Peering inside - Second Life's user retention

One year ago, Linden Lab gave out the 90 day retention figure for Second Life. That is, the percentage of people who were still logging in to the virtual world after their first 90 days. That figure was 10 percent.

In the 12 months since that time, there have been an enormous number of changes. Changes to the user interface, two completely new orientation plans, a complete reworking of the volunteer corps who help new people out, a new knowledge-base and Support Portal/ticketing system.

So, what's the number now?

Actually, according to Linden Lab - it's still ten percent.

Originally, we were given the impression (though it was not explicitly stated) that the retention figure given last year had held true for perhaps a year. "That percentage hasn't changed much with the much higher rate of new users," said Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale at the time.

And a year later, all the efforts to improve retention seem to have had no overall impact, positive or negative. That's a bit of a head-scratcher, really. A completely new orientation island was built, deployed and tested against shorter term retention results from the old one. When it showed to be performing better than the old system, it was widely cloned.

These days there are many orientation systems, competing to provide the best short-term retention gains - but once we get to the 90-day retention figure, we're still talking ten percent.

Live Help has been discontinued and replaced with a ticketing/triage system and web-based Support Portal.

Voice has been added to the grid.

Specialist Linden Lab staff oversee the volunteer teams who have been completely remade with their own orientations and training, new facilities and orientation.

Not to mention all the mainstream media hype that annoys just about everyone.

And it's still ten percent.

Whether that ten percent figure is actually good or bad depends on who you ask. Some people will tell you that that figure is actually very good (one MMO operator tells me that it is - but won't let me name them or give me their own figure), other pundits think it's terrible.

We've contacted the PR arms for a number of game and non-game MMOs and asked what their comparable figure is. So far, everyone's declined to provide one (or declined to respond).

So, we can speculate all we like about whether ten percent is wonderful, terrible or just about the industry average, and that won't help any - there's no data to work from.

The really interesting thing is the lack of change in the retention figure itself - despite everything done to improve user experience - it's not budging, so far as we've been told.