Second Life: Finally some useful numbers and it’s 20,000 not 2 Millions

Linden Labs Second Life really had it the last days. First the press stops praying and hyping and gets a bit more critical - see this Boing Boing article to name just one - and then their whole system came to a halt yesterday and is now slowly coming back up again.

But what we were really waiting for and couldn’t find was that someone puts that whole hype back in line - so we provide you the figures ourselves.

Linden Lab today proudly announced that they have finally broken the 20,000 peak concurrent users (CCU) numbers. And they also published (as continuously updated) >2M Residents = user accounts, >800,000 logged in last 60 days = active user accounts. So what is it that’s important here - we are talking about a multi user online game. IT’S THE CONCURRENT USERS.

Anything else does not directly matter that much for Online games - so it is actually not a world but merely a small town stretched out over the whole world. That feels more like going hiking in some areas of Canada where you won’t meet anybody for two weeks.

So lets compare these numbers with other online games (some you might not have heard the name of before):

• Eve Online : >33,000 peak CCU
• KRGsoft Yulgang : >300,000 peak CCU
• Netease Westward Journey 2 : >500,000 peak CCU
• World of Warcraft (WoW) : >660,000 peak CCU
• Zhengtu Online : >680,000 peak CCU
• Netease Fantasy Westward Journey : >1.3M peak CCU

These are just some examples and others like “Extreme Soccer Online” (>50,000 CCU on the first day) or Optisp’s new game Shaiya (>300,000 CCU in the first hour) provide further inside into usage or popularity of particular Online Multiplayer Games.

Many of those numbers are for the Asian markets alone (sorry we did not find any global statistics) and if you want to get further details have a look at mmogchart.com from were also the chart below originates.

Please note that active users / active subscriber numbers are equally larger for these games e.g. WoW in Asia >6.5M active subscriptions.

This puts Second Life at about 3% size of WoW in Asia or at about 1% of the most successful Online Game there.

Click on the image for the jump

We think its time to get back to real life and see “Second Life” as what it is - just one of many online games with some success.
On the charts with the Asian figures alone you would have problems to plot the numbers for Second Life as they are so much smaller than even those from games with medium success.

And that’s after all the hype and massive increase in user numbers for Second Life…