i can’t help it, i’m like a moth to a flame or a bystander watching the world’s slowest train wreck! =p
every month or so, i plot a graph of SL private sim numbers based on Tyche Shepherd’s excellent GridSurvey.com. i only look at private sims since that comprises the bulk of Second Life’s revenue. Tyche also breaks that down by type of private sim and as of january 14 it is US$4.244 million per month o_O *now that’s walkin’ around cash*
the graph below should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt because it only plots the first two weeks of this year and the average loss of over 4000 private sims in 2013 would only be true if this rate was steady for the year
last year Second Life lost an average of about 8.4 private sims per day for a total of around 2865 sims. i had predicted a loss of 3000 and this year i do predict 4000 with the loss of more educational/non-profits as their discounts expire and the continued awareness of OpenSim as a viable alternative
the improvement of OpenSim both as a application (BulletSim physics and HyperGrid 2+) and as an offering (ie, Kitely’s performance and megaregions at low cost) will attract some people from SL – but that migration is always a painful one and probably isn’t very big
good thing i have a parasol, one day some of that SL sky might actually touch it!
The demise of SL doesn’t bother me, but the loss of beautiful and interactive builds certainly does. I wish there was a way to convince those sim owners of the benefits of moving what they can over to Kitely (preferably) or another OpenSim-based grid rather than disappearing altogether. It breaks my heart to think of the volume of artwork that might be disappearing forever.
Ohn Lang
15 Jan 13 at 12:07 pm
well said Ohn – so many beautiful builds, many completely original, are gone. i’d guess the number is in the thousands =(
it’s a shame from both a creative side and also inspirational. so many different styles . . .
it’s a double shame considering LL has (or had) all those OARs – would be nice to have them archived somehow
Ener Hax
15 Jan 13 at 12:20 pm
What a shame that is, I agree I already miss some beautiful places :-( And now not only sims are going down: even prims are missing! More than 11 each day ;-) (according to the legend of your graph)
Orlando Frequency
15 Jan 13 at 12:24 pm
@Orlando LOL! I missed that.
Ohn Lang
15 Jan 13 at 12:37 pm
darn missing prims! once 15,000 go missing, a sim poofs! =p
*Orlando is the official blog proofreader* =D
nice catch!
it makes me wonder about missing prims . . .
maybe that’s not an issue anymore, but i remember in late 2006 (yikes, i feel old!) that i lost a shoe, just one shoe, and then it reappeared in my inventory about 6 months later!
the really wacky thing is that i lost the shoe while skydiving! maybe the attachment could not keep up?
i dunno, but i swear that is a true story!
Ener Hax
15 Jan 13 at 12:44 pm
I have noticed quite a lot of missing prims and returns to my inventory following the weekly server updates that have become a big worry for what might go missing or end up dysfunctional and need tweaking and/or resetting. I expect problems with Opensim which is alpha, going on beta software, and we know it is still in serious development but Second Life is production software and we have had several years of digging up the road while the traffic rolls over it so to speak! And no compensation! No one at the Lab really gives a damn. Take it or leave it! And no reduction in tier for all the inconvenience and loss.
That is Linden Lab attitude to their customers so it can’t be any surprise the grid is in serious decline. It’s not the fault of Opensim or Cloud Party. The fault lies squarely with Linden Lab.
Personally, I would recommend anyone with beautiful regions worth preserving to start making what backup’s they can and set some of their work on an Opensim grid in case the Lab folds suddenly. But in any event it would make sense to back it up using Opensim since you can’t get an OAR file from the Lab. Backup could take you some time so 2013 is the year to get it done.
That’s what I think.
Ener’s article has been mentioned on G+ Opensim Virtual…
http://bit.ly/VUQU4e
Gaga
16 Jan 13 at 6:50 am
Lost… lost forever, so much effort and beauty.
It’s like watching the Library Of Alexandria burn slowly, and so few valuable scrolls and books escaping the flames.
-ls/cm
Crap Mariner
16 Jan 13 at 6:59 am
well Gaga, as usual, you have summed it up nicely and your recommendation to start backing up to OpenSim is a prudent one
it’s much easier to rebuild what you had inSL if you can do it while still in SL! unfortunately, it can also be overwhelming and i fear that many beautiful and useful builds simply poof
nice analogy Crap with Alexandria – there are so many sims that were insanely beautiful, and original, and also so many that served useful purposes. many examples of what could be created are forever gone
but Linden Lab did not seem to care about IBM who invested some 12 million dollars intro virtual worlds between 2005 and 2007, so why would they care about some group’s talent and thousands of hours making something?
for those reading this, Gaga and Crap are well acquainted with what has been inSL in its glory days. Crap, i think you have been around since quite early on eh? (like way early when you could hang out with Torley for hours on end!)
Ener Hax
16 Jan 13 at 7:34 am
My first av was a short-lived one in 2004, then late 2006.
Hang with Torley? If I did, I don’t remember. And looking back through my personal snapshot archives, I’d think there’d be more shots of him if I did.
Was more of the podcaster crowd, then music.
Alpha’s post really nailed it on the Marketing twits: http://www.alphaauer.com/?p=3749
Nowadays, the banner ads I see out there are Patterns. Oh boy. The Adventures Of Doritohead. And the ads I see within mySL are the Premium teases… Space? Privacy? Rewards? How the heck does Premium really give these?
I believe the word they keep missing was Philip’s Third F: Fun.
And anything that gets in the way of Fun needs to get cut or fixed.
-ls/cm
Crap Mariner
16 Jan 13 at 8:33 am
Crap Mainer said it all. A lot of the Fun has gone out of Second Life and I really don’t think Rod Humble understands virtual culture one little bit. He came from the video game industry and all I have seen him do is build video games on top of Second Life. What’s more Linden Lab just seems to want to pull the rug out from under the commercial life of SL and hog lucrative parts of it to make more money on. Look at the way they have managed Market Place and the damage done to inworld trading. They could have managed that a lot better but the profit line seems all they care about. Premium homes have helped to bottom out the rental business and search is a joke. I could go on but if anything is taking the heart and soul out of Second Life then it is the Linden’s mismanagement and profiteering to blame.
Gaga
16 Jan 13 at 8:54 am
http://www.alphaauer.com/?p=3749
Exactly! If anything, Second Life and the Opensim Metaverse is, for the most part, an adult playground. And what did we do as kids in the playground?
We had fun!
Gaga
16 Jan 13 at 9:10 am
“What’s more Linden Lab just seems to want to pull the rug out from under the commercial life of SL and hog lucrative parts of it to make more money on.”
That’s the only rational answer to “Why?” at this point, because you can drive yourself batty with conspiracy theories and other nonsense until the cows come home or Hamlet’s blog server crashes from the same old five people beating the same old dead breedable horses.
And all the folks offering up suggestions for solutions… they aren’t listening, guys. Save your breath. Do what I do, and play with cats and read.
-ls/cm
Crap Mariner
16 Jan 13 at 12:21 pm
the straight line graph looks too suspicious, like a planned decrease of sims. the earlier graphs show a couple of curves. If I didn’t know better I would think that the previous graphs were showing the normal loss of sims, and the latest one was a controlled loss to get sim loss down quickly to 20,000. Thats when I would think if this was planned that LL would cause empty sims to disappear from the world map. with a smaller world, the number of avatars per square meter would jump up to a ridicously high number as a marketing ploy for LL to try to jump start SL.
joe
16 Jan 13 at 6:32 pm
Joe, the line is straight because there are only two data points represented (1/1/2013 and 1/14/2013). If there were intermediate samples, you would probably see “curves”, but with only two data points, a straight line is the only reasonable representation.
Warin Cascabel
17 Jan 13 at 5:07 am