Jim Tarber
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I'm also asking again whether "economic participation" means "spent $1 or more" or what it means. It used to be reflected in those terms, i.e. whether or not a person had spent more than $1. Thus buying Lindens but not spending them, or getting a stipend on the premium account and not spending it would not count as "economic participation".
Nelson did say these were defined on the wiki page linked in his posting, and that page makes it pretty clear economic participants includes those getting a stipend, or anything else that will cause a non-zero transaction on your Transaction History.
That said, this just means the numbers are so clouded in unrelated counters being merged together that this stat is not useful to anyone.
And as you pointed out, with the other former stats that are now missing, I agree with Torben that it feels like a waste of time to read this one.
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Last time it was "stable". This time, "steady". Or in some cases, continuing to decline slightly.
As I said on my blog, that's a great euphemism for "flat", which in the online gaming and social networking worlds really means "dying". Yes, something needs to be done.
"The most significant quarter-to-quarter loss of user hours was from the heaviest usage segment (accounts logging over 300 hours per month)."
So the oldbies are starting to lose faith.
It doesn't have to be this way. You can promote SL through new incentives for the social networking folk, while keeping the existing long-time residents happy just by throwing them a bone once in a while and really listening. You can introduce catchy new viral mini-games within that include recurring revenues, and you don't have to narrow that to one brand of bunnies, but rather grow the whole industry, the whole category of mini-games within, become THE platform for a richer experience of social and building mini-games. You don't have to replace the existing user base, or abandon the dream of providing that rich content experience for all, a place where dreams can become reality.
You can let the third-party developers do all the work providing these mini-worlds within, while taking a cut on all sales, as well as an increasing number of regions for supporting this, growing the economy overall as well. It's a feedback loop and the more you provide, or indirectly provide through enabling others, the more new residents will enter, the more existing residents will be retained. And while letting the others do the work for this, you can fix the underlying base technology, and turn Second Life into the platform of choice. Making teleports reliable, fixing fundamental issues with rezzing and assets, retaking control of the script engine from MONO so that performance is not impacted, fixing the bottlenecks so that regions properly scale to hundreds of users.
You can stop pushing user activities outside of the in-world environments. Promote in-world shopping, building, and editing by removing the need to do so much outside SL. First and foremost, fix the in-world search so that the results are not skewed to completely useless by bots (traffic) and bribes (paid ads). Dedicate development teams to implement in-world editors for animations, mesh editing, and maybe even clothing design (painting). You did an amazing job on providing prim-based builders the masses can access. Replicate that success with the rest of the core functionality...
If you build it, they will come. Entering the social world requires good support from word-of-mouth; if you pepper them with ads and browser plugins, pushing content creators outside your world, and alienate the millions of existing users who have invested heavily in this world, it will fade away and die. Treat the residents with respect and given them reason to participate and to believe and they will grow as in previous years.
I am saddened by the deep feeling that, now that Second Life has become a huge success, the huge potential there is being needlessly thrown away. The difficult part -- attracting millions of residents -- has been huge success. Just cultivate that and water it and watch it grow. Stop trampling on the flowers.
The Second Life Economy in Q4 2010
in Featured News
A group blog by Secondlife in General
Posted
In September, I posted a blog Second Life Growth, Land and Economy - Meh, Yawn. In it, I lament the decline of some serious indicators of the Second Life economy and Linden Lab. One factor being the 35% drop in the estimated company value in only 6 months. That number is now 42.5% drop.
Here are a couple of exerpts from that article. I feel they are even more true now, perhaps just more obvious months later:
Linden Lab seems intent on forcing residents out of Second Life in order to increase revenues. This is a short-term view that will end badly for Linden Lab, Second Life, and its residents:
It's sad that the same issues are still plaging us 10 months later, and in fact getting worse:
Great news: user hours are "stable" from the previous quarter.