Coffee Pancake, co-host of the largest Second Life-themed group on Reddit, recently noticed an odd trend in her subreddit related to IMVU users, and began investigating.
Her findings coincide with some data points I’ve been wondering about myself — IMVU has shed millions of monthly active users in recent years, with even website traffic from its official site slipping beneath Second Life. (Even though on paper, SL has about 500,000 active users, versus IMVU’s 4 million or so.)
What’s going on? Here’s Coffee Pancake’s observations around the recent decline of IMVU activity — which includes a hidden warning for Second Life too. – WJA
We’re seeing an uptick in new users on the Second Life subreddit, some specifically mention having come from IMVU. There has been something of an exodus going on the last few years that might have stepped up in our direction lately. Curiosity got the better of me, so down the rabbit hole I went.* While I am not an expert on IMVU, I hope my observations provide an informed perspective, yet my impressions may contain mistakes and misconceptions (and I welcome any feedback).
For Second Life users unfamiliar: IMVU is a more socially focused platform, designed around a chatroom-based structure and social mechanics. A notable difference is that avatars can’t freely walk and must instead pick from specific predetermined places to sit or pose, an open world skipped in favor of only hosting social destinations.
The entire platform is a series of chat rooms of various flavors, some made by the operators, most made by the users. There’s shopping, mini-games, and an Instagram-style feed. Fundamentally, not much is going on aside from dressing up, posting and reacting to thirst on the feeds, hanging out, chatting, and engaging in many forms of roleplay. Family groups (including adopted child-like avatars) form a core social foundation with a range of themes and styles springing from that. This includes a considerable amount of adult and kink activity (with illicit ‘market rooms’ known for black market content), combat, furries, holding court, and the occasional coven for the obligatory vampires.
Basically, all the stuff we do [in SL], for all of the same reasons… with less walking. So, while their avatars do have legs, they don’t get out much.
I’ve done some research into IMVU community spaces online, and the following issues are mentioned frequently:
- VIP (their version of SL Premium) was split into 4 membership tiers, separate for both desktop and mobile, increasing the cost to participate and create.
- Constant upsell attempts through aggressive client spam.
- Presence of actual minors.
- Struggling creators leaving, citing the high cost of doing business and membership requirements.
- Accusations that staff-player relationships focus on big winners & influencers to the point of corrupting policy & governance.
- Lack of governance accountability, arbitrary bans, and perceived lack of fairness or understanding.
- Limited ways to resolve billing issues result in lost accounts and bans.
- Lack of chat in chat rooms & parked (AFK) avatars.
- Plummeting online population.
- Actual bots spamming the feeds [see image at right]
- Suggestions of company employees acting as users & astroturfing.
- NFTs (that failed to take hold as hoped).
- Broadly unpopular “dumbed down” web client.
- Lack of community representation in marketing, especially…
- Shame surrounding the adult Access Pass (AP) community, despite it being the biggest, most loyal, and most profitable.
- Replacing the one-time payment Access Pass (AP) with a monthly subscription (AP+).
In summary, what seems to have happened is a corporate-led desire to refresh the platform, focusing on a younger generation of users, leading with a simpler, easier client, mobile focus, and gradually adding more monetization. There have been surveys to gauge end-user sentiment and reactions, but these are criticized for using leading questions to guide respondents to management’s desired answer. There is an observed lack of PR, marketing, and a disconnect between the platform’s policies and support/governance actions.
The IMVU YouTube channel has some pretty abysmal viewing figures, many of their user story feature pieces having hundreds (hundreds!) of views after a year of being published. Marketing seems to be generally limited to keyword squatting on App Store search terms (including “Second Life”).
Creators have been bailing for a while due to fees, perceived lack of protection from content theft, and an uneven/unfair slant to market operations from both the platform and other users gaming the system.
The social community has broadly tanked with multiple stacked factors in play: The user base very much views the platform as an over-18s ‘adults-only’ space. The presence of actual minors (some having acquired an adult Access Pass) and adult content in general spaces make the platform feel unsafe for everyone. Heavily loaded terms like ‘infested’ are thrown about, with no possible middle ground.
A strong mobile focus has certainly made the platform accessible to the under-18 demographic, but the established user base wants nothing to do with them, especially in adult spaces.
A recently pushed update to the chat system very imperfectly censors chat everywhere (public GA spaces, private AP, and private messages) in what appears to be an attempt to police the broader ToS & community standards. This, combined with fears about the company keeping & preserving conversation logs, has users wondering why they should bother saying anything at all.
All combined, the effect has been to silence active participation. No one talks, giving the impression chat rooms are empty, with avatars apparently ‘parked’ boosting conversation tourism (users trawling the platform wishing to find an active conversation rather than start one). Why talk to someone who just appeared and isn’t going to stay anyway?
The community perception is that IMVU is socially dead. Reduced to an Instagram-style ‘smash or pass’ feed with an avatar store, users parked in public rooms acting as baited lures to engage elsewhere (typically Discord), actual children trying to get in on the fun while the operators deliberately look the other way, wishing they had Roblox’s fortunes.
Second Life is mentioned from time to time, either as the place people have moved on to, or as being hard and having all the same problems.
IMVU has some distinct usability and accessibility advantages over SL. It’s a tighter experience and, therefore, easier to engage with, especially on a limited mobile device. The system requirements are far lower, and complaints about performance are few and far between. There is potential for the time between login and a meaningful interaction to be far lower than SL can ever manage. On the flip side, if Discord ever integrates 3D avatars and someplace for them to sit, the entire platform could become irrelevant overnight.
My impression is the bulk of the user base appears to be mobile, which accounts for the population count, some of the interest in our own mobile client, and the high numbers of broadly unwelcome actual minors.
IMVU is a simpler platform, capable of evolving and adapting far faster than Second Life. Yet, its recent trajectory and much of the social commentary I’ve encountered feel eerily familiar—relevant and foreboding. A world without liminal spaces left feeling entirely so.
The two platforms are very different in many ways, but socially, the core interests are exactly the same. Everything people do in SL socially they do in IMVU with the same motivations. Social locations in SL tend to mirror the way IMVU works and deliberately eschew all the extras SL offers.
If the end result is avatars sitting around chatting, how they got into the seats is immaterial. Second Life’s social and roleplay scene, for example, is on the rocks. Myself and a friend just did a deep dive into the Star Wars RP scene in SL as a non- Adult passtime and it’s shocking: A few sim owners hanging on due to sunk cost and discord servers full of people complaining there is no roleplay anymore.
I’m really not sure we in Second Life are on a different path from IMVU, or that what’s different about SL changes the ultimate outcome.
*NOTE: These insights are based on compiled sentiment from reading posts on IMVU’s Reddit community, their forums, and conversations with several regular IMVU users. To protect their identify, I’m not directly linking to specific discussion threads.
What’s your take on Coffee’s take, readers? I’d especially love IMVU users past and present to weigh in. I’m also contacting IMVU the company so they have a chance to reply, if desired.