"Your target audience doesn't exist"

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Rachel1206 said:

it is like the old academic saying: There are numbers, lies and statistics! [trustworthiness highest on left]

The phrase I'm familiar with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

Well, I would at least test the waters there if a vastly superior alternative would show up.

But what is the waters are actually strong acid, boiling oil, or lava? * borrow someone else's toe to test the waters *

[ChinRey]

3 minutes ago, Rachel1206 said:

EA Games: 500 million

Epic: 194 million
Steam: 120 million

Sony Playstation: 114 million
Micosoft XBox: 100 million
Nitendo: 100 million

Some numbers from single games where Minecraft has a staggering 738 million users and Microsoft Solitaire (still!) has 400 millions users. In top it is the free games like Battlegrounds, Candy Crush on social platforms topping. While the big games like Grand Theft Auto V, APEX Legends has 100-120 million users.

• 100 millon users = 1.3% of the world's entire population
• 114 million = 1.4%
• 120 million = 1.5%
• 194 million = 2.5%
• 400 million = 5.2%
• 500 million = 6.4%
• 738 million = 9.5%

For some reason I can't really explain I tend to take these numbers with a grain of salt.

[Love Zhaoying]

18 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Some of the older games can be super finicky on newer systems, yeah.

At the other end of the spectrum, REALLY old games you can install an emulator for (such as MAME) and run on "almost any" system (Windows PC, Linux / Raspberry Pi, etc.).

When they can finally do that for SL, we're immortal! Kinda.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

At the other end of the spectrum, REALLY old games you can install an emulator for (such as MAME) and run on "almost any" system (Windows PC, Linux / Raspberry Pi, etc.).

When they can finally do that for SL, we're immortal! Kinda.

Oh yeah, I used to use emulators a lot (for C64 and DOS). On the DOS side at least, GOG made that unnecessary. At least, in theory. Not sure if I'd ever go back to using DOSBox now. It's all such a hassle. 😄

[Ayashe Ninetails]

29 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

• 100 millon users = 1.3% of the world's entire population
• 114 million = 1.4%
• 120 million = 1.5%
• 194 million = 2.5%
• 400 million = 5.2%
• 500 million = 6.4%
• 738 million = 9.5%

For some reason I can't really explain I tend to take these numbers with a grain of salt.

That's fair. A lot of gaming population numbers are registered accounts - not actually active users - so they can be a bit inflated. This gives a little more insight into Epic itself, including daily active users, accounts, money spent, etc.:

https://www.engadget.com/epic-games-accounts-500-million-165908445.html

 

For Xbox, that number is for monthly active users (this article is from 2021, so I'm not sure how up-to-date the info is now):

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/26/22250795/xbox-game-pass-subscribers-growth-microsoft

Edited June 15, 2022 by Ayashe Ninetails
Punctuatioooon

[Love Zhaoying]

52 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

• 100 millon users = 1.3% of the world's entire population
• 114 million = 1.4%
• 120 million = 1.5%
• 194 million = 2.5%
• 400 million = 5.2%
• 500 million = 6.4%
• 738 million = 9.5%

For some reason I can't really explain I tend to take these numbers with a grain of salt.

..you can't spell "salt" without "alt" - maybe there are a lot of "alts" built into those numbers.  (Individual users being interpreted as multiple users. In case someone does not understand my intent.)

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

But once you hit the point where you start losing your long-time users, it becomes very difficult to recover unless you can quickly innovate into something that'll bring in new users.

Thing about SL though is the fact that many long term users that leave return after a while. Taking breaks is one of the reason why they are long term users.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Yes but I don't think either of you are representative for the majority of SL users. The fact that you are active on the forums is enough proof of that.

Never claimed to be. Posting on the forums has nothing to do with it. This isn't the only place I visit on a daily basis.

[Jaylinbridges]

Games?  I thought MS Solitaire was still on Windows 7, but it's missing.  Only games I can find in my Games Folder is Inworldz and Second Life, oh excuse me, they are not games.  But I still have MS Flight Simulator on my Apple II.  So I gather about 94% of the world's population are not gamers...

 

[Spooky Shadow]

Fun watching people pretend to be master economists and great business people giving their opinion without having any data or financial records at all to back up any of it.
Thrilling.

[Bree Giffen]

I think the main point of the article is that most people stick to a game and don't really play multiple games or switch to new games often. I don't believe SL falls into the article's scope because it's such a different alternative to games in general. SL is not a game. I can't really jump from Cyberpunk 2077 to Valheim.  But I can jump from either one of those to Second Life. One minute I'm shooting arrows at bees and the next I'm adjusting the optional bangs on my hair.

[cunomar]

Reminds me of the Landrover Defender which wasn't very good but was conceived at the right time to make it popular  , for 67 years it continued to be uncomfortable and leak out what was supposed to stay in and let in what was supposed to stay out .

I guess it stayed in production so long because it was rough and ready junk . Easy to fix was its main selling point which is ironic because what made it seem easy to fix (every weekend) is that you didn't have to remove the problem because it had already fallen off lol .

Diehard fans will be devastated at its demise while refusing to admit they drove most of their miles over the past few decades in the wife's car .

Its hilarious that LR decided to replace the defender with a rolling laptop that has nothing which might appeal to the faithful .

Had they just increased its dimensions to fit comfortable seats in it they would now be without competition in the 4x4 market .

People are the only interesting thing in SL so "growth" is not necessarily a question of finance and commerce .

About 2 years in i decided i'd met just about everyone and i really have no curiosity about their alts . Attempted to beat the boredom for a while by helping new players but it quickly became apparent they all knew far more than me about this game , there are some of course , typically they are about 6 months old and still haven't worked out why their shoes don't fit and nobody has bothered to tell them why .

Edited June 16, 2022 by cunomar

[ValKalAstra]

Two arguments from me on this. The first concerns the idea of locked audiences. I'm a gamer gal. Been around the gaming block for a while and if there's one constant in gaming then it's that it is constantly in flux.

Gaming behemoths come and go all the time. Heroes of Newerth was to be the king of the MOBA genre, taking the crown after DotA - indisputable, indomitable - today it's a footnote at best. Burned to the ground by League of Legends and later DotA 2.

A few years back, H1Z1 was king of the battle royals. Do people even really remember it? It got murdered by PUBG and in the west, that in turn took some heavy hits from Fortnite.

Sure audiences can be slow to move but innovations and blunders happen all the time. I'd also like to add two more aspects.

One is that every gamer I know, be they mobile gamers, console gamers pc gamers or just gamers - plays more than one game. I've got a permanent subscription in Final Fantasy 14 and just this week alone I've played six other games.

Another aspect is the growth of gaming. The market is still rapidly growing and even despite some occasionally ill fated attempts at diversity (Cleavage to Fruit Baskets), it still draws in an ever wider crowd because it's not just white teen dudebros anymore and because gaming has utterly penetrated the main market. World wide.

So, to summarise: Behemoths fall all the time, players do migrate for innovation or over heavy blunders. Also the market grows so even if audiences were to never move, there'd still be many more gamers the next day, and then the next.

 

My second argument then is a simple question. If we assume that SL's audience is locked into some juggernaut...  can anyone tell me what that juggernaut is? Which product out there is suffocating our niche? I can answer that for every single genre but not for the niche SL is in.

Imvu? It never struck me as super big.

VR Chat? A niche within a niche that requires prohibively expensive gear AND living space accommodations. Maybe this is the juggernaut? Maybe?

If anything I'd say that SL is among the juggernauts of it's niche. However I'd also claim that it is stagnating. Personal opinion, obviously. I think it's currently protected by an insane amount of content such as all those outfits and avatars and by obscurity. Given how rabid media can be for clickbait crucifications and seeing what happens in SL - maybe obscurity is a blessing.

[Rachel1206]

23 hours ago, ChinRey said:

• 100 millon users = 1.3% of the world's entire population
• 114 million = 1.4%
• 120 million = 1.5%
• 194 million = 2.5%
• 400 million = 5.2%
• 500 million = 6.4%
• 738 million = 9.5%

For some reason I can't really explain I tend to take these numbers with a grain of salt.

According to financesonline there are 2.69 billion video game players in the world. Even with let us say 30% doppelgängers it is a staggering number. Some other sources (DFC, statista) estimate the number to be 3.1 - 3.4 billion. Clearly this can only be estimates.

Edited June 16, 2022 by Rachel1206
Typo

[Silent Mistwalker]

19 minutes ago, Rachel1206 said:

According to financesonline there are 2.69 billion video game players in the world. Even with let us say 30% doppelgängers it is a staggering number. Some other sources (DFC, statista) estimate the number to be 3.1 - 3.4 billion. Clearly this can only be estimates.

That is a pretty hefty percentage of the nearly 8 billion current world population.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

[Luna Bliss]

4 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

VR Chat? A niche within a niche that requires prohibively expensive gear AND living space accommodations.

VRChat has desktop mode too.

Edited June 16, 2022 by Luna Bliss

[ValKalAstra]

44 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

VRChat has desktop mode too.

You're right. I often mentally skip over the fact for how limited it is compared to full body tracking and such. Kind of like going with a default library avatar in sl versus a decked out mesh one.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, ValKalAstra said:

I often mentally skip over the fact for how limited it is compared to full body tracking and such.

I wonder how many use Desktop Mode vs VR Mode.

[Love Zhaoying]

"Your target audience doesn't exist" sounds like a Sansar reference - each audience member is in a separate Instance!

[Solar Legion]

On the VRC aside bit ...

FBT is not a requirement outside of varied cliques. You can easily enough get away with a Quest 2 (still not exactly "cheap") and a Link Cable (or AirLink(Windows)/ALVR(Windows/Linux)) setup.

ETA: As for FBT itself ... One need not go for the rather expensive Tracker + Base Station options out there: SlimeVR is an option and I know at least one person (personally) that uses it. Is it as accurate as the Tracker + Bast Station types? It varies and it does eat up a few 2.4Ghz WiFi slots but it is a worthwhile tradeoff if you're on a budget (as said person is).

I don't intend to do FBT myself - nothing to do with the cost as it is possible to do the above (SlimeVR) on a limited budget (such as SSI).

Edited June 16, 2022 by Solar Legion

[NikolaosSakamoto]

On 6/15/2022 at 9:52 AM, ChinRey said:

• 100 millon users = 1.3% of the world's entire population
• 114 million = 1.4%
• 120 million = 1.5%
• 194 million = 2.5%
• 400 million = 5.2%
• 500 million = 6.4%
• 738 million = 9.5%

For some reason I can't really explain I tend to take these numbers with a grain of salt.

I wouldn't doubt for an instant that 10% of the population plays Minecraft.  I'd have guessed 20 percent.

[Mr Amore]

SL's niche is the maturity of its audience, you won't find another game where the average player is 30+

When Elder Scrolls Online was releasing, they claimed there would be 'mature' servers for older players so I pre-ordered the game, but Zenimax did not deliver. The fact this was even a topic suggests I'm not the only 'ageist' who wants to game online, but with adults. This will become a larger consideration going forwards as the gaming-population continues to age into their 50s and 60s. I'm not quite there yet, but have met many in SL who are from combat and roleplaying sims.

LL's issue is, their scope has stagnated. It's still focused on the market economy, where creators upload an item and consumers purchase them to dress their avatars and their homes. The upcoming 'metaverses' will focus on experiences, by providing creators with the tools and assets to create whole environments. Consumers will still socialize and embark upon shopping frenzies, then load an instanced environment and take their friends in for a gaming session.

A Roblox for adults with visuals like these, which you can freely create and distribute.

 

 

[Silent Mistwalker]

58 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:

 

 

 

Twenty years ago, many of us "oldbies" had dreams of SL looking/being exactly like this. It's only been in about the last 5 years that SL has started to close in. 

If LL can find a way to modernize what already exists, perhaps by developing something along the lines of UE5 with the ability to port current inventory (or done automagically by the Lab), then SL will be around for another 20 or so years. The problem is, well let me put it this way, how many years did it take to get UE where it is now? Longer than Linden Research has been in existence.

Quote

The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games.^[4] Having created editing tools for his shareware games ZZT (1991) and Jill of the Jungle (1992),^[5] Sweeney began writing the engine in 1995 for the production of a game that would later become a first-person shooter known as Unreal.^[6][7][8] After years in development, it debuted with the game's release in 1998,^[9]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#First_generation

[Coffee Pancake]

59 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Twenty years ago, many of us "oldbies" had dreams of SL looking/being exactly like this. It's only been in about the last 5 years that SL has started to close in. 

We have closed in terms of model fidelity, but technology that's driving it all is hopelessly out of date 

59 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

If LL can find a way to modernize what already exists, perhaps by developing something along the lines of UE5

UE5's rendering is what's known in the industry as jesustech, it's dramatically transformative in terms of the content that can be published and the workflows required to get there. LL can not hope to "roll their own".

 

Edited June 18, 2022 by Coffee Pancake