SL Usage: Median Daily Concurrency Up 13% Since "Pandemic Boost"

Here are more solid figures to back up reports that Second Life is currently experiencing a "pandemic boost" -- via Tyche Shepherd, keeper of the best data on SL outside SL the actual company.

"Second Life concurrency shows a significant uplift since 10th March 2020," she tells to me. "Underlying trend in Median Daily Concurrency begins to grows from that date and has been 13% higher on average than the previous 9 weeks."

As you can see above, median concurrency reaches up to around 46,000 in mid-April, then starts steadily decreasing to a point where it is now around 41,000.

Which is pretty decent! To put that in modern terms, VRChat is now reaching peak concurrencies of about 15,000 on Steam -- so  its total is probably 2-3x that number of people launching VRChat from other platforms. I.E. SL concurrency is still competitive with VRChat.

The next question is why usage starts slipping in May:

If had to speculate (and that's why I'm here), I'd say we are seeing a small surge of old SLers who returned, looked around awhile... then moved on in search of other entertainment.  At the same time, we're also seeing Summer kick in, and people going outside more and more. (As typically happens, even without a pandemic.)

Wonder which way the numbers will trend. With the pandemic once again reaching crisis levels, in the US and UK at least, my guess is we see many millions of people once again going indoors. And looking for a better world to log into.

Comments

[playboxhd]

These numbers are so fairs.

[Argo N.]

Seems to mimic infection rates on the east coast US and over in the EU. You probably can't get this kind of data but it would be useful to see how the curve looks by demographic and geographic breakdown. Businesses have gotten good at knowing their customers buying habits, in fact, its become critical to operating a business, living in modern times as we do. BTW I was listening to an old podcast by a fairly well known data science person. She was asked by the interviewer this question: when she was a newbie data scientist what datasets did she work on to prefect her knowledge and techniques? She listed a couple of large more or less public datasets but the list also included a quick mention of looking at Second Life users. I am guessing that took place back in the SL's fab era (2005-2010) That LL is also doing something this might be guessed from an pretty old posting I read about what it was like to work at LL. This staffer said he was pleased, he got to work on many things including Hadoop (Apache Hadoop is a necessary evil if you are doing data science at scale.). The post was kind of old,so its old information. Data Science isn't magic and will never replace good old creativity and skill, but it can illuminate unintelligible masses of data and help see the patterns and signal where only noise meets the eye.

[Mondy]

I wouldn't be surprised to see usage slip as restrictions are eased in countries around the world. I've seen many old friends come back to SL in recent months, but its not surprising with warmer weather and the ability to see friends and family again that Second life usage starts to take a back seat. July and August will see probably see a further dip as it does every year, although it may be higher than last year as fewer people will be able to vacation away.