Thursday 20 December 2007

Virtual world growth predictions

Kzero has a nice little graphic showing predicted growth of various virtual worlds during 2008. I'll ignore the specific numbers since I have no idea what they actually mean but in terms of general trends it seems reasonable. There's a Slideshare presentation to go with the image.

Meanwhile, over on Second Thoughts, there are some predictions for Second Life in 2008.

I don't go in for crystal ball gazing myself - largely because I'm crap at it.

3 comments:

Peter Miller said...

I still think the position of the 10M ball for SL gives the impression it had 10M users in 2003 or earlier.

Anonymous said...

But now you understand it Peter, do you have an opinion on the growth forecasts?

Peter Miller said...

I don't think the number of registered users is all that important; the crucial number is the number of active and concurrent users. Maximum concurrency has stalled at 58K for the last few months and I predicted 75K for Dec 2008. The record was actually broken yesterday though by a significant margin. If those entering had a good experience (technical and content) then maybe there will be a snowball effect. However, against that is the fact that user experience tends to deteriorate significantly around peak concurrency and the likely advent of significant competition.