a hard time seeing someone take the place of a small person like I was – getting 19 sims up and ready takes a few weeks
more telling and probably way more accurate is the reduction in private sims and last year’s 18 million user hour decline
Ener Hax
26 Apr 11 at 5:59 pm
Ener –
None of the numbers or calculations are mine. (Just some of the charts — I love making charts!) All the major data comes from Tyche at Grid Survey. I LOVE that site! — Maria
Maria Korolov
26 Apr 11 at 6:40 pm
I’m not particularly thinking of the landlords just packing up and moving over to OpenSim — but in starting to market OpenSim as a lower-cost alternative. There are benefits for landlords, including the chance to own the customer relationships (instead of having Linden Lab own them).
The landlords already know how to sell land, and how to make residents happy. These skills are easily transferable to OpenSim.
My point was that this could cause a cascade. Every single person who moves from SL to OpenSim is additional downward pressure on SL land prices, smaller margins for landowners — and makes OpenSim a fraction more attractive. Plus, the folks who move to OpenSim help make OpenSim a better place, by contributing content, or their attention, or their spending money, or coding skills. Which in turn makes it even MORE attractive.
This cascade is self feeding — a snowball going downhill. It starts out small, then rolls along, gathering speed at first in small increments then bigger and bigger and suddenly its a landslide.
Maria Korolov
26 Apr 11 at 7:00 pm
well Maria, you made the numbers digestible and approachable and that is a big part of them =)
InWorldz has proven that the $295 a month model is not the best that virtual worlds can be. sure they don’t have some of the things like as good a voice but for the cost, people don’t seem to mind =)
it is a cascading thing – it took me many hours to build nice sims and i never ever had two parcels touching, there was always at least a 4 metre wide buffer (made it easier to enforce building limits) but the market drives prices and i tried to price the same as Anshe. when i had an 85%+ occupancy, i made money, otherwise i did not
if a big player that has 100 sims leave, no one person will pick up 100 sims of slack, land occupancy is too low and it would take HUGE bucks for anyone to instantly add 100 sims!
who knows what Rod has in mind but there is no doubt that SL is kind of “just there”. nothing can really make it grow fast. even if sims dropped to $195 a month, i’d never go back – i have a nice ~16 sim estate for a bottle of Plymouth Naval Strength gin less than that!
Ener Hax
26 Apr 11 at 8:51 pm
One of the factors mentioned in the article made me laugh.
The poor way in which LL communicates with residents/customers.
Communication would imply a two-way road, and LL just doesn’t do that.
It’s “we decided to change this and that, give us your opinion but be ready to swallow our junk regardless how you feel about it” and if your opinions are a bit too critical of SL, well, chances are they’ll shut down your forum post.
The “new viewer” that they keep pushing (put in quotes because this basically applies to every new release) is another example.
They push these new versions even when every user tells them that it’s just a big steaming pile.
And when they (on rare occasions) promise to change what’s wrong, they just throw more eye-candy and trivial functions at it, rather than actually fixing or removing that which causes the problems (and trust me, a viewer that crashes computers is a problem).
Luckily there are a few decent third-party viewers, but the people who develop those are apparently also continuously targeted by LL, judging by how they keep coming up with ridiculous policy changes and banning 3rd party viewers – some viewers are just plain nasty rubbish that deserve being banned, but over just the last year I’ve seen some great little projects that got stamped out by LL, based on policies so absurd that even Monthy Python couldn’t come up with.
I don’t see OpenSim-based worlds filling the ever-growing gap soon, but yes, they are on the way up (thankfully) and more and more people with good skills are making the switch.
Blitz Blitzen
27 Apr 11 at 1:40 pm
I would simply love to add sims.
But not at current prices. I run a community based small estate and because I’m RL retired I have the time to spend a ton of time interacting with my residents. Leaving approx 50% of my sims as public land means I rarely break even, and while making a few $$ would be great… I’m just foolish enough to still be in love with Secondlife…………………..for awhile longer.
brinda allen
27 Apr 11 at 7:32 pm
its all about demand, if those estate owners leave because of lack of users renting that is different, then them just leaving. There will be someone to step in and buy a sim if there is a demand for rent. I don’t think people will just default to the main land.
Metacam Oh
27 Apr 11 at 11:03 pm
wow brinda, i think you may have motivated me enough to log into SL just to see your estate!
i don’t know what percentage of mine was public, it seemd like a good amount. each sim started with a 4 metre edge and then each lot had at least 4 metres around it. then i had an openspace park and also the Eville Atomic Lounge, Haxor Lunar Lounge, some waterways. so maybe 25-30% was public? i also charged $7.50 to 8 L per prim which was too low . .
Ener Hax
28 Apr 11 at 8:17 am
you are right Metacam – to a point that will happen, but it’s the small ones, like I was, that slowly leave and even though 400 private sims over the last year is a small number for SL to lose, it still represents over $100,000 USD per month (if most were full sims) that LL lost
i think SL will be around a long time if it does not get sold or do any really huge changes
the residents that love it are mostly loyal
Ener Hax
28 Apr 11 at 8:27 am
I recall several years ago when I posted to the SL forums about Open Spaces and the many little people that would lose their pride and joy sims. 1900 was it? yes, so it was and that’s when the rot really started as far as I can see. I got a warning not to post URLs to Opensim (yep, really!). I continued because I knew for a fact so many of the little people were on low incomes or disabled but it made no difference to Linden Labs. Then I got a visit from someone that tried to get me to see how damaging my forum posts were to SecondLife. I debated the issues and gave my reasoning and they left. Next time I tried to post I found I was banned from the forums!
This is how Linden Labs listens to its customers. LL has some slogan like “Your world, Your imagination” which implies some sort of democracy but when the chips are down LL dose what it always dose, rolls out what it wants its residents to have. Then just ignores any objections or says it listens and makes a fanfare of some trivial, laggy widget (I wont even mention viewer 2).
I am so ready to jump ship!
In the past week I closed two sims in SL so I can finance a move to Opensim with change to spare. I think the time is right so I’m finally on my way.
Strangely, I have a deep sense of disloyalty syndrome, not to LL but to the landlord that has served me well for years.
Gaga
29 Apr 11 at 1:49 am
i understand you Gaga, selling my estate was a difficult decision and very emotionally taxing
the Openspace thing was te start of the demise and a very clear turning point for my estate
but once i was “gone” from SL – a huge relief washed over me and was followed by the excitement of something new
for me it was two fold – one i was getting out of the land business and the constant worry of making the nearly $3k a month tier and secondly was going in an entirely new direction with virtual worlds – education
in that second part, it meant that the social aspect was not so important anymore and that i could use my real life education in VWs – it was a closer alignment to the real me
you can only be responsible to yourself and you are not being disloyal to your landlord – SL may no longer fit your needs or have practices that align with you
i never held any of my residents to blame if they left me, it was business and much of that business was influenced by LL and often by their poor decisions
Ener Hax
29 Apr 11 at 7:12 am