Oh goody! More numbers, this time courtesy of Second Life's Zee Linden, who seems to work in the LL Treasury Department or something, and it's all  super-great-funtime, with an economy that's great, has always been great, and will continue to be great, forever! Cue big soviet-style posters with muscular peasant women wielding huge sledgehammers!

Official Second Life Blog: Growth of Second Life Economy

and the focus of today's lecture here:

Second Life: Economic Statistics - Graphs

I only play the Chancellor of the Exchequer on TV, of course, but let's have a pick over the bones here.

Premium Residents: Ah, right into the good stuff. The first graph shows the number we've all been looking for - Premium Residents. In any other MMO, these are called Subscribers, and are people who are paying a monthly fee (currently $9.95 USD), in order have the capacity to own any land at all, and be given about 2000 L$ pocket-money a month as part of the deal. Out of a currently flaunted 1,966,820 'Residents', only about 36,000 are actually paying anything. Everyone else is a Basic Resident, or to the rest of us, on 'Indefinite Free Trial'. These free trial Basic accounts make up 98.17% of all Second Life accounts.

According to zee, around three times this number of accounts have ever bought money from the LL run USD-L$ exchange, so perhaps 55,000 Basic people have still paid into the economy anyway. That 90,000 number means that around 95.43% of all residents have never contributed to the SL economy in any way, shape or form, from their own money (as opposed to the stipends given to them by LL in the first place, presumably). Once again, we see the massively inflated and spurious 'Residents' number biting them in the arse. Still, it's nice to finally have a REAL number, and that number is in fact, 36,000.

Land Ownership: 250 km2 of virtual property (250,000,000m2), divided by the Premium Accounts (the only ones who can own land, remember), is just under 7,000m2 a head. However, each Premium person is entitled to 512m2 for only the initial purchase cost of the plot. No 'Tier' (the monthly land maintenance fee paid to LL), is charged below this amount of property holding. Removing 512m2 per head from the total gives a more accurate picture of take-up; about 6400m2 extra, chargeable land, per paying head. That much land holding would accrue a monthly fee, in addition to the Premium US$9.95, of an extra US$40 a month, making it on average, a US$50/month hobby for the Premium folk.

Of course, many own much more land and actually treat the whole thing as a business, and get a bulk discount on their fee, whereas some own nothing over the initial 512m2, and pay nothing extra, so this could be a bit of a flakey guesstimate. On a very rough average though, LL pulls in a cool US$1.4 million a month on these recurring land fees, compared to a paltry US$360,000 from subscriptions - a 70%/30% split. Cunning and very much the Razors and Blades model, as used in most console gaming business plans. It does rather seem as if a very small and affluent minority are propping the entire world up though.

(Incidentally, these numbers mean that there is 127m2 of land per head, if you use the ridiculous 1.96million Residents number, or if you want to go by concurrent peak users -  about 16,000 players - around 15625m2  of land per person logged in. A Sim (SL's 'zones', run on it's own CPU, with two or four CPUs per server, depending on type) is about four times that size, giving SL an average player density of 4 people per zone at peak. A server hosts, on average, only eight or sixteen players, and tends to die on it's arse anyway at numbers larger than 40 or so.)

User Hours: An aggregate total of 6.4 million hours have been spent in Second Life. Dividing once more, by the number of 'Residents', reveals that on average, a Resident has spent only 3.25 hours online, ever. Hardly the stuff of obsession, although to be fair, getting this kind of number out of a more traditional MMO is tricky at best. At a guess though, I'd say that most people rolling up to WoW, EQ2, etc spend longer than that just working through the tutorial. Hell, I managed that long in Shadowbane and Project Entropia before logging out in despair!

Being generous, and giving the typical Basic Account tourist an hour to get confused/bored/repulsed and leave, never to come back, and using the 'Number of People Who Have Ever Bought Money', 90,000, as a fair estimate of 'Interested and Invested Players', gives us an average commitment of 48 hours '/played time' for the remaining people, which seems fair enough, although still seems low compared to the typical MMO character '/played' time.

LindeX Volume and Cash Payouts: From the graph, we see that while around $US2.6 million was traded in November, only US$1.1 million was effectively withdrawn from the system, ('cashed out'), around 42%. This could mean that people are either so confident in the economic future of SL that they're willing to reinvest most of what they make back into the system, or that they're making so little that it hardly seems worth bothering with, once exchange and PayPal fees are taken into account, let alone *giggle* income tax.

In November, on average, each resident cashed out approximately 55 cents. However, given that Basic residents only form of income is convincing Premium Account holders to give them some, via sales of objects, camping chairs, SLingo or really hot furry cyb0r escort services, a more useful number is that 90,000 again - people who have ever put cash in. Using that, we get US12.20 cash withdrawn in November, which is even slightly more than the subscription fee! Clearly very few people get to pay their First Life mortgages via Second Life, and I'd go with 'game', rather than 'business' as a definition of what SL actually *is*.

Economic Activity: This one is a little beyond my understanding to be honest - but I'm sure the term 'Velocity of Money' is familiar to real economists. It is interesting to see how little monopoly money is actually being printed by LL, given the soar-away Residents figure in the last year. There are, in effect, $L500 in circulation per head, or thereabouts. I have no idea what this means!

Presumably, for most Basic tourists, SL money is somewhat irrelevant, not receiving any ever. I've always been a bit lost with Hyperinflation, Base Rates, Interest Rates, but I can't help but wonder with morbid fascination what the 'basket of common goods and services', used to calculate a Retail Price Index for Second Life, would look like. Pass the mind-bleach, there's a good chap!


It's interesting to see that, when you cut away the obvious spin and frankly, lies, of the zOMG2millon!!1! Residents number, and bring the whole enterprise that is Second Life back down to earth, and the 36,000 and 90,000 numbers, the whole thing starts to look fairly robust, and more in the style of something like EVE Online, a small 'other' MMO doing reasonably well, and paying it's way.

Two-Million-Day is coming however, probably this week or next, and I expect to be made very angry by the PR Apoplexy that will come with it, when the above analysis, based on LL's own numbers, shows that at least 1,800,000 of those Residents hardly make any difference at all, and at least 75% of all supposed players haven't logged in in the last 30 days anyway.

My advice to LL would be to stop with the 'Have Played EVER!' numbers, and associated hyper-hype, and start using the numbers that mean anything. Perhaps then I, and so many others out here in the outer darkness of Blogsville, would be less incensed every time the BBC or CNN go off on one with them. As things are, the only thing the numbers, as presented show, is how quickly most people get bored of SL.

But until then, I feel it my duty to unravel the lies as and where I can!