Nov 242006
 

In a comment here on the VentureBeat article I wrote, Steven Davis stated,

I was with you until your final comments. Outside the US, MMOs/online games are moving to a Virtual Asset Purchase model. They are selling you the songs while sitting by the campfire is free (though you don’t get many songs until you pay, to strain your metaphor). Second Life should be the same. Where they have run into trouble is that they do not manage “song creation” / virtual asset creation by their players well so their DRM system is not effective – and has begun to undermine the player-driven economy. Whether it is possible to do so in a system like Second Life is a subject of a different discussion, but “song sales” seem to be growing rapidly as the business model (according to Gamasutra, microtransactions now drive about 50% of the Korean online game industry).

Well, yes. But no, at the same time.

Continue reading »

YouTube for Games #3

 Posted by (Visited 10860 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking
Nov 232006
 

Here comes another… this one, from GarageGames. The Great Games Experiment is a site where you join a social networking service of gamers, developers, and publishers. At heart, it’s a social network, but it does allow uploading of games to the site. More here about how it works.

Clearly, this whole “YouTube for Games” thing is something lots of site owners are interested in, and probably some developers. But are a lot of players actually looking for it? I don’t know yet. Guess we’ll see soon enough.