This Q&A with Kongregate’s Jim Greer is really worth reading, if only for the stark contrast it presents to how traditional games publishing works. They just landed a bunch more funding in order to essentially seed indie developers with projects. The seed money is treated as an advance against royalties, but the IP remains creator-owned.
I have mentioned the Branson project A World of My Own before, but now reports are that it is ready for beta. For those that do not recall, this is essentially a digital distribution venture, but one that adds in sort of an achievement/social networking layer on top of it that is centered on a virtual world. So you download games, and get stuff for your avatar, which is your overall identity within the system.
Really, despite the name, this is probably more a competitor to Steam, GameTap, or Trion than it is to the likes of Second Life. That said, this is a big area — a lot more well-heeled folks are likely to jump on the burgeoning AAA digital delivery bandwagon.
VastPark is a highly interesting project. You can create 3d worlds, have stuff stream in from the Web, and post it as a URL. It looks like a single-player, proprietary client implementation.
They started closed beta back at GDC, and just went open beta. If you get to the “old site” section, you can read their developer Wiki and see videos of worlds that early testers made.
All these taken from the liveblog of Peter Edward’s speech at Edinburgh Interactive Fest.
