Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Lindens have been upgrading the server operating system. Mazidox Linden describes it, “For those of you who don’t attend regularly or just missed that meeting, DRTSIM-323 is an upgrade to the simulator operating system to bring it up to more modern standards. It won’t change anything you should notice, and could change anything, at the same time.”
This is like a user changing from Windows 7 to 10. Everything working on 7 is supposed to work on 10. But, until you try it, you don’t know.
The Lindens have posted Improved Region Capacity and Access in the forum. They are raising the number of avatars a region can support. Not by a lot, but who can enter and when is changing a lot. I think for events this will be a big deal. If people actually kept up on Second Life development news, I think we would hear screams from the snowflakes.
Once the feature is rolled to ‘your’ region owners and estate manages will be able to enter regardless of the current avatar count. OK, that makes sense to me and shouldn’t have much effect on us non-owner-manager users.
The SL Blog, Forum, Knowledge Base, Answers, and other parts of the “Community” web site are up and running. See: Welcome to Our New Community Platform! While this isn’t a tutorial, it will give you some tips and probably save you some time.
The thinking is the new HOME page provides more information about what is happening in the community. The Blog, Forums, Events, and more are supposed to be easier to find. Well, the Home page has a synopsis of the latest SL Blog post, the most recent SL Forum post, and the Flickr picture of the day… I don’t consider this page particularly revealing as to what is happening in Second Life™. I am curious how helpful you think the page is?
Today I see the new SL Community Site is up. Not working, but there is a new landing page. No posts are showing. I can’t post anything. But, there is progress… I think…
According to SuperData Research people spent US$91,000,000,000 on games. Billion… This is an all-time record. But, they are hyping things a bit. In 2015 Statistica shows $91.5 billion spent and $99.6 billion in 2016. I suppose it depends on where one gets their numbers and categorizes them. Game revenue is notoriously flaky as companies like to hype their increasing sales and keep decreases secret.
Still that is about a 10% increase year-to-year. Eight billion isn’t chump change, unless your spending $10 trillion on credit, like some governments…
They break the revenue down into subcategories. Handheld games are dying. Smartphone games are the hot item. They show the largest growth from 2015 to 2016 and that is expected to continue, which seems reasonable as smartphones are selling well.
In 2005 smartphones sales were just $3.8 billion. Eleven years later in 2016 sales of smart phones was $55 billion, a 1,447% increase. So, as more people get smartphones there are more possible users of smartphone games. According to Statistica a little less than half of the 2016 game revenue was from smartphone gaming.
I used to do a review of the past year. See my Annual Review tag. But, that is a lot of work and time. So, not this year. This year the Lindens have done a year in review piece. See: Putting a Big Ol’ Bow on 2016 in Second Life! It is a good quick … Read more