At SXSW, Susan Choe of Outspark stated (and was promptly tweeted as having said) that Outspark manages to get $60 ARPU, which is quite a respectable figure.
The challenge there, of course, is that you have to know on what basis this is being measured. I immediately asked “was that ARPU or ARPPU?”
I’m not at SXSW (we have way too much going on here at work!) but there’s a great liveblog of a panel I wish I had been at, on Virtual Worlds News, about “Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds”.
Wu: Will games and virtual worlds eventually compete based not on art and storyline, but on who can offer the most rights to players?
I hope the answer is “yes.” What’s more, I hope that at some point there’s a minimum standard accepted industrywide and enforced by an industry trade body. As in, companies join the trade body and as part of that they agree to uphold a base set of practices and policies as a condition of membership.
