Whirled launches!

 Posted by (Visited 6738 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Nov 102008
 

Congrats to the Three Rings crew and their cap’n — Whirled is officially launching today.

The site features 12 “example” games that show players what is possible as they create their own games.

Creators set their own prices for the goods they produce and get a third of the virtual transaction price, Three Rings keeps a third, and a third goes to the affiliate (shop owner) who initiates the sale. Typical items go for maybe 10 cents.

Since launching the Whirled beta in March, there are 15,000 active users logging in each day. So far, 60,000 have registered with very little promotion.

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Enterprise VWs — do they suck?

 Posted by (Visited 8654 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Oct 032008
 

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?

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Brief notes: IGE, Shanda, SmallWorlds

 Posted by (Visited 6872 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
May 212008
 
  • The Hernandez case in Florida, where IGE is being sued for damaging the WoW gameplay experience, is trying seeking class certification. This was always their intent, so I suppose really, I am just pointing out that the slow gears continue to grind on.
  • In other legal news, a Legend of Mir 2 player is suing Shanda, trying to get monetary damages for the value of the in-game items that they lost due to some sort of technical glitch. In other words, a “virtual property” case. The player had been buying these items, and Massively did the math, working out that the guy had spent almost $30,000.
  • SmallWorlds is about to launch — basically, it lets you make isometric multiplayer apartments and embed them on pages and link them. They are apparently planning on lots of Hollywood tie-ins. It will be interesting to see how this goes, given the similarities to Whirled, which has not set the world on fire yet despite being very cool. Using the “open big” estimation method and eyeballing their curve using the numbers they report on the site, they look to be on track to peak around 20-30,000 users unless they manage to crack another market or go viral. Naturally, we’re watching all this kind of closely since Metaplace bears some similarities to both of these.

Is there such as thing as a casual online world?

 Posted by (Visited 11461 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Apr 092008
 

I’m not sure there is, at least as we understand it. Not at the moment, anyway.

When we speak of “casual” we mean a cluster of things. Sometimes we mean targeting a different demographic, one not excited by the hardcore fantasy-and-sci-fi fictions we concoct. Sometimes we mean shorter play sessions. Sometimes we mean things like not requiring grouping in the worlds, which makes it easier for a less dedicated player to have fun.

More “casual” experiences often have a connotation of being shallow. One thing that is clear, though, is that it doesn’t matter how casual you make an experience, some people will use it in a hardcore manner.  And that means that it must have hidden depths of some sort. A shallow experience simply doesn’t tend to keep people.

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