Raph Koster on SL User Numbers: “Something Doesn’t Add Up”
by Urizenus Sklar on 18/11/06 at 6:08 pm
We’ve heard all the hype about a million residents of Second Life and talk about two million users being just around the corner. But, in a recent blog post, Raph Koster takes a look at the recent population stats released at the most recent Linden Town Hall Meeting.
If you have experience with typical VW population ratios for these figures, your immediate thought is “healthy growth, real numbers there, but something doesn’t add up” — the numbers just “look wrong.” I’ve been working on figuring out why, and I think it relates to play patterns.
Koster then offers some more plausible numbers in a comment below his post: “My estimate says that there are 100-150k regular SL users, and a huge amount of folks who are trials.”
This is consistent with what the numbers that I have been hearing from other stats-knowledgable observers, and frankly, it feels right. Of course this raises the question of whether the big corporate investors are being sold a “pig in a poke” and whether the PR and marketing folk will pull up stakes and leave once they realize the harvest of eyeballs may be less than they realize. Alternatively, the strategy may be this: generate enough hype with bogus numbers so that wads of people join and thereby make the bogus numbers come true.
Tateru Nino
Nov 18th, 2006
Raph’s got the right of it, IMO.
Chrischun Fassbinder
Nov 18th, 2006
Million plus compared to hundred thousand, isn’t much difference. Especially when compared to the size of the reachable market via web. Doubt any clients of the marketing companies would leave or care if the numbers were 1/10 what is stated. They’re also mostly in it to feed off the SL hype, be it true or not.
Jaime E
Nov 18th, 2006
Chrischun’s right I think. I’ve heard an anecdote or two about PR people shrugging off the “true” numbers.
And really, do you think MySpace has 100+ million unique and active users? It (and the blogosphere in general) is littered with abandoned and fake accounts. Not to mention the equivalent of alts, as many people have multiples…. Does the media generally talk about that, or quote the 100 million number?
No clue what MMORPG retention/activity rates are like, although I presume people who pay the monthly fees are at least kinda active.
Raph
Nov 18th, 2006
Typically, most of the subscribers to an MMO are active. There’s a small percentage of folks who forget to cancel, or who pay to keep their stuff around, and then anyone else who doesn’t log on in a month generally cancels.
Giff / Forseti
Nov 19th, 2006
I thought Tateru had a great post on retention and mentor issues with all this growth over at NWN. It’s not all sunshine and daisies, here, and no one should say it is.
I don’t think it changes too much from a marketing project perspective. I tell everyone that if you are approaching this as an eyeballs play, it’s too early for you. Some want the PR, yes, but everyone knows the PR buzz will get harder, not easier. No, many companies consider this an important future technology, and they’re getting involved because they want to innovate, and learn what works and what does not.
Of course, the Herald will be there ready and willing to point out what doesn’t work (or at least your opinion of what doesn’t work)
Urizenus
Nov 19th, 2006
I look forward to bitching about the Sheep and SL many years from now.
Tomas Hausdorff
Nov 19th, 2006
The suggestion that perhaps only 10% of the total number of accounts actually represent “regular” residents doesn’t really surprise me. I don’t think it surprises anyone else, either.
Second Life has some fairly fundamental differences from massively multiplayer online games, differences that mean that a lot of people don’t feel particularly compelled to spend 10 hours a day, seven days a week online killing rats and beetles. But that is somewhat beside the point when considering the business opportunity that the big companies are thinking of when they come to SL. They are seeing SL as a “different kind of world wide web”. A web where the site visitors can see each other, and where social dynamics can play new and intriguing roles.
Think of the average web user. How many hours per day do they spend looking at web pages with their browser? Of the 200 million or so folks supposedly browsing the internet, how many connect daily? Weekly? Monthly? For how many minutes per day?
If you were to compare those numbers with Second Life, thinking in terms of time spent per participant per time period, I suspect Second Life would look fairly favourable. And better yet, there is a pretty desirable demographic hanging out in SL.
I don’t think anyone is being “fooled”: the big corporate players can read the numbers at least as well as I can, and I didn’t need Raph Koster to point out the obvious to me.
Raph
Nov 19th, 2006
“Second Life has some fairly fundamental differences from massively multiplayer online games, differences that mean that a lot of people don’t feel particularly compelled to spend 10 hours a day, seven days a week online killing rats and beetles.”
Actually, the average 3 hours a day figure that Philip gave out suggests that in fact, core SL users do spend just as much time online as the typical MMO player does — possibly more. In analyzing the ratio of uniques to PCU, I suspect that we’re seeing a lot of very short sessions, and a core group that stays on 10+ hours a day.
“I don’t think anyone is being “fooled”: the big corporate players can read the numbers at least as well as I can, and I didn’t need Raph Koster to point out the obvious to me.”
I didn’t say anything whatsoever about anyone being “fooled” — please do not ascribe that motive to me.
Tomas Hausdorff
Nov 19th, 2006
Sorry, Raph: I was making two different references in one sentence. “Fooled” refers to Uri’s comment about investors being sold a “pig in a poke”. My second reference- “I didn’t need Raph Koster to point out the obvious”: ‘obvious’ refers to the fact that the total number of SL accounts versus “active” residents in SL is different than in traditional MMOGs.
I believe there are fundamentally two types of people in Second Life. “Residents”, who spend some appreciable amount of time in the world on a continuing basis and who are likely paying the monthly premium fee and possibly land tier besides. These behave much like traditional MMOG account holders. The other type are “tourists”, who pop in for a few minutes now and then, never pay a monthly fee or land tier, and perhaps never return after a visit or two. This latter type has no real analogue in traditional MMOGs, certainly not to the level that exists in Second Life, and exists due to the free account strategy. And “tourists” constitute the vast majority of the 1.4 million accounts currently in existence. I would be surprised indeed if much more than 10% of the 1.4 million are premium (paying) customers. This observation is nothing new.
I am certain that there *has* been some growth in the category I’ve called “residents” above, but it’s a category about which Linden Labs hasn’t shared much data yet. It would be interesting to me, personally, to know how many premium (paying) accounts there are month to month.
What is distressing to me is the fact that Linden Labs is sacrificing the enjoyment and usability of the world for paying residents in favour of supporting the vastly larger tourist population. Non-paying tourists are consuming the vast majority Second Life’s bandwidth and server resources, and the world becomes a laggy, stuttering, buggy mess whenever more than about 12,000 are logged in at once. It could be argued that Linden Labs just needs to scale up their infrastructure to support this: the obvious question is, who will pay for this expansion? Currently, the strategy seems to be to charge the minority resident population more and more, while giving them a slower, laggier service as “reward” for their contribution. But that is a different discussion.
Raph
Nov 19th, 2006
Thanks for clarifying, Tomas.
One thing to know is that there are actually plenty of “traditional MMOs” beyond the standard subscription model. Stuff like all the microtransaction-based and free-play games, ranging from Habbo Hotel through Runescape and on to stuff like Kart Rider, is all pretty comparable in a lot of ways. The patterns of those are less well-known, but by and large fairly similar overall.
In my calculations, I was using a mix of assumptions from both models…
I think the growth in residents is demonstrated by the growth in landowners and economic participants, which we can track both directly and indirectly via the published stats… it’s hard to really participate in Second Life without being economically active and holding some land, I think.
Urizenus
Nov 20th, 2006
The problem is that some of the economic stats are bogus too — at a minimum we know that the “US dollars spent” figure means nothing of the sort. Number of servers, on the other hand, seems like a reliable barometer provided that the servers haven’t been purchased in anticipation of the million users who never did and never may arrive. Assuming number of servers is a meaningful stat, we can think of SL as a kind of web hosting company and we can compare it to other such companies. Maybe it’s a mistake to compare SL to online games at all.