Is Second Life's Population Passing TSO?

Following a Slashdot article to this site (mmogchart.com) , I found charts showing all the MMO game's relative populations. Quite interesting. It shows how newcomer Second Life is showing steady and ever-increasing growth. It also shows that The Sims Online seems to have lost half their active user base since it's peak, and if trends in both games continue as charted, they should be crossing paths about now.

Is Second Life now more popular than The Sims Online?

Nice link, Tiger.

Actually SL is being flooded with ex TSO players now. Well maybe not flooded but alot have made the switch. There's probably a direct correlation between TSO losing users and SL gaining them.

I am a former TSO player who does still keep track of the tSO forums (stratics.com)..... I can tell you NOW from first had experiance, that yes there is a corilation. I myself (an other TSO friends) have already refered may a friend from TSO an they are playing SL now an are quite thankful they came too...

SL is more popular than TSO. Why is TSO failing (an gonna die soon I beleave)? Easy. Its because of several reasons. The economy is ALL screwed up big time now. Cheaters & Botters are taking over. Tons of firings in the company due to "budget cuts'. Ea/MAXIS don't give a crap about the game anymore. There are only TWO developers in charge of maintaining the game now. There is no more advertisment for the game an one cannot get it in a store anymore. The Sims 2 has come out. Big time server problems (Lag, crashes, cities not running, ect).

And all these reasons don't even include the lack of anything like custom content in the game (unlike the sims offline does). Bottom line, EA droped the ball a LONG time ago with TSO and has never recovered since. TSO had the potential to be one of the BEST MMO games on the market, but EA and others f.u.b.a.r. 'd it big time...... Too bad too......

Well, I hope this helps and clarify's things a bit...............

EA has proven again and again, they will not support a game that isn't overwelmingly successful. If the game isn't on the top charts, they drop it like a rock. They also love to bury other company's games too. They have repeatedly bought out smaller companies and run their projects and companies into the ground, while those game's loyal players beg for continued support (MCO, E&B).

Additionally, they are currently involved in a class action lawsuit for abusing overtime laws, and getting their developers to work 80+ hour work weeks without any kind of compensation. Their management constanatly issues a neverending promise that they are just on the final stretch of a project and just hang in there a bit more and all will be done and things will go back to normal, but they never do. Burnout follows. But do they care? No, they know that they can just hire more eagar young programmers who they can then burn through just to hire even more.

EA does not care about their employees. EA does not care about their customers. They only worship whatever product is currently bringing in the most money. As soon as a product gets a bit of tarnish by falling out of the spotlight, it will be tossed onto the compost heap to wither away.

Please do not support EA. Please do not buy their products.

EA of the 00s sure sounds sucky compared to the EA of the 80s. But then again, Dani Bunten could have told me that.

Oh, Lord, do I miss MCO. I really, really want to play that again.

Same. I miss driving 1943 Cadillacs at 150 mph with custom V8s and loud exhausts....

LF

I was putting together a rather nice collection of 65 Mustang convertibles. I really miss Hazard Hollow and the "trolls".

*Wipes tear from my eye*

Man those were some good times indeed.... *snif* Nice to hear someone else thinks likewise......... TY Torley

I have always suported EA since its earlyest beginings. I stall have a bunch or EA games for the Commodor 128...... Good times indeed..... I wonder how much everything is worth now... Hmmmm

EA let a lot of us old folk down with TSO and other games too..... This is one of the reasons I came to SL in the first place. A ton more respect for the "players" then EA has in there entire company.

Memories..........

The stats are interesting... but the conclusions are... eh.

Like, all things are given an A or B rating, nothing lower. It seems if a game has numbers or growth it is getting a B, and both gets an A. But how can you give EQ1 an A when you see it trending downward and it's sequel released and booming? It's analysis of games is limited to numbers... Second Life was reduced to (paraphrasing) "Well, after a slow start it's at 17000 users" And?

What I seem to notices is that there is a warped bell curve to the active-subscriber charts. I'll speculate and extrapolate and divide the bell curve into sections:
1. The initial upward slope:
This is how fast the game catches on. As long as it is concave upward, its growth rate increasing, the game has no where near its peak.
2. The first part of the hump:
This is how catchy the game is. If the game is hyped, this will be steeper than the second part. Case in point - Star Wars Galaxies.
3. The second part of the hump:
How playable the game is. The wider the hump, the more staying power the game has
4. The rapid demise:
After the game has lost its appeal, the hump will disappear and leave just the hard-core base.
5. The hard-core base:
This is a plateau below the humps representing die-hard player base. Once only hard-core players are left, the decline will be slow.

The ratings are data quality, not population performance. Everquest gets an "A" because they've got frequent official population updates.

As for your curve sections, there are actually two types of games shown:
1) Ones where the box has a price. Those follow your model
2) Ones where there is no initial purchase: RuneScape and SecondLife. Those appear to be following an exponential curve, and will probably end up being logistic curves, once the rate of leaving matches the rate of new arrivals.

0. Ahh, well, then, they really didn't make many conclusions at all.
2. I would argue that there is a great deal of people who buy L$ to buy land, or buy the initial auction, and that would be considered a "box" so to speak. If you look at many of the other MMOs, they start with the exponential curve, too - which I described as the "initial upward slope". With the big publishing companies that heavily market it, these slope up very fast.

I would predict that SL will bell-curve, but due to the start-up nature of LL, it will take a longer period of exploding growth before it's accepted. And due to the nature of SL, if it really takes on, it will break through the MMOG conventions and simply track like Internet use

No, it wouldn't. With most MMOGs, it is flat-out impossible to get into the game without an initial investment of around US$60. With Runescape, it is possible to play a large part of the game for free, and with SL, it is possible to get in with no up-front fee (or with no monthly fees, your choice).

Just so you all know, the Lineage number is based on the number of accounts created (subscribers can create many many accounts) and thus there is a gigantic over-exaggeration in that game's member-count.