f13.net forums - Linden Lab publishes games metrics for Second Life

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July 20, 2025, 02:07:11 PM

we're back, baby

Zee Linden from Linden Lab published detailed game metrics for Second Life yesterday and wrote about it in the Second Life blog.

They are attempting to address the controversy over their earlier published population numbers by breaking down the population into "unique" residents and total residents (unique users plus all their alts). However their method for counting unique residents is not 100% accurate because it depends on users entering in the same billing information and/or email address for all of their characters so it's likely that the number of people who have signed up to play is less than what they are reporting as their unique population. Still the published figure of ~1.9 million unique users is impressive for a US-based 3D social space and the number of new people signing up each month is increasing dramatically going from ~2K a month in January 2006 to ~500K a month in January 2007.

The more interesting figure for those that are interested in revenue numbers is the number of premium residents in the game, with 57,702 premium residents reported for January 2007. These are the residents that pay a monthly fee of $9.95 (less if they pay quarterly or annually) so that they can own land.

They are also making a decent amount of money selling L$ to people (the in-game currency) with January 2007 being reported at US$622,839, down a bit from December's amount of US$740,943 (I guess people were splurging for Christmas or something). LL also makes money from land sales/rental but they don't report revenue numbers for that and estimating from their land usage numbers it doesn't look like that's a significant source of revenue for them.

Another interesting population related number is the total hours played which for January 2007 was 10,817,668 hours. It's hard to estimate how many "active" players that might represent since they didn't publish playing hours data though Zee did say in the blog that 10% of the unique residents have spent at least 40 hours in the game.

While interesting, 'unique' users doesn't tell us anything. I know I have at least 3 users I've created (all with different billing addresses) and I've only ever played them maybe 1 to 2 hours.

If only 10% of spent 40 hours online, then we could safely say only 10% of 3.1mil users are 'active' and actually doing anything with Second Life. (Since there are no subscriptions other than premium, this is the best number we have for active users). So, 311k active users. Not bad. But, only 58k (~19%) of those users own land and have a subscription fee.

Also interesting, looking at December 06's L$ purchases vs December 06's population.. 225k users bought 200mil of L$, for an average of L$889k per user that month - which is about $781.

$781/month per active user seems pretty damn good. So why the hell does Second Life suck ass?

Quote from: Viin on February 10, 2007, 05:39:15 PM

Also interesting, looking at December 06's L$ purchases vs December 06's population.. 225k users bought 200mil of L$, for an average of L$889k per user that month - which is about $781.

$781/month per active user seems pretty damn good. So why the hell does Second Life suck ass?

You're right: that would be good. However, Second Life is exactly one thousand times worse than that by your figures:

220,000,000/225000 = 889 (rounded) linden dollars per user

L$889 = US$0.781

So those figures suggest that they are making they are making 78 cents per user through this route.

Whoops, you are right. Thats what I get for going too fast.

So, while it does bring money in, per user it's worse than even $1/month subscription fees.

$.79 per user plus the ~ $70 per year per premium user, to be fair. Remember also, that the premium users are the only ones who really use up any significant database space, as the non premium users can't own property and thus are basically just an avatar.

Well, I've been sipping a lot of kool aid recently, but I'm still dubious about their unique users--their system of charging $10 for alts but giving them away free if you say they aren't alts encourages people providing unique billing information. The population peaks are a little over 30k, which under the "20% rule" gives you about 150k subs. And it feels like a game with about that many users.

Paid users in the sense of people who pay money to play the game is probably actually higher than the 57k number they note. Their premium accounts are the ones who pay Linden. A larger portion of land is in the form of private islands, most of which are split up and sublet by "land barons." Most of these "rental" owners are basic accounts. They pay retail to the landowner who pays wholesale to Linden and profits. There's roughly 3800 of these private islands and they're generally split between 6 to 10 users. Ansche Chung owns 400 sims that support thousands of owners, but is one premium account.

I did a really lowball guess on income:

Direct L$ sales: $622,839
Premium Subscriptions: $574,134
Lindex player to player fees: $174,552
Private Island: $741,000 (3800 sims @ 195/month)

=$2,112,522

If we take the 150k guestimate, it would be about $14/user.

BUT add to this the newer non-grandfathered sims that are billed at 295/month and all mainland land tier fees. My guess would be that this adds 200-400k to the monthly income. But that's just an educated guess.

They're massively overhyped, but doing pretty ok for a small independent company.

Whoever the backers are certainly doing their bit in promoting it to a naive media. 60 minutes just aired a puff piece on 2nd Life. (Local NZ segment) Obviously full of the talk that corporations and universities are jumping in. It would rasie red flags for me to see any local company that decided to throw away money establishing a presence trying to market to the "Mom's basement" crowd.

I think right now and for a temporary period Second Life is an ok investment for a company. Not because of anything that happens in the game, but because it is such a novelty that it can get you publicity outside of the game simply because of the fact that you're inside of it.

I saw the new Scions because of Second Life. I've never been to their build in SL. I have no interest in ever going to their sim in the game. (Cars? With that lag?! LOL) But I was an article in a business publication about how they were in Second Life and there was a picture of both the real and the in-game car and lots of details about their new models.