Why Is IMVU Usage Slipping -- And Will Second Life Share the Same Fate? (Guest Post)

Coffee Pancake, co-host of the largest Second Life-themed group on Reddit, recently noticed an odd trend in her subreddit related to IMVU users, and began investigating.

Her findings coincide with some data points I've been wondering about myself -- IMVU has shed millions of monthly active users in recent years, with even website traffic from its official site slipping beneath Second Life. (Even though on paper, SL has about 500,000 active users, versus IMVU's 4 million or so.)

What's going on? Here's Coffee Pancake's observations around the recent decline of IMVU activity -- which includes a hidden warning for Second Life too. - WJA

We're seeing an uptick in new users on the Second Life subreddit, some specifically mention having come from IMVU. There has been something of an exodus going on the last few years that might have stepped up in our direction lately. Curiosity got the better of me, so down the rabbit hole I went.* While I am not an expert on IMVU, I hope my observations provide an informed perspective, yet my impressions may contain mistakes and misconceptions (and I welcome any feedback).

For Second Life users unfamiliar: IMVU is a more socially focused platform, designed around a chatroom-based structure and social mechanics. A notable difference is that avatars can't freely walk and must instead pick from specific predetermined places to sit or pose, an open world skipped in favor of only hosting social destinations.

The entire platform is a series of chat rooms of various flavors, some made by the operators, most made by the users. There's shopping, mini-games, and an Instagram-style feed. Fundamentally, not much is going on aside from dressing up, posting and reacting to thirst on the feeds, hanging out, chatting, and engaging in many forms of roleplay. Family groups (including adopted child-like avatars) form a core social foundation with a range of themes and styles springing from that. This includes a considerable amount of adult and kink activity (with illicit 'market rooms' known for black market content), combat, furries, holding court, and the occasional coven for the obligatory vampires.

Basically, all the stuff we do [in SL], for all of the same reasons... with less walking. So, while their avatars do have legs, they don't get out much.

I've done some research into IMVU community spaces online, and the following issues are mentioned frequently:

 

• VIP (their version of SL Premium) was split into 4 membership tiers, separate for both desktop and mobile, increasing the cost to participate and create.
• Constant upsell attempts through aggressive client spam.
• Presence of actual minors.
• Struggling creators leaving, citing the high cost of doing business and membership requirements.
• Accusations that staff-player relationships focus on big winners & influencers to the point of corrupting policy & governance.
• Lack of governance accountability, arbitrary bans, and perceived lack of fairness or understanding.
• Limited ways to resolve billing issues result in lost accounts and bans.
• Lack of chat in chat rooms & parked (AFK) avatars.
• Plummeting online population.
• Actual bots spamming the feeds [see image at right] 
• Suggestions of company employees acting as users & astroturfing.
• NFTs (that failed to take hold as hoped).
• Broadly unpopular "dumbed down" web client.
• Lack of community representation in marketing, especially...
• Shame surrounding the adult Access Pass (AP) community, despite it being the biggest, most loyal, and most profitable.
• Replacing the one-time payment Access Pass (AP) with a monthly subscription (AP+).

In summary, what seems to have happened is a corporate-led desire to refresh the platform, focusing on a younger generation of users, leading with a simpler, easier client, mobile focus, and gradually adding more monetization. There have been surveys to gauge end-user sentiment and reactions, but these are criticized for using leading questions to guide respondents to management's desired answer. There is an observed lack of PR, marketing, and a disconnect between the platform’s policies and support/governance actions.

The IMVU YouTube channel has some pretty abysmal viewing figures, many of their user story feature pieces having hundreds (hundreds!) of views after a year of being published. Marketing seems to be generally limited to keyword squatting on App Store search terms (including "Second Life").

Creators have been bailing for a while due to fees, perceived lack of protection from content theft, and an uneven/unfair slant to market operations from both the platform and other users gaming the system.

The social community has broadly tanked with multiple stacked factors in play: The user base very much views the platform as an over-18s 'adults-only' space. The presence of actual minors (some having acquired an adult Access Pass) and adult content in general spaces make the platform feel unsafe for everyone. Heavily loaded terms like 'infested' are thrown about, with no possible middle ground.

A strong mobile focus has certainly made the platform accessible to the under-18 demographic, but the established user base wants nothing to do with them, especially in adult spaces.

A recently pushed update to the chat system very imperfectly censors chat everywhere (public GA spaces, private AP, and private messages) in what appears to be an attempt to police the broader ToS & community standards. This, combined with fears about the company keeping & preserving conversation logs, has users wondering why they should bother saying anything at all.

All combined, the effect has been to silence active participation. No one talks, giving the impression chat rooms are empty, with avatars apparently 'parked' boosting conversation tourism (users trawling the platform wishing to find an active conversation rather than start one). Why talk to someone who just appeared and isn't going to stay anyway?

The community perception is that IMVU is socially dead. Reduced to an Instagram-style 'smash or pass' feed with an avatar store, users parked in public rooms acting as baited lures to engage elsewhere (typically Discord), actual children trying to get in on the fun while the operators deliberately look the other way, wishing they had Roblox's fortunes.

Second Life is mentioned from time to time, either as the place people have moved on to, or as being hard and having all the same problems.

IMVU has some distinct usability and accessibility advantages over SL. It's a tighter experience and, therefore, easier to engage with, especially on a limited mobile device. The system requirements are far lower, and complaints about performance are few and far between. There is potential for the time between login and a meaningful interaction to be far lower than SL can ever manage. On the flip side, if Discord ever integrates 3D avatars and someplace for them to sit, the entire platform could become irrelevant overnight.

My impression is the bulk of the user base appears to be mobile, which accounts for the population count, some of the interest in our own mobile client, and the high numbers of broadly unwelcome actual minors.

IMVU is a simpler platform, capable of evolving and adapting far faster than Second Life. Yet, its recent trajectory and much of the social commentary I’ve encountered feel eerily familiar—relevant and foreboding. A world without liminal spaces left feeling entirely so.

The two platforms are very different in many ways, but socially, the core interests are exactly the same. Everything people do in SL socially they do in IMVU with the same motivations. Social locations in SL tend to mirror the way IMVU works and deliberately eschew all the extras SL offers. 

If the end result is avatars sitting around chatting, how they got into the seats is immaterial. Second Life’s social and roleplay scene, for example, is on the rocks. Myself and a friend just did a deep dive into the Star Wars RP scene in SL as a non- Adult passtime and it’s shocking: A few sim owners hanging on due to sunk cost and discord servers full of people complaining there is no roleplay anymore.

I'm really not sure we in Second Life are on a different path from IMVU, or that what’s different about SL changes the ultimate outcome. 

*NOTE: These insights are based on compiled sentiment from reading posts on IMVU's Reddit community, their forums, and conversations with several regular IMVU users. To protect their identify, I'm not directly linking to specific discussion threads.

What's your take on Coffee's take, readers? I'd especially love IMVU users past and present to weigh in. I'm also contacting IMVU the company so they have a chance to reply, if desired.

Comments

[My Opinion]

In general as people age, they become less social. This has been observed multiple times, and has studies, if you care to look them up. IMVU has an aging demographic, and that is the reason why you see less participation in it, there might be newer players but they are probably the minority as there are superior platforms available to them.

It is the same with Second Life, we are an aging demographic, in general, we become less invested with socializing with strangers as we grow older.

Everyone seems to be hyper focused on making Second Life more of a social place, providing new methods to get people to socialize, the sad thing is, the places being created, for this purpose, remain empty because older people are more than likely not as interested in socializing as they once were.

The best thing that I believe LL at this point is, try to bring in some new blood, but not at the sake of the older players. SL is never going to attract enough of them to make up for the losses of the older player base if they lose sight in what people enjoy about SL. I would suggest LL bring in more tools for people who are not hyper focused on socializing, that gives them something to do in world, while maintaining the possibility of social interaction.

[ChesseTheWasp]

Roblox has actual games for people to engage in; imvu has none and second life games are very shallow in what they can do because of the major limitations of LSL and becuase of how much of the code runs serverside. People can only do so much with roleplaying without an actual game backing up said roleplay, which is probably why dungeons and dragons is so financially successful even now in 2024.

Maybe Second Life can be saved with the LuaU coding that is coming to the platform but I don't think good games will be made on Second Life even with LuaU because of the limitations of how "Sims" work compared to how servers work on something like Roblox or VRChat. Even if you make a good and engaging game in Second Life you will have to pay something like 200 dollars a month for a single server made for 50 concurrent players.

[Electra]

I think the numbers are already beginning to look much lower for second life, sadly. Lately there have been several days where fewer than 30k accounts were logged in concurrently during daytime hours USA.

I would say the number of accounts logged in is down about 20-30% from what used to be normal over the past two years, but that is just a guess.

Speculation as to why could include that the new viewers with PBR are almost impossible for many to use. There do seem to be other technical glitches going on currently as well, like attachments not rezzing at all (people literally look naked sometimes).

I hope they figure it out! So much creativity to root for, and countless groups in world trying to socialize the grid.

[Nescolet]

SL is more interesting as a simulator and sandbox and much less as a social platform, but this just because how the people are. If you have fun doing your thing, others can easily become irrelevant. So if there is no public chat or hardly any good private message, doesn't matter, we just enjoy the few chances of finding something --mainly style inspiration-- at social places.

[Pulsar]

Second Life, too, isn't doing great this year. Linden Lab's actions contributed to a noticeable decline in SL user concurrency.

Daniel Voyager kept track of the concurrency peaks month by month.
https://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/2024/10/13/second-life-daily-user-concurrency-early-october-2024/
Typically, as with many other things, SL user concurrency decreases in summer and then recovers slowly. 2020 and 2021 were more irregular due to COVID-19 lockdowns, but the general pattern holds.

This year it went a little differently.

In 2024, Second Life statistics declined, rather evidently, already in the first months. From 53k in February, by May, the highest peak had dropped to 50k users. After the Linden Lab scandal - or whatever you think it was - at the end of February, they eventually absolved themselves and in early May loaded the users, instead, with new Terms of Service. This may have significantly impacted the user base. Many people were disappointed, uncomfortable, or shocked by what came out and this situation. Several shops stopped selling products related to kid avatars.

A second drop occurred in July 2024. That time, Firestorm PBR was being released. They stated there would be no going back and no way to disable BPR, unlike ALM previously. That July, the highest peaks dropped from 50.1k to 47.2k, then continued to decline in August, falling to 45.7k. Eventually, in August, the Firestorm team announced that the old version wouldn't be blocked, but it was likely too late, and users didn't return.
In September, the highest peak remained low, reaching only 46.2k, about 4k less than the previous year, well beyond the usual year-by-year slow decline.
As of October, the highest peak so far is around 47k. This is again 4k less than the previous year.

[sirhc desantis]

coffeedujour.resident says what? And take a trip through the biz history of IMVU - makes SL look sane

Oh and yes I also keep 'data' and no you cannot have it. A decades worth+

and we get this today as a result of 'reaching out' you promised
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/10/linden-lab-second-life-layoffs.html
:) seen CEOs come and go of our little hive of madness.

[Nomad]

LL finally got off their backside to make new avatars, and guess what?

The people of the lab decided to make genderless avatars, with a blank face and no masculine of feminine features, this goes in stark contrast with the user base who's crushing majority make very masculine, or very feminine avatars, a trip anywhere on the grid shows this, but we just had to have current year modern audience starting avatars that most people look at, throw up in their mouth, and move on...

If that wasn't bad enough I have an insider telling me they're working on a third shape, gender neutral, just so "those people" don't get all offended having to pick male or female with a special pronoun box on the table, which is likely to happen as well sometime later.

Because when they look at all the woke movies, series and games bombing someone obviously thought "let's tap into that financial ruin as well!"