world-metrics posts

This week Linden Lab published a set of economic data for Q4 2009, and for 2009 as a whole. After going through the data in detail, and discovering at least one important typo and one important calculation error, it looked like we were going to have to recheck every figure before presenting them.

That's a lot of work, especially as the data published in the quarterly/annual reports doesn't follow the same definitions as the ongoing statistical feeds or is not represented in them.

So we thought, well sod that for a game of soldiers. Instead, let's talk about the report's claim that the Second Life economy has grown 65% in 2009 over 2008, and why that's just rubbish.

Back in March this year, Second Life was closing in on Everquest in terms of peak popularity. Everquest itself peaked at approximately 90,000 concurrent users during its most popular period and Second Life came within a whisker of that at 88,199.

Since then, though, Second Life's user-concurrency (as you can see in the chart above, covering the last two years) has been slowly declining.

Going over the Second Life metrics that are available to us, it seems clear that this virtual environment has reached one of its most significant growth plateaus, and one that it doesn't seem to be able to push past. User-to-user transactions, active users, weekly/monthly logins, all remain very flat.

All the while, more than 9,000 new user accounts are created on the service every day, though the retention rates appear to be extraordinarily low, making up only for what appears to be an almost negligible attrition in the medium- and long-term user-base.

Linden Lab has released the figures for the third-quarter performance of Second Life.

If you want the short version, it wasn't a growth quarter. Q3 2009 figures were not really very distinguishable from Q2 2009. There's actually nothing wrong with that. Growth plateaus are occasional and inevitable and generally represent a good opportunity for engineering and support to catch up a little with the service.

Generally, operators of MMOGs and virtual environments don't show their numbers unless they feel they've got something to crow about, and Linden Lab's crowing today, releasing a selection of figures that give you an idea of the scale of Second Life.

Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life. That's 108 million messages per day and more than 600 million words are typed on an average day. That's a whole of messages for any architecture, quite honestly.

Linden Lab's Tom Hale has published the Quarterly report for Second Life for Q2 2009: "Economy grows 94% year to year, hits new all time high in Q2; World expands and voice usage hits all time high; Bot policy affects user hours and logins"

We beg to differ in some key respects. From the figures presented, we see quite a different picture (go on, tell us you're astonished by that). Allow us to touch on a few of the high points as we walk through the report, and we'll lay it out for you.

It's been widely grumbled about that Linden Lab has stopped publishing some key Second Life economic and service statistics, such as the number of non-mainland simulators (that is, those that are privately owned). Well actually,as it happens, that isn't entirely true, thanks to the wonders of automation.

The data was culled from the Second Life Web-site, where these things go, quite some months ago but automation is a funny thing. Linden Lab's systems kept publishing the data, and my own automated systems kept collecting it. So, despite a months-long blackout of the data it all continues to pile up in my databases, with the reliability and patience that only machines possess.

Linden Lab have released their figures for Second Life for Q1 2009, showing growth in virtually every respect.

Unfortunately, most of the figures lack definition and meaning, and their nature or relevance can only be guessed at. The few that are clear, however, do show solid growth, which is good for Linden Lab and for Second Life. We've got a breakdown of the highlights for you, such as they are.

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%.

October metrics for Linden Lab's virtual environment, Second Life are not yet formally available, but Lab CFO John Zdanowski wound up giving out a link to the information in advance, so we have the figures to work with. September was not a good month by these metrics, and we were interested to see how October panned out.

Your key takeaways for October are a continuing plunge in premium accounts, and a reduction in overall economic activity. User hours, however were up. A more detailed summary follows after the jump.

The unprecedented decline of Second Life land area appears to be accelerating according to data from virtual world operator, Linden Lab. The net loss of simulators which totalled nearly 9,000 acres as of midnight on 10 November, has escalated to a net loss of 12,874 acres (52.1 million square metres, or 795 simulators) by midnight of 16 November. At present this represents an accelerating decline, with no sign of it bottoming out.

While a number of users have requested a consolidation of four Openspaces simulators into a single ordinary simulator (which would represent an overall net loss of three simulators per consolidation) there is no data available to suggest that any of the requested consolidations have yet been processed. Linden Lab was not able to confirm for us that any such consolidations have yet taken place, so it is unlikely that they are a factor in this data. The net loss currently represents more than 6% of the total Openspaces simulators as at the time of the new pricing/product announcements.

Linden Lab's CFO, John Zdanowski is better known to Second Life users as Zee Linden, though we think of him more as a Zeno, after Zeno of Elea, who baffled, annoyed and amused pre-Socratic thinkers with a set of seeming paradoxes, many of which revolved around the adjustment of frames of reference and measurement -- and, whatever their original intention -- amply display the follies that arise from doing so.

You can pick up all of that from yesterday's Q3 2008 world metrics from Zdanowski, entitled 'Q3 closed on a high note with an unusually strong September'. You might want to check September's published figures against that report, and see if you agree with 'unusually strong'.

Since the announcement of Openspaces 3.0 product pricing for Second Life (and the subsequent update to a reduced specification Openspaces 4.0 product), Linden Lab has seen its virtual world shrink for the first time on record with a net loss of 24.05 million square metres (a little less than 6,000 acres).

That's a net loss, so however many new simulators have been brought online since the beginning of the month, those gains have been canceled out by customers dumping land, and an additional 24 million square metres have been lost. During its Q2 2008 report, Linden Lab identified the (now deprecated) Openspaces 2.0 product as a primary growth driver.

It isn't presently clear how long this downward trend will last. So far, those net losses amount to just 2.8% of the total Openspaces 2.0 product that are actually out there on the Second Life grid. Many owners, however, have said that they intend to hang on to their void simulators for as long as possible, and dump them just before the jump to Openspaces 4.0 (or Homesteads 1.0) becomes mandatory. It remains to be seen if the Lab can shake off the chill and push those figures up in the latter half of the month.

	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.

The published, key metrics for Second Life for the month of September are now available as both an Open Document Spreadsheet and in Excel format.

Your key takeaways this month are an increasing fall in total premium accounts, a fall in total user hours, zero mainland (Linden owned estate) growth (but a 7% increase in privately owned estates), and a reduction in economic activity. A more detailed summary follows after the jump.