Did Any Second Life Competitors Pass 1M Users? I'd Say So

"Philip Rosedale: The Media Is Wrong, Second Life Didn’t Fail" is an interesting new PandoDaily article with a lot of points one could quibble with, and a lot more that's already been exhaustively covered here, but at least one passage stands out to me and is worth highlighting:

[R]osedale argued hard — and pretty convincingly — that Second Life was a success. Second Life has 1 million active users... The problem — really the only problem, but a big one nonetheless — is they couldn’t ever find a way to make those numbers grow. Nothing they did worked, and Rosedale doubts that even early Facebook integration would have helped. And as Rosedale pointed out, VCs invested half a billion dollars in Second Life competitors, and none of them found a way to get beyond that number either.

To be fair to Philip (and it's foolish to fail to), I think he's probably referring to the many virtual worlds that were launched shortly before and after SL went commercial. (Think Sims Online, think There.) But if by "competitor" we mean a 3D virtual world with user-generated 3D content, I think several virtual worlds have attracted much more than a million users. For instance:

• Roblox, the 3D game world building platform, claims "millions of users", and its Google Ad Planner data seems to back that up.
• IMVU, the 3D virtual chat room with user-generated content (which is also sold in a virtual marketplace), had about 3 million users last year.
• Minecraft isn't strictly a singly virtual world, but a lot of its millions of players connect on multiplayer servers, which are effectively mini virtual worlds.

Some SLers will say these aren't direct competitors with Second Life, and to be obsessively strict about it, that's true. (Then again, to judge by recent ads, Linden Lab itself considers IMVU a competitor.) Some objections have been rendered moot by Second Life's own evolution: You could insist that a virtual world must be a fully contiguous space, but in practicality, SL hasn't really been like that in years. For how it's used by 70% of its users, who rarely explore outside their log-in point, it might as well be a series of separate chat rooms.

All that to one side: It remains true that there is a proven market for 3D simulated worlds where user-generated content is possible and popular, and it's much larger than a million. (10-15 million seems like a more plausible number to me.) So I'd say the reasons for SL failing to pass that one million hurdle remain more vexing than a larger lack of interest.

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[Metacam Oh]

I love how Second Life is kind of referred to like a dead body.

[shockwave yareach]

The key to making a virtual world is:

1) let customers enjoy their make believe world without tomes of regulations and rules. Some rules, yes -- needing a lawyer to know what is permissible, no.

2) let customers be able to make money that they can then cash out into real funds, or otherwise pay their charges with. Everyone wanted to be the next Stroker, so a vibrant inworld economy is a must.

3) communities keep SL together, in spite of your platform's numerous serious faults and dead-end directions. People who are a part of a community put up with lots of hassles to stay while those without one simply quit and take their money to play WoW or something.

Making communities and landowners actually want to be in SL is the critical lynchpin your company has never been able to comprehend. With your super high prices and your 10,000 commandments, along with a viewer that won't work when you try to login the first time with an Nvidia card, it's no wonder you have lots of signups and few visitors.

You create a Disneyworld -- treat your customers like visitors to Disneyworld rather than inmates of your private jail.

[Dave Bell]

I must admit, I wonder about that million active users. But getting 7% of the total market isn't bad going. Increasing that number would be good, but eventually SL is going to hit limits on the overall system design. Peak numbers have dropped, but getting past 70,000 concurrent users would be the big technical barrier.

I am not going to waste time suggesting what Linden Labs could do better. but SL has bugs that are older than general access to Facebook.

[Mitch Wagner]

That PandoDaily article was extremely silly.

If you're going to start an essay by tarring all non-Silicon Valley media as dummies, its helpful if you yourself get basics right. Like not making factual errors in your headline. To wit: It's "Second Life," not "SecondLife." And the company that runs the service isn't SecondLife; it's Linden Lab.

When I first read the article I was pleased because I was glad to see Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab, and the Second Life community get some praise for a change. But after thinking about the piece three minutes, it revealed itself as evident bullshit.

PandoDaily and Sarah Lacy have discovered that a company that has remained in business 10 years is not a failure. And PandoDaily thinks this is news. And then Sarah Lacy makes it all about her.

(I posted a lot of this on Google Plus.)

[froggie]

No, SL succeeds in still treating its customers like crap while taking huge sums of their money.
1 million users? those are like fake AOL numbers from the 90s.

[Eddi Haskell]

Second Life will never grow unless the ability to master a viewer is made far more simple and far less confusing. Right now, Second Life requires a level of sophistication far beyond what the typical Facebook user can feel comfortable with.

I visited Cloud Party again yesterday, my second visit since it launched. Although it has a long way to go, its ease of use heralds a good future even though it looks like hell.

Second Life should be viewed as a success if everyone can admit that it was never a mass market platform, but a game specific to those who have a need or a desire to engage in the highly intensive interface it requires. And like any game, it has reached it's plateau.

A mass-market Second Life (and I do not think it needs to be pad oriented) built upon ease-of-use and robust performance, with good content and graphical appeal still may have a mass-market future down the road.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Hamlet's got one point I agree on: For most of SL's users, this might as well be IMVU. Its pretty similar.

Sit in one spot on a cartoony avatar and flirt / drama with those around you.

Well Hamlet didn't say that, but that's how I read 70% of folks staying in one sim and chatting it up.

- And yes, most of you with your 8' tall Barbarella avatars, are just as cartoony as those in IMVU. Only the avatar over there can't "fail" at it and end up looking wrong as easily.

Phillip's comment:
"Rosedale said one of the biggest surprises he had building SecondLife was how when given total creative license, most of the houses just looked like ones in Malibu. Most people just covet the things they know, he says."

- Is it. SL has too many human avatars, but not just that - too many that are 'WASP' Kardashian-knock-offs. Everyone in SL wants to be the 'girl in high school that picked on them the most', and live in the house she now lives in on reality-tv somewhere.

Most people just don't care for a virtual world that is original, unique, and user created. They just want to be an army of Kim Kardashians and Paris Hiltons.
- And not enough people are out there that desire that fix in this way. Let alone who haven't already been taken by IMVU.

The fact that SL lets some people -not- be Kim Kardashian makes it the -weaker- product, sadly enough... People in that 'if only I could be WASP-glam' crowd disdain being around those not in it or not seeking it.

[Pussycat Catnap]

"PandoDaily and Sarah Lacy have discovered that a company that has remained in business 10 years is not a failure. And PandoDaily thinks this is news."

The thing is, in Silicon Valley, that -IS- a failure.

Repeat: staying in business 10 years, round here, means you did it wrong.

Which is why Silicon Valley is such a mess.

People don't seek to become long term stable companies - they seek to get hyped up and bought out, or hyped up and IPO'd, then sell out.

When one of them actually turns out a product that has lasting stability and comfortable paychecks its owners can bank on and its employees can settle into and think about retirement with... the rest of the region looks over and says "Ha ha... you suck!" while eating ramen noodles and playing the startup lottery...

And I think LLs biggest problem is that it either fails to realize its a stable business, or fails to communicate this - and keeps acting or appearing to act like it needs to find the next shiny, rather than just managing the brand.

(The said, in the behind the scenes quiet way - they have done a lot of work in the last year and a half that has been about finding ways to keep the brand stable, though some were not ideal - and better communication on this would help.)

[Pussycat Catnap]

p.s. to the above: Note how Phillip has himself moved on from SL. Even he doesn't get it about being a stable company. He'd rather sit out on the Nude Beach in San Francisco (Baker Beach, where the photo a few weeks ago was taken) with a laptop playing startup lottery with employees eating takeout Chinese... than manage and grow a healthy lasting business that has the potential -if done right- to keep his grandkids in profit.

[String]

Yes, Second Life was a success. But Cloud Party will be the winner.

Second Life has brought creators enough frustration on content theft, risk of MP delivery failure, MP payment system's unreliability.

CP is the direct competitor with Second Life, after talking to CP's CEO, I just know it, believe me or not.

[shockwave yareach]

String: it is far too early to tell if CP will eclipse SL or not. They've only barely gotten CP started up.

But I will agree that CP has gotten an enormous amount of the hardest part of the work done in a mere 5 months, whereas SL still has the same bugs and crushing limitations it possessed in 2003. These noobs came onto the scene and in less than half a year did all the things LL said couldn't be done at all? Were I an LL exec, I'd hang my head in shame.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

Second Life is a success in that it has so many users who are passionate and vocal about it. It has outlasted any would be competitors and is going strong 9 years later.

It certainly looks as if your Second Life based blog is successful and doing well. You have attracted enough traffic to garner advertising, and enough attention that you have an agent to manage your public speaking engagements.

Your success is based on Second Life's success. I would say that Philip is right.

[elizabeth (16)]

"did it sell?"

thinkfail !!!

[Iggy]

I wish I'd been born on the other coast. I'd be a surfer-dude visionary world-changer, discussing philosophy in a coffee shop instead of an East-Coast nihilistic tattooed freak, drinking PBR with all the other freaks still listening to the Ramones.

Nah. I'm stickin' with my people.

@Pussycat, who wrote,

"SL has too many human avatars, but not just that - too many that are 'WASP' Kardashian-knock-offs."

Pappy Enoch is about to send you a marriage proposal.

[Scarp Godenot]

All of these people that think Cloud Party is going to take over the world need a serious reality check.

1) A successful buisiness needs to MAKE MONEY. Just how is Cloud Party planning on doing that? ...... Anyone?

2) After it becomes larger than an OpenSim, just how is anyone going to find anything there? The current version of their visual inventory will cease to function when the items start numbering in the thousands for instance. Let alone the billions as are present in Second Life.

Lets face a few facts. The exact same problems Linden Lab faces regarding large amounts of inventory and across platform communication are faced by ALL virtual world competitors. Several OpenSim worlds learned this VERY quickly after opening their pie in the sky dreamer low priced sims. Prices rose a LOT. Why? Because they HAD TO!

These types of things are just economic facts. Bandwidth and servers cost money. You can't live for long on venture capital and dreams.

[Desmond Shang]

"Everyone in SL wants to be the 'girl in high school that picked on them the most', and live in the house she now lives in on reality-tv somewhere."

Ms Catnap, that did cause a grin! But I gently suggest that at least in my case, your statement is possibly inapplicable?

Real Virtual Land Barons of OC,

Desmond

[elizabeth (16)]

Scarp-- "1) A successful buisiness needs to MAKE MONEY. Just how is Cloud Party planning on doing that? ...... Anyone?"

i know !!! sell land. oh! wait jejejjeje (:

[Masami Kuramoto]

OK, Scarp, here's your reality check:

1) They are already making money from land rentals right now. And that is only the beginning.

2) Their visual inventory allows you to add thumbnail pictures to each entry. This is already more than SL has to offer. Plus, there is a search function. Plus, you are judging the feature set of a beta version as if it were the final product. They are literally adding new stuff to Cloud Party every few hours. Refresh your browser!

You are trying to argue that CP is doomed because OpenSim didn't scale well. You are completely missing the fact that all of OpenSim's scaling issues were essentially solved when it became hypergrid-ready. Those grids you are talking about use the old centralized model, and that's why they fail to scale and have to raise prices. You ignore that CP's topology is closer to hypergrid than to SL's tiled land map model; you ignore that CP uses sharding and is designed to fire up and shut down arbitrary numbers of regions on demand. Your conclusion is based on the assumption that CP is merely SL inside the browser. It isn't.

[shockwave yareach]

Scarp - inventory scaling problems are solved by not having a single server that holds everything, and is thus a single point of failure. You can distribute things by having one database per 100 sims and appending the number of which database to the beginning of teh UUID. Thus if you suddenly quadruple the number of sims, you also quadruple the number of databases serving them. And you need not worry about syncing them -- the UUID includes the number of the database, so even identical UUIDs on two different databases won't be the same as the database numbers at the beginning won't be the same.

This was proposed years ago as a scalable solution to the poor overworked ASSET cluster, which does not scale and becomes a chokepoint for data (since every single byte for all of SL passes through it's gigabit link).

[David Cartier]

There is so much going on that you just cannot make blanket statements about SL. We have communities of gay warrior barbarians, manga devotees and Trekkies. Mormons use SL to train young men for their missions. Disabled vets use it as a part of the healing process. There are areas of incredible beauty and mindnumbingly ugly blight. You have to venture into the Korean and Japanese areas to see some of the really incredible things, these days, but SL is by no means senescent, dying or dead, despite the best efforts to kill it off.

[Dave Bell]

Perhaps the big advantage that CP has is that they don't have to copy how SL does things.

The newcomers know that a hundred AVs can be in one region, if they do the right things differently.

[Mitch Wagner]

The real problem that CP will face isn't entirely technical. It's psychological.

The people of the world have spoken. They're not interested in general-purpose virtual worlds. It's a niche market.

So CP has to figure out a way to make money serving a very small audience. As James has pointed out, the costs at this point are much higher than the potential revenue. Of course, computing power does get cheaper. Is it cheap enough now that Cloud Party can work?

[Pussycat Catnap]

"All of these people that think Cloud Party is going to take over the world need a serious reality check."

But... But... But...

All the hype.

THE HYPE

Don't forget the hype.

Cloud Party will KILL SL.

It's in the hype.

It'll kill it like a skunk on the freeway.

I read it in teh interwebz hype.

...

Yeah something will kill SL eventually... but its like all the people who spend all day on WoW forums declaring every new game will Warcraft. Only to be disappointed when it fails to happen.

Oh and...

SL was already killed...

By Blue Mars. In 2009.

Didn't ya'll get that memo yet?

[Ezra]

"The people of the world have spoken. They're not interested in general-purpose virtual worlds. It's a niche market."

Since when was "niche market" the opposite of demonstrated interest rather than the exact definition?

Why should it be at all enlightening or relevant that the only people into "general-purpose virtual worlds" are people who're well, into "general-purpose virtual worlds"?

What does it matter what "people of the world" have spoke?

Every market is niche at some level. Facebook is niche if it levels out at 1 billion users if you look at it from a glass 6/7th empty "people of the world" perspective.

Second Life demonstrates a large and profitable market for virtual worlds. It does so even with a dismal retention rate of less than 1% of all sign-ups.

If there was a restaurant in a food court called "VIRTUAL WORLDS" and only less than 1% that walked into the door actually stayed to eat, and the restaurant STILL made extremes amount of money, grew, lasted 10 years beating the odds of the average startup in Silicon Food Court, would it really be foolish to not only believe there's a worthwhile market there, but that it could grow?

[Mitch Wagner]

@Ezra - On a global scale, Linden Lab is a small business.

If a business has been around 20 years, and received a lot of hype much of that time, and stayed small, it's reasonable to think it will continue to stay small in the future.

This kind of thing is cyclical. Twenty years ago, we were all going to live in MOOs and MUDs. Five years ago we were all going to live in Second Life.

This is not to suggest that there's anything wrong with Second Life, or the people who love it. It will always be a niche market. And that's OK.

[Mitch Wagner]

@Ezra - On a global scale, Linden Lab is a small business.

If a business has been around 20 years, and received a lot of hype much of that time, and stayed small, it's reasonable to think it will continue to stay small in the future.

This kind of thing is cyclical. Twenty years ago, we were all going to live in MOOs and MUDs. Five years ago we were all going to live in Second Life.

This is not to suggest that there's anything wrong with Second Life, or the people who love it. It will always be a niche market. And that's OK.

[Mitch Wagner]

It's OK, that is, if it can be made sustainable financially. And by "Second Life" in the last graf, above, I mean "general purpose virtual worlds."

Proofreading. I've heard of it.

[Iggy]

@Mitch, I agree that there's nothing wrong with niche products. I drive a Mini Cooper. Yet that offshoot of BMW, able to reach into its parent company's deep pockets, still has to innovate to retain drivers.

They do it with new models that maintain the philosophy of a fun-to-drive car that, despite its higher price than competitors' offerings, draws in the faithful and their bucks.

That's clearly the case with Apple, another deep-pocketed brand.

Now if Linden Lab could match the quality experience of either Apple or Mini, while retaining SL's uniqueness...we'd have a niche product that commands respect.

[froggie]

"This kind of thing is cyclical. Twenty years ago, we were all going to live in MOOs and MUDs. Five years ago we were all going to live in Second Life.

This is not to suggest that there's anything wrong with Second Life, or the people who love it. It will always be a niche market. And that's OK."

hah! Wagner has become Prok.. and that's OK...-)

[Iggy]

Should have added that I just got out of a voice-chat planning meeting with three educators, all of whom are experienced SLers.

It took the group two relogs and 20 minutes before we could all hear each other and speak. That is just not acceptable.

The niche will only get smaller unless LL fixes some of these basics, no matter how faithful the die-hard base. Rather like Apple in the mid 90s.

[Scarp Godenot]

Masami Kuramoto sez: "You are completely missing the fact that all of OpenSim's scaling issues were essentially solved when it became hypergrid-ready. Those grids you are talking about use the old centralized model, and that's why they fail to scale and have to raise prices."

WHY didn't the larger OpenSim worlds adopt Hypergrid? Well, they simply had to face the facts of economics. They needed to make money. They needed an economy that they could control. They needed to protect IP rights. They didn't understand this until it became clear that Hypergrid would limit those possibilities, and inhibit their ability to survive. This is the exact SAME reason Linden Lab failed to join Hypergrid after participating in the early development of it.

So your blaming their need to raise their prices is the complete opposite of what actually happened.

As for the future Hypergrid: it will not seriously be adopted UNLESS 1) there is some sort of IP protected cross worlds way of dealing with virtual world inventories. And 2) there is some sort of agreed upon safe and secure standard for micro purchases. This can only happen with an overarching standards group that can set up a protocol of standards, plus the adoption of those protocols by everyone involved.

My main point of posting here is not to badmouth Cloud Party but to suggest that regardless of the base technology of any current or future virtual world, there are certain VERY DIFFICULT problems that they will all have to solve. Here are a few of them: 1) how do you communicate to your users what is happening in your virtual world when the number of events becomes massive? 2) How do you deal with billions of inventory items that must be accessed anywhere on your grid? 3) And most importantly, how do you make enough money to pay for bandwidth, servers, advertising, maintenance staff, customer support staff, and product development staff, THEN make a profit on top of that?

[Masami Kuramoto]

@Scarp

The reason why there is no walled OpenSim world with a hypergrid topology is because teleport destinations are chosen by the viewer, and the viewer is out of control. In other words, if your commercial OpenSim world is a collection of hypergrid nodes, you can't stop people from teleporting into and out of it.

The makers of Cloud Party don't have that problem. They can adopt a decentralized model that resembles the hypergrid and still have a walled garden at the same time. They can use multiple asset databases just like they use multiple instances of the same island. (In fact some details in their UI indicate that they store assets in a distributed revision control system.) They can use load balancing just like any other website. And since they use the Amazon cloud, they don't even need to make risky infrastructure investments which would keep operational costs unnecessarily high during times of low demand. They can literally expand on Fridays and scale down on Mondays, without running any idle capacity during the week. And they can make a profit just like any other free-to-play MMO. In fact it's fascinating how they avoid all the pitfalls of SL while adopting its strengths. This isn't even remotely comparable to Blue Mars which was basically a design failure from top to bottom. (And I'm on record having said this very early on, while most people were still caught in the hype.)

Does that answer your questions?