Data shows growing divide between casual and heavy SL users
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Over 62,000 avatars were online in Second Life at the same time last weekend, another new record in a recent series of boosts to the concurrent population of Linden Lab’s virtual world.
But the rise in concurrency — the technical term for simultaneous online users — hasn’t left Second Life’s statisticians cheering. Statistics available from Linden Lab show total hours spent in Second Life are flat, while the count of distinct active users has dropped sharply in recent months. The numbers suggest that Second Life is more appealing, and time-consuming, than ever for its most dedicated users even as its attraction fades for a general audience.
Sunday’s record concurrency of 62,263 avatars represents a jump of over 20 percent in less than four months since Second Life cleared the 50,000 milestone in September. But the active user count has been in free fall, plummeting from almost 1.7 million users last summer to under 1.2 million now, according to Linden Lab datastreams collated by Tateru Nino of Massively.com. “As we understand it, it is the number of users who accrued 60 minutes or more of usage in the last 60 days,” Nino said.
The smaller user base has been spending approximately the same total time inside Second Life that a larger population spent last summer. Residents spent 25.6 million hours in Second Life in December, down from October’s peak and modestly up from July’s 23.6 million.
“Presumably the mayflies have a shorter life-span than ever, and that’s being partially offset by users who make it past their first hour who are spending more time overall,” Nino said.
Concurrency, Nino argues, is essentially a question of whether the Linden grid can handle the load of users logging in and trading inventory at the same time. As evidence, she points to a graph of Second Life’s concurrency, which she said shows a series of plateaus followed by jumps as something changes behind the scenes.
The boost in concurrency, according to Nino, reflects improvements by Linden to Second Life’s servers. And she said there’s still latent demand, and if the login servers could handle the load concurrency would be even higher. “For certain time periods during the week demand is exceeding supply.”
Jeroen Frans (Second Life: Frans Charming) of the Vesuvius Group, a virtual worlds consulting firm, also tracks concurrency figures closely. He agrees that concurrency is partially a function of capacity, but is more optimistic about Second Life’s appeal to new users.
“When you talk with new people you always hear about the tech being slow, and it definitely gets worse as more are online,” Frans said. But the new users are there, he insists. “After January, there seemed to be some new interest.”
“You see it outside of Second Life too,” he added. “Groups about Second Life and meetups all have more people than ever.”
