Most Business-Launched Virtual Worlds Fail 72
bughunter writes "Internet consultant firm Gartner claims that only 1 in 10 commercial virtual worlds succeeds, and most fail within 18 months: 'Businesses have learned some hard lessons," Gartner analyst Steve Prentice said in a statement released Thursday. "They need to realize that virtual worlds mark the transition from Web pages to Web places and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics. Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience."'" Hard to believe it's even as high as one in ten -- most "virtual worlds" with obvious commercial trappings certainly don't inspire much besides mockery.
Most Businesses Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
The average success rates for most businesses is also about 1 in 10.
Re:Most Businesses Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, your mileage may vary, but I didn't take the point of hardburn's post to to be that he was offering precise data to be taken to the bank, nor do I think the absence of a citation invalidates the point. I took the statement to be a stylized way of asking "is it clear that this failure rate is special to the business domain?" Or, put another way, "is the choice of business domain driving these businesses down artificially, or is it the same thing that drives all businesses down: failure to keep an eye on the business need?" Even in the summary, the statement:
highlights an issue that seems certain to bring down plenty of companies (who cares the precise number?) if they fail to attend to a material customer need for which people will be willing to pay.
After the so-called dot-com bust, for example, there seemed to be a sense that investing in things named ".com" was risky or bad. Surely people had lost money investing in this or that dot com. But not because of the name ".com". That was just smokescreen designed by some skillful person interested in face-saving to say "It's ok you lost money here. Don't be embarrassed. It wasn't something you could have forseen. It was due to the nature of the market." But in quite a lot of cases it wasn't. It was due to the idea of investing in something you didn't understand and that never had a clearly articulated plan for making money in the first place. And learning that the absence of such a plan is going to lead to problems wasn't news ... or shouldn't have been.
So whether the poster can back that specific pseudo-statistic with a citation or not, I still think the apparent point seems valid.
Re:Most Businesses Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Mod parent up to 5 and let's just declare this thread successfully finished. What more really needs saying?
Re:Most Businesses Fail (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Most Businesses Fail (Score:5, Informative)
Two-thirds of new employer establishments survive at least two years, and 44 percent survive at least four years, according to a recent study. These results were similar for different industries. Firms that began in the second quarter of 1998 were tracked for the next 16 quarters to determine their survival rate. Despite conventional wisdom that restaurants fail much more frequently than firms in other industries, leisure and hospitality establishments, which include restaurants, survived at rates only slightly below the average. Earlier research has explored the reasons for a new business's survivability. Major factors in a firm's remaining open include an ample supply of capital, being large enough to have employees, the owner's education level, and the owner's reason for starting the firm in the first place, such as freedom for family life or wanting to be one's own boss.
Sturgeon's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sturgeon's Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sturgeon's Law (Score:5, Funny)
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Because they're a stupid idea (Score:2)
Re:... do something... (Score:2)
A fun way to look at businesses is "every action someone can do has a market... the only question is whether the market pays enough".
Virtual Lawyers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Virtual Lawyers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Virtual Lawyers? (Score:5, Funny)
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My Virtual World (Score:5, Funny)
While it isn't business, it is life. My virtual world has never failed me. Especially six. I live in it now. I deviate and fork when I dream. Dream I do. If I don't like things, I change it. I live two instances of virtuality, my dreams state and my outwardly facing persona.
Best part, it works without a computer. Requires no electricity, although a few beers helps.
Miller time!
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Also, a few beers?
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You have to know me why I said that.
Love the USA. I am not one of those inbreed types following the bullshit politics out of Ottawa. Don't follow NDP hatred of NAFTA, Americans and Canadians in my view are kissing cousins with stupid political spats in between.
America is great.
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I'm American. I was thinking more about Labatt. Much better than Miller. If you get away from pilsner, from what I remember when I drank it, Moosehead was pretty good also.
Moosehead, we send that down south for a reason ;) Labatts, never drink that stuff warm, same with Budweiser. Now Miller and Big Rock...yum. MGD is good with a twist of lime when it is above 30C and when it gets cold a full bodied Big Rock hits the spot. Labatts 50, Old Stock and Brador, give that to my American friends when they come and visit. Nicely chilled and high test, gets them going fast.
Wish Miller still made Lowenbrau, was a nice amber lager. Something like Molson Golden before it was screwed
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You can't touch this.
Virtual mockery (Score:4, Funny)
Especially here.
Re:Virtual mockery (Score:5, Funny)
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Obligatory IBM conversation (Score:3, Insightful)
Employee: He doesn't know how to do that.
Manager: The whole point of innovation is to make money.
Network Effect (Score:3, Insightful)
Web Places? (Score:1)
Re:Web Places? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Buzzwords (Score:3, Informative)
Once you get past the Snarking, sometimes the buzzwords actually have a point.
A Web Place requires the user to spend tangible amounts of time physically present at the place, preferably with greater than 25% attentiveness. IRC is the case study to "online in absentia".
AOL's legions of Septemberites learned their first wee steps of the web because they responded in raucous rapid-fire quantities to each other.
Re:Web Places & Pages (Score:2)
Sure.
You posted to a Web Page at 8:23 PM. You don't feel it's necessary to hang around for 2 hours for me to post my reply at 10:30.
The problem with "web places" is that no one has quite mastered how to "hang" at web places without spending first tier time at a computer. As a few SF books have shown, web places will take off when you can visit for 17 minutes in the line at a restaurant.
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The problem with "web places" is that no one has quite mastered how to "hang" at web places without spending first tier time at a computer. As a few SF books have shown, web places will take off when you can visit for 17 minutes in the line at a restaurant.
It's called a 'smart phone'. They will be invented in about the year 2000. Furthermore I predict that a well-known upmarket vendor of digital appliances will come out with a very elegant one in about the year 2007, and that it will rapidly become popular.
Great, this predictions business!
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Yeah... that might actually replace "e-learning 2.0 Space" [slashdot.org] as my favorite buzzword laden nonsense in a Slashdot summary.
WTF counts as a virtual world. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dreaming Companies (Score:4, Informative)
It's also because they need financial partners, so they tend to inflate their numbers to attract money.
Investors like to hear about attracting 0.01% of the Internet users, even if they have nothing new, or even worse, nothing to sell !
Hint: I worked in 2 such game companies, and they both failed !
Buzzword bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is why Slashdot is great. A previous poster didn't know the difference between the two words. You explain in great form.
Now that the difference is apparent, I agree that someone misjudged the implications of "virtual meatspace"... which at its worst is like Small Town Effect. "Oh look! A dandelion!"
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Um, it's Gartner (Score:5, Insightful)
First, Gartner is pathetic [pbs.org].
Second, there are some virtual worlds launched by businesses that have been astoundingly successful. They're called MMORPGs.
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Attention on deck! (Score:2)
Keep up the good work, Slashdot needs more committed members like you.
P.S.
This article has NOTHING to do with ga
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also... Cringely is frequently wrong, but always for interesting reasons. One of the few talking heads (typing fingers?) out there who seem to process what they take in rather than reframe what they read. You would do well to emulate this behavior.
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Cringely is frequently wrong, but always for interesting reasons. One of the few talking heads (typing fingers?) out there who seem to process what they take in rather than reframe what they read. You would do well to emulate this behavior.
I'd read the Cringely article before I got to this thread. Yes, Cringely is sometimes wrong. But he's not wrong about Gartner (or Aberdeen Group, or other such-like 'research companies'). Of course, the fact that they mostly spout rubbish doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong in this report, which I haven't read.
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never thought I'd see somebody complaining about Gartner
haha
What virtual worlds? (Score:1)
Most MMOs fail before even hitting the market, too (Score:4, Insightful)
Heck, even some of the ones that are still going today would have died if they hadn't gotten lucky. Vanguard is only around because SOE bailed out Sigil, and the product is still not very good a full year after release. It should have never gone gold when it did, as it's now a "paid beta".
The only thing that keeps the full numbers from looking so bad is the various "free to play but with an item mall" MMOs that come out of the Asian Pacific market. They can all call themselves successful, but they have no recurring income due to subscriptions, so they have little to no future development, and are basically "how many potions can you carry and use" games with no strategy outside of that.
Don't think so many have gone belly up? Check this site out, and look at the number of games that were cancelled either pre-beta or during beta, or after launch. It's a lot. BetaWatcher [betawatcher.com]
Re:Most MMOs fail before even hitting the market, (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Most MMOs fail before even hitting the market, (Score:3, Interesting)
Fixed that for you. And I'm quite serious: many of the exciting new products in many fields are proposed by people who have no idea of what the market will actually support, misled by their own hopes and the VC marketer who took the commission for finding them the money and is long gone by the time the product finishes failing. Far
Re:Most MMOs fail before even hitting the market, (Score:2)
Not all worlds are mocked (Score:2)
most "virtual worlds" with obvious commercial trappings certainly don't inspire much besides mockery
That might be true of a lot of B-list games and such, but "virtual worlds" like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Second Life have more fans than detractors.
more sucessful than sourceforge! (Score:1)
Success or not (Score:1)
A spectacular failure with promising starts is of course, The Sims Online.
Snow Crash (Score:2)
virtual 3d office (no - not "virtual 3d desktop") (Score:2, Insightful)
no, not a virtual desktop, because that would imply that placing every single item - like a 3D filing cabinet - onto the 3D rendition of the "desk top" - is something that people would find "useful".
the "desk top" metaphor has been overused and overburdened, and, after several decades of pain, i think it's clear that it's no longer "useful".
a 600mhz ULV pentium M, in combination with the older 815 extreme graphics c
Re:virtual 3d office (no - not "virtual 3d desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
My employers will sell you this. Indeed, they'll be delighted to sell you this, since we developed it three years ago and so far have no real customers. It's a great idea... on paper.
My virtual business (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the reason 9 out of 10 businesses fail in virtual worlds, is they are so easy to start. Its nothing to buy land (rent server space) and set up shop. You don't even have to have a product of your own. The hard part, is taking it seriously, customer support, having events and such.
The second reason is most people open the store and think its like a web page, place things for sale and people buy.. completely automated.. no work at all.. I find, in virtual worlds the community factor is something that those 9 don't take into consideration. When coke put up there sim, it was empty of anyone that works there. People come to virtual worlds to communicate, explore, and create, and it defeats the whole purpose of the virtual world not to have a staff on hand to communicate and reach out to the audience.
And, as far as the fancy ligth show, and physics, I would agree that the core business user of a virtual world would not care about those things, but I believe the base users do. They want a great experience with great graphics. Most people that come into second life just want to escape reality for a bit, roll play, chat with friends and those thing add to the experience. And if you have not seen the wind light version of secondlife, I recommend you take a look, its stunning.
And now time to defend virtual worlds a bit... Last night I was searching the net high and low for a mathematical solution, but could not find it anywhere. I join the mathematics group in second life and had the answer I was looking for in just seconds. This is a great example of how the community is very powerful function in virtual worlds. In the future, I do believe virtual worlds will increase in popularity. I know IBM, Google, and Second life are working together now on something even bigger and better. While, right now, I would never suggest using second life as a work at home but in a virtual office, with the price of gas I believe something like that will become even more popular or more likely in the future.
Well.. just my 2 cents.
a virtual world currency that pays a divident... (Score:1)