Counting the real 'Second Life' population

(continued from previous page)

Blizzard charges $15 a month to play WoW, though the company said that about 3 million of those subscribers are in China, where the monthly fee is much lower. Still, WoW brings in tens of millions of dollars a month in revenue.

For its part, Linden Lab has said that Second Life is nearly profitable, largely on the strength of revenues from land use fees.

"I'm open to any Internet service that has a solution to the Internet identity problem. We don't know who's at the other end of the keyboard."

-- Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab CTO

So why the controversy? Critics contend that journalists don't understand the difference between "registered accounts" and "active users," and that execs at Linden Lab haven't exactly gone out of their way to clear up the confusion. Because Linden Lab prominently reports more than 2 million residents, many articles have said that Second Life has more than 2 million users.

Ondrejka argues that this is still accurate.

"The total residents, which we have always talked about, is the right number to represent users," Ondrejka said. He pointed out that Linden Lab also prominently reports the "trailing" number of residents who logged in within the last 60 days, which as of Wednesday was 844,310.

That means, of course, that at best, fully 63 percent of registered accounts have not logged in within 60 days.

There's another issue with that figure: the game industry typically reports users logged in within the last 30 days, not 60. The 30-day number, as of Wednesday, was 534,738 for Second Life. That means 77 percent did not log in within 30 days.

Ondrejka said that Second Life is different from traditional online games. He pointed to a recent study Linden Lab conducted over six months in which the company examined member usage.

He said that 30 percent of users had gaps of one or two months between log-ins. And that's why the company prefers to put the 60-day trailing number on the SecondLife.com front page.

Ondrejka said it is nearly impossible to arrive at a true number of active users because of the vagaries of the credit card numbers and IP addresses employed by users, and the fact that users can have multiple accounts.

"I'm open to any Internet service that has a solution to the Internet identity problem," said Ondrejka. "We don't know who's at the other end of the keyboard."

Still, because Second Life users frequently return after long times away, he said Linden Lab sticks to its "resident" definition.

Other virtual-world and online-game veterans acknowledge that it's very hard to figure out how many real users there are.

"With the rise of non-subscription services, the industry is having to adapt to different metrics altogether," Raph Koster, a designer of Ultima Online and former chief creative officer of EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies publisher Sony Online Entertainment, wrote on his blog. "The original metric people used, of course, was subscriptions. This is a great metric for assessing how much revenue a game is getting, but it does have a few oddities in terms of determining the popularity of a game."

Koster wrote that his favorite measurement is "average weekly unique" users.

"Basically, counting how many people are online at any one time, or counting how many are paying, doesn't tell you how many are actually playing," wrote Koster. "But counting how many people logged in each given day, and then averaging that out across the week to smooth out the daily fluctuations will give you a very good sense of how many people are actually playing."

In truth, there may not be one easy answer to the virtual census problem.

"The real metrics that matter are 'number of daily unique logins' and 'average length of sessions,'" said Michael Steele, a vice president for the online game middleware software developer Emergent Game Technologies. "No one cares about raw registrations anymore."