New World Newsfeed: Second Life Concurrency Competitive With Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike

NewTeeVee >> How Meet the Spy Machinima Helped Double TF2’s Popularity

If you play Valve Software's Team Fortress 2, you might enjoy my new NewTeeVee article on the making of the very cool Meet the Spy machinima that's been making the rounds this month. During my interview, this intriguing datapoint came out:

Up until last week... TF2 was hitting maximum concurrency numbers of 32,000 players; over Memorial Day weekend, however, that more than doubled to 68,000.

Those numbers jumped out at me, because as regular Second Life users know, the world reaches maximum concurrency numbers of nearly 90,000 on the weekend. I wondered if this was an anomaly, so about 15 minutes ago, I compared the concurrency stats of the top games on Steam, Valve's online game distribution/online multiplayer system (available here) to Second Life's concurrency (available on the official homepage and on the client log-in page) and came up with the above comparison.

So looking at concurrency levels, Counter-Strike Source seems significantly more popular than Second Life -- which in turn is about even in concurrency with Counter-Strike, and considerably more than TF2 or Left 4 Dead. Another data point: Valve's Jason Holtman told me that Steam now has 8 million monthly unique users; Second Life, by contrast, is getting these concurrency numbers from roughly 750K monthly uniques.

None of this, I should hasten to say, is meant as a slam on Valve games; I'm a great admirer of them myself, and the company's success is well-deserved. The comparison is worth making, I think, to correct a common but mistaken impression (held especially by hardcore gamers) that their favorite titles are more popular than they actually are. These concurrency stats (as did Nielsen's March ratings) suggest otherwise.

Comments

[anna gulaev]

If there isn't both motivation and ability to run bots on those other systems, I think we can assume those are all humans, That'd place SL's *human* concurrency about 4th, after Team Fortress 2.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

90k concurrency isn't shabby. That's almost as much as some MMOs... currently in open beta.

WoW recently celebrated one million concurrent users.

[Oboreruhito Gabilondo]

@anna gulaev: You'd be surprised how popular idle servers are in TF2. Campers/bots and idlers probably cancel each other out.

These are totally different experiences, too. Not many people pop into SL for a 20 minute visit, but plenty jump into TF2 or L4D for a single match, a couple survival games or whatnot. Concurrency matters less than the number of active players.

Also, I don't doubt that the hardcore audiences of TF2 or L4D are less than Second Life's - there's no in-game assets to maintain, no persistent world to manipulate. And they're always in the process of moving from one competing product to another; SL still doesn't have that churn.