Poll: Why has population been so stagnant?

As a large business owner and SL game developer, I was very pleased with the rapid population growth that we enjoyed during 2006. (Of course many problems also stemmed from this.) My sales increased relative to the population to the point of being able to consider SL as a full time job. However, for much of 2007, population growth has been stagnant. I'm curious as to what people think is the PRIMARY reason for this lack of growth. I think the most revealing population measurement is logged on in past 60 days, which has been stuck around 1.7 million for a long time. Also, in comments I'd like to get opinions as to when this figure will hit 3 million.

Last year Linden Labs had a goal to reach. So they pulled out all the marketing bells and whistles to reach that goal. Now they spend their time trying to sustain the monster they have birthed.

So you need to tap into the percentage of people that have not been exposed to your product and create a marketing plan to get these people to buy. The audience with the disposable income is there waiting to buy.

@ bladyblue

So you think it is mostly because they stopped promoting the game as much?

we've reached a plateau, SL is no longer brand new and there are plenty of alternate choices for people to make online. What SL needs is a paradigm shift to get the next big wave of people.

Interesting poll, here is a hypothetical with guestimated numbers.

1000 people hear about SL one day and decide to give it a try:

Compatibility problems: SL likely has the best chance to work on mid-range computers. Many of those with very new or very high-end computers will rapidly run into problems with Vista, muti-core processors, and dual or quad graphics cards. (I run SL on my mid-range computer for these reasons.) Those with old or low-end computers won’t be able to run SL at a tolerable frame rate. Others may also experience firewall issues (as can be the case with any online game). 200 people never get the game working.

800 people remain:

Buggy software: After getting the game installed and running, many will experience a full system lockup within the first few minutes of playing. Others will experience a general game crash followed by the subsequent crashing of the crash logger. 300 people roll their eyes never to play again.

500 people remain:

Steep learning curve / Negative newbie experience: Some people won’t like SL because it is not a specific goal oriented game. (SL is not for everyone… but who needed them anyway.) Some may love the open-ended experience but find that the learning curve and arguably clunky GUI too time consuming to learn. Others are eager to learn but experience intolerable lag or stare at gray textures on helper island that never rez. Still others will be attacked by a griefer on their first day (probably a 14 year old on a free account who has nothing better to do than to orbit newbies). Deduct 100 people for each of the above problems.

100 people remain to play for a substantial period of time:

Poor customer service: I will bet that poor customer service gets a lot of votes above, but I bet few people even make it that far. Unfortunately, during the same time period as these people were joining, 200 veteran players required customer support for a serious issue. 100 of these veterans will find the customer service experience so frustrating that they will leave the game. Case in point: A friend of mine had a huge prim overlapping a substantial amount of her property. She filed a ticket but the first attempt failed do to a technical glitch. Her second attempt was successful. A few days passed and the issue was listed as resolved… The huge prim remained on her land. This level of customer support (or lack there of) is really too extreme to be general incompetence. I truly feel LL has made a conscious business model decision to write off the needy customer. For now, they are content to rid themselves of most of those who can’t take care of themselves. If they ever get any serious business competitors, they will either have to rapidly reconsider their customer service policies or go the way of the dinosaurs. (I hope they decide to stick around.)

Net result: No substantial population change.

Of course many veterans continue to persevere. We see that SL (despite all of the above problems) still has a lot to offer. When things are working smoothly, SL can be a wonderful place where you are limited only by your imagination. We, as a community, continue to develop this exciting new world… even though we may feel the need to vent a bit on the forums.

I see a few "others" up there already. What are the others?

All of above (other than competition) but I think especially the poor newbie experience and bugginess / compatibility since most new users don't have to deal with the poor customer service until later on.

Just have to chime in about compatibility. Instead of adding shiny features like Windlight that mean fewer people are able to run SL well, efforts should go into making SL accessible to as many types of hardware as possible.

This is to say, new shiny features should be accessible to raw computer power and not require specific hardware. The decision to trade off between shiny and speed on marginal machines should be offered to the user.

Whether we like it or not, more of us will gradually be forced into Vista over time. That is an issue also. But there is also an untapped market of people who have cable broadband at home, but who can't afford a gaming rig; or they have great broadband at work, and a lenient internet use policy for lunch hour. Setting up SL so that a decent office-grade computer can access it as an equal, would be a very good step forward.

Getting a working version of SL onto a popular game console would also rock.

It's all about the democracy.

If I wanted a game playable on any 5y old or low spec machine I would be on There.com, TSO or something. Something has the be state of the art and if people can't keep up within a couple of years of technoology they will be left behind.

@ Tegg

But as Doctor Mosely pointed out, SL really works best with mid ranged computers. Low end computers will run SL too slowly and new or high end computers will run into a lot of compatibility issues with vista, muticore processors, and multiple graphics cards. So in many ways, I think it is SL that is doing a poor job of keeping up with technology. I know it is a lot of work for a small company to do so, but that is the world we live in. People expect software to work smoothly on their brand new high end computers.

Vista is the main problem, most high end machines can still run XP, I have no problems running 3 different graphic cards with my dual core intel

High numbers of signups mean a wider range of mainstream people are signing up. Not evryone is cutting edge in their computer setups. If LL wants SL to be a haven for silicon heads, that's fine. But the Corporate Overlords want Joe sixpack's money as well, and he probably isn't buying a new machine evry year.

What Daz said. I chose other. I think its a natural pause and end to this level. It will shift again as people like me who came in fall 06 finally get our friends and loved ones to try it for god's sake, its really not that weird!

That being said, my brother who owns a large programming company could not get past the new orientation successfully and I had to bring his AV in world and kit it out. He just didn't have the time to fiddle around to get inworld.

for busy people or people not used to virtual worlds, the learning curve is very steep and off putting.

Incidentally, SL runs just fine for me too in Vista x64, with a core 2 duo and a geforce 8800.

I don't know about everyone else, but for me the first major turn off in SL was that everything cost money. Coming from AW (http://www.activeworlds.com) where aside from the $6.95/m membership fee everything was free, including as much land as you wanted, my first thought of SL was "Meh, I have to get money? That's annoying enough in RL without having to worry about it in SL too..." And I logged off after a few minutes and didn't try SL again until my friend got me to about 3 months later.

As for why the population is stagnating it's probably because most of the people that joined last year only stayed for a few weeks to a month and then got bored of SL. Which would explain the 6.3 million people that haven't logged on in 2 months.

@ Kevin

Ah yes, expense. I should have included that one as an option. Stipends for paying customers are less, and the cost of islands is way up even though LL now runs 4 islands on one server which costs them much less money to operate. I wonder if most of the "other" votes above were aimed at the expense issue.

SL is anti-newbie thesedays. it destroys any new growth in the game, and makes it difficult for the econemy to pick up.

not only is the learning curve huge, LL has taken away everything that made the game a bit more newbie freindly. help island is the only thing left for educational tools when there useto be a large and well funded instructor group that ran regular classes. i havent seen a class on the grid in months. not only that, but earning the lindens to do anything is now difficult for anyone whos unfamliar with SL. without any weekly stipends, new players have no way to make money, other then hunt for camping chairs and money trees. untill they learn how to build texture or script, they will be unable to actually do anything in SL, and will likely find it lacking.
i wont even get into the attitudes that alot of older residents have for new players.. but when many RP and entertainment sims are placing playe age restrictions, you know there's a bit too much bias floating around.

please, it just appears to you that LL is not newbie friendly and older residents are are treating them badly.

Considering the thousands of newbies that log on each week and the millions of interactions between avatars old and new, there is no way you or any of us have the foggiest idea what most of those newbies are experiencing. No offense intented but it is a little tired to hear such broad sweeping generalisations and conjecture based on scanty amounts of facts.

Newbies can now tp directly from websites to specific places of interest including many many newbie friendly places and there are several options for them to purchase lindens, which are so cheap that most people able to afford to be on the internet in the first place can probably afford to buy a couple hundred which is all you need for most things.

Older residents are constantly helping newbies, i see it all the time, but like i said earlier, there's no way you or I can possibly see the majority of anything, there's just too much going on. So take a deep breath and try to look on the positive side ok?

Recall the Brazilian invasion and then the French invasion a short time later. The positive press Linden lab was releasing into those communities was far-reaching and had a positive(?) impact. Has SL launched in any new countries in the last few months?

Buggy software is the main area of concern for me and other AV's I know. For example, one of the changes made to the latest version 1.18.0 (6) means that we now can't teleport or cross-over to another region without being logged out of SL due to a bug

I was also disheartened to hear of one SL user who has been unable to TP for a few versions now... seems as though SL will only fix bugs if it affects more than just a handful of users. This doesn't give me much confidence in LL's commitment to providing the best possible viewer for everyone.

It really takes the fun out of SL when bugs get in the way of what should be a fun experience... for some of us SL has instead become a really frustrating experience.
One thing is for sure, if this TP bug isn't fixed by the time my subscription is due to expire then I won't be renewing my Premium Membership (I paid for one year)... and I'm sure that other disillusioned users will follow suit.

It's hard to choose, really. (I chose customer service.)

I was talking to a friend today about SL. When he found out I made houses here, he wanted to check it out. What followed was me asking him all about his computer, warning him that he might not be able to move at first, and to find me to minimize that, and saying various other warning things about . . . well, various things I won't go into here.

So thinking of that, hmmm . . . I didn't make it sound very inviting, in terms of actually being able to get on and move and PLAY.

When you have to warn your friends that they may find it almost impossible, and even then, it all depends on their system, that isn't a real good sign, is it.

I think the loss of the basic stipend had a huge effect, too. I've always felt that it was a small price to pay to "prime the pump."

Thrifty players (like I was) would save up their stipend and make it a sort of a challenge to see how far they could get on it. THEN, when they get tired of that, they could buy Lindens, and it wouldn't seem so terrible.

Now - it's you get in, realize you have to buy Lindens right away. This just doesn't fit in well with the typical gamer, who considers that a form of cheating. And for the other people, it is like - hey, I just got here, and in order to get anything, I have to buy money?

That $50 stipend made a huge psychological difference, I think, beyond proportion to the pittance it actually was.

Reinstating that would improve retention, by giving people a reason to log on, and something to build ON. (Right now, there is really nothing to grasp for their future, no basis; and nothing apparent except this big space with no form or purpose.)

But - what can I say. LL wants this to be . . . something else, I suppose.

coco

My problem is asset issues. Loss of items from my inventory, loss of items from my land, loss of items from stores, paying vendors and not recieving what I purchased. The list goes on. Now with this latest slew of new updates, I find myself usually unable to walk - never been a major issue before. I've always suffered some lag, but lately it's been intolerable. Consistent crashes, even from people who have high end computers, buggy software.

I once told Vektor Linden that I did not envy his job, that I knew they were working hard to make things right, and he told me it was very difficult. Most of what they were doing was uncharted and new, to them.

I still believe that most of the Lindens are pretty decent people, who are working hard, but for the most part I give a big "U FAIL" to them, for poor and lacking communication, and shitty updates.

That's why population would be going down. I can't say it's really going down, or up, because I haven't looked that hard at the stats, but if I were to cite reasons for any stagnation or drop, those would be them. Second Life, I love you to death, but you are about as reliable as a blind sniper.

I think there is enough interest in SL to keep a steady increase in population and i don't think, at this point, that the majority of newbies are entering SL with no idea of virtual worlds at all, and many of them will have inworld help from friends.

The learning curve is steep if you want to build things and market them but it's relatively simple to walk around, chat and tp to places.

What is a problem though is that popular events cause the sim to crash and particular groups of like minded people are going to be less likely to advertise outside of group messages/bulletins. For example the tiny sumo contest on sunday afternoon crashed the sim with 0.1% of the online population (approx 40 people in the sim vs. 40,000 online).

IMHO It could be dependant from which perspective the 'introduction' came from. Bad press is better than no press so they say. 12 months ago when I frequented Help Islands, you could almost see a trend from the questions asked by newcomers.

1) How do I go about making the millions of $'s I've read about?
2) So where are all the Girls/Boys that want sex I've heard about?
3) So where can I buy a big gun and kill people in here, that I read?
4) Where do I get all this free money and land I read about?

I haven't been to Help Islands in quite a while.... but maybe.. just maybe, Greeters there are being asked now...

1) Where are all the child porn stars?
2) So where are all the off shore gambling places I've heard about?
3) So where can I listen to ilegal music broadcasting, that I read?
4) Where can I get those copyright protected DVD's I read about?
5) I want to be a top designer, land owner, model and I want it NOW..
6) Give me your clothes (would be Arnie's)

Those that are here for more 'reachable' goals that are sustainable amount to around 90% of the reported figures.. the other 10% are just passing traffic.

I did not vote because I just read in both a recent statistical EPA report, and a RL magazine that the population is booming.

So that would be the opposite of what you're saying.

@ Michael

Huh? Just look at the logged in over past 60 days figure on the start up screen. It has been around 1.7 million for about 6 months now.