Second Life November metrics: Nothing gained
by Tateru Nino 
Dec 12th 2008 at 12:00PM
Filed under: Economy, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
November metrics for Linden Lab's virtual environment, Second Life are available for examination. September and October were relatively poor months, and November's results don't look great at all.
In fact every one of Linden Lab's key metrics fell in November. Land size, user-hours, transactions, PMLF. The only gain is an infinitesimal increase in the Linden Dollar exchange rate of 0.3%.
Stable:
- User-to-user transactions are down an additional 0.3% from October's fall ( by 34 million Linden Dollars), but this figure does not appear to provide any useful measure of economic activity, and Linden Lab cautions us against inferring any such activity from it.
The losses:
- PMLF (accounts with a positive monthly Linden Dollar flow) is down by 3.32% to 59,422, falling much further than in October.
- The amount of USD exchanged during October fell for the fourth month running. The previous three months saw a fall of 4.8% (US$459,000). In November, it fell another 4.8% (US$440,000) in only 30 days, now at its lowest since February 2008.
- Premium accounts seem to be in free-fall. The decline continues to accelerate each month with no end in sight. Another 2.1% fall during the month (that's 1,758 accounts) bringing the remaining premium accounts to 79,721. Linden Lab's new CEO, Mark Kingdon says that 'Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business,' however, Linden Lab is trying to find ways to make premium accounts more appealing.
- Land area fell by 142 million square metres (7.05%) representing the first decline on record. This appears to be purely from the repackaging of void simulators into reduced-specification products, to become effective in January 2009.
Basically while September and October weren't good months, November represented a much worse proposition.
Demographically there seems to be little change. Second Life is still firmly in the hands of Baby Boomers and Generation X as far as active users go, and younger users statistically remaining unengaged. The percentage of user-hours consumed by users under 25 rose slightly to 15.39% (including Teen Second Life).
 |
Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop. |
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jacek Antonelli said on 2:07PM 12-12-2008
Tomorrow, on the Linden Blog: "Hey, it's not _all_ bad. If you just turn the graph upside down... wow, things are going really well! It's almost like it's smiling! Happy graph is happy!"
Mom always said I missed my calling as a PR spin doctor. Hey LL, you know my number. *Makes "call me" gesture and winks.*
Reply
Tharkis said on 4:19PM 12-12-2008
Move along.. Nothing to see here. The Second Life(tm) economy is not in a decline, recession. Nor does it resemble a downturn. It is not due to the misstreatment of residents, or movement towards a corporate audience and away from it's loyal userbase. Also it has absolutely nothing to do with them jerking said userbase around on land deals and rates for over a year. Goodbye Second Life(tm), hello Corporate Life(tm). A new cubical (the new name for the open space simulator) will be available soon! Only 64 prims allowed, $500 a month and 1/32 the size of a normal sim.. Can't beat that deal with a stick!
Corporate Life is a trademark of Shindig Labs, Inc. Any resemblance to real people or companies in this post is pure coincidence. This comment should not be ingested, read or looked at. Do not taunt Happy Fun Graph..
Reply
Ciaran Laval said on 9:06PM 12-13-2008
It will get worse before it gets better. There are RL economic concerns, the openspace debacle will be exacberated by the next blog post that explains how the new tier process will be introduced and generate a lot more bad will.
Reply
Jay said on 4:32AM 12-15-2008
This game is dead, all that is left is for the Baby Boomers to realise they are being screwed over by the lab and realise that as a game SL just isn't worth it.
December is bound to be worse BTW, that is when the first tier increase will hit.
Reply
Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 5:25PM 12-15-2008
*yawns* at Jay. I'm sure you've heard that SL is *not* a game, never was, and never meant to be. Anyway... moving ahead.
Tats, it would be nice if you could compare the "sudden drop" (in both relative and absolute terms) to other of LL's "bad news", e.g. the shutting down of casinos (if I remember correctly, this meant a 30% decrease in financial transactions through the LindeX which took over half a year to recover). Put into other words: how bad was the OpenSpace decision compared to the latest bad decisions?
I don't really believe there is any relation to the alleged financial crisis, either, but I might side with Ciaran and also think that LL is planning a lot more "bad news" for us: getting rid of Premium accounts (what will happen to technical support?), introducing the new Class 6 series servers and dropping once more the setup fees, and the messy transition phase to the "new products" that will replace openspace sims. But there might be even more bad news ahead.
I just expect some good news by the end of 2009, really. By that time, SLim might even be worth installing, and we'll have a new "Lite Viewer" for clueless computer users. Who knows, the Architecture Working Group might even convince Linden Lab to adopt Hypergrid instead of pursuing their efforts on the Open Grid Protocol.
Reply