Second Life- Economist Article

October 2, 2006 on 7:41 pm | In MMO (Live), General Gaming, Playstyles, Industry

While visiting the in-laws, my father-in-law mentioned he had held aside for me an Economist article about Second Life (did I ever mention how with-it they were?) Unfortunately I left the article down with them. 

Fortunately, The Economist is with-it as well.

Some interesting data-points are mentioned within.

• There are 747,263 residents as of late September
• This is growing by about 20% every month
• There are about 7,000 profitable businesses in the game, with the top 10 entrepreneurs making about $200,000 in profit every year.
• About 25,000 lease property of some amount (at $20 per acre), which generates about $1mil a month for Linden Labs
• A possible Democratic candidate for President in 2008 gave an interview in the virtual world (with 62 people attending, heh)
• Roughly 9,000 people are logged in at any given time.

Wait a sec… 9,000? Out  of almost 750k?!

I'm not sure what's more telling: that a game with so many residents barely collects just $1mil a month, that only 3% of them are paying any money into the game at all or that so relatively few of them are online at any given time.

It makes me wonder: has the concurrency roughly been around that number for all of this time with only the number of residents going up? Do they include in that 747k all residents, including those who pay nothing but still have an active account? 

To me, SL has always been the game most people talk about but don't actually play. Web 2.0, a new form of browsing, the next Matrix, whatever, it's still a fairly niche experience with a very steep learning curve. As "big" as the game has gotten, it still is incredibly hard to pick up for a neophyte, not to mention all of those people who haven't ever been around content creation tools. I'm sure Mark Warner (that Democratic candidate/hopeful) had a whole staff of folks not only customizing his avatar, but programming how it'd move).

<>That this makes for a great market/commerce opportunity for real SL residents has long been proven. But I'm forced to wonder if their market is a bunch of temporary hey-this-is-cool seekers who dive in, make some choices, buy some stuff from other players, realize the Herculean task ahead of them to actually learn this stuff, and head off for games that deliver to them content on a silver platter.