After reading an article about Showtime's persistent presence in SL (You can read it here- http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/01/10/showtime-mulls-expansion-of-sl-presence/)
, I came across another article about Coca-Cola moving their SL presence to a competitor, www.there.com. This got me thinking about other SL competitors, and how Second Life intends to stay ahead of the competition. In addition to direct competitors such as
IMVU,
There,
Active Worlds, and
Kaneva (list taken from Wikipedia's article on SL), how many others can be considered indirect competitors? Does SL see itself as a business competing with MMORPGS, such as World of Warcraft? What about Sony's Home environment on the PS3 (thanks to another poster for info. about Home), or the Sims Online?
How popular are any of these virtual environments, anyway? I've seen articles boasting the number of registered accounts on SL, but to my knowledge nobody knows how many accounts are active or how much time the average user spends in-world. I'd wager none of the virtual environments (SL and its direct competitors) are as popular as WoW. Could this be a reflection of the preference for goods consumption over creation? Reflecting back on some of our past readings about virtual worlds representing human utopia, what does this say about our ideal world? Perhaps we feel more comfortable with rules and restrictions rather than an open environment. Sure, we like to try to bend the rules sometimes, but just like children, perhaps we prefer having boundaries in place.
