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.
Fireworks… when it’s all over
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.
Community Site Home Page 3/2017
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?
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.
Recently the Lab gave land owners more prims, well changed the prim limits on land. Today about 10 AM (12/7 – Pearl Harbor Day) the Lab announced Land owners can buy even more prims, push the limit from 20,000 to 30,000 prims… or more accurately change their Land Impact limit for some money.
