Back in March, Cory Ondrejka, CTO of Linden Lab bet Dmitri Williams a quarter that within 2 years, Second Life would have more North American subscribers than World of Warcraft.

Since then, the debate raged and raged.

I managed to add fuel to the flames by doing the math and calculating what would happen if the current growth figures for Second Life continue.

Recently, Cory pointed out the inherent silliness of the WOW vs. SL grudgematch:

“To compare SL’s growth curve to any existing MMORPG is a little silly. WoW launched with approximately $10 trillion in advertising (I may be off by a factor of 2 one way or the other), like all other MMORPGs, and is primarily driven by retail sales. SL launched with approximately $0 in marketing and is completely based on viral, referral growth.”

Amen. It’s really interesting to watch this debate unfold but ultimately frustating because its almost intrinsically doomed because of the the apples to oranges problem. Although Second Life looks like an MMORPG and uses much of the same tech, the similarities sort of end there. Both in terms of adoption and usage patterns, Second Life’s growth has been much more like that of the Internet than like a single game title.

My prediction and hope is that it will continue to do so (grow like the Net). In fact, one could argue that the accelerating success of SL is the result of a series of conscious anti-MMORPG-model decisons. Listed briefly these would be user created content, user ownership of their own content, the allowing of free trade in virtual items and finally the move to a free model where the majority of free users support the paying minority and allow them to pay much larger monthly fees.

For SL to continue to move toward an Internet-like model, it will require sustained vision and counterintuitive decision making on the part of Linden Lab. Specifically, to accomodate the scope of their vision, they will need to continue to sacrifice control and/or ownership of slices of the software stack, placing those in the hands of users or 3rd Party companies.

To me the question isn’t will SL catch WOW, it’s when. And while it’s fine for us to spend our time arguing over definitions of users or time spent in world, the truth is that SL and WOW are radically different beasts. WOW is arguably the most polished example of MMORPG the world has seen to date — this type of highly orchestrated and refined content is something that distributed content creation will never (IMHO) threaten. I’d love to be proven wrong and will be overjoyed to sit enthralled in the audience watching a movie like Titanic that was made by thousands of loosely connected prosumers, but I highly doubt it’ll happen. And hence, there’ll always be room for WOW and it’s sucessors.

SL is something radically different and ultimately much larger. What I’d love to see is a shift in focus, away from the “Who’s Bigger and Badder?” debate. Instead, why don’t we start puzzling out the really tough problem of how Second Life (and ultimately others like it) should handle the radically difficult problems and great responsiblity that come with creating a true 3-D internet.

This entry was filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.