Second Life’s economy is stalled because of poor integration and retention of newbies, Rezzable proposes.
Their economic analysis is really quite useful, as is their conclusion:
In fact my guess is that the Emmy award will be a marker for SL…a milestone for when things got really tough. A massive, complex software/hardware environment, more difficult management issues and no doubt some serious competitors coming to this space. And really if a new virtual world platform can only get 400,000 engaged users…well the new players would be equal with LL pretty fast. And that could happen with 3 months with a well organized, well funding marketing plan on an inferior platform.
It’s an interesting post, and reconfirms the humming noise and observations I’ve made previously. In general, I’ve proposed that the issues with Second Life aren’t related to poor grid performance but to retention rates for the ‘casual’ newcomer to the environment. Grid stability isn’t a reason for people not to sign up - I didn’t check on the percentage downtime before I logged into SL, and a few crashes and TP freezes didn’t have me running for the exits. Grid stability became an issue when I started to use the platform seriously.
Grid stability might be one factor considered by businesses wanting to enter SL, but they’re just as likely to evaluate other factors as well: security, brand protection, communication mechanisms, ability to measure ROI, concurrency, and service/support.
If major brands don’t currently find SL as attractive as they once did, that leaves corporations who see it as a vehicle for collaboration rather than branding, educational institutes who are attracted by how easy it is to get up and running (with accolades to the NMC of course), and the creative class who are using SL for everything from immersive virtuality to art to getting laid.
Linden’s stated goal is to connect everyone to virtual worlds. This implies therefore that limited corporate uses and education are just one slice, or foundation, upon which needs to be built an environment that attracts, stimulates, and retains ‘casual’ participants. People who arrive in SL without a specific intention other than curiosity. The attrition rates that Rezzable points out re worrying indeed.
With all the focus on whether or not SL REALLY is getting more stable, and all the grid-sphere babble about whether HAVOK is a key to greater stability or one part of the puzzle, attention is taken from the real performance indicators:
- How many people who join SL are still there an hour, a day, a month later.
- How well do the social functions of SL facilitate creating, managing, and participating in communities.
- How well does the platform and tool sets aid in development within SL as a creative medium, attracting ever widening partners and participants.
To solve these things, LL would need to focus on:
- Vastly improved log-in and orientation experiences, and not simply relying on corporate welcome centers set up primarily because they were fed-up with the current system. These orientation experiences need to include a proper process for mentoring. Linden Labs should spend significant money on newbies in the first few weeks - e-mails, free guides, invitations to seminars, mentoring, and perhaps some freebies and enticements to get them to stay engaged.
- Vastly improving the social tools within SL. There’s been a lot of talk about using the JIRA to get the group limit raised, but frankly the issue is so much deeper and requires much more creativity than the group limit. SL social functions should probably include ability to have interoperability with the major chat programs (MSN, AOL, Yahoo Messenger), better group management, global and regional chat channels with opt-ins and filters to avoid the sort of vendor spam you hear in places like WoW, and the ability to sort, group and tag your friend’s list in a more useful way.
- The creative class beyond the current circle of brilliant SL residents will never expand significantly until true interoperability is available. The architects and designers who use Autodesk products would migrate in a minute to platforms that offered deep interoperability if it also included a limited number of the features of SL. On the coding side, LSL needs to be abandoned in favor of Mono. And overall, the platform needs to enable the same production work flow as the gaming studios use. The launch of Havok4 doesn’t do anything to address the fact that a game or virtual world development studio needs to learn and set-up a whole new production stream to handle SL. The virtual/game development stream is such a highly developed discipline that SL should be learning from it and integrating elements of it into the platform, or risk being left behind by platforms that understand.
There are economic and social implications to the above. Maybe there’s a fear that if Linden upsets the balance of current policy and the restrictions and opportunities built into the current code set that there would be defections from the current user base. As much as I hate to say it, however, it’s perhaps even more important now than ever to switch the balance to worrying more about newbies than the feelings of current residents.
Gaming platforms have known this for years: after an initial point, the early adopters need to be abandoned in favour of an expanded pool of users. Contentious as this is, I also think it can be done in a more productive way that finds favour on all sides because increased traffic, usage, spending, and retention can only benefit those who understand the future of the medium and who will find that future either on SL itself, or in the virtual worlds to come.
Of course your post is on target as usual. While I am sure that Windlight + Havoc4 will raise the bar for online virtual worlds, issue still is attracting/converting new users.
We are going to try to do something here, but it would sure go a lot further if LL had a matching marketing program–ala intel inside.
LL is making some little effort here now with their new “Showcase” http://secondlife.com/showcase/. But not sure that gonna do too much. They would do a lot better with an email campaign to the 12 million people who signed up!
Simple things are too hard to deal with now. Simple example…it takes a ton of time to enter an Event. We all know events are key, but it takes 5 minutes to do something now…and no integration back out from Events to something like Google calendar or even RSS feed. While SL is a very open platform…events are trapped.
But LL is also trapped, they are still dazzled by virtual real estate and missing the point that residents–especially new residents–want to do fun stuff. They want to explore the virtual world and they want to meet people. And it’s not only about sex.
A perfectly made point. If I’d dare to nitpick, I would however state that I find it pointless to hope for the Lindens to augment the beginner’s experience — simply because I suspect that SL’s burgeoning society has outgrown any concept they might have had of it long ago.
Their failure on elementary governance and customer support, the disastrous Teen Grid and the horrid orientation experience are just cases in point that His Majesty King Philip, for all his benign intentions, is sitting pretty far away on his throne, only very remotely aware what all those pesky colonists in the New World are up to…
By the way, one of the Colonists has come up with a nifty software bridge between the in-world event calendars and the widely accepted ICS format. Head over to the esteemed Ms Ordinal Malaprop’s box of tricks at http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/contents/ to grab the URLs.
It’s funny how, completely independently of Rezzable, using much less sophisticated tools (snapshots on my homegrown newsletter for my sims) I came up with the same conclusion today on my own blog: we are churning way too many sign-ups with far too little numbers retaining (we all knew that)– but worse, we are losing rapidly even those who retain, not logging on again after 60 days.
I know 10 games that I’ve tried and never gotten off the orientation island or first frames — WoW, Twinity, Guild Wars, Eve Online among many. Why? Because they were too hard too learn, not satisfying enough in their activities, too limited, or too complicated, too hot, or too cold. That’s life in the Metaverse.
But SL shouldn’t be like a hard first-person shooter game — it should be fun like Facebook and easy like Yahoo — at least, that’s what many people coming to it hope from it.
Like others, it took me 2 tries to get on SL and stay, and the second time was a very slow curve up about five months before I really got it to work for me.
A really big problem I’m seeing now in SL is vast hordes of newbies who don’t have money and don’t have direction, worse than ever. The intelligentsia of the various countries whose geeks have gotten into SL, and whose handful of creatives have gotten in, aren’t bringing in the rest of the educated classes. Only consumer-oriented people are coming, but they aren’t educated consumers, i.e. sophisticated in knowing what they can get out of a virtual world.
Second Life needs to be a leisure activity before it can become a labour activity, and for far too many people, SL is work — even camping and plucking money trees is like skill-grinding work, with little reward. People with disposable income and disposable time need to feel a huge rush, and a huge payoff from SL quickly and really get engaged — and they don’t. They need to feel they have social potential they don’t have in RL, or intellectual potential they don’t have in RL, and somehow SL is failing to give this to them rapidly enough.
Unlike Himoff, I don’t imagine some other competitor, even with an inferior platform, will take over from those who disengaged from SL because those people either went to Myspace or WoW or the mall — or back to listening to NPR or reading Slate. Until the thinking people in many countries are inspired to understand this SL simulation will be very valuable for real life prototyping, it will not succeed.
You’re absolutely right that grid stability means nothing. We froze and crashed on the Sims — that didn’t drive us to SL. What drove us to SL is that the most creative people among us got tired of the tools’ limitations and migrated, and we followed them. And then more ordinary consumer types followed simply because the world where they were seemed to have people lacking in interest.
Education is being touted as the next big thing, but it can only become that if it truly breaks down tradition and makes real schools without walls. If I can pay some low fee and take a real class. If I can actually full-fledged degree online with interactivity in SL. If I can audit a professor or have a round-table with other thinkers that really matters — if the university can really behave like the university, and not a Sears catalogue of purchases I make to credential me for my first job as so often it is in RL nowadays.
Lindens already worry far too much about newbies, Dusan. That’s the whole reason why they are so hobbled. They infantalize and therefore cripple newbies, sequestering them on islands and smothering them with Mentors. There is only one cure for this: opening up advertising to businesses and nonprofits. When people can find their interest cohorts, whether they be book clubs or dance clubs, through boards they can click on and teleport to, we will clear some of this hurdle. We need to find ways to make “home stays” which are the most important factor in absorbing any influx of migrants in any world — the people who can take on a newbie and mentor him not according to the company’s script, but by his own set of interests among his cohorts.
What’s happening now is the Lindens are farming out the care and feeding of newbies to their friends in various special corporations, and also letting their FIC-y mentors run the hubs. They should close down all the orientation stations as most of the content is not used or understood, and rework the entire thing as really a big party, a social gathering, a vivid, interactive search come alive, with tableaus, so to speak, displays, demonstrations, portals, ads for people to pick their interests and go to them — not as set-piece tutorials but with people.
The resident-made infohub concept should be expanded in lieu of these re-education labour camps on OIs that force avatars to learn to fly or drive vehicles when they could care less about driving, especially in a world with such rough sim crossings. Vehicle driving is one of the most minority activities in SL, and inflicting that on the newcomer is really torture.
Imagine, I’ve been in SL for 3 years, I made an alt, and couldn’t get off the damn OI myself because the system had grabbed me, hog-tied me, and put me on a track I couldn’t get out of to learn to fly at some sort of aviation tower that I couldn’t even find. Bleh. I finally picked my way through to the “get off the island” kiosk — which should be 16 m2 from the landing point, not located across and obstacle course!
I totally agree that the Lindens need to dump their fixation on early adapters and even mid-adapters. But…They’ve been obsessed about newbies as creatures that need to be swaddled and taught to script and build and drive laggy vehicles and dream of Havoc 4, however (a function of their orientation to early adapters).
We need to pry their hands off all this and find ways for various businesses, nonprofits, venues of various sorts to take the newbies with their affinities, and for the masses who can’t pick an affinity, to have a greater party-like socializing experience which they can then opt to leave to learn if they like, intead of forcing people to learn in a bootcamp before they socialize.
And when I say “party,” I don’t mean dance poles. I mean the wine and cheese party at your college after a poetry reading.
Virtual real estate satisfies a lot of people — it is the engine of SL’s growth, such as it is, to this date, whether any tekkie wants to admit it or not, or whether any “date destination” like the Rezzable sims wants to admit it or not. And virtual sex matters to a lot of people, and that’s fine.
But it’s not enough, because people need to make friends and make connections, and not only romantic ones. They can do this when there are more event hosts.
Event hosting is a thankless, impoverishing job. Those of us who have taken on this job know that it is an uphill struggle, and that even when the Lindens paid you, or even when the Sheep pays you, it is a slog, and it’s hard to expect it to be anything else. A lot of the success of Second Life has hinged upon the willingness of primarily female residents being willing to host people and hold their hands through orientation experiences. There is no substitute for the enormous amount of manpower needed for this job, the labour intensity, the diversity, the more sophisticated tools needed (better groups, more groups, less buggy groups).
People don’t like to just go and gaze passively at fabulous builds that leave them in awe, but have no place for them. They can sometimes have more fun on something simpler, and interactive, but more social.
The Showcase is a welcome development just because the Lindens are finally moving away from only feting scripters and their favourite designers and showing more diversity like live music or education or interesting venues. But they need to enable the community to constantly expand and refresh these pages, and currently, they are hostage to a funnelling through a few Lindens.
>LL is making some little effort here now with their new “Showcase” http://secondlife.com/showcase/. But not sure that gonna do too much. They would do a lot better with an email campaign to the 12 million people who signed up!
Says Himoff, whose Rezzable sims are *featured* in this Showcase (!). I think it’s too much to ask the Lindens also to email 12 million people for you. I think you need to do your own advertising in the audiences that you think could enjoy these sims.
all true, good to see some lessons learned about 3d worlds and media… as well as some now ready to ask for reality, not fantasy from these tool and “service” providers. welcome;)_
BTW- we launched multiple PODBALL fileds this week, as well as a full RPG infocenter for the Starbase C3 world within SL. Over the last year weve slowly grown a totally original sci fi mmo community within SL based on our 2d/3d website of the same for many years.
So theres original stuff to do and to sponsor in SL for companies of all sizes. And maybe Linden and those who toss dollars at vr worlds will realize this is the only economy they have that can help pay for their services or tools. The future and past of immersive 3d rt has always been community entertainment or edutainment thats created by those who make content for end viewsers- not “pundits” :), sounds alot like the Television/ cable and broadcast model ? Dont it.:)
c3
you should start a seocnd blog, it’s grear!