There’s an apparently fun game that some virtual world developers and publishers like to play, in which they brag to the world that they have achieved X registrations. Second Life, for instance, is rather infamous for talking about registered users rather than actual users. They like to claim they have half a million+ users, for example, but somehow they only get peak simultaneous users of around 10k. The Second Life hype machine is truly second to none, which is actually a bit of a shame as it obscures the fact that they are actually growing. Gleaned from a short article on James Wagner Au’s blog (who blogs about SL) are these stats:
A few months ago, SL had 8k concurrent users max with 300k registrations. Today, 10k concurrent users max with 600k registrations. What does that tell you? That, once again, registered users mean very little. They doubled, but concurrent usage only went up by 25%. It’s outright dishonest to represent registered users as having anything but the most tenuous connection to actual, active users, particularly in games where creating an account is free.
I should know. Iron Realms has had considerably more users register than Second Life has, but our peak concurrency is less than 10% of Second Life’s. I keep wondering if I should jump on the media idiot bandwagon and issue a press release trumpeting that a text MUD company has achieved over a million registered users and quoting myself in the release as expressing my views on how meaningless the number of registered users is. The games media is rife with “reporters” who are not and media that does little more than reprint company press releases, making me wonder if people would just publish it as a matter of course.
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November 10th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Pingback from The Forge · More Second Life Nonsense
September 6th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Mike Rozak
Back when I worked on sound cards, creative labs advertised an 8-watt on-card amplifier, so the card could be plugged directly into cheaper unpowered speakers.
What they failed to mention was that the PC power supply only provided 2 watts of power to the ISA card, which made their 8-watt op-amp moot.
I also wonder about sound cards that advertise 20-bit DACs… We had a 16-bit DAC, but could never get more than 13 bits of signal-to-noise, which made the last 3 bits pointless. Unless ground plane design and shielding has been ramped up for 20-bit cards, which it probably hasn’t, they still only get 13 bits before noise takes over.
And even if 20 bits means 20 bits, you’d only notice if you were in a perfectly quiet room and playing games that had very quiet sections in them… which doesn’t happen.
September 7th, 2006 at 5:48 am
Andrew Crystall
And Eve-Online has had 30,500 online accounts in a single graphical virtual world. Kinda. (Let’s not mention the new “traffic management” system which breaks a lot of things like large-scale combat)
That’s not 30,500 users of course…I’d be interested to see comparative stats for multiple accounts in various MMO’s.
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:31 am
Account #4322341
To be fair, it is not a practice only Linden Labs (or virtual world companies in general) is guilty of. Just to view a larger perspective of any service-based software company you will find that the number of registrations is the most commonly used statistic when it comes to PR (for the simple reasong that is is the biggest number).
Microsoft with their Hotmail registered user account (when in reality most people use their accounts for junk mail garbage bins and registration accounts), Skype with their hundreds of millions of registered users and hundred thousand new accounts *per day* in China alone when in reality any time you log in you see at most few million connected users (and no doubt part of that number is due to Skype by default starting up automatically after install, most people won’t, or don’t know how, to turn it off).
So it’s a pretty standard practice at large. It is not entirely invaluable either when it comes to collecting investment money. Those registrations can be considered as sales leads (depending on the registration process, more or less qualified). Qualified leads are valuable to, say, a media company interested in advertizing. Furthermore, any investor worth their salt will look at the % of those leads currently being monetized, evaluate the company’s strategy to monetize additional % of those leads and based on that make their valuation.
October 20th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Alessandra
love