News and Commentary: Linden Lab CEO States Second Life Userbase Now 900,000

It's been generally agreed that since the start of the Coronavirus crisis, the number of people using Second Life has been growing due to people staying at home and looking for things to do online. In early April, Brett Linden stated the number of new users was up 60%. But Linden Lab didn't say anything about it's monthly userbase, until recently. In an interview in Vice Magazine, CEO Ebbe Altberg stated Second Life was used by 900,000 people every month.

“The Second Life community, which now has about 900,000 active users monthly, hosts hundreds of events daily,” Ebbe Altberg, the CEO of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, tells VICE.

So how big an increase is it? Ryan Schultz thought about the 2013 statistics in the article about Second Life in the December 2017 edition of The Atlantic, which estimated the number of regular users were 600,000. That's not necessarily a 50% increase from just before the Coronavirus pandemic. In a Backchannel article (published via Wired Magazine) in Feb 2017, the number of monthly residents was estimated to be 800,000 by Linden Lab, down from 1.1 million from 2006.

So at least according to the Lab, the userbase fell by almost half from it's peak of 1.1 million to 600,000 in 2013. Then it grew some over the next four years to 800,000. And in the past three years, presumably mostly in the past few months, it's grown some more to 900,000.

While a one-eighth increase in usership is less dramatic than a 50% one, an increase is still an increase. It does seem to suggest that while many more are at least trying out Second Life, once again only a fraction are staying.

Sources: Vice, The Atlantic, Ryan Schultz, Wired   

Bixyl Shuftan

Pokemon GO Numbers In Decline

Pokemon GO was the game of the summer. The number of users of the mobile ap augmented reality game skyrocketed since it's release on July 5th to close to 45 million in about two weeks. But that's as far as it's numbers got, and it late July and August was steadily getting smaller. More than 12 million have stopped playing, "Data from Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia," stated Luke Kawa in Bloomberg, "show that Pokemon Go's daily active users, downloads, engagement, and time spent on the app per day are all well off their peaks and on a downward trend."

So why the decline? Over the weeks there have been a number of cautionary stories in the news about careless Pokemon players getting into accidents or getting robbed. But the real reasons for the decline appear to be shortcomings in the game itself, not much you can do with critters once they're caught, no quests, no way for players to duel, the gameplay seemed to be centered on capturing "gyms" that were held by monsters that were of a level unrealistic to reach by casual players. There have also apparently been server issues that have been quite irritating to players.

Hamlet Au predicted that eventually the userbase will settle to a dedicated core of about fifteen to five million. Certainly not a bad number for a game, but he felt Pokemon GO's decline would have a negative impact on the augmented gaming market that it had earlier sparked interest in, To succeed in a truly massive way, an AR game needs to be linked with a massive, well-established brand that has a 'fantastic, invisible parallel world' premise well-integrated into its branding."

Kawa suggested that over the long term, the augmented reality market would remain smaller than the one for virtual worlds, citing one analyst, "The Google Trends data is already showing declining interest in augmented reality, whereas interest in virtual reality remains high."


Sources: New World Notes, Bloomberg, Yahoo, PC Mag, Arstechnica 

Bixyl Shuftan