The South Korean government has even dropped the requirement of military service for those willing to work in the game industry, considering digital games key to the international export of Korean culture.
Jun 072007
Meet-Me, new Japanese virtual world
(Visited 11651 times) Game talk
Jun 072007
Virtual Worlds News has the details because they beat me to having the article translated. Ah, the cruel battles of blogdom.
In any case, head over there for the scoop. In short:
- A mirror world that mimics Tokyo
- Lego-style building rather than prims
- More locked-down in terms of content creation
- Heavy emphasis on events
Eve democratic?
(Visited 11384 times) Game talk
Jun 072007
The big news today is of course the announcement that Eve Online will allow players to elect an oversight committee, intended as a response to the recent charges of corruption.
I have to admit I feel ambivalent about it. I have been playing with the idea of player-elected representatives for a long time. At one point, I wanted the SWG correspondents to be player-elected. Ironically, players seem to react negatively to this sort of idea when it’s presented — take for example, the player commenter over on Scott Jennings’ blog, who basically dismisses elections of all sorts with the remark
So, players elect people to go check up on CCP. No way will those guys be favored stooges for the resident uber-guilds.
Kinda like Senators are favored stooges for lobbyists, I guess is how the logic goes.
Some HiPiHi details
(Visited 7547 times) Game talk
Jun 062007
Not many, but there’s some new screens and some commentary about what it plays like over at Centric – Agency of Change. It’s basically a top ten list of notable things they saw in HiPiHi.
What struck me about the list was how full of, well, assumptions it was. As if the template for virtual worlds were more settled than it actually is.
NYT looks at kids’ worlds AGAIN
(Visited 14720 times) Game talk
Jun 062007
“Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play”, says the New York Times. Among the games covered are ones I hadn’t really paid attention to before, like Stardoll and Cartoon Doll Emporium.
Over at Virtual Worlds News they give this handy table summarizing the growth rates of some of these; I added to the table with additional unique user stats elsewhere in the article:
Site Users in April 2006 Users in April 2007
Club Penguin 794,000 4,073,000
Webkinz 325,000 3,879,000
Cartoon Doll Emporium ~3,000,000
Stardoll 367,000 1,241,000
WeeWorld ~900,000
The NYT mentions that the category has grown 68% in the last year alone; some of the sites report 20% growth monthly.
My list of “the biggest MMOs in the West” is evolving rapidly. With Habbo Hotel and Runescape also clocking in with multiple millions of unique users every month, it may be possible that World of Warcraft is actually sitting around #4 or #5 in the top MMOs in NA and Europe.
Of course, by and large, the gamers and gaming industry will likely blow these off as “not counting” or “shallow” or something. I get that pretty regularly, particularly from folks who are hoping that I am not making something like these games myself. (I’m not — I just find it fascinating).
