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Games Entertainment

Second Life Hits 100,000 Users 35

Posted by Zonk from the that-is-a-lot-of-beat-poets dept.
Gamasutra reports that the virtual world Second Life is boasting 100,000 users. They've had a large influx of users since they opened the games for free to non-property owners. From the article: "Statistics released by the creators say that the game's inhabitants hail from 95 countries in all 7 continents (apparently including Antarctica). Users spend an average of 4 hours per day playing the game, which has no specific completable goal, but places importance on in-game item and building creation by Second Life citizens."
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Second Life Hits 100,000 Users More

Second Life Hits 100,000 Users

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  • To be honest (Score:1, Informative)

    by tokaok ( 623635 )
    These people really need to get out and a life!

  • Only four hours (Score:5, Insightful)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) * on Friday January 06, 2006 @03:57PM (#14411320) Homepage Journal
    The reason why players only spend 4 hours per day on Second Life? Simple -- they spend the other 20 hours discussing the hypoanthemics of paradimensional economies in the blogosphere.
  • Let's see, 4 hours daily playing game in a lonely room, 8-10 hours sleep, 8 hours work (lol), 2 hours meals. Getting a life: Priceless
    • Let's see, 4 hours daily playing game in a lonely room, 8-10 hours sleep, 8 hours work (lol), 2 hours meals. Getting a life: Priceless

      24 hours a day playing a game in a crowded room, 10 seconds of sleep between map loads, 5 minutes drinking Red Bull and No-Doze every 12 hours. Dying of heart failure on the way to the bathroom after 96 hours of this: Priceless
    • You totally forgot time for the commute. You should probably subtract that from sleeping. I'm assuming that if you work 8 hours a day that you might have a 'real' job.

      'Real' can be a relative term. You can decide what it's relative to.

  • Consindering the fact that folks can "play for free", and that you don't really cancel your account, but simply cancel payment for it... I wonder how many folks are actually playing at least once a week.

    Heck, I cancelled my account payments more than 6 months ago, after giving it a quick shake to see what all the blathering was about. I checked the site, and my account is still considered active, but I haven't been in game in over 6 months.

    I bet Guild Wars can boast some pretty impressive numbers, too. T
    • I was going to post the same thing. I have an account and switched it back to a free account but haven't played with it at all in a year or so. I forgot about it until I got the email saying any one that had ever paid for an accuont would still be able to get in free.

  • Ouch. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Solder Fumes ( 797270 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @04:28PM (#14411595)
    I've been starting to notice that a lot of my extra time was spent in Second Life, though I have no easy way of tracking it all...I really should cut back.

    Despite the often lackluster performance, frequent crashes, copious bugs, and strange userbase: it's still THAT fun and addictive. Imagine walking along and suddenly getting an idea for something; you whisk basic objects out of nowhere and mold them to the right shape, then write some code in a language similar to Java or PHP. Voila, a spaceship. Or hummingbird. Or peanut-butter sandwich. Second Life satisfies an urge many of us have, the desire to see ideas come to life NOW.

    • Re:Ouch. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @04:35PM (#14411646) Homepage
      There's an older medium for doing that. It's called a MUD. Some MUDs, especially the MOO variety, make it easy to whisk together interesting objects, often without programming, sometimes in a programming language somewhat similar to C. And while you can't "see" the results of your creation per se, that also means that you don't need spectacular artistic skills to pull it off. You also get to exercise the imagination.
      • Yes, it has been said that LambdaMOO is the grandaddy of Second Life. I believe its creator has even visited Linden Lab's office recently!
        I've never been to any of those crafty sort of MUDs... only action-oriented and roleplay-oriented. How powerful is the language there?
        SL is any geek's wet dream. You can freaking code your own TCP/IP stack over SL comms, or your own RPC platform, or your own
        For a distributed systems geek like me, it's the ideal place, since programming in SL is inherently distributed. Plu
      • How many muds let normal players code their own items?
    • If you want to know how much time you're spending in game ... go and install XFire. Launch your games from there and it'll track how long you spend in game.
  • Second Life has a lot of potential. There's a lot of interesting and creative people on it. There's a ton of cool things for coders and modelers to put together.

    The engine is a piece of crap. Lag makes it unusable a lot of times. The promised fixes never come, pushed aside for pointless features nobody requested. If they ever upgrade to Havok 2, like they've been promising...well, forever, it might improve somewhat.

    It's fun in short spurts when you feel like creating something to terrorize new people.

  • not quite accurate (Score:3, Informative)

    by presearch ( 214913 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @05:29PM (#14412151)
    Granted, Second Life is something special. (Yes, I'm one of those 4 hour people.)

    But I think the 100K number equals the total number of unique account names ever created.
    At night, there's always under 5,000 people in world. Looking right now, 16:30 EST, there's 3500.
    Many of those accounts (especially for those 4 hour users) are alt avatars, perhaps 30%.

    But I have to agree with a previous poster, bugs and all, it's a quite remarkable environment.
    Too bad you can't host your own server....
  • Over 100000 users, it's free, and the users spend an average of 4 hours a day playing.

    Am I the only one who's suspicious of these numbers?
    I know several people who have a free account, and they don't even play 4 hours a week.
    Perhaps, of the people who played at all last month the average is 4 hours a day,
    but I'd be skeptical of even that claim.

    I wonder if there's any way to determine the numbers independently?

    -- Should you believe authority without question?
    • They don't seem fishy to me. You need to realize that a lot of people actually LIVE off of their SL business, or at least derive a non-trivial amount of money from it. It's sort of like a new 3D web, or a 3D ebay or something... some people are starting to make RL corporations just for SL-related work.
    • The number is users who have logged in in the last 30 days (might be last 45). The total number of accounts exceeds 200,000 and is coming close to 300,000.

      So yeah, it is actually accurate. The bigger private name2key databases have well over 100,000 entries.

      -Adam
  • Second life is basically free, the basic account (in which you are poor ;D ) is completely free of charge, you do have to use your CC or Paypal but you are not charged anything unless you become a land owner and therefore change your subscription plan.

    Ive been playing for a while and I know several people playing who have never payed a dime and stil make a nice (virtual) income there and have a ton of friends, jobs, etc.

    If you are not currently in an mmog and you want to know what the fuzz is all about but
  • I ask becouse theres places in second life that pay out Linden dollers based on how long a user camps out in the area on a special item such as a "dance cloud" or the more generic "camping chair"
  • Say...what's the sex like on Second Life - I hear it's a big draw. But then I also heard there's lots of furries and weirdness too. I'm too lazy to actually see for myself so I am willing to rely completely on heresay - so make it good. details...I want details...
  • There was a story on /. recently so the influx was probably from that. I know I installed to have a look at it and the game sucks.

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