Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します
Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.
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The reader conversation around creating an AI-driven experience that improves Second Life new user retention continues. Just please, writes, Zane Zimer, no SL bot like Clippy, the intrusive, unhelpful "assistant":
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- Second Life Mobile Updates Coming Soon (on my Patreon)
- VRChat's Solution to the Social Problem of Poorly Optimized Avatars
- Cajsa's Choices: Six Favorite Scenes of Celebrating Winter in Second Life
- Roblox Joins Epic in Fight Against the App Stores. Will Other Metaverse Platforms Join Them?
- VRChat Peak Usage Trending Toward New Record (150K+) This New Year
- Here's How AI Bots Could Help Improve Second Life's New User Experience
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New on my Patreon: Get a sneak peek of upcoming features to Second Life's mobile app — and the long-term marketing strategy which drives it. For instance:
"The mobile app was not designed for new users where I spend a million dollars to bring [them in]," as [Linden head Brad] Oberwager put it. "We built the mobile app for current residents… we're not putting marketing dollars to bring in new people." Under their strategy, they even expect mobile users may create an alt account for mobile, yet continue using the desktop client.
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Recently saw a Reddit rant about a VRChat avatar with a hilariously ridiculous number of triangles (above), and had to laugh in recognition at the title: "Friends joining with these half a million polygon avies are literally ruining the experience (not only for me)! This is outrageously stupid and unnecessary!"
Maybe unnecessary, but also inevitable, on metaverse platforms: When you give novice grassroots creators UGC tools for enhancing their avatars, many will add so many enhancements, they often end up making avies with quite a lot of polygon junk in their trunk.
This also has been a challenge in Second Life for many years. Many of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are extremely resource heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies. (They're so resource heavy, a former Linden Lab engineer once compared them to a local DDOS attack!) Some SL shopping events have even taken to setting up a "viewing sim" near the actual kiosks, so shoppers can view the wares at a safe, less laggy distance.
As for VRChat, there's some guidance in place which makes this less of a social problem:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
With this unseasonably warm winter, back in my hometown they are measuring how thick the ice is trying to determine if it’s safe to put their ice houses out on the lake. (See photo at the end of this post!) That made me think how lucky we are in Second Life where the ice is always thick enough, even in July.
Angelus van Engelen captures some of the delight of an ice-covered canal where folks gather just as in a city park, to enjoy the frost in the air and under their feet. There were generally 300 or more houses on our lake, though since there were multiple islands and coves you only saw about a quarter of them at a time. If you want to go to the canal and skate, here is a ticket. [Teleport link here: Canal City]
For more icy adventures, click here:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Tamarind Silverfall sure knows how to focus our eyes. There is a path leading our eyes into the fairy cave and if that were not enough, the bright frost-covered roses and the bright butterfly frame the cave and keep our focus on it. It’s a beautifully composed picture.
For more of Tamarind’s lovely pictures, click here:
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In case you missed it over the Thanksgiving holiday rush last week, Roblox is now actively promoting sales of its virtual currency Robux via its website as opposed to making the same purchase on mobile or console.
This is highly significant, because up until recently, companies like Apple and Google would delist Roblox for doing something like this, since it deprives their app stores of the usual 30% in-app purchase cut. But with a court ruling against Google in favor of Epic last October, Roblox is joining Epic in what's effectively a game of chicken against the major platform publishers. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is ebullient at this, of course, praising Roblox for "finally fighting the Apple tax".
So now Epic's Fortnite and Roblox, the world's most popular metaverse platforms, are openly challenging the major app publishers. How will the largest, Apple, react?
"I think Apple has been browbeaten into this position by regulators," a veteran virtual world exec tells me. "There's a lot of attention on Apple at the moment looking at whether they're anticompetitive or not. A few years ago, this would be a fast track to having your app updates denied — or worse, be removed from the store. Today, Apple is allowing it; but I would surmise they're not happy about it."
One way of making this move a fait accompli is if the other metaverse platforms in the app stores follow suit — specifically, Rec Room, ZEPETTO, VRChat, IMVU… and, of course, Second Life. Should they join forces with Roblox and Fortnite?
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Via the VRChat metrics site and a highly helpful VRC source, here's the latest concurrency trends for our favorite next gen metaverse platform. If you click to embiggenate, you'll see that peak concurrency has been trending toward 120,000 in recent weeks, hitting just shy of that over the Thanksgiving weekend holiday.
That's decent growth from last New Year's Eve — that holiday is typically the platform's biggest day, usage wise — when it reached the 100,000 CCU milestone. (105,991, to be exact.) This concurrency has been steadily, slowly creeping up every weekend, with most of the usage from Quest users.
Given these trends, I think there's a pretty decent chance VRChat reaches another milestone soon: 150,000 CCU for this New Year's Eve.
Because historically there's been a spike of user growth every holiday season:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 