What if...

...SL grew and grew and grew and things pretty much remained as they are except we got to say, 100 million real users in ten years?

Unlikely, maybe, but I just saw Ultima Online was on year ten and celebrating it on their site. Considering all that has gone on since their beginning... Everquest to Warcraft... wow.

Year TEN, people!

I remember thinking UO was an expensive indulgent fad in 1997 -and signed up! (but I quit a few years later due to 80 hr workweeks in RL - I still miss my bear though...)

It doesn't look like Ultima Online is going anywhere. Maybe SL won't either?

Interesting point of view. It's pretty easy to forget how new all of this really is and how fast it is improving. We don't see the improvements day-to-day, but when you take a step back, it's mind-blowing. When I was in college (89-93), dialup was the only option in existence and webpages had just been invented. We ran a popular MUD (a text based RPG) and celebrated when we were able to increase concurrent users to 50. We conjectured over pizza about how awesome it would be to be able to use graphics instead of just text and to actually get paid for creating the game. By the time I got parolled from grad school in 98, the internet had exploded and revolutionized business around the world.

Now in SL, we're often breaking 50k online at once. All on the same platform. It's really incredible, but if you would have suggested 50K by year's end when I first logged in this spring, people would have laughed at you. We could easily be to 200K concurrent by the end of next year. 100 million real users in 10 years? In 10 years time, it will probably seem like a ridiculously shortsighted number.

A 200-fold increase over ten years? Stranger things have happened online, and recently. I suspect that in ten years SL will be at or above 100 million souls - or else at zero.

I'm rooting for the first outcome myself, but we'll see.

if linden lab will start to get their act together as i thought they were doing untill they announced downtime on the 31st, with finally upgrading some core code with havok4, finally new asset db hardware, they might pull it off

only been in eve as far as mmo`s, but seeing it trough early stages of alpha to 4 years into release, LL is for me doing worse then what i "know", ccp were atleast upfront with problems, LL is shuving them under the carpet


ccp: yea we got lag and alot at times, bear with us while we try to fix it and wait for new hardware
LL: blog says it`s fine and fixed so it`s fine and fixed


nearing my 9 months (wich flew past) and must say that unless something bad will happen, i might be still around if they keep developing and stay with the time and be abit more customer orientated again, like lag, we all know it`s here, they know it`s here, why deny it?

asfar as residents amount, if they do the abouve and help newbies, it might go up to that perhaps?

Your leaving out the other possibility. That it will peak somewhere between Zero and a hundred million, and then decline to a reasonably stable plateau like a lot of other online "games"

say at 2 million regular users for example.

I am feeling some renewed optimism in the SL technology
*hides*

hmm *thinks back* i have had some beer today.

At SLs current retention rate they would have to sign up close to half the adult population of the world to reach the 100,000,000 regular user mark. Since only about 3% have access to broadbamd now, that would be some change.

Sometimes we forget how privileged we are to be able to come to SL at all.

Well said.

.

Considering out of 40 people I work with, I'm 1 of 6 with Cable Internet, while 8 others have dial-up and the rest dont even OWN a computer.... I am VERY lucky

No, UO isn't going anywhere. Not for a while yet I suspect. OTOH, it isn't what it used to be - AoS and the long dark months afterwards came within a hairsbreadth of killing it. As it is, it just barely misses being in the ICU.

Given LL's habit of shooting themselves in the foot, and spending a great deal of time and effort on irrelevancies, frippery, indulging in Cargo Cult and Emperor's New Clothes fallacies, and generally mucking about without clear direction... In ten years I suspect SL will be what it pretty much is now.

A footnote.

Beyond all the press this thing has gotten, more people I know have NOT heard of SL than have heard of SL. According to some report that I was checking out, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Broadband_Commentary.pdf
just under half of the U.S has broadband. This same report states around 15 percent using dial up and 29 percent are not online at all. (2 percent have access from work, 2 percent have access from other than home or work, and 5 percent didnt state their connection speed) Of those who are not online at all, the median age is 59, not exactly the average SL user. Of those with dial up, 40 percent would rather have broadband and 60 percent like their dial up. ( median age for dial up users, 44). So we wont be gaining members from the 59 year old no internet crowd, and we wont be getting any newbies from the 60 percent of dial up subscribers who like their dial up. There are still plenty of potential new customers out there who would be playing if they knew we existed, but....shhhhh...we dont want em all showing up at once. A nice gradual climb that the technology can handle without choking would be nice. Not that I need more people clogging up my SL, I just want to make sure this thing is profitable enough to keep em from pulling my plug. Do I want to hang out with 100 million people? Dunno, would I notice a difference? Would it be all laggy? Would Jessica Alba finally be on, hanging out at my house? Best of luck SL.

Over the next ten years competitors to SL will come and go. I'd guess that LL are being pushed to stay ahead technologically while also under pressure to make the existing set-up work properly. We often hear the cry from disgruntled residents: 'why don't they fix what we've got now before they bring in new features?" But the truth is probably that they need to do both in order survive long term.

/me misses her 7X GM Tamer/Mage

I'm with Alicia on this one. It's a coin toss -- LL shows signs of both inspired decision-making and institutionalized denial/happytalk. In my experience the latter will sink you, (or vastly decrease your valuation) every time. But I'm not close enough to LL to see which side of the coin will be showing when it finally stops spinning ...

Well, we are coming up on year 5 already - June 2008.

(If you want to get technical - 5 year anniversary is coming next week Tuesday, Oct 30....
http://lindenlab.com/press/releases/02_10_30)

hmh...interesting )

maybe u should see this, i can bet many of u know for this ...but ...
anyway here's the link

http://216.70.117.172/me_english.htm

Its pure specualtion, if I had a crystal ball that could accurately foresee the future, I wouldn't be posting here.

However, I thinkthe answer lies in how good the inevitable competition will be and how LL handles the challenges of no longer being a monopoly.

If the competition is too santized and/or too controling [by that I mean how they dealwith content creation], LL will most probably lead the pack in virtual worlds.

If, on the other hand, the competition comes up with a platform that is even slightly more stable than SL and factors in better management and better customer relations, LL will slip badly. Will they go under? Probably not, at least not right away. If the above mentioned competition getsit right, I see them as being third or fourth in a small field of Virtual world platforms, concentrating on a niche market.

Who knows?

I think by this time next year, we will be able to gauge which way the wind is blowing.

Sooz

Sl have the potential, though I suspect they now need serious corporate drive if they want the lead, Blizzard or someone could do it a lot better.

SL will do fine as long as people see it as a place in which they can maybe do something that hasn't been done before.

Which, to me, is a complex combination of: Tech, Performance and Cost.

Tech = Regular significant advances in versatile new capabilities to experiment with

Performance = Regular improvements in Speed & Stability to handle ever more user created complexity

Cost = The possibility of users engaging in Affordable playtime activities and for value/content contributors the possibility of Self-Sustaining or profitable works.


It can limp along with fewer than 3 out of 3... for a while, but I think it's well positioned to offer a reasonable degree of all three for some time to come.

Very cool. I'd seen the info before but it's very well presented.

SL now is probably about where the internet was in the 1992-93 timeframe. Most people had never heard of it. Most people with computers hadn't heard of anything beyond telnet, ftp, and bulletin boards. Mosaic had just been created. I think the creators of Mosaic had started Netscape by 92. Internet Explorer wasn't even a gleam in Bill Gates's eye. 5 or 6 years later, eBay had it's IPO and quickly went from around $20 to over $300 per share. Zero to worldwide, revolutionary change in 5 or 6 years.

We're 10 years beyond that now, and even though there's still a lot of people that don't or even can't access the internet, and some in the world that have never heard of it, you can't argue that the internet is not a pervasive and unavoidable part of the world economy. 10 years from now, it's pretty easy to believe that SL (or whatever similar platform that replaces it) will be taking over the world in the same way the internet has up to this point.

I have every confidence SL will be around in 10 years.

I'm just not sure I'm going to like what it wants to be when it grows up.

I totally agree with Pie. SL will still be here, in what form and how popular remains to be seen.

I'm sure after it's first three years, people were predicting the iminant demise of UO as well. User populations DO increase, But technology also Advances. SL isn't the same as it was Five years ago, and i'm not just talking about the front end. New types of servers are becoming available as Tech advances, so there's no reason SL won't celebrate a Ten Year Anniversary just like UO. Unlike UO, and WoW, and SWE, and TSO, Second Life has almost infinite Flexability in HOW people Choose to play it. That Alone guarantees it will Always be Fresh and Engaging.

There will, No doubt be periods of rapid growth, as well as periods of leveling off. Normal enough, But SL is stedily gaining a foothold in Popular culture. Mention of it is getting Common in Comic strips, and on various television presentations (Sometimes thinly disguised due to Copyrights) This Week, on CBC newsworld, there will be a documentary run called "You Only Live Twice" About the growing SL Popularity.

Despite the Dire predictions of Pessimists, and Nay sayers who see disaster in every Minor problem, I think SL will be around for a long time. The key to survival is Evolution, and the whole structure of SL is designed to Evolve.

Angel.