You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2007.
A month ago I blogged about what is shaping up to be an interesting virtual world law case between an ex-Second Life user (Bragg) and Linden Labs (SL’s developer). I summarize the case at the very bottom of the post if you’re not familiar with it. That post talked about Judge Robreno’s ruling that he was declaring part of Linden’s ToS invalid, among other things. Linden has now filed its response to Bragg’s claims, as well as its counterclaims (they are suing Bragg now). You can find the court filing here.
My friend Dave IM’d me earlier asking, “Are you ready to feel old? I can do it in a single link.”
http://www.paxtonland.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/baby-on-nevermind-album-cover.JPG
Sigh. I hate you, Dave.
I dislike the term “serious games,” which implies that there is something that isn’t serious about, say, WoW. I’ll go ahead and suggest that a service that brings in ~$700 million/year in revenue and provides thousands of jobs (both within Blizzard and in multiple gold-generating operations) is a lot more serious than any game that has, to date, been produced with a purpose other than entertainment. In fact, I’m just going to refer to them as Alternative Purpose Games (APGs) until I grow tired of having to explain what I mean every time I use the term. I think APG sums them up much more clearly than ‘Serious’ does when trying to distinguish between games whose purpose is entertainment and games whose purpose is something else.
Anarchy Online has become the latest MMO to add virtual item sales. That’s all. Just thought it was interesting. (Related note: Funcom just raised another $30 million.)
Adobe has a piece up about Sherwood RPG, a 3d MMO that runs in Shockwave (a web browser extension if you’re not familiar with it). Sherwood garners 1.4 million unique visitors a month, is completely free, and is ad-supported. It also takes about 30 seconds from clicking ‘Play Now’ to getting into the play experience, if you have Shockwave installed (I have heard Shockwave has about 55% penetration in the US market).
A few people have asked where I am today and why I’m not at the Virtual Goods Summit. My apologies if you were looking for me. Something came up this morning that required my attention and by the time it was sorted out there was only one session left I could have made it to, which isn’t worth the hour drive each way.
I hope it was a great conference, and thanks to Charles and Susan for putting it on. I look forward to watching the video of it.
Neopets, an online environment in which users raise virtual pets, has announced that it will begin to sell virtual items to its users. For those who have somehow avoided Neopets, know that it’s one of the most popular online games in the world, with more monthly users (12 million) than WoW, Runescape, Habbo, and so on. It’s not a virtual world but it certainly competes with some of the ones aimed at tweens.
Players will purchase “Neocash” with real money (the equivalent of the “credits” that we sell), and that currency will co-exist with “Neopoints” which is the currency earned in-game by completing tasks and playing mini-games. Interestingly, Neopets has opted not to allow players to trade Neopoints for Neocash, which makes little sense that I can see. By allowing players to trade Neopoints for Neocash, demand for Neocash would increase significantly, since you’re tapping into a greater demand by allowing that trade to happen.
Via Playnoevil.
10 years ago, Iron Realms (with me as its sole employee!) pioneered the “sale” of virtual assets in our first MMO - Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands. I always say pioneered rather than invented because the nature of virtual items is fuzzy (money is effectively virtual…do mortgage companies essentially sell virtual items by giving out loans?) and because even in the context of virtual worlds I’m fairly sure that it had happened on an isolated basis here or there before Achaea did it. On the other hand we are, as far as I know, the first company to ever build a business model around it. We were also, I’m fairly sure, the first virtual world to offer an in-world currency exchange allowing players to trade gold (earned in-game) for credits (purchased with real money) and thus play a commercial game for free, forever.
As I write this I’m in the midst of a game of Settlers on Xbox Live Arcade. I’ve played Settlers maybe ten times or so as a board game, but in the past week I’ve played probably 30 games via XBLA.
I suck. I don’t quite understand why as I’m typically reasonably good at turn-based strategy games, but Eileen and I have something like a 1-20 record. Granted, since the ranked games involve four players, the average record should be 5-15, but 1-20 is a long way from that! I can write off a couple games with the excuse that I was trying to write some of Earth Eternal’s history while playing, but that’s only four or five of those games.
I despair! But damn it, I will win.
I loved this quote from a Forbes article talking about how dubious the value proposition is for outside businesses in Second Life. It’s from the creative director of Wells Fargo’s digital marketing agency.
“Going into Second Life now is the equivalent of running a field marketing program in Iraq.”
As I posted last month, Club Penguin (one of the largest virtual worlds/MMOs around, focusing on kids) was in talks with Sony for acquisition at half a billion. According to paidContent, the deal is off. The Club Penguin folks were asking for upwards of half a billion, and Sony was offering $450 million or so. There were also some issues, apparently, with user churn and the insistence on the Club Penguin side that CP continue to donate a portion of profits to charity.
Club Penguin is a self-funded company as far as I know and while they’re doing about $30 million/year in profits or so, I can’t help but want to slap them and say 450 MILLION DOLLARS! If they’re that concerned with charity (and good for them if so!), take the money and give a hundred million to charity right now. We can all hope to have such dilemmas.
Sparter has launched its player-to-player virtual currency trading exchange today. It’s not the first P2P virtual currency exchange (playerauctions.com has been around for nearly a decade I believe) but it’s certainly the most high-profile one to launch and it’s got VC backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, a top-tier firm.
I’m curious how much it will be P2P and how much it will really be a clearing house for other virtual currency brokers like IGE and MOGS.com.
It’s no secret that Linden Labs (developer of Second Life) is experiencing a lot of bad PR these days. I’m not going to bother to look up the articles, but just Google yourself up “Second Life child porn”. Presumably in order to try and run damage control, Linden has angered a good portion of its userbase by instituting new rules that prohibit some types of violent and sexual content (that are legal in in the US, but not in, say, Germany).
Last night I was chatting with a friend who was in a call on Friday with a group looking to make social virtual world experiences for a number of prominent real-life brands. What was interesting was that my friend said that the group had rejected Second Life out of hand because the bad PR around it wasn’t something they wanted to be tainted with.
If you’ve not seen the announcement that Lego’s MMO will be called Lego Universe, here it is!
I don’t know why, especially given that few concrete details about it have been released that just sounds like fun. Kotaku opines that this could be the next big MMO and I’m tempted to agree, though it’s a long ways between now and Q4 2008.
EVE Online has an image problem and possibly an actual corruption problem (though I’m not entirely convinced). For those of you following the story, you can find a summary of all the relevant details here. Corruption by admin staff is nearly as old as MMOs and there’s nothing new or particularly interesting about the EVE corruption scandal unless you are an avid player of EVE.
What IS interesting is CCP’s response (detailed in the same article above). They’re setting up a player-run task force to supposedly oversee the games’ development and will go so far as to fly the players on that task force to Iceland (where they are headquartered) regularly to…..Well, to do what, I don’t know. As Raph points out, the idea of flying some people out to walk around an office and magically detect corruption is a bit silly. I don’t mean to sound overly cynical, and I’m sure CCP has the best of intentions, but it’s pretty clearly an empty PR exercise designed to make the player representatives feel important, feel included in some sort of inner circle, and thus be pre-disposed to saying nice things about CCP.
The quote that caught me and made me go “ugh” though was this one, from Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s top exec (who generally rocks). He said,
“Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.”
I don’t know whether he was really serious when he said this or if it was an off-the-cuff remark but it is a nonsensical assertion.
I have been remiss in not mentioning how much the DS game Puzzle Quest contributed to downtime on our recent vacation. For those of you who haven’t played it, Puzzle Quest is a lite-fantasy RPG wrapped around a battle mechanic that is essentially Bejeweled with some variations. It’s insanely addictive, and Eileen got her puzzle on considerably more frequently than I did. I don’t care for match-3 games normally but the added leveling up, earning gold, getting better equipment, finding runes, and so on creates a context (it’s always about context!) in which there’s enough added meaning that the games become fun.
Puzzle Quest might be the perfect airplane game.
I don’t post about food very often, but it’s one of the great joys in my life and I’ve written a few times about it before. Last week I happened to have an appetizer at what amounts to my local diner, and it was both delicious and well-presented. It was a take on insalata caprese, which is a salad of basil, tomato, and mozzarella. In this case, however, watermelon was used, and then the salad was drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Hadn’t seen that before but it was delicious. I decided to re-create it at home a couple nights later, and these are the results.