Bucking Downward Trend, Second Life Private Sim Loss Stopped Last Week

Well this is interesting -- last week the SL grid actually gained a single private sim according to metaverse analyst Tyche Shepherd. That's a rare event, because if you look at her weekly reports on Twitter, the trend has been near-consistently downward - 4 private sims gone one week, 19 gone another, minus 34 another, and so on.

This may be false causality, but another rare Second Life event happened last week: Linden Lab announced plans for a major update to Second Life, including cloud deployment and hints at different pricing options. Common sense suggests private sim owners on the verge of quitting would reconsider when plans for a huge infrastructure investment/feature expansion came out. 

That said, one week of positive sim growth may not suggest anything substantial just yet:

A net increase of 1 #secondlife region this week
Grid stands at 23546 regions - more details here https://t.co/1eTzwgQgki pic.twitter.com/0ssCLZ6fD8

— Tyche Shepherd (@tycheshepherd) September 3, 2017

We'll really know if Linden Lab's stated plans had any impact on the the larger trend of sim loss over the next several months -- especially after the updates the company described are implemented.

Comments

[V]

The way the article is written gives the impression that you are upset that there wasn't more sim losses. Am I the only one who thought that?

[Exandir]

I didn't get the impression from this article that the writer wants anything negative to happen in SL but I agree with LL that they need to move forward with some kind of change for SL. Making it cheaper would definitely create growth. They really need to tweak with the platform too and improve the lag problem if they want people to keep investing.

[V]

I agree SL has so much potential that their limiting with the insane costs. Maybe it takes everyone leaving for them to act

[HS]

Also it's back to school time. It was a hard summer with a lot of vacancies. But now people are flooding back.

[LagOh]

Could it be that the owners looked at SANSAR and thought "this ain't gonna make it" and stuck with Second Life?

[Dani Vieira]

Sansar has been years in development and is still not out of open beta. How could they have made any such decision, LagOh? LL has been clear that they are not abandoning SL in favor of Sansar, and that they believe that SL has many more years of life in it.

[LagOh]

@Dani Vieira - I was talking about the SIM owners, not Linden Labs.

[Shockwave]

I got a homestead. All my fault.