Crossing the Chasm: Thoughts on Second Life's Plateau Phase from Electric Sheep's COO

This week, top metaverse developer Electric Sheep Company unexpectedly laid off a third of its staff, including NWN contributor Rik Riel.  Forseti Svarog, the company's Chief Operating Officer, has a thoughtful post on their blog, offering observations related to the cutbacks.  I described Second Life's current period as a plateau phase, while Forseti describes it as a chasm between early adopters and mass adoption:

If we assume that Linden Lab can solve the back-end architectural and stability problems, and that ESC can solve some of the front-end usability and landing path problems, then one primary question is how long will this chasm be? ...Disruptive technologies do not become mass-market ready overnight. That neither means that they are useless and doomed to failure, nor that their success is guaranteed.

If I read him right, he thinks web-based virtual worlds will be the training wheels for Second Life, especially for the kids who are currently enjoying them now, and as they reach adulthood, begin looking for a richer experience to graduate into.  That may be.  But maybe the real challenge is we're not just talking about one chasm.   

After all, World of Warcraft is a fully immersive 3D world, and has 9 million+ subscribers.  The non-game Habbo Hotel largely depends on user-created content, and last I checked, has around 8 million active monthly users.  Those are mass adoption numbers.  The challenge, I think, is that Second Life is immersive 3D and a non-game and user-created.  That widens the chasm by a magnitude of three.  Can it still be crossed then?

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Seems more like Secondlife is in the "Trough of Disillusionment" phase and 2008 will glide into the "Slope of Enlightenment" and then in a couple of years will finally make it to "Plateau of Productivity". Secondlife has a slower curve because it is so far advanced and ahead of it's time. In 1996 the market research for The Plaza on MSN put avatar based shopping into the current time frame. While the predictions were near exact in respect to shopping demographics there was a general expectation the technology would have been farther along. The world events that began in 2001 has put everything back a few years due to the injury to the economies.

The original idea for The Plaza was avatar based shopping in a virtual world ala Snow Crash. PC graphics were not up to par in the mid 1990's so that project was turned into eshop.msn.com.

The good times are yet to come. Only those patient and strong will stick it out and reap the rewards to come. The rest can run away as far as I'm concerned. I have been waiting a decade for this and I know what the potential is because I was there in 1996 when we tried to build The Plaza.

[Eggy Lippmann]

Change is hard. People don't like it. Especially when it concerns deeply ingrained lifestyle habits, some people would rather DIE than invest some time and effort into changing.
People who now smoke will have to die off en masse before we can safely stop campaigning against it. The children or friends or whoever was involved with smokers in this socially contagious activity will also have to die, so change in socially contagious habits can take multiple generations to wind down.
For things with deep emotional attachments, such as religion... well, christianity is 2,000 years old! So don't hold your breath.
People are non-technical. Computers have hardly even started to be developed. Multiple generations of people will have to grow up with multiple generations of virtual world technology until it becomes something as banal and universally useful as pen and paper.
Lucky for us, SL is not the first generation! :)

[Adz Childs]

This article makes me want to jump on the dozen-or-so projects I've started but never finished. If you're right, then this is a lull and a good opportunity to stake a claim on some I.P., possibly despite the ongoing threats of personal I.P. loss due to resident-to-resident theft, data loss, and Linden policy changes in the middle of the night. Anyway, thanks for the dose of inspiration. A fresh perspective is a very good thing.

[Ann Otoole]

That is correct logic Adz.
"Fortune Favors The Prepared"

[Alex]

Yeah! It's the same thing as on a stock exchange, any dip or a time of a bad sentiment is a 'buy' opportunity. :)

P.S. AC, check your home page, "Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/slnamewa/public_html/include/last_names.inc.php on line 899" is there.

[Jon Himoff]

...we are all of course wondering if other news is coming from the other larger SL developers on cutbacks...

I think WoW is an interesting comparison now. Roughly same amount of registrations give or take a million.

but... WoW charges all users each month $15.

LL of course charges the Sim owners $150-300/month and the initial $1500-3000 initial fee.

So if you look at the money side...LL is still getting nice growth at 560 sims new each month = 1.2 million USD or so.

but nothing like WoW $125+ million/month subscribers fees !! This is serious money.

What is even more interesting is that LL has such a weak customer service plan for existing customers even though more 11,000 sim owners are paying probably more than $2.0 million per month in service fees. I also wonder if LL is going to start publishing how many Sims are cancelled/dropped each month in their statistics. We know at least a few are gone this month (Motorati, CSI, AOL).

It seems to me now that SL is hyped across the world on a high-level we need to start looking at growth of engaged users in SL...and this seems to be best measured by how many people buy something each month. LL says that is 330,000 in November. Which is a lot lower than Wow for sure.

We think SL is at an early stage, but the potential is for a 3D Web product, not a game world. Where SL is amazing and unique is with the web-side integration that is open to developers. While LL seems to be in a rut, we should not take away anything from their stunning acheivements in 2007. I would put Windlight on top of that list of great things.
But the churn on their registrations in continuing to be concerning.