Second Life never made sense to me. While something along the lines of Home sorta makes sense, in my head (meet up with your PSN friends, chat for a bit, have a game of bowling, then hop into Warhawk), the idea of visiting an overpriced 3D chatroom, just because, is a concept I could understand. We at SG have always been a little skeptical of the idea (inspiring a parody song, if you remember) and it’s with little surprise I find myself writing about what could become a drop in the number of Second Life services, beginning with the announcement by Reuters that have closed down their virtual news agency.
What sorts of repercussions does this announcement hold? Some serious pondering awaits after the jump.
Way back in 2006, about 3 years after Second Life first hit the internet, the 3D chatroom (no, it’s not an MMO…the way I see it, it’s just a glorified IRC channel) started picking up a lot of media attention. With thousands of accounts registered, it wasn’t hard to see why businesses started to invest in the application, setting up virtual stores where virtual people could buy virtual Nike trainers with real money: as sensible an investment as shares in Lehman Brothers.
Trade, as you might expect, was roaring for a while. With everybody caught up in the Web 2.0 boom (where internet content is largely provided by Joe Public – you and I) Second Life enjoyed a huge amount of success, with memberships increasing by 4100% over the course of a single year between 2006 and 2007. People had their Second Lives to go about with, Linden Lab and its partners made cash, and everybody was happy.
The thing is, since then, the Web 2.0 bubble has burst and everything’s sort of calmed down now. Nobody goes crazy over Blogger or YouTube, or stirs up a frenzy over Twitter or Flickr, but accepts them as just ‘part of the internet’ now. They’re as incorporated into the World Wide Web as the first news sites that appeared at the time of the Web’s conception. They’re not really a big deal anymore, and this is slowly becoming reflected in Second Life.
There’s a website I’ve stumbled across showing a lot of handy Second Life graphs, and the trends they show make for good food for thought. While the total number of memberships shoots up and up, the number of logins occasionally suffers steep drops, dropping nearly as much as 200,000 regular members deciding not to turn up for whatever Second Life Residents do.
What’s more, the growth rate of ‘Premium’ memberships ($9.95/month, which gives you genuinely helpful tech support and 300 Linden dollars – the app’s currency – to spend) has been falling and falling, even into the negative, in the past year and a half or so. A huge spike in what looks like the start of 2006 would sit comfortably with the Web 2.0 boom, and the decline in Premium memberships would just as easily fit into the idea that nobody sees the concept of 2.0 as something worth celebrating anymore.
Reuters, the news agency, has obviously realised this, and has shut down its virtual news agency. Is this the start of a trend in Second Life? Hit up page two to see what I think.
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I think Second Life died a long time ago. One of the little segues on G4 had a quick report by Morgan Webb saying that the average time logged by a Second Life user was 12 minutes per month! That’s pretty damn low. Linden Labs is running on fumes now and they’re just making money off companies that haven’t figured out that the Second Life craze is dead.
“where virtual people could buy virtual Nike trainers with real money” Just reading this one sentence carfully, you know that the author is trying to manipulate into his point of view. How is the money real, when the people are virtual? The virtual people pay with virtual money, no? Or maybe there are real people behind the avatars? Maybe the author of this article is a bot, i.e. a real virtual person. That would explain the low value of this article.
Second Life was an interesting idea that is now populated by sad people with no lives, griefers and perverts. When it dies, which it inevitably will, it won’t be missed.