New World Notes

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Tokyo Revengers Avatar Cosplay & Other Coolness by Sam Wednesday

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Sam Wednesday’s picture “the weekend be like” captures the reality of weekends being more the time to do your laundry, clean your apartment, and go shopping than partying all night long.  I love the quotidian honesty of the picture and its title. 

For some cosplay excellence, click here:

VRChat User Concurrency Hit Nearly 90,000 Last New Year's Eve!

Chart annotations by Adeon - click to embiggenate

VRChat hit a huge milestone in the final hours of 2021, when the company and community host a widescale New Year's Eve party across the platform. As you can see from the chart above, peak concurrency on the last day of the year reached as high as 89,300+, but let's just say "nearly 90,000."

To put that in perspective, those concurrency numbers make VRChat usage competitive with the the top 10 most played games on Steam.  For instance, Grand Theft Auto Online also had about 90,000 players logged in via Steam on New Year's Eve. But unlike that game and all the others topping Steam's chart, almost all of the content on VRChat is created by the user community, not a professional studio or publisher.

This also means VRChat has finally beat the all-time concurrency record of local favorite Second Life, which peaked at just over 80,000 during its hype period.

This news (and the charts here) are from longtime VRChat user Adeon, who was checking the platform's concurrency API for just this month. If past trends remain consistent, he believes 90,000, as high as that is, will become the standard in 2022.

"[Y]ou can see that the jumps mostly happen on New Year's -- and they stay around. So this will most likely be the new normal, and slowly increase from here."

As Adeon's chart also suggests, VRChat usage grows every time there's a new spike of VR headset purchases -- or as he calls it, "Questmas":

Beautifully Composed Photos of Virtual World Landscapes

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

◕~ PɛȶֆɨҞ~◕, who I assume is PetSik, produces amazing images such as “No Escape” an eerily macabre playground picture. The teddy bear is placed right at the focal point of the Golden Ratio. In another great element of composition, you can see how a diagonal line from lower left to upper right connects the trike and the bear. The colors add to the eerie mood. It really succeeds at taking benign elements like playground toys and making them feel menacing. Of course, the hanging bear really is menacing, isn’t it? 

For more exquisite landscapes, click here:

Shock Stat: More People Own Items in Second Life Than Own NFTs

One advantage of writing about Second Life for so long is it gives me a unique perspective from which to compare the relative strength of any other virtual world/virtual economy phenomenon. Based on official reported numbers and inside sources, there are currently about 500,000 to 600,000 active Second Life users* -- i.e. people who regularly log into SL, interact with other users, and use Linden Dollars to buy unique virtual items.

Which brings us to NFTs, which are supposed to be the latest transformative technology. However, as the Financial Times just reported:

Chainalysis found that NFTs have introduced a huge number of retail investors to the crypto world, with small transactions of under $10,000 accounting for more than 75 per cent of the market. But much like the market for cryptocurrencies, it remains dominated by a few large players, or “whales”. Between late February and November, there were 360,000 NFT owners holding 2.7m NFTs between them. Of those, about 9 per cent — or 32,400 wallets — held 80 per cent of the value of the market, Chainalysis found.

Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasis. There are more people who own unique virtual items in Second Life (about 500,000 now) than own NFTs (360,000). Second Life hasn’t been “hot” in the tech world since 2008, but its virtual economy is still larger than the supposedly hot NFT market? (And that's setting aside the report that less than 10% of those NFT owners -- i.e. under 36,000 people -- dominate that economy.)

This should be the kind of figure that makes people in tech excited about NFTs deeply question their assumptions. We read about various NFTs selling for many millions of dollars worth of Ethereum, but it's rarely mentioned how small the market for NFTs actually is.

Or to put it another way: If there was a small city of 380,000 people where painted beer caps were highly, highly valued, but they were only valuable to people in that city, and generally considered worthless to the other 7.75 billion people in the world, would you consider painted beer caps the next greatest thing in the global economy? Or just a quirky anecdote about that one small city?

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2021年12月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

 

 

Cajsa's Favorite SL Style Blogs from 2021 -- And Tips for Being Featured by Cajsa in 2022!

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I thought I would end my column this year by telling you what I like in Second Life blog and am more likely to feature in 2022:

1. I like to see fresh, unique fashion styling. If you are wearing an outfit right out of the box, it is less interesting than if you mix and match from different designers. 
2. I like clothes. I am tired of the 50 Shades of Lingerie posts. I am tired of ass cheeks and nipple covers. If everybody is doing it, it’s not transgressive and brave. It’s boring. 
3. I like stories, if your picture tells a story, I will probably love it. 
4. I like text. I love blogs with narrative. If you love something, tell me why. If you want to share that you got an A in history, do it. Let us into your life. Show more of yourself than a picture. 
5. I like blogs that are simple. No sparkling banners, no music, no autoplay anything. 
6. I like blogs with small banners. If I have to page down to see your content, I might not see your content at all. 
7. I like unique avatars. Feel free to be a frowny-face or a cyborg or a furry. 
8. I like slice-of-life pictures that show you doing something. 
9. I like credits that include the creators’ names. There’s so much rebranding and the use of special characters in store names, so give us creator names so we can search for something that is less likely to change. 
10. I like originality. Perhaps because I am constantly browsing Flickr groups featuring bloggers but there are days when it feels like it’s all the same old stale woman laying on her bed in lingerie. I don’t know why there are twenty lingerie pics to one with clothing, but come on, can’t you see how banal it is when everybody is doing the same thing? 

Now here’s a look at my favorite bloggers of 2021:

Ten Noteworthy Metaverse Stories from 2021 You'll Read More About in 2022

Here's ten New World Notes posts from 2021 highlighting noteworthy trends, features, controversies, or challenges that we're very likely to see come cropping up in various forms in 2022 and for that matter in years to come:

ROBLOX Reportedly Pressures Journalist Covering Platform's In-Game Market "In Which Children Are Encouraged To Gamble Real Money" (December 2021)

At some point, you have to think, controversial stories like this will become a much larger headache for ROBLOX in general and Metaverse platforms in particular.

Decentraland Stats: 300K Monthly Active Users, Under 20K Daily Users

With no shortage of breathless stories this year about a putative "Metaverse real estate boom", we're likely to see a slew of stories asking whether these purchases were leading to an actual boom of users interested in that real estate. (And expect similar themes to bubble up around the broader NFT craze.) 

Facebook's Biggest Metaverse Safety Problem Is Baked Into Facebook's Brand

Can Facebook/Meta actually transition into becoming a Metaverse company when its DNA is so essentially not very Metaverse-y? Find out in 2021!

80% Of Facebook Employees Believe This Week's Whistleblower Revelations Will Damage Company, According To Massive Internal Poll

Same theme as above, but more government regulation-y.

Anyone In El Salvador Actually Using Bitcoin? Evidence Seems Scarce

Same as above, but more "virtual currency is disrupting Central America and leading to a crisis"-y.

Five more beyond the break:

Top 10 Most Read New World Notes Posts of 2021

As with most years, the most shared and read New World Notes posts of 2021 tell you a lot about the current state of the Metaverse, along with Second Life and its successors' place within it:

• BREAKING: Sansar, Would-Be Second Life Successor & Metaverse Platform, Is Offline -- Staff Reportedly Furloughed Since September
• Neal Stephenson: The Metaverse Isn't Dystopian, The Problem Is Monetizing User Data -- And We Need Collective Bargaining To Make It Better
• Dear New York Times: Here's What Stylish Marriages In The Metaverse Actually Look Like
• Watch: Second Life Land Baron Who Hates Evicting Tenants Featured On HBO's How To With John Wilson
• Dear Media: Maybe Don't Draw Wrong Metaverse Lessons From Second Life?

  Five more after the break, including the saddest news of the year:

Cajsa's Favorite Second Life-Based Images from 2021

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

One of my favorite posts from 2021 was this one that featured Nicholas Huntsman who recreated Saturday Evening Post covers with his own pictures. I love the wit and macabre sense of humor. Look at the treasure he posted on Monday. 

For more, click here:

Sansar's Corporate Owner Announces Attempt to Resolve Unspecified "Issues on the Platform" After Last Week's Downtime

Here's a mysterious update to the Sansar platform and website going offline and then back on again last week before the Christmas holiday: Steve Moriya, VP at Sansar owner Wookey, posted this in the official Sansar Discord server on Christmas Eve:

hi there. this is steve from the wookey management - sansar team. i thought i'd pop in to let you know we are actively looking to resolve the issues on the platform. we value our community big time, and hope that we can get things running smoothly soon. big thanks to daisy for her assistance here. we appreciate your patience and understanding...

No further word about the specific "issues on the platform", and insiders I've talked to aren't sure either. (And I've tried contacting Wookey for an official statement multiple times to no avail). Reportedly one of those issues is resolving the furlough of Sansar employees that has existed since at least September.