The 250K mark was crossed early yesterday-- looks like credit goes to Tateru Nino for catching it first, followed hard upon by Zero Grace, who throws several worthwhile observations into the bargain. Evidently the final surge over the quarter million marker was impelled by a recent change in the sign-up process, with credit card numbers no longer needed (for a limited time, at least) to get an account. Linden Lab's hope, I assume, is that doing this will bring in enough users to justify the extra number of griefers this policy will probably engender, as well; we'll know how that hypothesis plays out soon.
Another interesting point: I took the above screenshot yesterday afternoon at around 2pm PST, with 6,500+ in-world. SL crossed 7,000 in peak concurrency only last week, and that was during "prime time" (roughly 6pm-9pm PST). Up 'til now, concurrency levels in Second Life usually hover at 2500-5500 throughout most the 24 hour cycle, and only crest over 6,000 as we approach prime time. Watching this process from the vantage of a beloved Mentor welcoming waves of new users, Tateru Nino concurs: "The minimum concurrency certainly seems to be surging," she observes. "The maximum seems a little less elastic."
Update, 12:05 PM: Rik Riel may deserve the props for first catch. He also points to a very interesting related discussion on MMO designer Raph Koster's blog, which is joined in the Comments section by Sir Bruce of MMOGCHART.com, the top Web resource for tracking MMO subscriber numbers. It suggests a partial explanation for why Bruce hasn't updated his SL figures for nearly a year.
Much of the controversy in the metaverse blogosphere swirls around 124,028, the number of Residents who have, according to the latest figures on SL's official Economics Statistics page, come in-world during the last 60 days. This, goes one line of reasoning, is the more meaningful number. I have to disagree there: while 124K is indeed the more accurate figure of currently active users, the 250K plus figure is just as meaningful, because it's the total number of people on the Internet who have a renewable investment of time, technology, and identity in Second Life. In plainer English: 250,000+ is, more or less, the total number of computer users who have downloaded and installed the SL client, who have created an avatar and completed the sign-in and orientation, and who can-- this is key-- return to Second Life at pretty much a moment's notice. So while it may be true that only 124,000 users have visited in the last 2 months, it doesn't follow that the same number came to SL in the previous 2 months, or the previous 2 months before that. The assumption that "active user" is the most important metric is actually a hold-over from the traditional roleplaying MMO model, which is based on ongoing time investment and (more important) paying a monthly subscription fee. Neither apply to SL.
These observations track to my own anecdotal experience of Second Life as it's experienced. Many Residents will take long breaks from SL to spend time in another MMO or on another activity entirely, only to return months later; many will visit SL sporadically, to attend a conversation with Lawrence Lessig or a book-signing by Cory Doctorow, only to return when for another event of that type; still more visit SL every few months, catching up with friends, visiting the latest content and events they've read about on SL blogs or mainstream media articles. None of these behavior patterns are captured by a "visited in the last 60 days" metric, but I'm hard-pressed to say they're any less valid.
While we're at it, here's another number to toss into this mix: $5 million. That's the estimated value of monthly user-to-user transactions last January, as reported by BusinessWeek in May. It's surely much larger now, but taking $5 million as a base rate, this means 250,000 SL residents are paying at least an average of $20 per month for their in-world activity. This is $20/avg. that residents pay each other, and doesn't even factor in revenue paid to Linden Lab through land use fees, etc. Another figure not captured in the argument over how many total active Residents there are, a thriving economy missed entirely by a narrow focus on old paradigms, one of those classic forest-for-the-trees deals.
Update, 5:21pm: In Comments, Sir Bruce himself just weighed in.
Not to nit-pick, but my post on this went up at 12:39am on June 11.
Lots of debate on this going on elsewhere too.
Posted by: rikomatic | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 09:53 AM
Hi Wagner. It would be really helpful for first-time readers unfamiliar with SL and MMORPGs if you added some definition links, e.g., for 'griefing'. :)
SL: Dan Magpie
Posted by: Dan Winckler | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 10:28 AM
250,000 members doesn't mean much (since I know a lot of people that only played the game one time) BUT the number of actual players at a given time does.
Posted by: Johan | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 10:44 AM
Sorry Rik, I didn't see the timestamp on your post, will make a note of it.
Griefing definition (though mostly confined to traditional MMOs):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 10:55 AM
No, Hamlet, my bad. I realize that I didn't have the timestamp enabled in my posts, so for all you knew Tateru and Zero were first to post.
Posted by: rikomatic | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 11:03 AM
>In plainer English: 250,000+ is, more or less,
>the total number of computer users who have
>downloaded and installed the SL client, who
>have created an avatar and completed the sign-
>in and orientation, and who can-- this is key--
>return to Second Life at pretty much a moment's
>notice.
That's irrelevant. The vast majority NEVER WILL, and it's simply because of the fact the basic account is free that they can return "at a moment's notice." It's completely unfair to count all those users as if they're compareable to people who have to pay every month to play World of Warcraft.
You really want to count all free accounts of people who have ever played? RuneScape would have millions. EverQuest could give everyone who ever signed up a free level 1 character, and they'd be millions, too. Lineage would be off the charts. Etc.
Now, perhaps you don't like 60 days as a time window for activity to count them as "active", but heck, most other games only get measured via a 30 day window. If inactive Second Life accounts actually expired and were deleted after a year, then maybe the metric would be more meaningful. But only if you then compared it to similar timeframes for other MMOGs.
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 05:04 PM
"... and who can -- this is key-- return to Second Life at pretty much a moment's notice."
...."That's irrelevant. The vast majority NEVER WILL"
I hear what you are saying Bruce and in this instance I agree, but I think the point is THEY (theoretically) COULD, and as long as the client is still sitting there on their machine they are only 1 click (well ok 2 clicks and a short log) away from landing in SL's 3D space from that SLURL link on a 2D page. This brings it all a little closer to being able to realistically consider SL as an alternative imersive web experience.
However of course, until LL begin to make their updates to the server backward compatible with a standard version of the client (equivalent to a browser plugin perhaps), having to download the next release of the client (currently weighing in at 51MBs Mac or 25MBs PC) will more that likely put the casual user off.
Posted by: Robbie D | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 06:10 PM
Thanks much for posting here, Bruce. I'm curious about this point you make:
"The vast majority NEVER WILL [return to Second Life], and it's simply because of the fact the basic account is free that they can return 'at a moment's notice.'"
Because that doesn't seem to be the case, at least according to officially published figures. As already stated, about 60% of SL users go in-world at least once every 60 days. And according to Linden Lab dev. VP Cory Ondrejka, that figure gets *much* higher at 3 months. He's quoted saying this in January:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/01/the_numbers_gam.html
"[A]bout 17,000 residents were in SL in the last 24 hours, and 50,000 in the last 30 days... If you go back even 90 days you get about 90% of the accounts having logged in.”
Did you have evidence that this is not the case?
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at 12:18 AM
The statement was about the vast majority... of those who hadn't logged in. So it's not that 60% logged in and 40% haven't in the past 60 days; rather it's of the 40% that haven't logged in, over half of those are probably never going to log in. That's a little more extreme than the quote of 90%, but then, that was back at a time of far fewer accounts.
The statement was more a comment on games with free accounts than SL specifically. You simply can't count everyone who bothered to create an account as an active player. Heck, for all you know they already HAVE deleted the program from their hard drive, so you can't use one-click reconnection as an excuse, anyway.
Second Life folks are, of course, free to revel in any particular metric is their favorite. However, for me to compare them to monthly paying subscribers or monthly active users, I need something that's rather equivalent. (I intend to hold the same standard to games like Puzzle Pirates and There.)
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at 06:20 AM
Ok, this is getting ridiculous. We are now losing residents by the thousands!
Posted by: rikomatic | Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at 09:52 AM
'...who can-- this is key-- return to Second Life at pretty much a moment's notice...'
Really? A moments notice?
You mean AFTER they download and install the latest perfomance sapping 'update' - then download and install the latest graphics card and motherboard drivers - then discover that the last update means their graphics card needs replacing - oh, and they really need a cpu upgrade too...
That's what you call 'a moment's notice'?
Sorry, IF all it needed was a relatively quick incremental client update - maybe - but the way SL is 'developing', coming back after a couple of months would entail more faffing about than the vast majority would stand for.
Posted by: Doc Nielsen | Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 06:43 AM
"they are only 1 click (well ok 2 clicks and a short log) away from landing in SL's 3D space from that SLURL link on a 2D page."
That and a fairly large download of a new client that may very well complain about their graphics card. Bit more than a click, and of couse assuming they are not sitting at work where the SL client ports are blocked even if they do the download.
But I think I see what you mean. There probably isn't a single metric we could use. SL is a very different animal than WoW and the others, and this "numbers game" is just as silly as it got between the web-email companies a few years back.
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