The Magic Million… now what?

So, sometime a few hours ago, we finally hit this fabled “million signups” that Linden Lab have been pushing for, for reasons unknown to the general population, thanks to SL being featured in a Yahoo news article about Reuters coming to Second Life.  Of course, over at Stratics, we interviewed Adam yesterday, but I guess as long as they catch up, it’s good that they give SL more publicity.

The question is… did we really need it, all in such a short space of time?

I see two problems so far.

Firstly, the SL infrastructure is creaking under the strain.  Earlier on, the forums failed completely, and there have been reports of corrupted install downloads and people having trouble connecting.

Secondly, the fact that most of these people signing in haven’t actually got a clue what they’re trying, except for the fact it’s free.

The Stratics Headquarters is designated as “Newcomer Friendly”, and some of the more intelligent new users have discovered us already through the Search facility.  Without fail, every one, dressed in their newbie uniform, has asked me two questions:

“So how do I make money here” and “So… um… what’s the point of this game”.

Typical newbie questions, but when you get asked 20 times in the space of an hour, it’s tempting to start pulling your hair out (although right click Detach would be less painful if it was a real life option).

Making money.  It takes time, skill, talent, marketing, finding a niche in the market, and lots of hard work.  That’s definitely not the answer they were looking for – and given all the LL marketing slant, you’d expect it to be growing on trees.  Ok, so in a few places it does – but only if you’re less than 30 days old usually.

What’s the point?  Well, forget every other online experience you’ve ever had.  Second Life is unlike anything else you have ever played.  There’s no point, no goals, no monsters to kill, no xp to collect, it’s entirely what you make it to be.  This is, I believe, SL’s greatest selling point – and biggest problem.  Your average gamer doesn’t want to spend weeks learning LSL, or figuring out the quirks of the build tool, they want to go and do STUFF.  It doesn’t matter what ’stuff’ it is, because looking at the joke that is the ‘popular places’ list, they’ll find *ingo, malls, camping chairs, casinos and laggy clubs, unfortunately missing out on so much of the potential that is SL. 

The question is… will they stay around long enough to actually discover these things?  Judging by the fact that less than 1% of this ‘playerbase’ is ever online, experience tells me that most of them won’t.