Ding!:

From Stratics

Jeska Linden just announced that Second Life has reached the 200,000 account milestone. Keep up the good work, Linden Labs! To give you an idea of just how much SL has grown, this press release from January 5th, 2005 marks the 100,000 account milestone. More details to come later.

~ moo

I'm sorry...how many in how long? 100k accounts in about five months seems like quite an achievement at first glance, but this most high profile of online construction kits has often drawn disapproving glances on matters of subscription number, largely down to it's 'Basic' and 'Premium' account options.

Compare the above press release to this one, from 28th March - a month ago:

Slashdot Games: Second Life Scores $11 Million

The key point in that article is the phrase "...For now, the company isn't profitable, and it's not clear when it will be...". Clearly then a signficant number of these 200,000 Second Life 'Residents' are not paying enough, or indeed, anything at all. At the time of writing, the Second Life Main Page shows 'Residents: 200,747', 'Online Now: 2418' and 'US$ Spent Today: 21,162.00'. It's off-peak, certainly, but even at peak 'Online Now' shows around 5,000 players, give or take.

It all makes me very dismissive of the big announcement to be honest. Taking another example, EVE Online, who are generally very open about their numbers, broke their 100k subscriber mark in February this year, and regularly report 25k+ concurrent users.

  • Second Life: 2.5% online
  • EVE Online: 25% online

Perhaps this is a better measure of a game's popularity - of those who signed up, how many are actually playing?

To give them their due, Linden Labs do seem to be masters of PR, showing up in all manner of Real World magazines, documentaries, websites and the like, in the 'Future of Commerce' sections - Business Week, the BBC's Newsnight programme (A quite serious and respected current affairs show), Wired, and so on. A great many 'normal' people are being intrigued, and going along for a look. They'll pay nothing, grab a freebie Basic account, fly about for a few hours and discover a world dominated largely by eccentrics playing with pine building blocks, and people in fox costumes 'bumpfuzzleing'. A bit of further investigation will show that contrary to the hype, giving up your Real Job and becoming an online Virtua-Mogul is, like anything else in life, a way to get rich that requires you to be quite rich to begin with, and eventually drift off, feeling cheated by whatever Serious Financial Authority sent them there in the first place. But, and this is the important bit - they won't cancel their account. Why bother when you're paying nothing for it anyway.

With so much media exposure, lots of people are bound to want to take a look for themselves. How many stay, play, or even pay, is another, more mysterious matter altogether...