Peering inside - Second Life's user retention

Not too surprising (well, it's always easy to be smart after you know the figures :-)).

But the basic underlying service hasn't changed that much since I started (in early 2007). It's still laggish, it still crashes, you still need to figure out your own purpose for being there, it still requires a semi high end PC and a lot of free personal time.

I think one out of 10 is pretty good actually, in software (shareware) the rule of thumb is one out of 100.

I'm pretty sure I could get bored with SL in 90 days, and I have a pretty open mind. Most people just don't want a second life.

Plus the crashes are insane. No other MMO this old would be alive if it crashed as much as SL does. A 10 minute crash means I won't be playing for an hour or two (when I finally check back in). A 1 hour crash means I won't play for the next -day- or two. The average person can only handle so much!

So yeah, I think 10% is good for SL. Its a strange piece of entertainment that gets a lot of buzz but just isn't everyone's bag.

If LL want to keep more people, they need to fix the bugs, stability, etc. I've brought people into SL, only to see them leave a couple of days later in frustration at stability or support issues...

I'm surprised to see that information, and wonder if it really is
updated or has some glitch in it, because I could have sworn that
Meta Linden told us during an office hour that in fact the
corporate-sponsored welcome areas in this special Linden program with
the registration APIs were posting better retention numbers.

I finally managed to get ahold of a set of those numbers, and in fact
saw they were pretty disappointing, both as to retention as to number
of Lindens spent in world.

The problem with retention remains because the Lindens did not change
the way they did things, they merely tried to do what they were always
doing in a more speeded up and even more feted way. The system is all
wrong.

1. Instead of having a list of special friends who get to have a
chunk of the newbies stream fed to them for free, merely because they
have a pretty face or are special in some way or promise to tap into
large RL communities, isn't a reason to hand over to them this social
good for free. They should pay for it. Anyway who thinks they can
serve newbies well should bid for that privilege and unabashedly
treat it as a business -- or a funded non-profit activity with
business-like productivity and attention to the bottom line.

2. Instead of ambivalence about outsourcing the newbie helping
business of SL, LL needs to emphatically embrace the inevitable and
outsource this job. They need a combination of their own outsourcing
of the task to some company who does online communities a lot better
than they do, and they also need to allow companies and groups to bid
for the privilege of having a fresh stream of customers for their
products and services. This is how the real-world works, and it's why
cities like New York retain newbies, the free market, not City Hall
alone, serves the newbies.
Also, randomized delivery of newbies should be changed to serialized
delivery, and the API program of free deliveries should be ended.

3. The Lindens need to move a billing and technology help desk kind
of presence inworld, on avatars. Billing especially is so fubar'd now
that 5800 accounts being frozen, and a precipitous drop in premiums,
is the result -- and that should NOT be happening. Outsource this
sort of 24/7 billing/basic tech help desk but use the world, eat the
dogfood, and have it be islands where avatars in blue shirts with
their names stitched on the pockets and chinos reply cheerfully
inworld in voice or in type.

4. Get rid of the volunteers and mentors system. It obviously isn't
working. It's among the reasons why retention does not work so well,
because it is reliance on a very unaccountable, and very uneven
system. Pay people for the necessity of dealing with newbies; accept
payment from them for the privilege of getting newbie customers.

When the Lindens are ready to do these normal things like a cell
phone company, then they will see better retention.

Let people willing to have newbies come to their sim sign up to do
so, without a reg API, without feting and fussing, let the market
take care of the world's needs.

I presume if that if there are better retention numbers to be had in some areas, then they are being offset by worse retention numbers elsewhere.

Either that or orientation retention is being scored on a shorter-term scale

Three comments:
-If Blizzard released numbers from their free trial program, I'd imagine that 90+% of trial accounts are banned within their first 90 MINUTES for advertising RMT in game. Even at face value, if there are 20Kish odd signups on a daily basis and 10% of them stick around, that's 2K new user accounts (correlated with, but not equal to, actual new users) per day. That would mean growth as long as you aren't losing greater than 2K longtime users per day.

-I'd imagine that a non-trivial number of those "lost" accounts were actually single-purpose to begin with. E.g. my favorite author/politician/archnemesis/etc is making an appearance, and I'd like to go listen/cheer/throw disembodied genitalia. Of course, having someone show up for an event is an opportunity to get them to stick around, but most online games probably don't have to deal with "losing" people who literally showed up to do a single event.

-As many naysayers on other threads are glad to point out, SL is not really a game. No amount of customer service, tech support, orientation programs, voice chat features, documentation, etc is going to turn it into a game. People who show up expecting a game, and instead find a bizarre strip mall where everything costs real money, are going to be very hard to retain. Orientation programs are going to give misleading short term retention numbers if the user is sitting there thinking that all they have to do is finish this orientation and then they get into the real game (e.g. mining asteroids while waiting for skills to train in real time before you can start serious PVP in EVE). SL is not for everyone, and having new players get hit up for in-game currency that costs real cash as soon as they hit the open grid only helps force a decision on the player's part sooner rather than later.

I think this is really interesting, particularly the lack of engagement by some. It would seem, on the face of it without anyone elses figures, that this is a low figure and the current system isn't working, so needs a more fundamental overhaul.

Some festive headscratching and brainstorming perhaps?

I'm not surprised at the retention figure not changing much.

Grid performance and stability are not good. No better or worse but not good. Then the gambing ban (I don't gamble but a lot of people did) Then we had the VAT issue, paying 17.5% tax on a tiny bit of server space?, then Age Verification.

Voice is a gimmick. Most people still use Skype because it is a specialist tool for voice conferencing.

I've not seen the new OI or HI, but I suspect they won't make a radical difference.

So no real shocks for me.

I think there would be less drop-outs if LL were honest about the real technical specifications required of a computer to run SL properly. At the minimum specs they list, SL will be all but unusable, and I only managed to get stable use of the client when I increased my computer's memory to 2 gig.

Say the retention is still at 10%, that's not a bad number, mainly because of the population growth. So 10% just means that MORE people who are signing in are staying rather than last year.

I also wonder about the "hovering" figure on "60-day-old residents". It fluctuates between as low as 1.2 million and as high as 1.5 million or so. Why? :)

I asked a couple marketing directors that I’ve worked with in the past, what their average conversion rates were for people who contacted their businesses, inquiring about products and services.

The answers I got were “1.2%” and “1.7%” respectively. Granted, those are bricks-and-mortar businesses with tangible products - and, while they said they certainly wouldn’t mind higher conversion rates, those rates still translated into highly profitable businesses.