Virtual Worlds News

GeoSim on Building a Virtual Philadelphia

GeoSim started its work in mirror worlds developing terrain models for the Israeli Air Force. After years and millions in work with the military, it switched to the commercial side of things, beginning with city models. The first of which is Virtual Philadelphia in partnership with the Center City District and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has been in a quiet beta operation over the last few months, but will be launching new features, like avatars, next week and aiming for a full public launch sometime in November.  At that time, GeoSim hopes to have launched with commercial activities, featuring shops, stores, and museums.

"The city model is still a major investment," explained CEO Victor Shenkar.  "We would feature it as an application platform that could at the same time support infrastructure planning, security, and training at the same time as business, search, and local real estate, and, last, but not least, games and social interaction."

Fatfoogoo Hires Stevana Case for Business Development and Sales in North America

Casual game and virtual world commerce system provider fatfoogoo announced today that it has appointed Stevana Case as Vice President of Business Development and Sales, focusing on North America. Case built on a professional gaming career--beating John Romero at Quake--before co-founding Monkeystone Games and serving as Director of Business Development and Sales at Tira Wireless. Fatfoogoo recently announced a partnership to integrate its micropayment systems into Sun Microsystem's open-source virtual world and MMOG creator Project Darkstar.

"I am excited to join fatfoogoo; the team's experience with microtransactions and modular platforms will serve both developers and publishers nicely,"  Case said in a statement. "As a gamer, I love buying items and the complexity that microtransactions bring to the game experience. As a professional, I find fatfoogoo's technology the most comprehensive offering on the market."

Wizard101 Launches Family Plan

Taking a clue from cell phone carriers of the world, KingsIsle Entertainment announced a family subscription plan today for its virtual world, Wizard101. While normally users pay $9.95/month for premium content in the free-to-play world, now families can create accounts for $6.95/month each charged to the same credit card. The goal according to the company is to make it easier for siblings to play together as well as parents and children and grandparents and grandchildren, citing a forum poster who wrote that "I live 1500 miles from my grandchildren...and now this is the game we play. They both think it’s great that their grandma plays with them and they like to brag about it to all their friends."

Kids worlds have recently begun emphasizing parental use, whether through emphasizing safety and parental controls like BarbieGirls.com, extending a popular brand with moms to kids like Precious Moments, or simply providing opportunities for dual play. It seems to be working: earlier this year Stardoll released user activity numbers showing that moms were almost as engaged as their daughters, with 75% visiting with their children each week.

Linden Lab Taps Third Party for Second Life User Intro

Making Second Life easier to use, especially for brand new users, has been one of Linden Lab's main challenges for a while. Now the company is bringing in a third party design firm to help it tailor an experience suitable for users just joining the virtual world. The Electric Sheep Company previously worked on a similar project, designing their own, scaled-down viewer for their  efforts at bringing new CSI audiences into Second Life, specifically because Second Life was too challenging for brand new users. Linden has recognized the problem for some time, but with its increased focus on productizing  Second Life, and assumedly selling it to new users, it seems like they've ramped up  efforts to find a solution.

"Shortly after I started, we kicked off a project to reinvent what we call the 'first hour experience' (our web experience, the viewer, and the way we acclimate and acculturate users inworld) for new users," blogged CEO Mark Kingdon. "We’ve made great progress and will be working with an award-winning interactive design firm to help us complete the reinvention and bring it to life. Yes, we are creating a viewer that is new user friendly!"

For Hi5 PixChat Integration Is "Tip of the Iceberg"

When hi5 acquired PixVerse this summer I was surprised to hear talk of Pixverse as a virtual worlds company since its main application available on social networks was PixChat, a 2D chat widget that sat on top of the social network and enabled media sharing. Apparently, PixChat began as just a proof of concept for PixVerse's technology, but it took off so quickly that the company was almost forced to support it.

"It's basically a photo-sharing, video-sharing app for folks in the 2D rendering paradigm, but it uses all the technology on the backend of our virtual world platform. It tests all different parts of the system and our virtual world client platform," explained Charles Ying, a PixVerse founder now a software architect for hi5. "Even though you see a 2D chatroom environment that's accessible to folks, that's just the application that took off. The engine, the client, is capable of rendering a lot richer experiences, in 2D and 3D, but that's not publicly available now."

Will Lively Be a Game Platform?

At the Austin Game Developers' Conference earlier this month, Kevin Hanna, Creative Director of Google Lively, talked about Google's plans to open up an API for game development on the recently launched virtual world. In a follow-up interview, Hanna told GamesIndustry.biz that "There is a longer term goal of opening up the API so the architecture of Lively could be used as an online games platform." That runs under the headline "Google Lively to Become Online Game Platform," but in the full interview Hanna explained that it might not be so conclusive, at least for the initial API: "It's maybe not 100 per cent interactive to call it a gaming API, but it's interactive Google Gadgets which can include games."

Video: Reuben Steiger's State of the Industry Address

Video of Reuben Steiger's (CEO and Founder of Millions of Us) state of the industry address at Virtual Worlds Expo is now online for viewing.  You can grab the 73 MB WMV file here. We would once again like to thank Reuben for his participation at the Expo. 

If you missed the show mark your calendar for Virtual Worlds London on October 20-21, 2008 or Virtual Worlds 2009 on March 10-11, 2009 in New York City.

Video: Academy Award ® winning Producer Jon Landau Keynote Interview with Corey Bridges Now Online

Video of Academy Award ® winning Producer Jon Landau's keynote interview with Corey Bridges (Executive Producer, Multiverse) is now online for viewing.  You can grab the 85 MB WMV file here. We would once again like to thank both Jon and Corey for their participation at the Expo. 

If you missed the show mark your calendar for Virtual Worlds London on October 20-21, 2008 or Virtual Worlds 2009 on March 10-11, 2009 in New York City.

Nokia, City of Oulu Join realXtend Supporters

Nokia and the City of Oulu, Finland, have joined as supporters of the open-source virtual world platform realXtend, which has long been administered as a non-profit project by Oulu Innovation. It's not clear exactly what Nokia's support will bring to realXtend, whether it's participating materially or simply lending moral support.

"Nokia supports the realXtend project and objective of creating an open platform and interoperability for virtual worlds,"  Jari Alvinen, director, Compatibility and Industry Collaboration of Nokia, said in a statement. "realXtend has gained remarkable co-operation and adoption with other virtual world developers and solution providers. The large scale strategic development of this technology will spearhead virtual worlds for everyone."

Guest Post from Jeremy Liew: How to take money from children (for your online game or virtual world)

This is a guest from Jeremy Liew, Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Virtual Worlds News noted last week that:

"PayByCash announced ... that over 50% of its US transactions were coming from its Ultimate Game Card, a prepaid card that supports over 150 virtual worlds and games, like Club Penguin, Nexon America, and IMVU. Previously U.S. consumers favored PayByCash's direct debit options... I'd guess one explanation for the transition, and one to watch, is that adults are more likely to set up debit options... Kids and teens, who seem to be driving much of the consumer-oriented virtual worlds growth, simply pick up cards at retail."

It is an important statistic as it really underscores the importance of prepaid cards as a payment mechanism for free to play games.