Nielsen is saying that Club Penguin is stalling out — not much, just a -7% growth year on year from last April to this April.

Of course, with the quantity of kids’ worlds coming into the market now, this is not really surprising, is it? I mean, I was at the grocery store this weekend, and there was a rack of Beanie Babies 2.0 with giant “play online!” tags hanging on them. It may be that this is the death of “Web 2.0,” when it gets co-opted for Beanie Babies.

At left here is the rack of game cards available at Target — snapped this weekend, and strongly reminiscent, finally, of similar shots I have taken in Korea, Japan, and China. For years, there was no such rack in the US. Then it was just a couple of cards, and only at some checkouts. Now it gets a rack right between the TV box sets and the top pop albums (you can see REM’s latest CD there, abandoned on the top shelf).

Besides the cards you maybe expect to see, like Club Penguin, WoW, and Zwinky, there’s also a large stack of ‘em for gPotato games (Flyff, Shot Online, etc) And Acclaim, which make their living by bringing over games from Korea. There’s WildTangent cards, and the Gaia cards are almost sold out. The diversity is interesting, as is the lack of cards for most of the core gamer MMORPGs. The strong presence of the often-marginalized Korean games is telling.

Meanwhile, I hear that Age of Conan has something like 700,000 units in the pipe for day one, which is either a business blunder or a sign of high pre-orders and pent-up demand. WoW players looking for something new to sink their teeth into?

We’re starting to see the fragmentation that can come from having so many offerings on the market. How many kids’ worlds can actually survive?

I actually think the answer is “just about all of them.” If online continues to chew through the gaming market, this rack could be the size of a Gamestop someday — one stack of cards per game, in a world where all the games try to drive alternate revenue streams regardless of platform.

We watched Sweeney Todd tonight. The kids had my tablet PC in the room, so I grabbed it and doodled a bit. Then they got ahold of it. It was a bad end for one Pokemon who got the closest shave of his life, and perhaps ended up in a meat pie.

Was a bit disappointed that “More Meat Pies!” wasn’t in there. Or this lyric, which has stuck in my head ever since some of our friends in college staged this musical as their senior project.

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd

He served a dark and a vengeful god

He shaved the faces of gentlemen

Who never thereafter were heard from again

We’d been telling the kids for weeks about those two bits, singing them over and over…

So, why can the kids watch this with us, but not GTA? Good question. Perhaps because Rockstar just isn’t Sondheim for me yet.

Lest people think that Flash is the only game in town, there’s also a new release around Microsoft’s Silverlight, using Mono.

Mono offers open-source spin on Silverlight - CNET News.com

There is definitely a quiet little war on.

This happened days ago, and I don’t know how I missed it. It’s the Open Screen Project, which boils down to Adobe making a big move with Flash.

What did they do, and what does it mean?

1. The file formats will be open. Anyone can write their own player on any device, for free.
2. Their player is free too, to integrate wherever.
3. The protocols are open too.

Here’s a few ways to think about this:

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Rob Fahey has an editorial up on Eurogamer called “Genetically Modified Gaming” which makes the case that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is lifting the key elements of an MMO, and is in fact the most important MMO release of the year.

This definitely echoes things I have said in the past about the ways in which online gaming is taking over single-player gaming. After all, the CoD series has always been about strong single-player narrative despite its multiplayer component. With the latest installment, there’s lots of MMOish things like persistent character advancement snuck in there.

On the other hand, I think it is worth asking if this is really what we want:

Player retention and the science of addiction is being expanded upon in innovative, groundbreaking ways

Put that baldly, it’s rather disturbing. I don’t want my games to be about the science of addiction! There are a lot of other qualities brought to the table by virtual worlds, and to my mind, it’s these other qualities that are better.

Pac-Txt: Pac-Man meets Zork

Mostly a joke, not an art game. Astonishing how difficult it is this way, though!

Maybe someday the Polliwog will grow up to be a frog prince, but for now it’s still mostly a jam. This version is, I think, less of a trainwreck than the last one. The piano’s gone, but it’s all still at 200bpm!

At work, our biz dev guy forwarded around this highly interesting article about the future of paid video content on the Net: The Ala Carting of Video on the Net - Will it lead to disaster?

He commented that this had relevance for games — something about which I agree completely. I strongly suggest reading the full article, but here’s a brief sampling (which I gather is quoting a report from Bernstein Research):

On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out – click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30 minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs…by 88%?

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MMO Week: Industry has been irresponsible with kids // News // GamesIndustry.biz

Merrifield also thinks that there is an over-reliance on technology that ignores the human element, which is why they’ve decided to devote two-thirds of the company’s staff to positions such as safety moderators and customer service.

“We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody’s, especially because of that human element - we’re adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.

Jeez, I know professional writers who rack up less word count than that in a day.