Here's the results to the survey conducted by metaverse blogger Ryan Schultz, which asked readers on his blog, New World Notes, and users across several virtual world/VR themed Facebook pages, to state which virtual worlds they have an account with. (But not necessarily regularly use.) With 1,676 responses, this is a pretty decent, if unscientific, sample.
Unsurprisingly for this audience (and the world's 15 year existence), Second Life remains the proverbial 800 lbs. gorilla. More notable is that the top ten is dominated by "sons of Second Life", i.e. worlds that are closely related to SL in one direct way or another -- Sansar being created by the same company, Linden Lab, High Fidelity created by Second Life's co-founder (which is also funding Philip Rosedale's new company), Sinespace* being lead developed by Adam Frisby, a former SL entrepreneur who's also one of the co-founders of OpenSim -- which is itself an open source version of Second Life, while Kitely and InWorldz are themselves OpenSim spinoffs. So in the survey's top ten, VRChat, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room are the only three with no direct relationship to Second Life.
In terms of current usage, Second Life still gets the most concurrency (in the mid five figures every day), followed by VRChat (high four figures daily), and OpenSim-related worlds (probably low four figures, combined).
Disclosure: Sinespace is a proud sponsoring partner to this blog, but then you probably knew that.
There is something strange in that survey. 1676 is the number of votes, of which 239 are SL, and the sum of all the other votes gives that total, but... the survey had multiple answers! That's the total of votes, not of voters. If I voted 10 VW where I have an account, I'm not 10 voters!
It isn't that SL readers are the "14.26% of respondents", how Ryan Schultz writes. Instead it could be very likely that 250 people voted and 239 of them have a SL account, plus other accounts too. E.g. if you voted for SL and Blue Mars, and another one for SL and VRChat, he would think that SL readers are the 50% of the respondents, and Blue Mars and VRChat 25%.
He takes that in this way up to the conclusions. "What can these pools tell us? [...] no single virtual world has an overwhelming market share in the metaverse platform market. (The closest is Second Life at 15% of poll respondents." Nope. Furthermore this tell us nothing of the market share. If once you downloaded Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, what does count for the market share is the web browser you are using now. If you gave a peek at Sansar and at High Fidelity, and you never used them again, and what you are using now VRChat, the current market share isn't 33% each, it is 100% VRChat. The survey can't tell us that, because the question wasn't that, but on which social VR platform/VW you have an user account.
What can give us an hint is instead what you say, Hamlet, the concurrency.
I'm not surprised that Linden Lab costumers, from SL, gave a peek at the next Linden Lab project or the one from the Linden Lab founder Rosedale or even Sinespace; but what's notable is that with that advantage (not to mention articles, taking advantage of movies and OpTic Gaming), and so many people who made an account, Sansar has less concurrency than... ActiveWords (the ancient one from 1995 now almost abandoned). And more importantly, as High Fidelity, their concurrency is significantly less than other current social VWs and competitors, even less than Rec Room, and way less than VRChat. And many many times less than SL. That's the market share we are talking about, and it tells us (among other things) in which VWs people go and which one they are using, rather than other ones.
Posted by: Pulsar | Friday, August 31, 2018 at 05:37 PM