Second Life Still Alive
I’ve been spending a lot of my time recently in Second Life. Mostly attending special events, clubs and some games. I sometimes will find a good club with a live DJ and just dance while I actually work in RL. Other times I’ll find a nice place to camp but getting $2L for 20 minutes with a maximum of $20L per day just isn’t worth the trouble. There are some camping out there which gives out a lot more but usually I find the same amounts as I described. I have sat on some of the camping chairs to get a free product. Sat for some shoes for 4 hours.
I recently found a blog post which describes a nielsen rating for March 2009 of Top PC Game Titles. Second Life came in at #2 with WOW at the very top. There is a big discussion going on in that post which I’ll leave for interested users to read. What the chart really says is that users of Second Life play it a lot more hours then users of the other games. There was also a correction post describing that SL was the 8th game in popularity in the nielsen ratings. In my opinion, Second Life, has a small amount of users but those users are dedicated and find many reasons to play for hours a day. I find the nielsen chart to be very interesting from my own personal experiences. I find myself wanting to find new places to explore, create new stuff and make new friends. SL is more a social place for many people I talk to. There is a wide amount of different communities for everything. I also find a lot more international people doing business inside SL.
I still think SL has some promises but there are some major competition coming up this and next year. I think Second Life will still be the best virtual world for user created content. Some of the upcoming virtual worlds may get more advertisers from big companies, though. That could get more users to their worlds and leave SL behind.