Do you think Second Life will ever be close to being as popular as it was in ‘07?

[Maitimo]

7 hours ago, Shansi Kenin said:

Paid monthly PS is a rip off!😖  

That's why I use Paintshop Pro. 😁

[Coffee Pancake]

16 hours ago, JPG0809 said:

So Linden Lab brought up plans to bring SL to the cloud which can potentially increase the quality in which SL runs.

I'm afraid you've grasped the wrong end of the stick here.

Infrastructure changes (like the cloud move) will (if all goes well) be indistinguishable from SL running normally on a good day (as it does most days). It's unlikely it will improve latency, and certainly wont affect how avatar movement feels.

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I think this is exciting because one of the biggest draw backs for people to dip their toes into this grid is that their system, no matter how good, have issues running the client without a huge amount of lag.

Running servers 'in the cloud' is a fancy way of saying running the servers 'in a different datacenter'.

Lag caused by poor server responsiveness is quite far down the list of probably causes of lag, most of which are on your computer.

SL in the cloud will not rez faster than it already does (all of the assets have been in the cloud for along time now anyway), you will not move smoother, cross region borders faster, or have more responsive scripts.

The cloud will do absolutely nothing with regard to how SL looks, or how high your framerate is.

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So, say it did improve performance substantially (Though I’m not holding my breath) and people got into the idea of SL again, do you think it has the potential to spark a second wave of popularity like it did in the past? Reason I say this is because though there are other virtual worlds, none of them compare to SL

Most of the features that make SL unique are also responsible for it's performance woes. They just don't make them like SL on purpose.

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other than maybe Sansar even though it’s in it’s baby stages.

Sansar has very recently crashed out, everyone got fired and it's now for sale.

 

 

A cloud move will not make the slightest difference to SL's popularity. It may result in reduced costs for LL which may result in reduced costs for us .. but seeing how prices have been going up lately, I'm not hopeful.

Price of land (etc) was never a driving factor in SL's growth in any case, OpenSim has presented an almost identical end user experience to SL with significantly lower land fees for years, and compared to SL's concurrency, no one uses it.

SL moving to the cloud has been massively oversold following the end of Sansar, been quietly going on for the last couple of years, and in almost all use cases won't result in a different end user experience. It might run a few percentage points better, but that's not something you or anyone else will objectively notice.

 

 

[Ansiri]

I remember i first time heard of SL 2007 and wanted to come here, but then stayed on mmo's. Have no idea how popular it was then, but when i started here on 2012 i feel this was more popular then today. Just a feeling?

[Marigold Devin]

11 hours ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

Of those 40 million, 39,998,393 are alts of active accounts 😛

Yes, and 28 of them are mine  

[Mollymews]

4 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

A lot of those were never real accounts.

World of Warcraft often uses a similar stat. Some 973 billion accounts made... And McDonalds used to have that 'so many gazillion served' sign...

We have posters right here, some even getting quoted - who make the point. A lot of these old accounts are around on different names now.

Half of them are my alts anyway...

on this part

is true that quite a few people have monetarised/resurrected alt accounts. A number of them because of Belli.  Which from a Linden revenue pov is a good thing. Making the accounts Premium and putting a bit more money in than may otherwise have been the case

i am the same, not so much for Belli, but I made a alt account to be the other name in my parcel group initially.  I have ended up putting in about $US160 so far just to get some outfits and stuff for my alt account over the last about 3 months. Extra money I wouldn't have spent on my main, if that had been all I had. This amount doesn't compensate for the historical downturn in tier revenue from the heydays, but I do think it does reflect a reality of today. And can be a basis on which to go forward,  planning wise. Along with gathering more prepays like Premium, etc

is true also that of the previous 40 million or so (probably more) dormant accounts most have been long forgotten. This said, a target of 1-2/40ths might be doable. 2.5 to 5%.  1 or maybe 2 million returnees, logging in a regular basis (or even semi-regular) would be pretty substantial in the Linden/SL sense.  Even half a million returnee accounts would have everybody, Linden and residents breathing a bit easier 

i am in this target group.  We are trickling back in under our motivations at this time. The thing I think is how to maybe turn it from a trickle into a little rivulet

a thing I would seriously consider if I was addressing this question. I would give a discount on historical aggregated premium and tier payments.  A basis formula might be the total amount of tier paid divided by the total months of payments.  The discount would not be on the calendar age of the account, it would be the time that the account was paying tier or premium

like if I had 2 years worth of Premium back in the day.  Then if I was to re-Premium then I get the 2 year discount.  Similarly if over the 2 years I paid say an average of 4096m tier then I get a discount on this amount of tier.  After a further year of paying then the 3 year discount.  17 years of paying tiers gets the 17 year discount and so.  If the discount was say 1% then a 17% discount for an account which has paid 17 years worth of tiers

if this kind of program was in place then I think the clamor "the tiers are too high" can be seen from a slightly different pov. In addition to across the board tier reductions,, the tier reduction programme could also have some kinda loyalty (discount) component. People like getting loyalty rewards no matter how small they might be

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

9 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

That sounds cool...the performance improvement with the cloud thing.  

Lots of people I know use their cell phone exclusively and have no more desk top nor laptop and don't seem to want a desk top pc nor laptop for anything because they are hooked on pretty much FB and texting.  FB is not anywhere as interesting as SL.  The only reason I visit FB is to catch up with family.   

I do not enjoy the internet at all on a cell phone.  Yet, I have family and friends that will not give up their cell phone life period.  I think they view a desktop/laptop as a dinosaur and I'm not quite sure why.  

I don't even do FB and one of 11 people on the planet without a smart phone.  Only an old school flip phone that gets used now and then.

As for the dinosaur desktop/lappy sometimes a relative ask why I need that when they said the phone was more powerful.

One of the fellas in my computer circle has a nephew who only owns a smart phone, and one time he went to visit and his nephew was watching a moving on the phone which was leaning against a beer can.  He was asked about getting a TV and his nephew said the TV you can't take anywhere.

[Ardy Lay]

12 hours ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

Of those 40 million, 39,998,393 are alts of active accounts 😛

 

1 hour ago, Marigold Devin said:

Yes, and 28 of them are mine  

How many are rusting bots?

[Marigold Devin]

3 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

 

How many are rusting bots?

One may be a cardboard box. No rusting bots. Not. A. One. 

[Ardy Lay]

4 minutes ago, Marigold Devin said:

One may be a cardboard box. No rusting bots. Not. A. One. 

Heh, ..  Oh!  I meant of that about 40 million...   how many are bots.  How many are disused bots?  Any guesses?  Estimates?  Evidence, even?  I see unresponsive crowds making a comeback now.  Some say they never really left, they just went under water.

[Marigold Devin]

40 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Heh, ..  Oh!  I meant of that about 40 million...   how many are bots.  How many are disused bots?  Any guesses?  Estimates?  Evidence, even?  I see unresponsive crowds making a comeback now.  Some say they never really left, they just went under water.

Sorry, I misunderstood (I should have been in bed two hours ago, but keep saying to myself, as I flit from website to website, to emails to here again, "five more minutes"!).

Yes, I wonder how many are disused bots too.  Oddly enough - and I feel a little bit embarrassed admitting to this - round about 2008, I used to keep folders full of names of all the bots I'd found on various sims/regions. These folders, I only looked through this week, and shredded all the pages, as it seemed irrelevant to keep them for all of this time. There were hundreds - thousands - of the blighters.  

I still find clusters of them, in sky boxes above stores on the mainland. They probably are on the private regions too, but I tend to stick to the mainland, and I don't log in as much or for as long as I used to.

The ones I find underwater are often either the advertising bots, or Tiny Empires players (that still seems quite popular).

No official figures for the bots though.  

Edited February 29, 2020 by Marigold Devin
missed a bit

[lucagrabacr]

It can be, it's partly a matter of marketing to the right very-high-retention audience, the rest is technical development. I'm not saying LL haven't been doing a good job in marketing SL, in fact they've done a great job at it, as proven by the profitability of SL. However, to reverse the slight downward trend, LL needs to do a terrific job at marketing, not just in term of doing the right thing by the book using available data and statistical analysis which they've been doing, but a revolutionary, right-on-the-spot kind of marketing that truly resonates with the aforementioned audience(s). They need to go far and beyond and take risks in order to accomplish it

Edited February 29, 2020 by lucagrabacr
typos, better wording, more accurate wording

[animats]

On 2/28/2020 at 7:18 AM, Jackson Redstar said:

IMO SL will never be 'fast' or free of lag. Regardless of the coding, it still requires to 'live process' all the graphics, the lighting, shadows, mesh, avatars, textures etc...

SL is much slower than it should be. Why is well known. All the major game engines have a better asset creation pipeline than SL. The level of detail system in SL is not very good. The order of texture loading is poor. There's not enough impostoring. The viewer and Akamai caches do not play well together. The viewer is mostly single-threaded. SL makes too many draw calls and is stlll on OpenGL rather than Vulkan, so it overloads one CPU while underloading the others and the GPU. SL's problem is technical debt.

On 2/28/2020 at 7:07 AM, FairreLilette said:

If Photoshop came out with a super easy way to make a 3D object...that could spark some interest...but it would need to be affordable too.  When the first creative suite from Photoshop came out it was 900 hundred dollars.  No way! 

Check out "Dreams" for the PS4. They've made a major breakthrough in 3D content creation. They use a game controller only, and both joysticks and the controller movement are used. It took them years to figure out how to do this, and it's way ahead of anything seen before. It makes 3D creation accessable to the masses. Everybody else making 3D creation tools now has to rethink how they do it.

There are many Dreams creation videos online.; use Google.

Great things are coming in virtual worlds. Maybe not from Linden Lab, but coming.

[Tolya Ugajin]

On 2/28/2020 at 12:32 PM, Pussycat Catnap said:

World of Warcraft often uses a similar stat. Some 973 billion accounts made... And McDonalds used to have that 'so many gazillion served' sign...

For clarity sake, the McDonald's number was not the number of customers, but number of burgers sold.  It's over 300,000,000,000 today

[Tolya Ugajin]

5 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

It can be, it's partly a matter of marketing to the right very-high-retention audience, the rest is technical development. I'm not saying LL haven't been doing a good job in marketing SL, in fact they've done a great job at it, as proven by the profitability of SL. However, to reverse the slight downward trend, LL needs to do a terrific job at marketing, not just in term of doing the right thing by the book using available data and statistical analysis which they've been doing, but a revolutionary, right-on-the-spot kind of marketing that truly resonates with the aforementioned audience(s). They need to go far and beyond and take risks in order to accomplish it

Profitable companies with known opportunities to improve their product generally do not announce layoffs.  Not sure where you are getting your financial data from, as LL is privately held.

 

[Parhelion Palou]

5 minutes ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

Profitable companies with known opportunities to improve their product generally do not announce layoffs.  

 

When a company's direction changes it's often necessary to do layoffs. In LL's case, they had Sansar developers who knew nothing of SL. They apparently moved some of the former SL developers back from Sansar (or rehired them from elsewhere), in which case some of the existing staff would be 'redundant' (a lovely word for yer outta here). Layoffs and hiring can happen concurrently when a company's direction changes. It's the layoffs that get the press.

[Tolya Ugajin]

1 hour ago, Parhelion Palou said:

When a company's direction changes it's often necessary to do layoffs. In LL's case, they had Sansar developers who knew nothing of SL. They apparently moved some of the former SL developers back from Sansar (or rehired them from elsewhere), in which case some of the existing staff would be 'redundant' (a lovely word for yer outta here). Layoffs and hiring can happen concurrently when a company's direction changes. It's the layoffs that get the press.

While what you say could indeed be true, it is the exception, not the norm, and laying off 10% or so of their staff makes it highly unlikely this is a mere elimination of a few people who no longer have needed skills.  The underlying point (the part you did not quote) remains - LL is a privately held company, so it does not publicly release audited financial reports that would inform the person I was replying to as to SL's purported profitability - which they hold up as evidence of the supposed "great job" SL doing in marketing.

So, since we're playing guessing games, the most recent guess (and again, it's a guess, since LL releases no financial reports) I can find is that LL revenue is currently in the $50MM range, with roughly 300 employees, mostly based in the SF area.  Given it's a tech company and it's location, base salaries likely average in the $100K range (this is conservative, as it would include senior managers, and they likely don't have a lot of secretaries and janitors or other low skill/low paid staff).  Given the location (CA has one of the highest burden rates on labor in the US), conservatively estimate another $30K per employee, average, for benefits, FICA, FUTA/SUTA, WC, and all the other lovely costs of employing people.  That puts their labor costs at around $39MM, or 78% of revenue.  Seems rather high - but some fo their other locations (Boston, for instance) aren't much cheaper for labor costs.  And, we haven't covered rents, R&D costs, debt servicing costs, any payments required to their investors, let alone infrastructure costs, utilities (all those servers soak up a lot of bandwidth electricity)....

There seems very little chance LL is actually turning a significant, if any, profit.  If it were, the investors would almost certainly have taken it public by now.  If I were a betting man, the layoffs are intended to minimize the bleeding to make LL an appealing acquisition target.