sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with Online + games

Bay Area startup ZipZapPlay launched the latest entry in the quickly growing build-and-share-your-own-game space in alpha this week, a service by the name of Playcrafter.

ZipZapPlay CEO Curt Bererton and Chief Creative Officer Mathilde Pignol stopped by the GigaOM office recently to give us a hands-on demo, and what impressed Om and I most was the site’s whimsical beauty. That’s no surprise, as Pignol is an alum of frog design. It offers up a large set of interlocking objects with which to create your games (platforms, widgets, and so on), all of which are designed to work together, then attributes game properties to them. (Think Lego Mindstorms, but for web games.)

I particularly liked the intuitive feel of the building experience, and the robustness of its internal physics — an element that should appeal to all the hundreds of thousands of gamers who embraced Line Rider. Since showing it to us, they’ve added the ability to embed Playcrafter games on blogs and social networks. Even more appealing, they’re sharing revenue with game creators, giving them a cut of revenue earned from ads that are run while games load.

Image credit: www.playcrafter.com.

Back in April, ex-Organic CEO Mark Kingdon took the helm of Linden Lab, replacing its charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, at a time when the company was already struggling in an increasingly competitive market. While Linden claims to be profitable, its market share has plateaued, with scalability and usability woes keeping the number of monthly active users around 550,000 since last summer.

Is Second Life still relevant in this far more dynamic playing field, which now includes Lively, an offering from the Internet’s biggest player? I posed that question to Kingdon a few days ago in an extended conversation at the company’s spacious San Francisco headquarters.

“Anytime Google enters a new market,” Kingdon told me, “people’s reaction is ‘Oh look! Google’s there; they’ll win.’” But he doesn’t even see the search giant as a direct competitor. “I think the thing that most people looking from the outside don’t realize is how diverse the use cases [of content in Second Life] are,” he said, citing everything from art exhibits to a company’s shareholder meeting to a new educational initiative. By comparison Lively, Kingdon said, “…has I guess you could say almost a single-use case, graphical chat.”

As an author and blogger who writes about Second Life, I remain convinced that user-created virtual worlds are a transformative medium. But I’m less clear as to whether or not Kingdon can address the myriad challenges that await Second Life in the post-Rosedale, post-Burning Man era. So I wanted to know how he plans to fix them, especially with the proverbial train already going 60 miles per hour.

The Infrastructure

“We’re working on three things really intently,” he said. The first is “solidifying our proposition for what we’re defining as our core markets.” That includes the traditional personal user of Second Life, which is typically someone in their 30s, as well as the “enterprise segment,” which addresses the many corporations that use Second Life for conferencing, job fairs and other business applications. And finally there are the educators that use the virtual world as a teaching tool. “I think 18 of the top 20 educational institutions in North America are in Second Life and doing wondrous things,” Kingdon said.

The second task, he went on, is improving Second Life’s complex user interface, especially in relation to its confusing first-hour experience, which he admitted prompts many people to give up. “We’re also working very hard to make Second Life intuitively, and maybe even delightfully, usable,” he told me.

The third crucial task relates to what Kingdon called the “stability and scalability of the platform.” The Second Life client and server grid is notoriously crash-prone, but he said they’ve been working on it for months and were showing good progress so far.

The Competition

Linden Lab has also recently added ultra-realistic, 3D graphic enhancements to Second Life. But it remains to be seen if the market will broadly embrace immersive 3-D worlds. As I pointed out to Kingdon, World of Warcraft has cartoonish graphics, while the web-based, teen-oriented virtual world Habbo Hotel, which is just as big, is in 2.5-D.

Kingdon, however, insisted that he was extremely optimistic about the 3-D experience. “The 2-D or 2.5-D experience doesn’t offer you the rich, meaningful, visceral, profound connection that you get in Second Life,” he said. Take an in-world meeting with colleagues; the immersive sense of interacting with them as customized avatars via voice and text chat, he said, “beats a video conference hands down.”

The Money

In the last couple years, several Linden Lab staff have described the private company as profitable; on my Second Life blog, I did some back-of-the-envelope estimates of Linden’s publicly known revenue sources, and it seemed like the company was making $40 million to $60 million dollars in profit. But Kingdon said it wasn’t quite that much.

“I won’t say [how much], but it’s not that high, although we are profitable and generating positive cash flow,” he said. Much of that’s going into “making hardware purchases, improving the experience for users, investing in people, hiring a lot.”

And what about recurring rumors that the company was already preparing to go public?

“Our focus — I can tell you — is very much on the three initiatives I talked about before. That’s what’s occupying the minds of the management team right now,” he said. “It does take some time to get ready for an IPO, so since that’s not on my agenda today you can probably do the math and form your own conclusions about when it might be a possibility.”

The Future

Finally, I brought up the recent joint announcement made by Linden Lab and IBM that they’d managed to move several avatars from Second Life to Open Sim, the open source virtual world. This could eventually create a market for interconnected virtual worlds, but moving mere avatars was a tiny step toward meaningful interoperability, which would also require transporting objects and other virtual assets between worlds — a much more daunting, perhaps insurmountable challenge. Did Linden Lab have a road map for that?

“There is a plan and a timeline,” Kingdon said. And while he acknowledged the interoperability challenges ahead (”it’s an incredibly complex technical issue”), he said progress was imminent. “The next milestone will be between now and the end of the year, but it may not be the milestone you have in mind — so stay tuned!”

Image credit: Kingdon photo from AdWeek.com. Kingdon’s Second Life avatar “M Linden” screenshot by Crap Mariner

RuneScape is one of online gaming’s biggest success stories, but unless you play it or know someone who does, you’ve probably never heard of it. Launched in 2001 by Jagex Software, an independent studio based in the UK, it’s a traditional fantasy role-playing game that boasts six million active monthly players, almost all of them in the English-speaking world — making RuneScape more popular in the West than World of Warcraft. (Over half of WoW’s 10 million players are based in Asia.) Do a Google trend comparison of RuneScape to World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, the latest MMORPG darling, and you’ll see that the web traffic of Jagex’s indie title outstrips both of them. Despite all this, it’s received comparatively little coverage, even by the gaming press.

That may change soon, because this week Jagex will make its first appearance at one of gaming’s biggest trade shows — the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles — where it will debut a graphically upgraded version of the game called RuneScape High Detail. Ahead of the launch, I sat down with the Jagex team last week to find out how, with so little attention, the modest-looking RuneScape has attracted so many players.

Originally created by Andrew Gower and his brother Paul while Andrew was still an undergrad at Cambridge, RuneScape runs on Java, making it accessible to anyone who can get on the web. It’s also free, though 60 percent of the world’s content is restricted until you upgrade to a $5 monthly subscription, which some one million RuneScape players currently pay. And while even RuneScape High Detail won’t win Jagex any graphics awards, the developers have compensated by creating a game world with depth and variety of play. “In terms of gameplay,” influential game developer Raph Koster notes, “RuneScape is a very worldy world, offering a diverse array of activities that frankly, resembles Ultima Online.” (Koster was that classic game’s lead designer.) At the same time, the Java code makes it easy to add new features and make quick fixes. As Jagex CEO Geoff Iddison noted to me, “The beauty of Java is it’s platform independent.”

The result? Tremendous viral growth, especially from very young gamers on a limited budget. Jagex won’t give out specific numbers, but Iddison told me their greatest expense is payroll for 400 employees; he also said their profit margin is well over 50 percent.

More details on Jagex/RuneScape:

- New content (questions, items, etc.) added to RuneScape every two weeks
- 1.2 megabyte Java app
- Peak concurrency: 250,000
- Average player time: 12.5 hours/week
- RuneScape is a sharded MMORPG (i.e. copies of the world run on separate servers)
- 250 RuneScape shards for up to 2,000 players each. Unlike many MMORPGs, player characters are not bound to a single shard.
- 200 servers total
- Main player demographics: 60 percent are from the U.S., 25 percent from the EU, smaller percentages from Australia/New Zealand and Canada. Player age typically 8-20, approximately 80 percent between 10-16.
- RuneScape HD feeds graphic data to computers with 3D cards for dynamic rendering. Displays at 15 frames per second on minimum spec computers, but can optimize up to 50 FPS. Can display in full screen.

Ever since Apple put out its Software Developer Kit in March, game developers have been racing to create titles for the presumed market victor. But how much of a demand for them is there really? Based on the data from Cellufun, AOL’s designated mobile game portal since April, quite a lot. The company just told us that compared with other phone owners, iPhone gamers are generating four times the number of page views on Cellufun titles and double the time playing. (That’s an average of 21 minutes of game play and 65 page views per iPhone player session, compared to 11 minutes and 15 page views for sessions on other phones.) Pretty impressive, given Cellufun’s 5 million monthly uniques and 70 million page views. If the numbers are just as good for other game developers, expect to see the iPhone game catalog get a lot bigger soon.

Image credit: www.Cellufun.com

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
Mobilize — Mobile Web Today and Tomorrow

Iminlikewithyou, a New York-based dating game start-up has raised $1.5 million in Series B round of funding from Spark Capital, and a bunch of influential angels including Marc Andreessen. Baseline Ventures and Betaworks, also had previously invested in the company joined this round of capital. Bijan Sabet, who recently made news for investing in Twitter is joining the board of Iminlikewithyou.

I wrote about Iminlikewithyou at the time of their launch and found their dating-gaming platform very compelling and addicting. Over a period of time, I made many friends because of that platform. The gaming focus didn’t quite turn Iminlikewithyou into a web-sensation. Co-founder Charles Forman, refocused Iminlikewithyou as a way to build casual games.

That strategy seems to be working for the company, as it has gained some popularity for its four games - Blockles, Dinglepop, Drawmything, and Gemmers. Blockles looks like a clone of Tetris, but with a realtime multiplayer twist. Competing against many people in realtime makes these variants of old classics exciting and very social.

Iminlikewithyou, while keeping its dating site alive, will offer this real time casual gaming platform to third party developers who can develop games that can be played anywhere on the web. The move comes at a time when there is a growing interest in casual games, especially among investors who see ad-supported games and virtual goods as the next big pot of gold. Maybe!. I say that because these games and gaming start-ups need to get a big audience before they hope to crank up the money engine.

As part of this new round, Pooj Preena, former Skype executive who till recently worked for Betaworks is joining the company as Chief Operating Officer, hoping to build the basic infrastructure of the company. While I am happy for Pooj, it sucks because he is one of my best friends in San Francisco and he is going to move to New York. Maybe Pooj can calm down Forman, who is “mercurial” to put it mildly. (For a detailed litany of his antics, check out Valleywag). His co-founder, Dan Albritton has left the company.

Related Links:

Based on publicly available data, it looks like an Internet milestone will be passed by the end of next month: World of Warcraft will lose its undisputed status as the most popular massively multiplayer online world. It’s struggling to defend that title as Habbo Hotel, the web-based, social MMO from Finland’s Sulake Corp., is nipping at its heels. Habbo just sent me news that it has logged its 100 millionth registered avatar (pictured at left), and more crucial, that Habbo “attracts close to 10 million monthly visitors to its services worldwide.”

Currently 9.5 million active monthly users, to be exact, compared to Warcraft’s last-reported 10 million subscribers — but at current growth rates, it’s easily within striking range.

“Habbo expects to exceed 10 million unique monthly users within the next 30 days given current growth rates in Habbo and in virtual worlds as a whole,” Habbo Executive Vice President Teemu Huuhtanen told me through a publicist. (In the last six months, the company reports adding 20 million new avatars through a major site redesign and waves of new content, including avatar-based celebrity appearances by “American Idol”’s Jordin Sparks and others.)

“The users want to focus on Habbo’s core,” explained Huuhtanen. “[T]hat is, being in the [virtual] hotel — as opposed to extraneous material on the home page.”

Of course, the battle may not be over: Blizzard/Vivendi might have added more subscribers since reaching 10 million last January, so stand by for updates. Meantime, check out my write-up on “The How of Habbo Hotel,” in which a Sulake executive explains how it gained Warcraft-level numbers with a much smaller budget.

Image credit: www.habbo.com. LOL embellishment by WJA.

Ah Vermont, that lovely New England state known for its maple syrup, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream…and now, limited liability corporations that only exist online.

On June 6th, Gov. Jim Douglas signed an inauspicious-sounding bill entitled “H.0888, Miscellaneous Tax Documents” that could revolutionize the way startup companies are formed and run. As New York Law School professor David Johnson explained to me, up until now, U.S. law required LLCs to have physical headquarters, in-person board meetings and other regulations that have little relevance in the digital age.

No longer. Under the new law, for example, a board meeting may be conducted “in person or through the use of [an] electronic or telecommunications medium.” A “‘virtual company’ will be, as a legal matter, a Vermont limited liability company,” said Johnson. And other states are required to recognize the corporation as a legitimate LLC. So while in the past many companies registered in Delaware to take advantage of that state’s business-friendly policies, with this law, Internet-driven startups may find Vermont even more ideal.

Johnson was instrumental to crafting the bill’s language; he, along with his NYLS students and a couple of professors at Vermont Law School, spent the last two years putting it together. He foresees virtual companies launched for countless reasons, such as the production of software or publications written by people across the country, even for corporations that exist only in Second Life.

As you may have guessed, this isn’t just an academic exercise for Johnson; he’s also developing software to manage virtual corporations through NYLS’ DoTank project. Since word of the Vermont bill’s passing got out, he said, “I’ve had two people beg me to be the first to get on the list” to start filing virtual incorporation papers. Indeed, it’s easy to see this becoming standard practice in coming years, with traditional office buildings being abandoned for dynamic companies that exist wherever its employees happen to crack open their computers.

Image credit: Vermont.gov

I finally understand why Spore has been delayed for so long. Originally expected for a 2007 release, the simulated evolution game from Electronic Arts (ERTS) studio Maxis was suddenly withheld, much to EA’s chagrin. Maxis head Will Wright explained the delay, saying that the company wanted to make the follow-up to its wildly successful Sims franchise more accessible.

That turns out to be an understatement, as I found out yesterday at an advance press peek hosted at Maxis’ Emeryville, Calif. office. During the hold-up, Wright and his team (led by Executive Producer Lucy Bradshaw) re-tooled Spore into a Web 2.0 phenomenon designed to extend far beyond the actual game. A perfect example is the thumbnail pic above, from a YouTube video of the Spore monster I made with Maxis’ Spore Creature Creator, which is being released on June 17. (The full game won’t hit shelves until September.) The YouTube video creation and upload process is seamlessly embedded in the Creator software. As Bradshaw explained, the fan community’s ability to create and share Spore content is just as important as the game itself.

But that’s just the start.

By releasing the Creature Creator months before the game, Maxis is encouraging its fan base to develop a vast international ecology of user-created content. (It’s launching simultaneously on both Mac and PC, and the community sites will be available in 22 languages.) That includes a “MySpore” page for each player, which as the cheeky name suggests, is part of a social network for Spore creatures, and has similar functionality to MySpace and Facebook — your Spore Creature can friend other Creatures and share content across the system. (If the game becomes successful, it’s easy to imagine kids abandoning their real-world social networks for MySpore.) There’s an embeddable Spore web widget, and even an RSS feed, so you can track comments made on your MySpore page.

At the beginning of Spore’s development cycle, Bradshaw (pictured above) told me, “Sharing was intended to be under the hood” of the larger game. Instead, Maxis has made it the key feature — a testament to Web 2.0’s influence and a response to the what its passionate fan base has done with previous games. (The Sims games have a vast network of fansites featuring screenshots and machinima.)

Perhaps most ambitious, the content-sharing aspects of the Creature Creator can actually be integrated into Spore gameplay. While Maxis has made its own beastiary for the solo game, players can import their friends’ user-created creatures into it too, via a “Sporepedia” buddy list. The game tracks creatures’ meta data, and deposits them where appropriate in the game’s evolutionary timeline. You can even set preferences for the kind of creatures you prefer in your game, and Spore will search the player-made database for appropriate species and send them to your computer. (Sort of a TiVo for monsters.) Bradshaw told me Maxis is hoping to publish aggregated creature data on its site, showing which species are most popular and successful. It’ll be fun to see what creatures thrive in a kind of crowd-sourced simulation of Darwinian selection.

But will Spore appeal to a wide audience? The Sims succeeded so much because it was embraced by girls and women, who tended to enjoy its anarchic, virtual dollhouse quality — 60 percent of its player base is female. With its emphasis on spoogy, fanged creatures, by contrast, Spore seems more immediately appealing to boys. Bradshaw told me the game has tested well with girls, and anecdotally, even got her mom to enjoy it. Even more anecdotally, I challenged a nearby publicist named Katie (pictured left) to try her hand at the Creature Creator, and while hardly a hardcore gamer, she managed to whip up a scarily toothy snake-like beast as inventive as anything the dudes with the game press were making at nearby demo PCs.

“Making things,” as Bradshaw put it, “turns everyone on.”

There’s a lot of VC money going into web-based, advertising-driven casual games, so here’s a wake-up call to investors: They may get better ROI with mobile phone-based gaming.

In 2006, mobile game platform Greystripe launched GameJump.com, a distribution site for free, ad-supported cellphone games; since then, consumers have downloaded over 65 million copies of Greystripe’s hundreds of titles. The company will publish an extended report of their user data later this week, but were nice enough to give me an advance peek. I’m looking at a lot of surprising numbers, but the most striking one to me is how gamers interact with the ads that appear before and after gameplay.

According to Greystripe, 10.1 percent of them click on the ads, a CTR that far outstrips web ads, which average some 1 percent to 2 percent. I strongly suspect at least some of these are accidental, fumble-thumb click-throughs, but even then, from the advertisers’ perspective, that’s not a bug, but a feature. And while mobile games are almost by definition casual, the demographic breakdown is markedly different from the web-based casual space, which is dominated by older women.

By contrast, 69 percent of the site’s U.S. users are aged 18-34, and 60 percent are male — roughly the same percent that own a PS3/360/Wii game console. So unsurprisingly, the top 20 titles are not just puzzle games, but arcade-flavored titles like Rollercoaster Rush and Bikini Pool Summer, from a studio called, appropriately enough, Guy Games. With data like this, I think we’re going to see a lot more money moving to mobile.

Image credit: GameJump.com