You might be wondering where the Q4 2011/Full-year 2011 Second Life economy figures are. Sure, they’re late, but it isn’t unusual for them to be very late for Q4 and Q1.
Well, those reports are discontinued. We won’t be seeing one for Q4 2011, or any others.
Linden Lab spokesperson, Peter Gray told me today, “We don’t plan to publish a Q4 2011 economic summary. We are discontinuing regular reporting of aggregate economy-level data, because landowners and merchants have told us that the information is of limited value to them. Moving forward, we will instead focus on improved reporting tools that help individuals better manage their businesses in SL.”
Now, before you start pulling the start-cords on your outrage machines or kicking the starter-pedals on your doomsday prediction devices, bear with me for a moment, and keep in mind that I’ve benefited tremendously from those quarterly figures – my write-ups of those reports have pulled in nearly a quarter of a million unique readers each time around; which is pretty good, considering they’re mostly about numbers, statistics and metrics (topics that generally turn people off faster than an icy shower on a Winter evening).
Linden Lab, on the other hand, doesn’t get anywhere near that many readers on their economic reports. At a guess, I’d say they’d be lucky to be in the low hundreds.
Why?
Well, because the figures that have been being published in the last two years are just a shadow of what they once were. They’ve been cut down on something like five different occasions, and what is left can now only be properly interpreted by maybe a handful of people who know the ins and outs of the Second Life economic underpinnings well enough to translate them for others. And yes, for landowners and merchants they’re just not all that useful, even with a translator.
Essentially, over the years, the figures have been progressively stripped of the supporting data that gave them meaning, and now hardly anyone can understand what’s left. That kind of makes it a waste of time to extract the data and generate the reports in the first place.
Of course, the other side of the coin is this: When a company stops reporting some key statistic, it is almost always because the figure suddenly has gone South or otherwise looks bad. The Lab has stripped key items out of the reports on a number of occasions, as I mentioned, and it doesn’t take any great stretch of the imagination to figure that they were taken out because those figures were going sour, or that they appeared to be going sour because other data that would have aided in the interpretation of the figures was absent.
The latter tends to have a bit of a snowball effect. You stop publishing a metric that might be misinterpreted as bad, and then eventually its absence makes another metric misinterpretable as bad, until you’re left with a small set of metrics that don’t tell anyone anything terribly useful.
Now, I can’t tell you what happened here. Are the metrics suddenly taking a dive? Do they just look bad without other data? Or is what’s left just so recondite that it isn’t worth producing them anymore?
I don’t really know – and neither do you. The economy has been stable through the first three quarters last year, with no real signs of decline or signs that anything else that’s been going on has been causing it any trouble. It’s been as steady as you please, and while some might like to see high-growth, there’s something to be said for staying stable. There’s nothing really to indicate that Q4 was troubled.
On the other hand, if it were any almost other company, this would be immediately interpreted as a signal that things had gone bad. Linden Lab isn’t any other company, however.
Once upon a time, this was a company that was prouder of its fumbling attempts at transparency (though its successes in that area were limited and few), or of its successes in any other area of the business/Second Life. I am saddened to see this one pass into history, for whatever reason it might be.
You may start your outrage and/or doomsday-prediction machines now, if it pleases you to do so.
People would be far less pissed if they told us the actual reason, rather than whatever their PR person filtered lawyer person says :v
I will be attempting to lock down the torch and pitchfork market….
If I’d been better prepared, I would have made up a line of angry mob supplies.
You know, people knock the field of public relations. But part of what we do irl is tell our companies how they look to the outside world. That can sometimes change behavior for the better. You can really tell the Lindens never got near anyone in public relations; their view of how they look to the outside world is inexplicable. That said, the company must still be making money through tier and marketplace etc…and since these economic reports have no perceived effect on whether people choose to spend their time in SL, it does seem to make sense to not bother with the reports anymore. Unless transparency is part of your value system or helps you get business, it’s optional.
@Tateru, you’re antepenultimate paragraph says it all.
“On the other hand, if it were any almost other company, this would be immediately interpreted as a signal that things had gone bad. Linden Lab isn’t any other company, however.”
The critical difference is that the stock isn’t publicly traded. What slight market there is can’t react to this change, and most of the stock is held by people who don’t need these reports to know the state of the company.
So maybe they think they can get away with this.
And maybe you scare them. Do they know you get a quarter million unique visitors for you informed and erudite analysis? That alone suggests that the reports were not being done right. Are you a watercooler legend at the Lab, a warped and distorted image of the real Tateru Nino who once worked for them?
(There are some rather good superhero outfits available in-world, and some of the female ones are not the usual teenage wank-fodder of today’s comics.)
http://youtu.be/Wg3oRtN0iqE
But this bear thinks he looks silly in a bowler hat…
@Wolf Well, they know how much traffic I was getting on them now – but previously, no, probably not. From the tracking statistics I have, few people clicked through from my analysis to the Lab’s report.
Cut .. cut … cut! Eventually all the fat is gone, then the meat, and finally you’ve carved the bone down to a toothpick. Well, not even a toothpick is useful past that first annoying morsel removed. Sad to see yet another harbinger of attention from LL pulled off SL … and presumably pointed at some other internal venture which will be announced and heralded as “the greatest thing since …” MMO Sims anyone? LOL
well I claim bragging rights on predicting that the Friday stealth announcement would be a doozy this week.
Well, I had my outrage machine all fired up and ready to go, but reading your analysis of why they likely made this decision (the data was basically worthless) kinda took the wind out of my gas tank…
They did the exact same thing they did with last names, first they crippled it, and then when everyone was annoyed they messed it up, instead of fixing they just threw it out the window…
I don’t have a doomsday post in mind, nor am I pulling out the pitchforks. However, I think Tateru summed it up nicely:
A company that doesn’t publish growth figures… doesn’t have growth figures to publish.
(well, I almost got away with a short post this time, but han’s post brought out the ebil in me.
…)
han held: “Well, I had my outrage machine all fired up and ready to go, but reading your analysis of why they likely made this decision (the data was basically worthless) kinda took the wind out of my gas tank…”
Naw, you can still fire it up. Just like with LL’s past “figures”, we have to read between the lines:
* Over the years, Linden Lab growth and figures have been uncomplimentary, and they have consistently either tried to 1) Skew the data 2) Used spin to try to make the figures look better or 3) Removed the data.
* They have done this so many times, the remaining data has become useless for most purposes (that’s what happens when companies repeatedly intentionally hide data… eventually there’s no data to evaluate)
* Linden Lab prefers to run the company in a “we-say-so” manner and then obscure the results… rather than dealing openly and honestly with customers, providing what we need and want, and winding up with good results they’d be happy to post.
That’s pretty much how it’s been, for years. Cause and effect. They’ve decided to stop publishing those figures because their method of business has so crippled those figures they’ve become negative. For quite some time I’ve questioned their economic data (several puzzle pieces didn’t fit… such as how is it SL Marketplace sales boomed while L$ sales remained about the same. Answer: in-world markets collapsing because SLM is taking their sales. In-world markets collapse, merchants stop renting land, sims close down… guess what those figures show?)
How do we know these things? Because we’ve read Tateru’s posts and watched those figures consistently for quite some time now, and having actually gone to school at sometime in our lives, some of us can actually perform statistical and trend analysis, obscured or not. When the information is intentionally hidden… it just makes us all that much more curious.
My analysis based on this latest piece of data: Second Life overall is not in good condition. Their competition is hurting them, just as we’ve predicted would happen.
How do we know this? Simple: because if Linden Lab stats were doing well, rather than removing the data entirely they could just re-vamp it to work like it should have all along. They fact they’ve decided to remove the stats reports rather than fix them indicates that in truth, they really don’t want their customers pouring over their stats.
Although to be honest, I don’t see why it should bother them now; it hasn’t bothered them for the past several years we’ve been doing so. Tells me either they’re becoming more sensitive regarding their damaged public reputation, or the stats are starting to look really, really bad. Because one thing holds out true overall:
If the stats weren’t tanking, there’s no harm in them leaving them where they are. I mean, it’s an automated process, right? No skin off their nose to leave it in place. So why remove it?
The answer would seem evident: they don’t like what even those limited stats are revealing. Based on the evidence, I feel if they did publish the stats for this quarter, the real stats– including all SL figures and demographics, people would be a whole lot more alarmed than they already are. There’s no reason to believe differently. The company is hiding information.
There isn’t a need to get the pitchforks out! We already knew from Tyche Shepherd’s recorded data what was going on with Second Life over the last 2-3 years.
One can’t really hide that both Land mass and average concurrency have slowly but gradually declined over the last 24 months….which probably impacts all the other related data the LL Quarterly Financials reports on.
Of course Marketplace sales (LL commissions) would continue to boom….but at the expense of sales & traffic from In-World commerce! The knock-on effect are the increased abandonments of commerical land in SL. Rob Peter to pay Paul scenario!
I made a rough calculation, that the loss of about 1300 Private Estate sims from 1st Jan 2011 to the end of Jan 2012…would result in about $4 million USD lost of annual Tiers revenue (income)…..since then we’ve lost another 400 PE sims.
The question remains where is the LL break-even point likely to be?
@Rene It’s hard to say for certain. I’d say about 6,000 regions lower than it presently is – but that’s just an estimate.
I gave it some thought back in January…i thought it would be nearer 4000 PE sims. ( I think i was working off 10 or 15% Net profit margins)…..but regardless, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of LL anyway, but most likely lead to another round of staff lay-offs.
Rodvik’s announcement of LL diversifying into non-SL products (imo a good idea)…seems to suggest they have looked at the trends and crunched the numbers…..and come up with a Plan B.
In the absence of statistics under LL control, people will turn to statistics LL doesn’t control.
“On the other hand, if it were any almost other company, this would be immediately interpreted as a signal that things had gone bad. Linden Lab isn’t any other company, however.”
No, since this is LL, it’s not a sign that things have just gone bad. It’s a sign that things have been going bad for a while, and they’ve just now decide to deep-six the stats.
I’m sorry Tateru – but it is because it went bad. There was no way they could spin the figures to be good this time.
If SL ever does pick up expect them to suddenly reappear “because our users requested them”.
There are two things at this point that catch my attention:
1) Linden Lab business as usual. “Things aren’t as we want them, so let’s hide.” They might consider the alternative of Rodvik laying all the stats out there openly, saying “Okay, I don’t like how all this is looking and I’m determined to improve this product”. That might be a little more confidence building than sweeping the stats under a carpet. They really don’t seem to make any effort to increase their respect, do they?
2) For the first time in ages, what Linden Lab is doing overall is starting to make sense from a business standpoint, and that’s even more worrisome than when they weren’t making any sense. Here’s why:
When they weren’t making any sense, at lest there was a vague hope among users that they had something going on in the back room that would take everyone by surprise and come out the hero. Extremely optimistic I know, but there was that underlying expectation.
However, now that the company seems to be making sense, what is apparent is that they’re aware the product is tanking, has a potentially grim future, and they’re battening down the hatches. They’re hiding the stats so customers don’t get alarmed and bail even further, they’re diversifying into other products (most likely because they know it’s not wise to put all their eggs in the SL basket), and they’re clamping down on security and product control. These are all smart business steps all things considered. There’s not much they can do at this point to stop the competition (as predicted, it’s already cost them millions of dollars in revenue). The day of the $300 sim is coming to a close. (When that happens is of course anyone’s guess. I’m predicting this year, but we’ll see.)
If as Rene estimates they’re losing $4 million in revenue annually… that is a significant chunk of their profit line. Since I’ve estimated they pull down $5 million in profits a month and reliable sources have put that closer to $7 million, it’s not devastating, but it certainly would catch the attention of stockholders… and is an indication Rodvik isn’t the savior everyone hoped he would be.
What I’m seeing here, is that Rodvik might be a smart businessman who can read the writing on the wall. And if he has a lick-o-sense, he’ll probably recognize the best thing he can do at this time is get everyone to the lifeboats. Why? Likely he has not been granted the power required to pull an Iacocca. Lacking that power, all he can do is frustratedly try to keep the ship– and his job– afloat as long as possible.
It’s not that Second Life is unfixable. It’s that no one is willing to take the steps necessary to fix it. It’s the old monkey and the peanut scenario: the critter has his fist in the jar and he’s not going to let go of the peanut, even if it means his survival. That being the case, I think we can continue to expect Linden Lab to be an iron-curtain, we-say-so, profit-first company… right down to the very end. We customers have tried to help them for years, free of charge, yes?. But they’ve ignored us… the consequences we’ve predicted are coming to pass as predicted… and at this point I don’t think they’d be willing to write enough zeroes on a check to interest me. ;D
Hitomi: “I’m sorry Tateru – but it is because it went bad. There was no way they could spin the figures to be good this time. If SL ever does pick up expect them to suddenly reappear “because our users requested them”.”
Yes, it’s that obvious, isn’t it Hitomi. So we have to wonder why LL doesn’t seem to realize it’s that obvious. It’s almost humorous. ;D
The challenge is people forget Linden Lab is a PRIVATELY HELD company. They have absolutely no obligation to share ANY financial or other operational data with ANYONE!
If you want a company that fully discloses their financials, offers earning reports, and projections, find yourself a publicly traded company that offers a similar Virtual World platform. This will also give you the opportunity to buy shares in the company and as a Shareholder, have a legitimate influence on the company’s operations and strategic direction.
Don’t they got investors and busyness agreements and contracts and stuff?
Wayfinder….not sure where you’re getting the $5 Mill or $7 mill USD profit per month?
I presume you are talking about Net Profit (after all overheads). It’s my guesstimate that LL annualised Income are around $100 million USD mark.
From Tyche Shepherd’s latest calculations of $5.8 Mill USD Monthly Tier incomes, annualised that would be around $70 Mil USD. Add in the extras like Premium Subs, Lindex etc etc…..$100 Mill total income won’t be far off!
No way would LL be making $5 mill net profit per month on annualised Income of $100 Mill. (This business has a lot of overhead costs)
Again I’m guessing here….assuming 10-15% margins…the net profit is likely to be in the $10-15 Mill USD per annum range. So if they start losing 4 Mill USD worth of Tier income, even after you strip away all the associated costs of taking these SIMs & servers offline….it’s going to make a large dent to their bottom line figure. (before Corp.Tax)
@Rene: My estimate of profit was based on projected operating costs vs revenue. I wrote a blog on it once, but that blog is temporarily offline due to an unexpected overnight shutdown of the blogging company (apparently they were shut down due to illegal activity occurring on their board. Be warned people… it’s coming.).
There is no reason to believe LL is pulling only 10-15% profit on their product… not with sims priced $125 to $295. Their product is heavily over-priced, which means a heavy profit margin, even after wages and other overhead.
@Valiant: Yes, Linden Lab is a privately held company. But their customers take the form of “investors” of a sort… making heavy payments over a long-term period. Many of those customers hope for a return on that investment (merchants, land barons). Privately held company or not, Linden Lab might be considered to have some degree of ethical obligation to those customers to let them know the current state of health of the grid. Failing to do so or, in this case, refusing to do so, goes beyond concept of what hey have a legal right or obligation to do. If those customers get angry and decide to take their business elsewhere (as many are already doing), Linden Lab loses the source of their income. Their legal rights and obligations aren’t going to mean much then.
Ignoring (or rejecting) the needs and wants of the customer is never a good idea. Unfortunately, such seems to have become LL’s primary mode of operation.
Sorry, but you’re not going to get $60 Mill net profits from $100 Mill worth of revenues (income)….
One could determine approx salary costs, by knowing employee count and can assume some sort of State or National average salary per role, then office rental costs for that area in SF…..before we get to all the related computing costs. There is no way in hell they would achieve 60% margins for that type of business.
The pricing of their Sims are high, because of all those accumulated overhead costs, otherwise they would not have laid off 100+ employees 2 years ago…….the OS Grids don’t have that level of overhead! You cannot compare like for like……it’s like apple & oranges….and hence why the likes of InWorldz can price sims at $75 p/mth.
I find it suspicious that this comes at the end of the second month into Q1, when Q4/2012 reports are still missing. So one full quarter is missing, plus we’re two thirds of the way into the next. As if Q4 were bad and they wanted to wait and see if it was a one-time dip, and things would recover in Q1.
Two thirds of the way through Q1, they announce neither is coming. To me, this is screaming that Q1 didn’t look any better that Q4 did. Time to cut the reports.
I didn’t see anything in Q4 to suggest that the economic figures would have been substantively positive or negative. I expect that they would have remained statistically flat.
Tateru …they were never really that flat to begin with….it was a very soft but gradual decline since Feb 2010.
You’re right, in that there was nothing to be alarmed about….however Q1 2012 is a different proposition. Since 1st Jan around a 1,000 Private Estate sims have dropped off the Grid and LL should be concerned!
@Rene That should certainly concern the Lab – but it hasn’t seemed to have any significant impact on the Second Life economy one way or another from the data we have.
How can you tell how many estates have been lost?
han- The GridSurvey website…..Tyche keeps up-to-date records. Some stats are daily, others are weekly and monthly data records….plus all the helpful graphs.
@Rene: well, there’s no way to know which of our estimates is closer to reality (likely somewhere in the middle) and I certainly respect your opinion. However, when LL removed 1/3 of their staff I doubt they did so because they weren’t profitable. I suspect they did so because:
1) To make investors happy
2) To cut people they felt they no longer needed
3) To remove some people they knew to be problem areas (slackers and drama queens)
4) To make investors happy
5) To make a whole lot more profit
6) To make investors happy
Cos’ one thing’s probably certain: when they cut almost 1/3 of their staff… their profits didn’t decrease any. Considering HR is usually one of the major expenses in business, and considering their revenues remained pretty much the same, I imagine their profit zoomed a whole, whole lot. Which probably made the CEO’s end-quarter bottom line look really good.
Rene: “Since 1st Jan around a 1,000 Private Estate sims have dropped off the Grid and LL should be concerned!”
No, no… historically LL doesn’t get concerned until they lose 5,000 estates. Then they start back-peddling. ;D
Wasn’t there a special offer on new sims, back in November? It’d be more significant if the drop was in old sims, less so if the drop were in those special-offer sims.
It’s just that they’ve laid off all the people who knew how to run the reports
I agree Wayfinder…the 100 lay-offs wasn’t entirely due to their profitability being threatened and some of your reasons could well be valid. I heard rumours that LL were over-staffed at that particular point in time. It makes sense…as Mark Kingdon did the exact same thing at Organic Inc, whilst i was there. (Requested we make aggressive hires ahead of the revenue curve……only to shunt this model into reverse gear and make drastic cuts)
Wolf..it was Ocotber over a few days….i read somewhere that around 350+ took up the offer.
[...] och troligtvis även en hel del annan statistik. Varför tar de ett sådant beslut? Tateru Nino och New World News har inlägg om just det [...]
We have Tyche Shepherd, superstar, to give us stats galore.
Since, as has often been pointed out, Linden Research is a private company under no obligation to publish financial details, how well it is faring is really anybody’s guess. However, I think Rene hit the nail on the head by pointing out that no matter what figures they published, it would be hard to hide the steady and recently quite rapid decline in land. Tyche, as usual, is the oracle here.
One point that hasn’t been made yet: personally, I really enjoyed the financial reporting of SL. Now it has gone, that’s one less reason for liking SL.
@Rene Ballpark figure, I believe the personnel costs alone run to $20-22 million. There are quite a few other expenses involved on top of that.
@Tateru…yep sounds feasible…then once you add all the Office related costs including the lease costs of their Battery St building, …..and thats’s before accounting for all the computing related costs (Insurance, storage, networking, software, servers, insurance, bandwidth, power etc etc)…..Wayfinder’s net profit figures seemed way too high imo.
And paying for outsourcing (accounts payable, support, governance).
Anyone know where I can get a replacement pull-start cord for my Doomsday-prediction machine?
My old cord broke from pulling it so many times.
Ignatious, go to your local Briggs and Stratton dealer with the old pull cord, and they will usually be able to match the attachment to the rest of the mechanism. You may need to replace the supplied securing screw with another that has the correct thread for your hardware, as recent Doomsday-prediction machines use metric thread standards, replacing a confusing mix of BSF, AF, and Whitworth. Should the return-spring in the pull-starter be failing, Briggs and Stratton are not known to have a similar part in their spares catalog. I have heard reports that the kick-start on a 1976 Triumph Bonneville, American market model can be used as a replacement on some models of Doomsday-prediction machine.
A kit used to be available to replace the pull-cord mechanism with a Coffman starter, but the BATF is trying to classify any Doomsday-prediction machine so equipped as a “destructive device”, requiring a Federal License and the payment of a special tax on acquisition. In other countries, the starter cartridges may fall under laws applying to the sale of ammunition.
Computer simulations, running under Linux, are available on the internet from the usual sources,
Tateru, Thank you for sourcing and writing up this news.
It’s a great shame the Lab has taken this step but its not too surprising, as you know well, there has been a slow strangulation of LL’s publication of statistics over the years . I’m quite sure that landowners and merchants found the more recent economy reports of little value (though the Lab never asked me) .They had become so summarised and anodyne that they really didn’t shed any light on how Second Life is performing.
I suppose it lays down a gauntlet to you , me and other independents to provide residents with metrics and analysis. I plan to continue my data collection exercises in world and keeping my policy of making that data freely available to anyone via my gridsurvey site.
@Tyche – Thank you.
@Tyche And I’ll keep slicing the data that I’ve got. Neither of us has much that sheds light on the broader Second Life economy. Perhaps we can put our heads together and come up with specific data that we can request be added to the feeds.
Just want to say…that both you (Tateru) and Tyche do a wonderful job of providing such data and analysis over the years. For many it’s effectively become our bibles of information regarding how SL is performing.
Well, sheet, If the local Angry Mob Supplies store is getting a bit low at this news, wait till Linden Labs implement their strategy to kill user gathered stats.
In fact, best call an ambulance for wayfinder now, because the seizures and frothing will need prompt attention.
In short, thru TOS, viewer detection, and “RL” means(IE calling in the FBI), user stat gatherers might be getting a knock at their door.
Sites like this will have Linden calling the FBI : http://www.metaverse-business.com/regioninfo.php
And vintfalken published a somewhat prophetic article in 2009 just in case Linden Labs yoinked the stats at some time in the(back then) future – http://www.vintfalken.com/alternative-second-life-metrics/
And Linden Labs is capable. They will lump this into the same category as the alt detectors.
Coincidentally, the just-previous article has Linden Lamentations over lost pioneering spirit.
Because what the Donner Party really needed: better blindfolds.
[...] that is not all from the Linden Lab front. It seems LL has stopped publication of statistics for Second Life. The unanimous consensus is that the reason for no publication is that the numbers [...]
To me, this is just yet another in a long and growing list of ways Linden Lab no longer wishes to be of service to the Second Life community.
This isn’t about how many people it’s useful for. This is about accountability and demonstrating that the platform is stable and not nose-diving.
This will directly make me downgrade my confidence in Linden Lab’s long-term survival.
I have found the stats very useful and interesting. In RL I keep meeting people who consider such virtual worlds a waste of time. The stats prove otherwise. Trends come and go particularly if they are just percentage changes while the main numbers are in the thousands or millions. I note also they no longer publish the total number of residents or the number online at any one time. Other virtual worlds do.
They still make those numbers available, and I collect and chart them here.
In the past LL told as fairytales behind the statistic dates (btw., someone have in remembrance how large the statistic of last quartal was in 2007 or 2008?), now they are telling us bullshit, like the comment of the spokesman here or look at the statement of the CEO about the last names option.
[...] Lab are no longer reporting economic stats,as reported by Tateru Nino here, but personally I’d long gone off Linden Lab’s and found myself far more interested in [...]
I really miss the detailed information they used to publish before 2008. The breakdowns of who used SL by age, sex, and country were fascinating stuff. I’d love to see a return to that kind of data but I’m wishing in vain; LL as it exists now will never publish it again.
It´s a direct result of the failure to stop the decline (or stagnation) since the introduction of Viewer 2 and the establishment of 3D object imports. These actions were supposed to be a succcess, and both did by far not live up to the expectations.
Basically, Linden Lab is able to keep Second Life running as it is by truly brilliant tech troubleshooting but proves to be incapable to evolve a reasonable future strategy and user-oriented perception of the platform on the visionary, architectural management level. The logical result are declining (stagnating at best) user numbers, revenue and not exactly any numbers which Linden Lab could present as a “success”.
Once again, there’s no indication that the Q4 economy results would show any decline if we could see them. Other indicators suggest they might be up a little on last time – just not by a statistically significant amount. There’s really no evidence to suggest that the figures for Q4 represent a significant gain or decline compared to the previous year.
Incidentally, it has occurred to me that you might be a little over-focused on mesh. It’s just a thing. It hasn’t even been a very big thing so far. Just another bullet point in a list of other features.
Right, Tat, but in economics it´s only growth which will balance inflation and future investments. And stagnation is not success but failure. For example, when 25 percent of all prims are replaced by imported meshes this might be a supadupa “success” for the importing and selling meshies, but as long as there is not a single additional Linden Lab software user won by it and not a noteworthy amount of extra surplus won by it (for Linden Lab) it´s just – a failure.
Actually, the situation here is different. Because of the special circumstances of the Second Life economy (it’s the only economy that I’ve ever seen that meets the conditions of the Principle of Stable Economy), it can avoid various detrimental factors (such as inflation or deflation) without actually needing any growth at all.
This might be true for the almost ponzi-scheme of the SL economy. But even there shifting income from these few to another few or SL customer spending from one format to another format is not “success”. The existing SL user base does not pay more or less than it does now for these “virtual products”. And Linden Lab, as a result, does not benefit in way which would secure future investments and balance future expenses and enable future growth. I don´t say that the sky is falling but stagnation is not anything a company like Linden Lab can spin into a success story for anyone outside of the Second Life circuit at all.
Just checking if i understand it right; SL’s economy not growing means no one is buying L$ from LL, just exchanging pre-existing L$’s ?
SL economy not growing (stagnating) means a *real* calculative loss for Linden Lab. Income from object trade is only one part of the story, income from L$ exchange and server rentals another one. SL did not grow in any of these sectors since late 2009. Users (fluctuation aside) obviously still spend real money on SL, but overall less as they did in 2009/10, and flat, i think, since 2010. While, at the same time, we had inflation, an economical crisis devaluing investments, rising energy, maintainance and production costs and, and, and…It could be worse, of course, but it´s clear that publishing any numbers confirming the recent trend isn´t what I´d call good publicity at this point.
I totally understand the reason for Rodvik to stress the retention problem, because only solving this problem will save LL and SL in the midterm run. But it´s time for actions instead of declaring something really useful while wasting time on continued development and promoting of conceptional garbage SL never needed, anyway. Fact is, LL desperately needs more paying SL users and SL customers, not Blender users who do not even spend a dime on their modelling software.
Vivienne, on the subject of Mesh you are getting tedious, and you tend to discredit your own posts by your insistence on bringing it in to every conversation.
I think you’re correct about a set of stagnant figures being a failure. US inflation isn’t evenly distributed through the economy, maybe SL is less exposed to oil prices, for instance, but the longer there isn’t an improvement matching inflation, the less good it looks.
He, remember this old roman?
“Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam!”
[...] course now that LL no longer publishes their metrics, they can spin stuff anyway they [...]
[...] that they will no longer provide their customary annual or quarterly economic reports. Blogger Tateru Nino reports that Peter Gray, a spokesperson for Linden Lab, has stated that, “We don’t plan to [...]
[...] disposal, despite the current sim losses. In March, during a discussion on her blog, Tateru Nino estimated that the break point for LL in terms of private regions losses would be around 6,000 fewer sims than were on the grid at [...]