Recently two of the big 3D Virtual Worlds released some numbers of how they are doing, and I thought it might be fun to compare.

IMVU

Population: 40 million registered users
Active: 6 million average monthly uniques
Money Spent (Annual Run Rate) : $25 million
Activity: Users average 1 hour + per day on the site
Peak Traffic: 80,000 simultaneous users online
Other Stats: 770,000 chat sessions per day, and 175,000 virtual items are sold daily
Source

Second Life

Population: Over 20 million registered accounts
Active: Over 1 million unique logins a month,  over 750,000 average monthly repeat logins (logged in at least twice in a month)
Money Spent (Annual Run Rate) : over $500 million
Activity: Users average 1.3 hours + per day on the site
Peak Traffic: Peak Concurrent Users hit 88,065 in April 09
Other Stats: Over 1 million monetary transactions per day
Source and Source

These are very interesting statistics. While I realize that the nature of these two 3DVWs is very different, making meaningful comparisons difficult, they both can claim #1.

IMVU is easily the highest populated, thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign. But, the Second Life economy is about 20 times bigger. Oddly the activity and peak traffic statistics are very similar, so there is no clear winner based on popularity.

Then there are many that question whether or not IMVU is even a virtual world or not. By my broad definition it is, but others consider it a 3D chat program and social network rather than a Virtual World.  Since you can create your own avatar, build your own home, customize both as you see fit, and visit any room you want, its a virtual world in my book. The only significant difference between IMVU and the more narrow definition of virtual world is navigation.  You cannot walk around in rooms, you click on little yellow dots which animate your avatar to a location in the room. You also cannot navigate from room to room.You select an active chat, or create a new one, and you move to a room. Due to the lack of navigation, there is no real estate or vehicles, which explains why its economy is smaller than other virtual worlds.

Some of the statistics are questionable, or at least not directly comparable. IMVU’s active user count seems to be based on sign ins to their website, which is a social network site as well as a portal to the 3D chat, while Second Life’s is purely client logins. The IMVU client allows you to sign in and then wait for a friend to invite you to chat like other IM programs do. That would also skew the “activity” stat above.

Similarly, Second Life’s Activity stat is over inflated due to bots. “Bot” programs keep an avatar logged in daily for long hours, they are used to automate club invites or to model clothing in stores. While bots are a small number of the active user count, they over inflate the time spent in world. According to SL’s own charts 3% of the avatars log in for more than 300 hours a month. That 3% represents 34% of the “activity” in SL.

So are these the two biggest? Well most 3DVW services are a bit stingy with their statistics. About the only thing we have to compare is total accounts (Population), which as you can see above is misleading. No matter how you measure, “active” accounts is always significantly lower than total accounts.

Here are the next five 3DVW’s based on population stats (via kzero.co.uk and other press releases):

PS3 Home 7 million
Free Realms 5 million
Red Light Center 3 million
There 2.5 million
Kaneva 2 million

All others are under 1 million.  Of these five, I suspect There has the most robust economy (possibly bigger than IMVU), but Free Realms is the fastest growing (a million new sign ups a month), and likely the most active these days.

Regardless, it is clear by population alone that IMVU and Second Life’s position as #1 and #2 (or #2 and #1 depending on what stats you use) are safely uncontested at this time.

Metaverse News IMVU, secondlife, virtual economy, virtual worlds

Some strange things in SL news this week.

First up, Second Life has been interested in working with third party partners for a while now, that is no secret.  This week it was discovered what they were doing with these partners.

Dreamland, a privately financed continent created by long time business avatar Ansche Chung, started renting real estate at cheaper than tier levels. People looking into this have found out that Dreamland is purchasing real estate in bulk for a discount rate, and passing on the savings to its customers — which of course is growing because of the cheap rates.  Smaller real estate providers are crying foul!

I totally understand the SL side of this. Offering bulk discounts, or wholesale prices is a regular business practice of many businesses.  In a way this is a sign of Second Life maturing as a company.

I also understand the frustration of the small real estate providers who find themselves at a financial disadvantage. Virtual real estate is not a good thing to be into these days, prices across the grid are low, and getting lower. The PG vs. Mature vs. Adult policies is not helping things either.

Its a story worth following further.

Meanwhile, a 3rd party viewer client added an interesting and unexpected feature : jiggling boobs!

Yes, with the independently developed Greenlife Emerald viewer available here, you can now see all the female (and some of the male) avatars jiggle as they dance, walk, and whatever.

Just load the viewer and go to Edit > Preferences > Emerald > Page 2 > Effects > Click “Enable enhanced physics on avatar breasts”. (If it does not work immediately, you may have to restart the viewer)

I wonder how long it will take for this to be added to the official viewer?  I’m guessing a while.

Speaking of Official Viewers they released version 1.23.5 this week to plug a security hole involving notecards. Another 3rd party viewer called Neillife was exploiting this to allow people to copy inventory and remove permissions. Linden Labs caught a bunch of people doing exactly that and banned them.  This made a lot of content creators happy.

Well one person’s ban is another person’s slap on the wrist. The majority of these bans were overturned so fast I suspect a few of the violators didn’t even notice it.

Regardless, it sent a message not to use the exploit, and with the new official viewer the exploit has been plugged.

I just do not know how many people are going to be using the official viewer. What do you want a security hole free client, or one that allows you to look at bouncing boobies?

Finally a note. Second Life’s founder and former CEO is forming a new company. He will still be on the board at LL and will continue to be the public face, but he will only be at LL part time according to his note.  Good luck Phillip, and thanks for all the fish!

Metaverse News boobs, secondlife, sl clients, virtual economy, virtual real estate

One of the thing I do in Second Life is shop. I have been to a lot of stores in SL, but never bothered to blog about them, because most are so unoriginal. You got your box stores, your boutique stores, your fancy upscale stores that look like they belong on Rodeo Drive in LA, 5th Avenue in New York, or any of the other famous upscale shopping locales.

But this is Second Life! Why do you have to be normal?

I recently stumbled on to a few stores that were far more interesting as places to explore than as places to shop, and being the 3D adventurer, it makes me want to shop at these places more.

Being a “shopping” themed exploring guide, I decided to get a new outfit. Something wild but fashionable, but not formal dressy fashion, and ended up with the above outfit. Half the outfit comes from the first store pictured above The Abyss (more pictures) The store consists of two buildings and a walkway surrounded by a post-apocalyptic nightmare world. Lots of gothic and art deco looking buildings leaning at angles like they are about to fall over. Its a very cool.

The second completely original shopping experience belongs to The Boudoir (more pictures). The Boudoir City region looks like a french village on most of the server, but the skyline is dominated by a completely bizarre and completely original building. The bottom half has stone arches similar to a gothic cathedral, the top half looks like a post modern disaster you imagine seeing in East Asia.

As original as the exterior is, the interior is an equally impressive decorated store, looking like something you might see in a French opera house, or a Las Vegas casino. It makes you want to spend some money.

Finally on the stores that impress list is an odd fantasy combat store called Alruneia Sentry (more pictures). Being somewhat traditional in my tastes, there wasn’t much I was interested in buying, but the place looks gorgeous and unlike anything I have seen before.

The rez  point for the region will drop you at the store, but fly on down to the surface and explore there too.

Lots of glowing plant life and flying neon whales to keep your eyes busy. There are lots of hidden corners to explore. One was a “grotto” cave filled with water and  things to see both above and below water. I had to check it out but did not want to ruin my new clothes. So I just took them off.

Virtual Society exploring, secondlife, shopping, virtual economy

The Second Life world seems to have its panties in a bunch over a new 3rd party utility by Rezzable dubbed Builderbot.

Basically, Builderbot can copy every object in an Second Life sim and put it into an OAR file that can be loaded onto any OpenSim server, thus making a near exact copy (scripts as usual are a problem).  They also are creating an OAR editor, and (even more impressively) a way to port OAR files into Second Life, thus making transfers from OpenSim to Second Life possible.

There are two things that are upsetting to the Second Life community: 1. Builderbot does not look at copy permissions or ownership, it just copies everything on the sim. 2. Rezzable was planning to release the SL to OAR part of the Builderbot for free.  These things had the whole community grabbing torches and pitchforks ready to boycot Rezzable. Rezzable finally gave into demand and will not be releasing the SL to OAR part free.

Hate to be the person that disagrees with pretty much everybody on this issue, but maybe I’m the only one who sees the big picture. Builderbot is an awesome idea and a key component to expansion of the 3D web. It is probably the most important 3rd party SL utility ever, and if Rezzable doesn’t release theirs, someone out there should release something similar, including the ignoring copy permissions and ownership part.

Mobile Building

Lets start with the obvious need for Builderbot. Currently, putting a build in Second Life requires that you actually be in Second Life and spend sometimes weeks building there, paying monthly tier as you build. If you want to take your time and do it right it will cost you. Then there is the occasional system hiccup that could cost you hours of work.

Builderbot does two things, it moves the building part of the project off the SL grid. You can now build your server build on your own computer, no system outages to worry about. You can save and backup your work to OAR files as often as you like. If you make a mistake, just load the latest backup. When you are done building and ready to move your build to SL, it can be moved into SL in a matter of minutes, or at most hours. This is the primary design of this program.

Fixing SL’s Design Flaws

Second Life as it was initially concieved is a flawed system. Whoever thought it was a good idea to equate Real Estate with computing power, I hope they have learned a valuable lesson. I have written about this major flaw before. Bottom line, SL runs on thousands of computers, and as many as 80% are not doing anything at any given time.

The obvious fix is to store unused regions in memory and load them up to an available server as needed. Linden Labs could cut their server need by 50-75% with such a system.

They could also bring up mirrored instances of extra busy servers. Want to give a concert that 1,000 people can attand? Just copy the build on 10 different servers that can service 100 people each. If more people want to show up, add more instances.

None of this is possible without a reliable backup system. OpenSim has OAR files, SL has got copybot (basically nothing). What Rezzable is doing is creating a tool to save SL regions as OAR files that can be stored when not in use, quickly loaded when needed, quickly mirrored on multiple servers. Obviously there is some extra programming involved to do all this, but considering the cost savings it is definitely something worth doing.

Why it is necessary to ignore permissions

The biggest concern from most of the Second Life players, is that Builderbot ignores permission. Copy a region, move to OpenSim, and everything in that region has no permissions at all. Anything in Second Life could be quickly copied, permissions be damned.

Rezzable argues that there is nothing in SL that cant be copied already. Players argue “True, but you shouldn’t make it so easy.”

Building a region is like building a website. I build websites myself and anyone can steal my code by right clicking and click “view source”, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. It is super easy.

What most Second Life players  are asking for is DRM management for SL content!

DRM has been a failure everywhere it is tried. Music, video, ebooks, the case against DRM is pretty clear. Read boingboing.net to find out why. How many of you asking for DRM for SL have stripped DRM off a music or video file so you can play it in the format you want?

A Future Marketplace

I come from the 3D Artist community where people build and sell detailed models for use in other people’s projects. All of these models are distributed DRM free and fully copyable and sharable. Yes, there is piracy in 3D models, but it is part of the cost of doing business. But since I do artwork I may want to sell, I pay for all my models and commercial licenses.  This business model is where the 3D web (SL and Opensim) will eventually go.

Most SL players are thinking in L$ economic terms without seeing the big picture. Eventually there will be an xstreet for all grids, and the ability to buy a pre built full region builds (OAR files) to load on to your personal server or hosted server is likely to be a new popular alternative method to static build exploring.

There is much money to be made in building custom regions.  Especially commercial clients who would not dare copy other people’s work. Individual objects and props have their place in the new marketplace as well, especially if they include commercial licenses that will allow the objects to be put into other builds.

I believe this could be a huge market. If I could explore lag free by loading OAR downloads to my computer based open sim server, I would love it! If I could edit them and share with others to show my edits, that would be really awesome as well. I’m quite certain I am not the only one.

The possibilities for Second Life are numerous as well. Can you imagine the fun of going to an SL club that has a different build for every event? Random combat locales? Roleplay setting that can be brought up as needed?

Like it or not this is the future! Second Life is just the early primitive beginning. In a few years we will probably wonder what all the fuss was about.

Metaverse News builderbot, future, opensim, Rezzable, secondlife, virtual economy, virtual real estate

Notes from the Metaverse:

- I’ve been in a Guild Wars state of mind lately, which makes it hard to blog. Whenever you see months of no blogging, it is usually when I am playing Guild Wars.

- The Sims 3 is out now.  Have not gotten it yet, but the reviews look good. In the past I have gotten obsessive with The Sims:  1, 2, and Sims Online. Got burned out really bad at one point, not sure I’m over that.  Spore and Sim City Societies were kind of disappointments.  Apparently they are going with an online update system this time, where you can purchase new objects individually, instead of prepackaged CDs. If virtual worlds are any indicator, this could ultimately be an even more profitable way to go, especially if they open up to 3rd party brokering.

- Still waiting on Blue Mars to go open beta. I’m hearing really good things from beta testers, but they are not allowed to get specific or show screen shots per the NDA.  The Open Beta should happen later this year. I keep hearing “two months”, but I have heard that for the last 7 months.

- Also waiting for the new Second Life continent “Ursula” to open up.  The adult only continent where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed. I’m very curious how this experiment will work out, it could potentially be a disaster that ends SL once and for all, though the odds are small on that front.

- Speaking of which, SL is showing revenue growth in an other wise declining economy, just as I predicted in a post last January. Because of its low start up cost (free) more people are joining Second Life, and actually staying more, but as expected, they are spending less money per account. According to a recent interview with Phillip Rosedale, it seems the player growth rate is exceeding the spending decline rate, resulting in a net gain. Interesting.

- And finally, I released a new Dating Simulator update again, version 5.8. In the last version, I improved the swimming scenes, but noticed a “bug” that if you go to the kitchen after swimming, it goes immediately to an ending scenario. There was a very simple fix for this, but I decided the bug is a symptom of a problem in general: all the late date ending scenarios either involve sex or drinking, and if you do something dumb early in the date, all you are left with is drinking.

In an effort to open up the ending a bit, if you do go to the kitchen after eating dessert (or swimming, or showering), Ariane will suggest what to do next based on what you have or haven’t done so far. You can accept or decline her recommendations, until she gets tired of your constant rejections, or she runs out of ideas, whichever comes first.

The basic pattern of the whole dating simulator is to start out with a few basic options, explode into a ton of options, and then if you don’t royally screw up, finish with one of a few appropriate endings. Unfortunately, there are not enough appropriate endings. I needed a fun innocent ending to round it all out to add as a “bonus” to the suggestions.

The “downtown” solution to this is to find an amusement park to check out for a silly but innocent ending. I decided I needed a home version of the amusement park and came up with a “board game” ending.

Now I had the idea to have a board game in the dating simulator since version 1.0, but kept on running into obstacles. It would be silly to simulate a whole game unless I picked something easy like Tic-Tac-Toe or Nim, which are too predictable. So I decided to just simulate the ending of a game.The decision of which game ending to simulate came down to  two criteria: 1. It had to be a game with simple ending scenarios (Life, Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, etc.) 2. It had to be a public domain game (Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Chinese Checkers, most standard deck card games). For whatever reason, these two criteria are nearly exclusive. It took a while to finally figure out that Parcheesi is probably the only game in both categories, hence that is what I picked.

Metaverse News, Virtual Society bluemars, Dating Simulator, guildwars, secondlife, sims3, virtual economy

This is a detailed follow up to my earlier “comic” post about Open Sim.

The Paradigm:  The Open Grid

For those who do not know, Open Sim is an open source clone of Second Life. The Second Life download client, itself an open source program, can connect to an Open Sim almost as easy as it can to Second Life.

Open Sim networks run the same way as Second Life runs. You set up an account with a first and last name, log into the grid, decorate your avatar, possibly buy some land to build on, attend events, make stuff, sell stuff, etc.  So far there is little difference between OS grids and the SL grids.

Except there are differences. SL runs SL server software, OS grids run OS server software. OS has some advantages over SL, generally less lag, megaprim support, etc. But, as of right now, SL is the superior and more fully supported system. For example LSL scripting is not fully supported in OS yet.

The first thing you notice when you go to an open sim is that you are starting from scratch again. There are legitimate ways to get some of the SL stuff over to Open Sim, but it is time consuming.

Within a year, the OS project hopes to be at parity with Second Life, meaning if you can do it in SL, you can do it in OS. Soon after that, it is hoped the pattern will be reversed and it will be Second Life playing catch up. Among the things being worked on:

• “Mesh” imports made from 3rd party 3D models (Maya, 3DMax, Blender, GMAX, Lightwave, Cararra, etc.). Complicated models would generate serious lag, but simple models could do more than the current “prim” system with even fewer resources. This is what There uses.
• New avatar meshes, allowing more detailed form fitting clothing, or  even non humanoid avatars.

The Paradigm: Region Archives

I mentioned before that Second Life’s fatal flaw is the lack of virtualization of real estate. Open Sim has an archive system (so does Second Life, but the Open Sim one is better). With some improvements, it could be used to store unused regions in storage, instead of taking up server power.

A system could be designed to work as follows:

1. Player picks a region they want to travel to. System looks to see if the region is active, if so, player is sent to a server running the region, unless region exceeds maximum occupancy, in which case proceed to step 2.
2. An inactive server is activated, as soon as possible, player is moved to the server. Items are loaded from archive file while simultaneously “data” is streamed to player’s client. If this is an “instance” copy, player may be prompted to move to original once room is available.
3. When the last person leaves a region, temp items are deleted, foreign items are returned to owners, the region data is backed up (if changed by an authorized person), and sever is freed for later use.

Such a system would eliminate the need for so many servers, and would make expansion easier and less expensive, and also allow events to run across multiple servers with potentially thousands of players.

There is also the potential of people to run their own private servers on their own hard drives. People could build their region privately without needing to use web resources. People could share region archive files with one another allowing another method of group cooperation. Maybe people could even participate in certain events (concerts, lectures) on private sims by downloading copies of event venues and NPC data.

The Paradigm: The Multi Grid Marketplace

Under the Open Sim paradigm, there are multiple networks acting independently. Second Life could be like AOL of the early 90’s, and all the other networks like other web sites.

Under such a scheme there needs to be trade channels set up between networks, so stuff I make can be sold for use in any other network. In the 3D market place today there are web sites that sell 3D models for use in various 3D programs. Daz3d and Renderosity are ones I have used for my Poser work, but there are other big ones used by 3D artists using more professional programs (3DMax, Maya,  etc.). Artists can sell their original works for commercial and/or non-commercial use, via “brokering” arrangements. It wouldn’t be difficult to change XStreetSL into a multiple network market site.

Moving the SL model into the wider Open Sim model requires a lot of work, and involves a lot of hammering out of issues, chief among them being copyrights.

In future posts, I’ll discuss some of these issues, as well as an even broader 3D web paradigms (who says there has to be only one standard?).

Metaverse News 3D Web, opensim, secondlife, virtual economy, virtual real estate

There.com’s sister 3DVW Virtual MTV is closing its doors. Here’s a portion of the note posted at There:

Members,

As some of you might have heard, MTV is planning to shut down “vmtv.com”, originally known as “Virtual Laguna Beach”, later this month. We at Makena will be sorry to see it go, as its environments based on hit shows like Laguna Beach and The Hills were a new experience for us, and an exciting learning process for Makena and the VMTV community. As you can imagine, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on why they decided to shut it down, or what their future plans are.

However, as you all know, a virtual community is far more than the environment. In fact, it’s a small part of what makes it a community. Even though the environments are gone as we knew them, we know that the VMTV community will still be there, and many of them might visit us in There.com. As with any visitor from any virtual world, I know that the There community will welcome them and do their very best to make them feel at home.

As you know, VMTV was based off the same software as There.com, but it had a “simplified” UI and lacked a lot of There’s coolest features (Hoverpacks, ‘hugs, and real estate, to name a few), so a lot of the members might have questions and need a little help here and there. I know you’ll all be more than willing to help them out and introduce them to everything from CC Metro to our huge catalog of developer items.

So let’s dust off the Welcome mats and warm up those volcano fizzes! Company’s a comin!

Michael Wilson
CEO, Makena Technologies

Viacom, once a major supporter of these worlds, who also sponsored the now goneThe L Word Islands in Second Life, and the vSide clone Virtual Lower East Side, seems to be pulling out of the 3D virtual world business all together.

This is no doubt part of the major cutbacks being made at Viacom, which isn’t making as much money in TV ad revenue as they once did.

Update: From the vmtv.com forums:

Dear vMTV member,

In August of 2006 MTV launched its own virtual world where you could watch our shows and live the MTV life, virtually. You’ve sent us your comments and we listened. We’re excited to let you know that you can now check out a new and improved version of Virtual MTV at virtual.mtv.com! This new ALPHA version is browser-based and allows you to create an avatar, get your own crib, explore virtual worlds and play games.

Here’s how it’s going to work: On February 19, 2009, vMTV (www.vmtv.com) will officially close and the new virtual world experience will begin. You will be able to link your new virtual account with your old one and convert your MTV$ to our new virtual currency, MTV Coin, at a 1:1 exchange rate (e.g., 1 MTV$ will convert to 1 MTV Coin). Be sure to link your accounts by February 18th or your existing MTV$ will not be eligible for conversion for use in the new Virtual MTV.

To convert your MTV$ amount to MTV Coin, you first have to sign up for MTV.com and then link your existing avatar to that account (it helps if the email you use for vMTV is the same). If at any point you have trouble linking your account, please email us at virtualmtv@mtv.com. For terms and conditions of the use of MTV Coin in Virtual MTV please see our Virtual Reality Additional Terms for MTV.com http://www.mtv.com/sitewide/mtvinfo/virtual_terms.pdf

Thanks for playing and we hope to see you in our new world – we built it with you in mind!

Thanks and enjoy,
MTV Staff

So that’s that. Another one bites the dust.

Metaverse News closed, There, virtual economy, virtual worlds, virtualmtv

This is the third “opinion” essay on the imminent shake up of 3D Virtual Worlds, separating myth from reality. Today’s focus: Infrastructure realities and their effect on marketing.

I mentioned in part one that the technology behind Second Life, There.com, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, are all radically different. A truly successful mainstream 3D virtual world needs to somehow merge them all together. That’s my primary thesis.

Here’s my corollary thesis: Second life has a fatal design flaw and in five words or less the flaw is “computing power equals real estate”. This defect has been biting Second Life in the ass a lot lately.

First, they cant keep up with demand. Every four 256mx256m server means an additional computer is needed on the server farm. They have been expanding a lot lately, partly in an effort to lower land prices which a year ago were spiraling out of control. Land prices are finally lower now (much to the chagrin of people that made money speculating on land). The price for cheap real estate is steep: it takes in excess of 3000 web servers to run Second Life.

Second, a real estate design (open spaces) that came out last year was using too many resources. They answered that by raising prices way up, causing a loss of real estate equal to the size of a small country. In October, total real estate in Second Life was 1800 km sq. As of January it is down to 1600km sq.

But this is not just a recent concern. Many companies have dismissed Second Life as a marketing tool because of the low upper limit of traffic. No plot of land can have more than 100 people on it at the same time. Most players know it starts to get bad at around 60. Without ways to allow for thousands of players to be in the same place, it seriously limits the marketing potential of Second Life.

There is an upper limit to “crowds”, no matter what game you play. Other games just handle it better. Guild Wars for example has “instances”. If more than 40 people want to be in the same city, they open a second instance, and just keep on opening instances as needed. Some major events have exceeded 300 instances. It is possible under this system to move to the instance where your friends are, as long as any instance does not exceed 50.

For There.com, instead of computers = real estate, it is computers = players online. This is needed because There real estate consists of an entire planet almost the size of Earth. The entire planet runs on approximately 50 servers, significantly lower than Second Life.

There.com can get by with so few because the servers are independent of geography. If an area is busy, servers can be adjusted to compensate, something Second Life can’t do. When There started hosting concerts for Universal Records, they needed a way to hold hundreds, There “funzones” are limited to 50, sometimes less in certain zones, they initially built multiple venues that shared the same audio/video feed, but eventually developed a Guild Wars like instancing system to accommodate everyone that wanted to come.

Second Life has had some major concerts and events as well and was stuck only accommodating the 100 who could get on the server. The Electric Sheep Company has compensated by running multiple servers with the exact same content for promotions with “The L Word”, “CSI:NY”, and “Gossip Girl”. This works if your content can be duplicated, but in the case of concerts or lectures, where the presenter is in avatar form, it does not work. If Linden Labs (or the makers of the open sim project) could create an instancing system with presenting avatars able to appear on all instances “NPC” style, then events could hold thousands of players, and make Second Life more attractive to advertisers.

Now I know what you are probably going to ask. If they implemented an instancing system, wouldn’t all those instances require additional computing resources? Yes of course, but they have the resources to spare.

This is the other major flaw of the Second Life computers equals real estate scheme. At any given moment, about 80% of all real estate in Second Life has no one visiting. Probably closer to 90%. That’s a lot of computing power not being used for anything. That just amazes me.

Now what all that computing power buys you is flexibility of course. The primary goal of SL was to be as flexible as possible, and that is a huge benefit, There.com runs on far fewer computers, but lacks the customization (scripting, animation, physics, etc) available in SL.

But, for a system designed to be as flexible as possible the odd 256×256m land restriction seems oddly inflexible. I understand the limits on prims and user traffic are necessary to keep servers from being overloaded, but why the map size restriction? Why not instead of offering open sims, you offer the ability to make a sim 512×512 or 1024×1024 with the same prim and traffic restrictions? There are many uses for large area sims like this. I can also think of uses for a small 64×64 sized region, like a popular club or venue. And how difficult would it be to have a 64×64m region located in the middle of a surrounding 512×512m region?

A future 3D internet is going to have to have the best of all worlds. The flexibility of Second Life, the efficiency of There.com, and the instancing ability of Guild Wars for large events and commercial viability.

Metaverse News secondlife, There, virtual economy, virtual real estate

This is the second of three “opinion” pieces on what I see as an imminent shake up in 3D Virtual Worlds, dividing myth from reality. Today’s topic: economic realities.

Two things are certain today: Virtual worlds are growing in popularity, and the economy is shrinking.

I think it is a safe bet to say that virtual worlds will not save the economy, but unfortunately a bad economy might be very destructive to virtual worlds.

The primary effect is that VC start up money is likely to dry up fast. Any virtual world currently not making money via customer sales and/or corporate sponsorship is likely to fail soon.  Who knows how long corporate sponsorship will last as well. I know a big sponsor of There was Cosmogirl, a magazine that has recently stopped publishing. There still has MTV, Coca Cola, Paramount Pictures, and Toyota as sponsors, so they will likely survive. I have noticed many corporate sponsored servers in Second Life have also disappeared as companies tighten their marketing belts.

On the other hand, historically sources of cheap entertainment tend to prosper in hard times. Movies were big during the great depression, but the price of tickets have gone up since then. Virtual worlds are cheap or free for most players, so it is possible they may continue to grow during hard times.

Basically, 2009 is going to be a bad year to launch new Virtual Worlds, many unprofitable ones will likely drop out as well. But, older established worlds will likely see growth in traffic.

Here’s the dark side as I see it: Today’s established 3D Virtual Worlds (principally There and Second Life) are already “old” technology by today’s gaming standards. I know of at least four 3D Virtual Worlds that will be going into at least beta this year, maybe into full release, with superior graphics and (hopefully) smoother game play. In today’s economy, do any of them stand a chance? The principle goal for all new games from now on is: MAKE MONEY FAST!! Spending five years being unprofitable while you build an audience is no longer an option in today’s economy. We are likely to see more products appear and fizzle out like Google’s Lively did.

Part 3: 3DVWs failure as an advertising platform, and what to do about it.

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Last night, the Google blog announced the end of Google Lively. This may rank as the shortest lived 3D virtual world ever, less than 6 months.

The first sign of trouble was the sudden jump in popularity, followed by the fairly consistent drop in popularity within a couple of weeks after release. It never picked back up, and apparently there is a ton or never released content waiting in the wings. The second sign was Google shutting down its offices on the ASU campus that served as the primary development location of Lively.

So what happened? How did the internet’s biggest developer release a cool product like this and fail? And what does this say about the future of similar projects like 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, exitreality.com, justleapin.com, scenecaster.com, and any other 3D worlds designed to work in 2D browsers?

(And may I also note, this is not the only high profile closure I am aware of. Cyworld is closing its US operations to focus on its Asian business. I wrote about it a couple of years ago, but heard diddly squat about it since then.)

I posted earlier that I thought Google Lively had the potential to be the progenitor of a 3D internet.  Guess I was wrong. In fact, this may require a rethink of the whole concept.

Here is my rethink: The idea of a 3D internet built to work in a 2D browser shall never succeed beyond the “novelty” phase. There will be the “ooh thats cool” exceptions that some advertising team does for some product, but the die has been cast. The concept is a failure. Lets move on.

Furthermore, and let me change to bold type, The failure of Google Lively puts the last nail in the coffin to the idea that any 3D virtual world can succeed under the same business model as 2D virtual worlds.

2D virtual worlds that run on 2D browsers are doing very well, but the additional overhead and useability of 3D kills much of what makes 2D virtual worlds successful. In 2D worlds you can buy a room and decorate it with purchaseable pre-designed items. The fact that is only 2D means that it is so simple a young kid can figure it out, and young kids love these 2D worlds.

The added dimension to 3D makes things harder. To build stuff in 3D requires understanding perspectives, camera controls vs avatar controls, size, yaw/pitch/roll, 3D texture mapping, etc. The people that cope best are experienced 3D gamers which instantly limits your audience. Then any useful 3D virtual world is going to require a seperate client download, which limits the audience further.

The successful 3D VWs (Second Life, There, and IMVU) allow users to create their own content and sell the content to others, something even 2D virtual worlds don’t do. This is the fundamental difference between 2D and 3D.

Google lively attempted to bridge the gap. They succeeded in creating a 3D web embeddable viewer, They made building and arranging your “room” amazingly simple and offered a large inventory of free stuff to put in the rooms. That, and the fact they are Google, offered the best hope of bridging the 2D and 3D gap. But, ultimately the useability wasn’t satisfying to the 2D crowd, and the lack of custom content wasn’t satisfying to the 3D crowd.

Hence the end of the experiment. The 2D and 3D virtual worlds are likely to evolve even further apart now that they have proven incompatible.

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