is SL going to die ?

[Maitimo]

4 hours ago, raa21 said:

5,6.7,9 .. are closed i guess

rest social islands are dead like not many people

5 months back 1,2,5,6 were very popular. 

Social 1 for roleplay/vampires
Social 2 for all cool people
same with the 5/6

Since you left, the "newbie" process has changed and instead of automatically getting sent to one of the Social Islands after initial orientation, residents now choose from a "hub", for example music, adult content, skill-gaming, roleplay etc. And they get sent to a random venue in that category.  I imagine without having a stream of newbies coming through all the time, the Social Islands are no longer interesting to older residents, and they've mostly moved on elsewhere.

Overall concurrency in SL has been more or less stable for the past few years. So no, SL is not dying but the Social Islands will probably end up as deserted as the old Infohubs.

[JudiLynn India]

4 hours ago, raa21 said:

well i didn't exactly said it is dead..i am asking is it going to die?? i don't want this game (more than a game) to die. this is the most intelligent game ever made (my personal opinion)  

Oh, the point I forgot to make was that Sansar is not a replacement for SL. It's an entirely different kind of site and experience.  Most SLers don't seem to be interested in it. I have an account there and love it but it doesn't replace SL. It doesn't work like SL.  You go there to "experience" what talented 3D creators have put together. It's awesome.  
But no, it has nothing to do with SL.

[Pussycat Catnap]

5 hours ago, raa21 said:

Many socials islands are closed or others are dead,
Many people got banned from social islands My old friends are gone because of this decision

I used to run a store and was making around 20k lindens per months and now not many people buying.
Even my landord sold all of his land.

Will SL die?

Yes

Eventually...

Sometime between now and later on.

 

People... get banned because they do bad things. Many such people continue bad conduct because they feel some sense of entitlement to it, and blame others or refuse to accept the nature of their conduct as being bad...

Stores close. They close because they didn't meet a need sufficiently or no longer do so. Interests and fads change.

Land barons sell off land. It's what they do. Some of them cannot make a profit so they get out of the business.

 

New stuff arrives. New land barons arrive. New venues arrive.

Stuff

Changes

 

And Sansar is soooo yesterday...

It's already flopped.

 

Edited October 13, 2019 by Pussycat Catnap

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

If SL dies, somebody will just Necro it back again, and you'll get the usual screamers about necro-gaming versus it's not a game versus it's dead Dave versus no it isn't it's just tired out after a long squawk.

 

[SamanthaPrater]

I am wondering that myself. because LL usually reacts to things like this right quick lol.

[Selene Gregoire]

6 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

If SL dies, somebody will just Necro it back again, and you'll get the usual screamers about necro-gaming versus it's not a game versus it's dead Dave versus no it isn't it's just tired out after a long squawk.

 

You left out, "It's dead, Jim."

[Gabriele Graves]

Death Is Nothing At All

by Henry Scott-Holland

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

10 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I think they gave up on their introduction system completely and are directing newcomers to private welcome centers these days. That means less need for the social islands.

As for SL as a whole, it's stagnant and has been so for years. Nothing significant is going to change there, neither for good nor bad, it'll just slowly fade as users pass away from old age.

this is not untrue.. as I have aged in SL I have seen a lot of my peeps pass on to that afterlife server in the sky.

Edited October 14, 2019 by Tarina Sewell

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

3 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:

You left out, "It's dead, Jim."

I wrote that first but then decided to use Holly from Red Dwarf instead

[Aemeth Lysette]

SL in its official form might have about 10 more years. I say 10 because of the advent of VR; the first real consumer-level headset has been released (Quest) and it's only going to get cheaper from there. Once the number of headset owners grow, the Lab will probably have hit upon a second game that will be popular enough to move its users over to.

Even with that, SL will carry on with its diehard group. I remember being surprised in finding a lot of people still play MUDs and MUSHes... but a dedicated subreddit is quite active and have a lot of users playing various games over telnet still. Quite a few of those users are under 30! That goes to show you anything can happen, and sometimes nostalgia for earlier games bring in curious crowds who stay.

The key is going to be marketing and showing how Second Life stands apart from burgeoning social VR games. SL is good for simulation, fashion, and building. Big focus on simulation (think Sims/GTA). We really just need fashion and a bevvy of minigames here, and we'd be set with an audience for quite a while.

EDIT: And if you don't believe me about periodical interest in retro gaming and how nostalgia can drive sales with earlier tech, then look up Hypnospace Outlaw.

Edited October 14, 2019 by Aemeth Lysette

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

29 minutes ago, Aemeth Lysette said:

 We really just need fashion and a bevvy of minigames here, and we'd be set with an audience for quite a while.

If it just became fashion and minigames, I'd be gone and so would at least a couple of my friends. Fashion and minigames might draw in new residents, but how many would be transient rather than lasting a decade and more?

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Hi, SL is not dying and that's all anybody ever has to really read and go "okay" because if it was dying it would of been dead several times over by now.    we've had some serious things in the 12 years I've been here.   it dips, but always recovers and it's really been stable and nice for ages,   those social islands, ugh, I am not visiting them again,  The types that people ban easily from their sims and parcels tend to gather there. 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

17 hours ago, raa21 said:

Share your thoughts

My thoughts? SL is what you make of it and to me, it's not dying at all and the forum is going to die instead with this constant barrage of pessimistic threads like these.

[Conifer Dada]

I don't think SL is in any immediate danger.  I've been going to this year's Burn2 and I'm amazed by the creativity expressed in some of the builds.  Virtual clubs and festivals are one of the things SL does best.  

One thing I do find though is that it's more difficult to find new places to go when your regular haunts close down, which happens all to frequently.  

A useful idea for making clubs less laggy would be for LL to give landowners the ability to limit the complexity of avatars in the same way as individuals can with their viewer.  Then an over complex visitor would find themselves rendered as a jelly doll on arrival and perhaps get a polite message suggesting they reduce their complexity.

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by Conifer Dada

[Qie Niangao]

The SL Death Watch is a game longer than I have patience for, but the Sansar Death Watch -- I'm still playing that one. Sansar from birth suffered from "failure to thrive," has been comatose for a long time now, and... well, let's not get too graphic with that analogy. Somebody will pull that plug eventually, if not this CEO then the next one.

I do worry about the steady aging of the SL population, both in terms of account age (there sure are a lot of us old timey two-namers still haunting the grid) and RL maturity. SL needs more new blood. When it finally dies it won't be slaughtered by obsolescence so much as starved by the software's n00b-hostility.

[IntrovertBV]

Everything is meant to be changed every now and then...

Maybe some things have changed since I came to SL, And so since the beginning. That's how the things go...

Maybe the change for the best, who knows!!!

There are other open world simulators, and have a lot of people there, maybe more than SL residents right now,,,

But it depends on what appeals to one's satisfaction...

Last but not least, Everything has pros and cons.. And nothing is perfect at all...

[Alwin Alcott]

45 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Sansar from birth suffered from "failure to thrive," has been comatose for a long time now, and... well, let's not get too graphic with that analogy. Somebody will pull that plug eventually, if not this CEO then the next one.

thats not the message i read at the Sansar thread .. 7000 unique visitors at one experience and 1000 in one day and earnings of 10K .. and thats just one creator there.

Must say... i been in Sansar past week for 5 minutes, since over a year... it will take about the same time to have a look again, nothing there attrackts me.

[Lindal Kidd]

@raa21,

SL is not dying.  You have simply run into some of the changes LL is making to the New User Experience.

For several years now, new users arrive at Learning Island when they first log in to SL.  After exploring this island, they take a teleport portal to Social Island, a second region with some tutorials to explore.  From there, they move on into the main SL world.  There are actually several copies of Learning Island and Social Island, to handle the influx of new residents.  When one region gets too crowded, incoming avatars are shunted to a less crowded one. 

Over time, the way these regions are accessed has varied.  Learning Island has always been limited to new avatars only.  Once you leave, you are an "experienced resident", and cannot return.  Mostly, access to Social Island has been open to all residents, but from time to time, access has been limited to either new residents only, like Learning Island, or to new residents plus some qualified group of helpers, such as the old SL Mentors.

When access to SI has been open, the regions have tended to attract crowds of people.  Some just use the regions as a hangout.  Many others use their access to harrass the new residents.

Recently, LL restricted SI access.  With only newcomers on the regions, they were much less crowded, and LL was able to reduce the number of Social Islands.  Then, they re-opened some of the regions to all residents, but left others set to newcomers only, or to newcomers and members of authorized helper groups.

In addition to those changes, it's now possible for new residents to take other paths into SL.  Linden Lab has allowed groups participating in the Community Gateway program to develop their own versions of Learning Island and Social Island.  I'm aware that the Firestorm group has done so, and London City.  There may be others.

[AyelaNewLife]

21 hours ago, raa21 said:

well i didn't exactly said it is dead..i am asking is it going to die??

Yes. Second Life has been on a downward slope for over a decade now. But that slope has been incredibly gradual, once the initial cycle of boom and bust was over. SL is fundamentally no different to any MMO, and follows the same patterns of activity; a major spike some time after launch, followed by a rapid falloff as the first batch of users start to drift away, which settles into a slow decline. In some cases, including SL, that decline can take place over years and years.

Here's a lazy MS Paint graph to demonstrate this:

So yeah, SL is dying. SL will also be around for years to come. I don't know how many years, it could just be 3-4, or it could easily be going strong after another full decade. Given that "the end" is so far off, there's not much point panicking - just enjoy SL while it's still here 

[ThorinII]

Actually, I think that SL will be at least so long around that I'll be able to celebrate my 55th, 60th, and 65th birthdays inworld (I'm 51 now 😒)

 

 

However, I'm afraid that the Real World™ as we know it won't exist that long

Edited October 14, 2019 by ThorinII

[Aemeth Lysette]

7 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

If it just became fashion and minigames, I'd be gone and so would at least a couple of my friends. Fashion and minigames might draw in new residents, but how many would be transient rather than lasting a decade and more?

We have fashion and minigames now. I think more minigames to keep new users busy while they settle in to their individual pursuits would be good. More stuff like Madpea but for Premium members, things like that.. wouldn't be so bad.

Nowhere did I say "just" fashion and minigames.

Edited October 14, 2019 by Aemeth Lysette

[Bree Giffen]

Second Life is all about the long tail. Normally when games in the past are released they die after a few years as part of the normal life cycle. SL is, quit unplanned, a long tailed online world that can still generate money with a smaller population. 

[SamanthaPrater]

THEY need to focus on THIS World more then Sansar. instead.they need to implant new graphics on SL and stop being memory hogs x.x ; I love SL but I would rather have SL as it is instead of Sansar trying to be something like every other world. they need to improve this. not let it falter.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

3 hours ago, AyelaNewLife said:

Yes. Second Life has been on a downward slope for over a decade now.

This is what happens when you ban griefers, a certain percentage of the popluation ceases to be

[Beth Macbain]

Second Life is not dying. Neither is its user base (and I'm talking about literal death).

In this thread I've read that the number of residents is both stagnant, and decreasing because us old folks are dying off.

Of course some users are dying. Attrition is real in any sort of user base. Of all the residents that I've known that have passed on, though, not a single one of them was from old age. You've still got the Boomers and us Gen Xers to get through before you start seeing people aging out of the game of life and affecting SL. I really don't think we've ever had enough residents from the Greatest Generation to figure into the numbers in any meaningful way. 

I will admit that I think LL marketing has been desperately behind and, well, just wrong in many cases on how SL is marketed. The acquisition and retention rates probably haven't quite kept up with the rate of attrition, but it clearly hasn't slowed down enough to make a huge difference. 

I think a lot is going to change over the next few years. We have a champion in charge now. Not to put too much pressure on @Patch Linden, but he understands what it's like to be a resident of SL, and the amazing possibilities of the platform, and he truly believes in it and loves it. He's going to fight for SL, and I think he's going to (hopefully) start thinking of ways to work with marketing to make some big changes. 

I genuinely feel confident that SL is going to be around for many, many years and that we are going to see the user base start to make some significant growth again.