Are Second Life Trends Changing

We have all seen the trend of decreasing concurrent users and poor player retention numbers. There seems to be a turn around. I think it is too early to actually say that with any certainly… or if I wanted to be a wiener, certitude.

Sign Up Rate

Tateru’s site has stats on Second Life. One of her graphs is displaying signup rates.

Signup Rates

Signup Rates - from SL via Dwell On It

Since the SL Signup process changed we are seeing a climb in signups. On average the signup were about 10,000 per day for over a year. It looks like that has jumped to between 13,000 to 14,000 per day. It appears to be in an upward trend. It is early in the trend change, if it is a trend. We don’t know if this is a long term change or not. But the old trend has been broken.

Concurrency

For some time now concurrency has been trending down. Some weeks ago Tateru and then I both looked at seasonal changes to concurrency and it doesn’t show in the numbers. The Concurrency Graph has an upward trend similar to the trend in signups. The problem is the trend in concurrency does not stand out from the past months.

Second Life User Concurrency

SL User Concurrency - from SL via Dwell On it

Second Life Concurrency Stats

SL User Concurrency - from SL via Dwell On It

 

Rod Humble, Linden CEO, feels they have moved the dials on concurrency. He may have more detailed information. But, I can’t say I can see it in the graphs. In another month or even a couple of weeks we should be able to tell if concurrency is really trending up and breaking out of past cycles.

Metaverse also tracks some Second Life Statistics. Their graph below is tracking peak concurrency which appears to still be trending down. The minimum concurrency has a definite upward trend. Looking at the average concurrency we see a plateau for the last couple of months.

Second Life Stats

SL Concurrent Users - via Metaverse

If the peak and minimum trends continue, the average should start to turn upward.

In general, the trends look hopeful. We know new things are coming to Second Life and the Lindens are definitely working hard to upgrade Second Life. Various Lindens keep saying there are new things coming that we don’t know about. We know about a number of things, new features like mesh, viewers with modes like BASIC and Advanced, a number of things to improve performance, a recent chat load test conformed that upgrades to the Utility Servers were worthy and they are in place. But what all the unspoken improvements are is unknown.

How the changes will affect SL we can only speculate about.

Update: To add more fuel for speculation check out New World Notes article: Why Did Linden Lab’s Sharespost Value Jump Over $100M in 2 Months?

4 thoughts on “Are Second Life Trends Changing

  1. The most important concurrency figure is the median, and that’s halted its overall decline and has steadied. It may even be rallying, though it is still a little too early to call that.

  2. Let’s keep our careful optimism flowing 🙂 Of course, there are seasonal variations to account for, and I’m pretty sure that the new user experience also makes for many new users every day.

    Because I needed a “single-name” avatar (as opposed to a FirstName.LastName one), I registered an alt this past week, and, for fun, went through the whole registration experience. Well, I’m convinced. It was almost fun, and definitely way, way better than previous “first 15 minute experiences” although I see that the talking parrot was not yet retired… 😉

    • Tateru, Dwell On It, challenged one of my comments about seasonal trends in SL, saying the data doesn’t show any seasonality in SL. After looking through the stats I have to agree.

      The new signup process is way better for everyone, as you found. The trend in signup rates is definitely broken and moving up.

  3. Pingback: Second Life's 8th Birthday | MetaReality Podcast

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