A couple of articles to compare and contrast, the first, which many of you will have read, is from Slate Magazine: Why Second Life Failed. The second, probably less widely reported, is from the Indian section of The Business Standard: Virtues and Veracity Of The Second Life. Both articles are inaccurate, the Slate article because Second Life hasn’t failed and the the second article because it draws on a history of Second Life that doesn’t paint a true picture of where Second Life is today, but it’s a wonderful read of what was, what could have been and what may be in the future if the cards are played correctly.
The problem with Second Life articles is that they wind Second Life users up, when we criticise Second Life, poke fun at it, it’s ok, when someone who seems to know little about the platform makes snidey remarks and says it’s failing, we go into full on defence mode. The truth about Second Life probably lies somewhere in the middle of the two articles.
Second Life isn’t anywhere near the hype cycle it was in back in 2007, growth has flatlined, people are feeling the pinch, tier prices are high and people are getting frustrated, although the latter is part of a cycle that has been going on since Steller Sunshine first set foot in the virtual world of Second Life, people get bored, lose their drive, get burnt out, it happens.
How things are viewed is interesting, Slate state the following in their article:
“Today, Second Life limps along. In the first half of 2011, the company reported that an average of about 1 million users logged in every month—which, you have to admit, is about 999,990 more than you expected. But during this same period, Facebook averaged roughly 500 million logins per month.”
That’s still a fairly healthy position, not as healthy as Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft, which some people are saying is doomed because it lost one million subscribers in the last few months, still having ten million and another expansion pack in the pipeline suggests the naysayers are wrong there and they are wrong on Second Life too, it hasn’t failed.
Meanwhile, the positive slant from the Business Standard article contains gems like this:
“Second Life is viewed as an entrepreneurial, free market-based virtual economy that provides an unregulated playground for economic organisations (Hof 2006; Sharp and Solomon 2008). Krangel (2008) estimated the size of the virtual economy at Second Life to be $300 million or more, which is larger than the economic markets of several real nations.”
I have no idea what the situation is today, Second Life today doesn’t feel as rocking as it did back in 2007, but in 2007 it was all new to me. There are concerns with islands being returned, abandoned plots and yet Linden Lab are beavering away making improvements to the viewer, new ventures like the Linden realms games and Second Life does still have pretty healthy user figures, comparisons with Facebook are a bit futile as historically Second Life isn’t something you pop onto for ten minutes to catch up, you commit a fair amount of time when you login. However new developments with messaging from our profiles may actually change that, I’m sure the stats wizards can probably show increased usage once people get used to the new systems. When you consider the concept of lies, damned lies and statistics, I’m sure Linden Lab could boost some of their usage figures if they counted offline emails to im, it is technically usage! I do wish they’d add group functionality to those web based tools….. I’m in danger in going off on a serious tangent here!
Anyway, the bottom line is that Second Life is still here, it’s far from needing life support, indeed in yet another recent article, The Economist mentioned:
“PHILIP ROSEDALE is best known for his creation of Linden Lab’s Second Life, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that currently generates $75m in revenue (according to the firm) from hundreds of thousands of active accounts.”
That article was actually mainly about Coffee & Power, which from looking at my inbox, seems to be gaining in popularity and I still maintain that the Coffee & Power model of doing business could work in Second Life too, it’s a shame we don’t have a coffee & power style forum on the official site.
One thing I will add here is a little whinge, I like reading old forum posts, every upgrade to the forums has made it harder to find those archives, within those archives are gems and the real story of how Second Life developed, it would be much better if they were more user friendly. I realise that not everyone is sad like me and that many people find no pleasure in reading flaming forum posts from 2005, but I like history and Second Life has a great history, it should be cherished and nurtured.
When writing on the LL / user community as a whole earlier this year, I referred to the user base as a “loyal spouse” – and I think that our reactions to negatively (accurate or skewed), couple with the attitude we take towards LL fundamentally supports the use of that term:
– As the loyal spouse, we will take the “other half” to task if / when they get / are perceived to have got something wrong;
– If anyone else starts pointing-out the “other half’s” real / perceived “faults”, we’ll immediately step up to defend them.
I don’t so much see it being a “problem” when users react in this way – I actually look upon it as a sign that enthusiasm and love for the platform is still alive enough to make itself heard and felt.
Sure it’s a sign of enthusiasm, which is why LL would do well to take note of criticism, be it positive or negative, from their existing customers.