Second Life Private Sim Growth Continues With New Discount -- But Virtual Economy Expert Suspects It Won't Last

Here's the latest Second Life grid report from Tyche Shepherd, a top statistician for a major multinational whose quirky hobby is tracking the evolution of virtual world land ownership on Grid Survey.  (Follow her on Twitter here.) Key takeaway from her report: Second Life is still seeing positive growth of private SL sims (Linden Lab's top revenue source), a trend which started last July:

A net increase of 6 regions this week with all the growth among Private Estates... Adult rated regions were up by 25 to 5889 (24.8% of the grid) while General Rated were down by 1 to 2908 (12.2%). Year to date net change in private estate numbers now stands at + 46 (0.3% growth).

This kind of steady positive growth hasn't happened since 2012 (though it was much more positive back then). Much of this growth is attributable to the sim tier price cuts that Linden Lab announced last June.

"There has been a run of net private sim growth since the last couple of weeks of July," Tyche tells me. "A handful of individual weeks have shown very small losses but the overall trend has been positive."

Tyche believes this trend will help with Second Life user retention in the short term -- however, she thinks it won't last:

"I think the growth benefits of the tier cut are coming to an end and I think we'll see a relative flat growth period to the end of the year," as she puts it. "The financial benefits to landholders, though, will help user retention; however, the long term prospect is a slow decline in private estates. My gut feeling (rather than any actual analysis) is that the recent growth in regions has been among existing/lapsed owners rather than new landowners. In other words , while it may have brought in some lapsed users the tier reduction hasn't broaden the land holding base and natural decline is going to kick in again."

Seeing as Tyche has tracked SL land for a touch near ten years, I'm inclined to trust her gut.

Pictured above: The Second Life grid back in 2009, featuring Osprey Therian's mark-up of the map, showing the area of SL that existed when she joined in 2004.  

Comments

[Bebbe Bebbe]

Linden Lab is putting too much land on the grid and once the top is reached it will all drop like a stone again leading to serious losses.

All Linden Lab is doing is boosting their business in an artificial manner for which they soon will pay the price. M Linden did the same and then the shock came.