Van Hemlock tackles SL stats

  10 Responses to “Van Hemlock tackles SL stats”

1. Michelle Readman says:

   December 14, 2006 at 7:05 am

   In the following, I refer heavily to Nick Yee’s Daedalus project. Whilst it is slowly getting more and more out-of-date compared to the current MMO market, it is still a valuable resource, with the only VW to particularly break the findings being WoW, thanks to it’s real mainstream penetration.

   On player gender in SL:

   From LL SL blog – Growth of Second Life community and economy:

   women make up a little less than half of the total user hours each month

   From The Daedalus Project – Hours of Play per Week:

   There were no gender differences

   In addition, The Daedalus Project – Gender and Age Distribution suggests that players younger than 25 are more likely to be male, whilst those older are more likely to be female. I recall that in general, MMOs actually tend to see at least 50% female players, and I am fairly certain that it’s actually biased towards female at around 55%. However I can not find the source for this, so I could be wrong.

   Looking around other Daedalus project studies, it seems to me like SL really should have a greater percentage of female players than the ammount they seem to be listing. After all, social and creative aspects should be causing a greater appeal to female players. As mcuh as the furry scene is strongly biased towards men, I don’t think this can be blamed on them, either 😛

   The figures we currently have are far too small to draw proper conclusions from, but it does seem that something just isn’t quite right.

   On SL play time:

   The examination of graphs:

   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.

   If you refer back to The Daedalus Project – Hours of Play per Week, you’ll see that that means that the average ‘invested’ SL player only plays for less than 3 weeks, then leaves, or is only actually in game for a surprisingly short ammount of time. Strangely, this is roughly what you may expect from a fee-paying MMO, for which people pay for a month’s trial and then quit.

   It’s not yet possible to draw absolute conclusions, not just because we don’t have quite enough SL statistics, but that other major VWs are not also publishing similar statistics to allow a proper comparison. However, I still find myself worried again by these demographics. They don’t seem to be quite what you might have expected.
2. Raph says:

   December 14, 2006 at 8:07 am

   Michelle, gaming worlds typically attract 10-15% female. Social worlds attract 50-60% female. So SL is right in line with history there.

   On play time — the thing that many of us have been commenting is that SL has an odd session length and play time number. Looking at the figures, the conclusion is lots of folks with very short sessions who bounce off and do not return.

   This is NOT the same as fee-paying MMOs. In a fee-paying MMO, MOST users convert to subscribers after the first month, and then stick around for multiple months, with highly regular play patterns. A large part of this is because the purchase fee to get in serves as filtering mechanism, so most users who connect are committed already.

   Even in the free-play MMOs, irregularity of visits is seen as a major wanring signal that the user is not actually attached to the product and is therefore unlikely to provide revenue.
3. JuJutsu says:

   December 14, 2006 at 2:26 pm

   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*.

   Hmm, looks like bad times for my favorite anecdata…

   Let me remind you, Rik, that I’m not some pitchfork bearing FUDite. I don’t say “get off my lawn”. I say don’t harm my tenants by terrorizing them with the prospect of losing all their livlihoods in a day. Do the responsible thing and break this in within 30 days by not being an obsessive zealot about defending open-source, and controlling the tweaking of the client when it happens this way. Be honest and educate people (and to some extent the Lindens are doing that).

   $12.20 a month isn’t much of a livelihood for Prokofy’s tenants.
4. Wade says:

   December 14, 2006 at 7:24 pm

   All this talk of SL and virtual properties…
   Makes me wonder when Koster Life: Inside Raph’s Head the MMO is coming out :O
5. Prokofy Neva says:

   December 14, 2006 at 7:32 pm

   JuJutsu, you have a huge error here in your assumptions. Why do you think that Basic accounts can’t make money any other way except by working in the sex industry or camping? That’s silly.

   I have tenants who are basics who are content creators. They have stores and sell everything from clothing to vehicles to gadgets. Some of the enterprising ones have developed services like interior decorating or property management or events management. So they do make money. I think jobs have increased and the granularity and complexity of jobs has increased, though I certainly wouldn’t want to exaggerate it.

   They wouldn’t be renting lots for anywhere from $25 to $75 or more US per month less they had workable content creation businesses or some other business.

   Who are these people? Most are non-Americans — European, Asian, Latin American. Those who are North Americans tend to be dependent people — wives who don’t feel they can use a husband’s credit card, though they may have given it for initial payment only; people on fixed incomes, i.e. disabled. I have a mix of basic and premium accounts, but to imagine that all basic accounts are just day-only TryMe types is silly.
6. Prokofy Neva says:

   December 14, 2006 at 11:02 pm

   Oh, I see you are quoting out of Van Hemlock’s article. Well, I gave him a longer reply here: http://blogs.chimpswithkeyboards.com/vanhemlock/archive/2006/12/13/1574.aspx
7. Ace Albion says:

   December 15, 2006 at 7:02 am

   In my case, up until a couple of months ago, I never cashed out even to pay tier. I had been in SL a full year before doing anything vaguely commercial. I always spent money on L$ on top of my subscription to do things, buy things etc. Since then I decided to make a go of doing some small business as a change in pace. So I was pulling that average cashout down (between my two accounts) as I expect a lot of others were. Some people are making a lot of money in SL, some people are making a little. A lot aren’t cashing out and are in world spending what they make, or are buying L$. It’s not 12 bucks for everyone.
8. JuJutsu says:

   December 15, 2006 at 9:31 am

   Thanks for the link Prokofy.

   I have one of the main mainland rentals agencies, and I have about 900-1,000 customers on 15 servers at any given time now in a dozen land groups, ranging from newbies on free or subsidized 512 m2s to older residents paying for a quarter or more of a server, and paying via PayPal outside the SL system.

   Interesting. Obviously, the utility of an analysis like Van Hemlock’s depends on how much of the economic activity occurs within the system as opposed to outside the system such as via paypal. Are you willing to share a rough, ballpark proportion of how it works with you and your tenants?

   It’s not 12 bucks for everyone.

   True, but it’s good to start with the mean before tackling the variance 🙂
   Given Prokofy’s point about the external economic exchanges, its hard to get a grasp of central tendency….
9. Prokofy Neva says:

   December 15, 2006 at 3:24 pm

   >Are you willing to share a rough, ballpark proportion of how it works with you and your tenants?

   You can read “My Numbers” here:

   http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/12/my_numbers.html

   and as a bonus read about a far wealthier and far more competent land developer than me who makes $2000 a month of the same number of islands. My operation is completely different, since it just does a lot more different things with more people, i.e. subsidizing newbies and non-profits, events, the land preserve, etc.

   When you try to explain and report how real estate works in SL, people often don’t want to sit still for the complexities, and they want a quick fix — they want to hear “Anshe Chung makes a million; how do I do that?”

   I try to explain how most people are suckered into growth and it’s really a kind of pyramid scheme. You can make between $100-$200 per sim after tier, but I don’t think anybody in this business actually bills their hours at what they are worth. Real estate is a real gamble in SL; mainland rentals are particularly a fool’s erran. The losses can be tremendous sometimes just from one bad week of SL itself not being up, patches breaking everything, grid attacks, etc.

   Content creators, by contrast do so much better, because they can endlessly sell the same thing at an easily-adjusted price and go play WoW if they want : )
10. JuJutsu says:

    December 17, 2006 at 6:07 am

    When you try to explain and report how real estate works in SL, people often don’t want to sit still for the complexities…

    Well now I understand why, it is complicated. What I was wondering about was the proportion of economic activity that takes place outside the SL exchange system….’roughly half’ or ‘roughly a third’, something like that.

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