Before I get to the numbers, here’s a neat thing: a company called Comverse apparently made a utility that snapshots the SL client constantly and sends the snapshots of the screen down to cellphones — and lets you send commands to that SL client remotely. At least that’s my interpretation of how the tech works, since it requires an SL client running somewhere to work. Basically, a passthru to get SL running on a cellphone. That’s kinda neat. This same approach could probably be used for, well, just about any virtual world client. One wonders why they didn’t start with WoW instead. 🙂

More interesting to the stats junkies might be the key metrics spreadsheet than Linden Labs has posted for SL usage. Still monthly uniques (alas) but we do get an all-time uniques, which reveals that slightly over 1/3 of the 3.1m registrations are alts (leaving 1.9m unique people registering). That’s based on a calculation that “excludes Alt’s matching users by payment information and/or email address”… these days, I hear the average household has 7 credit cards, and email addresses are easy to get too (I use three regularly). So that is probably undercounting. Looking at the percentages of unique registered to registered over time, what we see is the incidence of alts increasing, which isn’t really surprising. Edit: an email from Cory Ondrejka reveals that the 1/3 figure is actually a mix of alts, and those who simply don’t manage to log in (because of not meeting hardware requriements, UI confusion, etc — and that in fact there’s more of these than there are alts).

Other stats that caught my eye:

Read More “Second Life hard numbers”

This is just a reminder that i will be at the UCSD virtual worlds event this afternoon.

Based on this CNet article on power-levelling services, I’d say there may be more full-time power-leveller employees in the world than there are MMO developer employees. Fascinating.

We also now know that the average market value of a WoW level is $8, and that an hour of WoW play is worth less than 75 cents. (note, levels for Burning Crusade are worth $24 right now, and an hour of play is worth only 62 cents).

Read More “The power-levelling industry”

SOE has released a whitepaper covering how the Station Exchange service has gone. Lots and lots of good detailed info in here. Edit: there’s an interview and summary on Gamasutra, along with a link to the full whitepaper in .doc format.

• • One piece of platinum trades for $7.35 when averaged for the year.
  • 34-year-olds spent the most money on virtual goods, accounting for nearly $39,000 in purchases.
  • The zip codes with the biggest buyers and sellers are both in Levittown, PA.
  • A high level character in EverQuest II is worth as much as $2,000.
  • A single seller made $37,435 from 351 auctions in the first year.

But those are just the fun stats. The really interesting stuff is in the analysis.
Read More “SOE whitepaper on Station Exchange”

This is a blast from the past: a 1998 thread on MUD-Dev that I clicked to randomly that is ostensibly about room descriptions, but goes on to discuss simulation versus stagecraft, worlds that impose worldviews as opposed to games which let the player decide how to see things, whether players come to the world understanding the need for empathy for other players, and a whole hsot of other topics. Many of the proposed technical approaches make most of today’s MMORPGs look simplistic (check out the design for berserking that’s buried in there…). Lots to mine here for inspiration, and a clear sign that our ideas vastly outstripped our ability to implement.

There’s also some truly hilarious analysis of the current state of the market (“Diablo’s mostly done now…” “Wonder how EverQuest will do?” and so on)…

OK, now I need to actually do work instead of reading old threads. 🙂