Reading Radar

Edit: re-reading this post, I have to think that they aren’t saying they had 30,000 signups and 1,000 land orders this week, they mean that’s what they have in total. But 20,774,912 sq m is only 317 sims, right? Not nearly 1000. I’m confused about what’s being claimed here. But I’ll assume they meant they hit over 30,000 sign ups, not that they had 30,000 last week. End of Edit.

Bettina Tizzy is reporting that Openlife claims 30,000 new signups in a week, and over 1,000 new land orders.

Here’s last week’s numbers published on their web site.

Here’s this week’s.

You be the judge. That’s a delta of less than 3,000, and the size of their metaverse hasn’t changed at all, meaning they haven’t filled any of those orders for land yet. Unless I’m misinterpreting what they mean by land orders, and they just mean people buying plots. But from their web site, the only land sales I see mentioned are sims.

I can’t wait until they really do start going through their growing pains and all the people who are supposedly leaving SL starting noticing “hey, this isn’t as smooth as we thought!”

Openlife is taking on a precarious role if they’re truly accepting the mantle of second Second Life by trying to attract the most dissatisfied SL’ers, because when they have a few “what the fuck just happened” moments, and they will if they really grow anywhere near as fast as they think they will, they’ll find out that how fickle people can be and how little most people want to go through the birthing process all over again.

Someday OpenSim solutions might be really appealing when they’re run like web servers and thousands of companies can offer stable sims with big bandwidth, but right now Openlife has to go through all the same stuff that LL went through to get scaled up. The difference is that their code is behind, and they have fewer people and less money.

Look, I’m not bashing them out of any kind of ill will, in fact I wish them all the best luck because choice is GOOD, but to think they’ll be able to sail sublimely through the troubled waters that LL’s already crossed is naive at best, amazingly stupid at most. They have huge challenges ahead. There are going to be problems, a lot of them which SL’s already been through. If people really understand that, that’s one thing.

I just keep remembering the whining about the system skirt. If people are upset about that kind of hardship, imagine what’ll happen when they routinely can’t keep prim attachments on or scripts go wonky, they can’t stay logged in for more than 10 minutes, and their inventory has to reload every time they cross a sim border (which kept happening to me, btw). I hope the crew at Openlife actually understands for real the high expectations of SL’ers if they’re actually trying to pull the disgruntled ones over. You know… the ones with higher expectations and less tolerance than anyone else?