When I talk about Virtual Worlds in public, the audience is usually somewhat surprised, when I tell them that "Online Virtual World" does NOT EQUAL Second Life and that there are many more "citizens of the metaverse" than "residents of Second Life". Actually there are dozens of platforms out there, which can be called "virtual world", even though they might be very much different from products like There, Second Life or HiPiHi. And I am not talking about online games like World of Warcraft with millions of paying subscribers, which could be called a virtual world, too
There is a nice - though probably not complete - overview table of virtual worlds over at VirtualWorldsNews. It is a long list and it shows the variety and diversity already available or soon to appear on the market. It is not easy to compare them, though. It is not even easy to learn about their size in sheer numbers. Second Life certainly seems to be one of the biggest worlds if you look at open-ended 3D environments. There are much more impressive numbers for some of the more simple platforms, like Gaia, Club Penguin, Habbo, Cyworld and the like.
The table contains a funny mix of "registered users", "members", "subscribers", "uniques" etc., though. And each company has its own definition for many of these terms. This really makes it hard, to do any meaningful comparison.
What is most promising in this context is a new initiative called the Metaverse Market Index, by Nick Wilson of Metaversed fame, Robert Blumfield from Cornell University and Christian Renaud from Cisco. I really do hope that this initiative gets some traction. It won't be easy, though. For most companies developing and maintaining these platforms it is rather important from PR point of view, to publish numbers as large as possible. So I am not sure at all, if they are really interested in transparency. (The only company offering some true transparency currently seems to be Linden Lab.)
The conceptual and technical problems between the current situation and meaningfull metrics are not small ones, though.
Comments