Is SL's Player Base Declining?

[Syo Emerald]

9 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

(and pretty accurate, although Second Life was able to hang on considerably longer than "a year or two."

I feel like its a common theme among all articles and individual people, who write about SL being dead or dying, that they all are very certain that THE END IS NEAR! And then SL lives on for years to come.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Syo Emerald said:

I feel like its a common theme among all articles and individual people, who write about SL being dead or dying, that they all are very certain that THE END IS NEAR! And then SL lives on for years to come.

 

[Selene Gregoire]

6 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Depending on who you ask, Second Life has been "declining" since even before I joined - near the end of 2006.

It's been "declining" longer than that according to some oldbies. Some say it was 2004, the year I joined. Some say it was 2003, the year the grid opened to the public. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[AngeliqueMinogue]

I have stood around social island 8 for the past year and a half learning more about scripting and creating things in blender. No point to explore the world (My first alt in 15 years) when I was doing something productive with my time.

I don't own land anymore.. so why move? I use to help new people that was joining the game till I was targeted and harassed daily with no help from the ones I shall not mention.

With that being said, new people are joining the game all the time. I do not see a decline in population.

Edited January 18, 2019 by AngeliqueMinogue

[Parhelion Palou]

7 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Personally, I like the line where he says that the Viewer 1 interface (the "intuitive" one many people on the forums say should never have been changed) was "a mess."

Viewer 1 was a mess. The problem is that the viewers that came after were worse.

[taintedxjennifer]

It is.

Its the simple strategy of divide and conquer.

What keeps people in SL is their emotional attachment to others. Memories, experiences, engagement, and other things like that. With SL's main attraction being the sell of land and having your own personal space, the number of connections made and the chances of doing so dwindle. As a result, the attractive force to draw in new individuals or keep the ones they have disappears. 

I'm sure SecondLife has realized this and is just coasting on its former success to milk from the system what it can. Any business only wants to make money in the end, a board of directors will only ever make business savvy decisions. If they want to experience humanity, they can do so when they go home with their families. Every corporate business is like this. That said though, its still a nice place even its decline.

[AngeliqueMinogue]

Not quite sure how to explain this, but I've got another point that maybe overlooked by others.

Example A: There are 50 avatars in a sim. The nightclub is built to scale. It's hard to get into the door without bumping into someone. The dance floor is packed! Even the bar got people sitting at it! It seems like the place to be. It's crowded.

Example B: There are 50 avatars in a sim. The nightclub is not built to scale. Nobody is standing around the door, you get in easy. The dance floor seems empty. Nobody is sitting at the bar. Not the popular place. It's not crowded.

Now what I ask of you.. With all the sims and new land.. Perhaps the world is over-scaled? Make sense?

Edited January 18, 2019 by AngeliqueMinogue

[iamyourneighbour]

On 1/18/2019 at 10:43 PM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

And again, it is the prophecy!

https://gawker.com/5158190/the-end-of-second-life

The irony of Gawker actually ended before SL. 
 

Basically, they crossed path of many people before, including the big gay Peter Thiel by outing him as gay while he is in Saudi Arabia. So when Hulk Hogan got involved with the lawsuit with Gawker, Peter stepped in to fund the lawsuit and spelled the end for Gawker after the court ruled in favor of Hulk Hogan.

[AngeliqueMinogue]

Whatcha Gonna Do? When Second Life Runs Wild On You? 😂

 

[sirhc DeSantis]

Second Life has been pronounced dead since December the 30th 2006. So I have heard. To paraphrase the boss (ask your Mum, kids) I'm still here - they are all gone.

[Fionalein]

4 minutes ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

To paraphrase the boss (ask your Mum, kids) I'm still here - they are all gone.

In what song did he sing that? Mum was no help - she only knows songs by Gerhard Höllerich and Hendrik Simons...

[clivesteel]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

If Vaporwave can die, so can Second Life.

[Selene Gregoire]

41 minutes ago, clivesteel said:

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

If Vaporwave can die, so can Second Life.

Apples and oranges.

[Rolig Loon]

12 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Apples and oranges.

"alive, alive, oh!"

[Selene Gregoire]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

"alive, alive, oh!"

"Yes, we have no bananas."

 

[Eileen Ceawlin]

Well, I agree that it might be odd to complain about SL dying. It's not a process a single person could evaluate properly as there are too many parameters having an impact on the number of active users. 

What I experience on my own is that more and more sims I visit are deserted... I further experience that the traffic on the sims I frequently visit is decreasing. I further experience that sims without any business purpose are decreasing (sims only having beautiful gardens, landscape architecture, themes without any commercial purpose). This makes it for me less attractive to visit SL.

Imo the insane land prices are one reason for interested persons or groups to refrain from living out one's fantasy by building and creating one'S own world on a sim. Linden should offer sims for non-commercial use for a much lower land fee than currently. Maybe land fees should depend on business turnover of that sim.

I'm of course aware that land prices are not the only reason for an obvious decrease of active users. SL is in competition with lots of MMORPGs today. 

Finally, I hope the focus of SL will shift away (at least a bit) from that adult-oriented stuff back to playing and exploring and simply meeting people from all around the world. That's what's imo the most compelling feature of SL.

 

Therefore, good luck Lindens!

[Lindal Kidd]

On 1/18/2019 at 3:48 AM, Tarina Sewell said:

one only has to look at all the yellow on mainland to know it is. 

No.  Or at least, not now, even if it was true back in January when Tarina wrote this.  Back in about 2008-10, LL made several business decisions which resulted in a LOT of vacant Mainland.  That oversupply lasted a long time, but recently I have found that it's getting harder and harder to find desirable Mainland parcels for sale, and the asking prices are going up.  In addition, LL has stopped the program they had for a while, of simply setting any Abandoned mainland for sale to anyone at $L1 per m2.  That tells me that the supply of Abandoned land has decreased to the point that LL feels they can handle it through the Auctions.

[Janet Voxel]

2 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

In addition, LL has stopped the program they had for a while, of simply setting any Abandoned mainland for sale to anyone at $L1 per m2.  That tells me that the supply of Abandoned land has decreased to the point that LL feels they can handle it through the Auctions.

This isn’t exactly true. I can confirm you can still open a ticket for a parceled out piece of land on the mainland and they will sell it to you for $L1 per sq m.

I found out by doing it, reading on here they don’t and forgetting about it, then getting a message from a Linden saying “Hey, you still want this land we parceled for you a couple weeks ago?”

This was a couple of months ago.

Edited May 31, 2019 by janetosilio

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Eileen Ceawlin said:

Imo the insane land prices are one reason for interested persons or groups to refrain from living out one's fantasy by building and creating one'S own world on a sim. Linden should offer sims for non-commercial use for a much lower land fee than currently. Maybe land fees should depend on business turnover of that sim.

That's pretty much what Linden Lab is doing with these changes - making land ownership less expensive while increasing the amount taken out of cash-outs.

Hence, the screaming.

[Pandora Barzane]

we're all ghosts, ghosts in a machine.

 

[Morena Tully]

Population is roughly equal to 2007-2010 numbers. I have looked at "users currently online" on my login ever since I started playing SL, and it hasn't changed. What has changed, is more and more private sims, spreading the population out many times over. So when people wish prices were lower, so more people could make still more sims, I'm torn. I too own (technically rent) a sim, and would love to not have to pay so much, but I also like seeing groups of people around. There's no winning for everyone, no matter what way it'd go.

 

I know this thread is old, but it got bumped up, so responding, since it's a frequent subject.

[Coffee Pancake]

Quote

And so it came to pass, Linden Lab blindly unhooked the engine that had driven the meta-verse, Second Life, for a decade; The number of groups given to basic accounts. It's only with hindsight that the true impact of this change could be appreciated. The masses chased from their Linden homes and the inevitable Ai dominated land war in Asia that followed.

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by CoffeeDujour

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, janetosilio said:

This isn’t exactly true. I can confirm you can still open a ticket for a parceled out piece of land on the mainland and they will sell it to you for $L1 per sq m.

I found out by doing it, reading on here they don’t and forgetting about it, then getting a message from a Linden saying “Hey, you still want this land we parceled for you a couple weeks ago?”

This was a couple of months ago.

True, they will (sometimes) sell you Abandoned land directly, but you have to ask them to do so, as you did.  The program that stopped (or at least, that I THINK has stopped) is where they simply automatically set Abandoned land for sale to anyone for $L1 per m2.  The reason I believe it's stopped is that I can no longer find any significant number of parcels by doing a Search/Land and Rentals/For Sale/Mainland, and sticking "Abandoned" on as a search term.

[MoiraKathleen]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

True, they will (sometimes) sell you Abandoned land directly, but you have to ask them to do so, as you did.  The program that stopped (or at least, that I THINK has stopped) is where they simply automatically set Abandoned land for sale to anyone for $L1 per m2.  The reason I believe it's stopped is that I can no longer find any significant number of parcels by doing a Search/Land and Rentals/For Sale/Mainland, and sticking "Abandoned" on as a search term.

I have never seen abandoned land automatically set for sale in my 5 years, so that program must have stopped. 

During the time last Fall when the Auction system was out of order (and shortly after the tier allowance was raised to 1024 sqm) LL really relaxed the factors (or removed them altogether) for people submitting a ticket to buy abandoned land.  Prior to that it was 50-50 as to whether you'd get the parcel set to sale to you or whether it'd be put up for auction instead. 

I haven't tried to buy abandoned land since the auctions became operational again, so I don't know if the factors are still relaxed or back in force.  (If I remember correctly, the factors had to do with whether you owned other land in the same region, whether or not the abandoned land bordered your existing parcel, whether the abandoned land had protected sides and so forth...)

Edited May 31, 2019 by moirakathleen

[Lindal Kidd]

Yep.  One of my friends recently managed to acquire some Abandoned land that bordered his parcel, and even a bit of Maintenance land that was along the waterfront of his parcel.  It seems that LL is applying those factors, but that they are being accommodating if possible.

Which makes sense.  After all, only Mainland owned by Residents is making them money!