New World Notes

New World Newsfeed: Brazil Game Portal To Drop Second Life (But How Will That Affect Brazilian SLers?)

Abril: Second Life fecha as portas no Brasil (Portuguese)

Kaizen is a major online portal for Brazilian gamers, and up until very recently, acted as the Lindens' Second Life outreach in that country, which counts a large portion of the active metaverse population. (According to the Lindens, 65,797 Brazilians logged into SL last May, which would constitute roughly 8% of the total active user population, making it the fourth largest user group by country.) According to the above report, however, Kaizen is dropping Second Life from its offerings, and iG, a company that maintains Second Life's Mainland Brasil entrance, ended it contract with Linden Lab last March. None of this means, however, as the headline above translates, "Second Life closes the doors in Brazil." At least according to the Lindens, who I contacted earlier this week:

New World Newsfeed: Second Life Rises To 6th Most Popular PC Game/MMO for April (But Slips to 2nd Most Played)

Nielsen Games recently posted its April ratings for PC games/MMOs run from client installs, and as with their March numbers, they make for enlightening reading. Second Life increased its total audience share by about 63%, pushing its ranking from eight to six among the top ten. Curiously, this meant it substantially leaped ahead of Half-Life 2 in popularity. I believe Nielsen counts any Valve game running the HL2 engine in this category, including Team-Fortress 2 and CounterStrike: Source, though I'm not certain. In any case, Second Life's concurrency rates are competitive with Valve's top games. Total average minutes played also leaped, from 760 in March to 842 in April. Mysteriously, however, the much less popular Lord of the Rings Online was played even more hours than Second Life that month. And one key point for hardcore gamers to understand: an online chess game is almost as popular as World of Warcraft. Anyway, side-by-side comparison of March and April figues after the break.

Listening Tour: Joe Linden On Second Life Voice Usage

As mentioned last night, the Lindens are touting impressive VoIP usage numbers that make Second Life, even though it has a far smaller user base, competitive with Skype. This explains why they're adding numerous voice applications to SL, starting in Beta today: AvaLine, which enables mobile-to-avatar calling, and a relaunch of SLim, their desktop app-to-avatar calling software. Down the road later this year are voice fonts and SMS-to-avatar messaging, among other apps.

But how widely used is voice now? I use it only occasionally myself, rarely find the need to use it during in-world interviews; is it really possible SL's user base have been talking over 15 billion minutes since VoIP launched?  Not exactly. In a campfire chat with product VP Joe Linden (copper robot, above), he explained how they arrived at that figure:

No, he said, if you're in Second Life with your microphone on, the ambient background noise and your breathing isn't counted as voice usage.  (Many have speculated this was the case.) In fact, he continued, if you were standing alone in SL, talking to yourself, that wouldn't count as a minute either. "In order for a voice minute to be counted," as he put it, "there has to be a listener." Minutes are calculated when a Resident is in a local or direct active voice channel, talking or listening.

With those metrics in mind, how widely used is voice? Joe Linden offered these stats:

Single SL: Less Than 6% of Second Life Residents Have In-World Partner, Veteran Users More Commitment-Oriented

Longtime SL Resident Jade Lily with listed partner (also married IRL)

Marriage and commitment ceremonies in Second Life are usually the focal point for wildly elaborate and well-attended celebrations. One unconscious reason for all that excitement?  As it turns out, probably because they're so rare.

That news from Second Life business/demographics analyst Metaverse Business, which employs data- gathering bots to generate highly detailed user data from Residents' public profiles.  Founder Louis Platini shares his findings with New World Notes from time to time (as here, and here), and I recently asked him if he could determine the number of Residents who listed an official partner in their profile. His bots went off tither, and after many weeks (months even) of counting, came back with these results:

Number of profiles retrieved : 698,997 - Profiles with a partner: 40,967 - Percentage: 5.86%

This would seem like a surprisingly low number, especially for a virtual world with near gender parity. (Women comprise roughly 42% of the active population.) Strikingly, the Residents who do have a partner listed are disproportionately veteran users who've been in Second Life for over four years. (2005 was a banner year for metaverse commitment, with 1 in 3 Residents born that year partnering up.)

How to explain the results?  An explosion of casual users in recent years, for one thing, but I suspect another major factor at play: divorce.  In 2006, a famed virtual wedding planner once complained to me how in the early times, Second Life partnerships were made to last.  More recently, she sighed, "They just do it for a few weeks for fun, then put in a divorce request on the website."

Full chart and Mr. Platini's trenchant analysis of the numbers after the break:

New World Reader Survey: 60% Predict Substantial SL Growth in 2009

Here's the results of my latest reader survey: with 332 votes received, 60% predict there will be 600K or more monthly active Second Life users by the end of this year.  (Currently it's about 500K, give or take 50K every month.)  Over a quarter of our respondents predict that number will stay roughly the same, while almost 15% believe the usage rates will drop.

Now that the results are in, what's my take?  Barring a drastic change to SL's server architecture, anything close to a million seems highly doubtful.  I think a more plausible guess is somewhere in the vicinity of 750,000.  That also happens to be pretty much what Cory Ondrejka thinks, and he knows better than me.

New World Survey: How Many Regular Second Life Users Will There Be In 2009?

Update, 1/27: In light of recent news, bumped up for a final chance to vote. Results released tomorrow!

Will xStreetSL Grow Second Life? Take/Re-Take the Survey!

How many monthly active users will Second Life have at the end of 2009?  I posed that survey question a couple weeks ago, before news of Linden Lab's acquisition of xStreetSL and onRez broke.  It's quite possible the integration of xStreetSL into the official webpage will influence the number of regular Residents.  I'll announce the finally tally next week, so if you want to change your vote (or register your opinion for the first time) before then, go here to take the survey.

Second Life Economy Snapshot: 100,000 "Heavy Users", 20,000 Heavy xStreetSL Shoppers

During my interview over the Lindens' purchase of virtual e-tail sites xStreetSL and onRez, T Linden offered some related usage stats that are worth spotlighting:

While Second Life has about 500,000 monthly active users, T. Linden told me the company estimates that there are just 100,000 "heavy Second Life users", defined as Residents who run SL businesses, own land, or otherwise spend significant amounts of Linden Dollars in-world.  Of those heavy users, just 20% (i.e. 20,000) regularly shop on xStreetSL. (Participation on onRez is much smaller, he added.)  The Lindens estimate a million Residents on average spend L$ on a lighter basis monthly.  (Personal interjection: and it's very likely those aren't the same million Residents from month to month, surely comprising many of the 400K or so new SL accounts created every month, most of whom churn out after the first log-in.)

This data provides some much needed context for the Lindens' acquisition of SL users' two leading web-based e-tailing sites.  Half a million people are in-world about 50 hours a month on average, but only 20% of them are regular participants in the economic system, and only 20% of them carry over that experience onto the web. Presumably, integrating e-tail website into the official Second Life experience will grow this activity-- and consequently, encourage SL content creators and entrepeneurs to grow and expand their activity, too. 

One more point about this 100,000 stat shot: metaverse developer Gwyneth Llewellyn called it three months ago in one of her typically epic economic analyses.

How Many Active Second Life Users Will There Be in 2009?

Still time to take the survey!  Results announced near month's end.  Some think the user growth plateau of 500K will continue, or even decline into outright loss; others see the usage base growing even past a million.  Here's two data points to consider: Sales of laptop PCs now greatly exceed sales of desktop computers, which are in steep decline.  (And since laptops aren't usually sold with robust 3D graphics power, which Second Life requires, the potential market will shrink.)  On the other side, tech insiders believe the incoming Obama administration will earmark billions to expand broadband penetration in the US. (Which will also grow the potential market for SL.)  How will that change the user base for the metaverse?  Decide for yourself here.

Second Life Larger Than WoW, There, Oahu Combined?

We recently saw the full map of Second Life (now available in hardcopy), but how does it compare to other landmasses, both virtual and real?  Gathering known data from various sources, virtual world explorer and developer Ariane Barnes recently posted this comparison on her blog, Virtual Underworld, which I've taken the liberty of annotating.  By her calculations, the full breadth of World of Warcraft and the islands of There are scarcely as large as SL's main continents.  For that matter, the main island of Hawai'i is maybe smaller by a fourth.  (As someone who grew up on Oahu, I love the comparison.)

I'm a bit skeptical all the data is fully accurate-- check out her math here.  I once thought to make a similar comparison last year, and Second Life seemed closer in size to the tiny Hawaiian island of Lanai.  And of course, in the wake of the Openspace imbroglio, the grid seems to be shrinking.  Then again, it's worth keeping the comparison in full perspective: you can pretty much circumnavigate most of Oahu by car in under three hours.  Hat tip: jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com.