Mainstream duopoly

The Economist has an article about Second Life (subscribers only), labeled a "special report" and being 3 pages long in the print magazine. I've seen Second Life discussed in Businessweek and the New York Times. In fact it is hard to tell which of the two games, Second Life or World of Warcraft, is receiving more media attention. But fact is that if you open a non-gaming magazine or newspaper and find an article about virtual online worlds, it will be either about WoW or Second Life. No other game ever gets a headline, they might just be mentioned somewhere in a list.

The surprising thing in this is that Second Life isn't a terribly successful MMO. While it has 750,000 "residents", this is just the number of people that have a free account. The number of paying subscribers, aka landowners, is just 25,000. And the number of concurrent users is a measly 9,000. Even Dungeons and Dragons Online has more players and monthly revenue, but never gets mentioned in a print magazine. So why is Second Life part of the mainstream duopoly?

The answer is probably the interesting business model of Second Life, which in a way is full in the famous "Web 2.0" trend. Users create content and sell it to other users, with the company owning the platform getting a share. The top ten Second Life entrepreneurs are reported to make an average income of $200,000 a year. With numbers like these, people easily oversee the fact that with just 9,000 players online at any given time, Second Life isn't quite the shining example justifying big investments in the Web 2.0. The big incomes are often made by virtual land speculation, the revenue from actually creating and selling virtual items is a lot smaller.

But in a way the duopoly is justified, because World of Warcraft and Second Life pretty much cover the two extremes of the game vs. world scale on which all MMO must find their place. WoW is very much a game, with up to now very little world aspects. There isn't even player housing, no way for a player to leave a permanent mark on the world. Second Life is the extreme world type MMO, with no game content except for user-created games. Here the user can't slay dragons and level up to ultimate power, but he can rent a piece of land, create his own dream home, and fill it with his own creations of virtual furniture, or buy these from other players. Many other games are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, being more game than Second Life, but more world than World of Warcraft.

While game critics often like world aspects in MMO, the MMOs leaning more towards the game side have traditionally sold a lot better. Fact is that most people either aren't very creative, or prefer to express their creativity in the real world. Very few houses in MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies or Ultima Online were actually worth looking at. I never played Second Life, but I am pretty certain that besides a few shining examples, there is also a lot of user created garbage in that game. A more game like MMO, where most of the content is created by developers and is subject to a certain quality control, usually ends up being nicer to interact with. And the game aspect of killing monsters, gaining experience points and levels, and looting stuff, is a lot easier to digest after a hard day at work than the task of creating new content. We are still far from a Web 2.0 world MMO beating out a game in the number of users, and we might never get there.