Economics of Virtual Worlds: The Rarest of Lawyers.
Great graphs there explaining why it is that a microtransaction-based model ends up hitting a far larger market than a sub-based one.
Second Life technology continues its slow move towards being an enterprise solution with the announcement that the SL-derived OpenSim project is getting commercialized by 3Di.
Enterprise was a big buzzword this year at the Virtual Worlds conf in Hollywood. (Of course, in the midst of it, someone had to ask “what is enterprise anyway?” It means “selling VWs to businesses”). The penny has also dropped for some users that SL itself seems to be trending in this direction — as Tateru Nino writes on Massively,
When you look at the hiring of Tom Hale, the ongoing hiring of enterprise sales and marketing staff, and the licensing of the Immersive Workspaces product from Rivers Run Red, this all seems to signal a clear direction for where Linden Lab is taking Second Life. Clearer than anything else we’ve seen in a year, certainly.
Of course, we have also seen Forterra and their OLIVE platform (derived originally from the There.com codebase) continue to focus on this area over several years, with particular success in work for the military.
Is all this a surrender of the dream? What about user-creation virtual worlds for consumers?
If you go to the front page of Worlds In Motion right now, you see successive screenshots of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Virek Online, and World of Warcraft. What’s Virek Online? It’s our most recent community spotlight. 🙂
Kinda cool to see this completely user-built Scandinavian folk music RPG (no, I am not making that up) side by side with the big boys. 🙂
I forgot to blog about this when we released it, but I have some more of those handy little development tools that we’re releasing for Metaplace available here for you. There’s a particle editor that spits out sprites so you can bring them into 2d worlds easily, and there’s an animation strip editor that helps you make sprite sheets. Both of them are only available for Windows right now — sorry! — but they’re fun to mess with and might be useful to you even outside of a Metaplace context. You can grab them here. They’re basically unsupported, since I do them mostly in my free time.
Some screenshots are below. There’s full docs in the tools.
Lessons Learned is a really good blog that gives a lot of insight into exactly all the sorts of things that I was referencing in that AGDC panel on how we have to adapt to web ways of doing things. Be sure to read through the archives.
I commented on that panel that the notion of doing things like A/B split testing is sort of foreign to game developers. But it’s something incredibly powerful when correctly applied. But it’s a little hard to conceive of saying “the combat rules are different from fight to fight.” The commonest form of game A/B testing is alternate rule shards, which is a huge investment and is far too large and game-adjusting an approach to really be used as a split testing factor.
It’d be worth pondering what sorts of split testing could be fruitfully brought into the game world, given how useful a tool it is. Of course, part of the barrier for game teams in the large-scale MMO world is that clients are updated via patches, not streaming, and there is no good mechanism typically for patching only half the clients, or some such. But imagine having taken the original SWG UI icons and the more colorful NGE revamp, and upgrading only half the users — and then seeing whether the control or the new design have better metrics.
There’s a level of commitment that we feel when making game changes that we should try to avoid. After all, successful game design in the early stages of prototyping and platytesting involves killing lots of sacred cows, often making big shifts in how things are played. But we tend to see patches as a case where “it’s a big deal if we have to revert.” Part of the web way is acknolwedging the frequency of mistaken hypotheses.
