Not many, but there’s some new screens and some commentary about what it plays like over at Centric – Agency of Change. It’s basically a top ten list of notable things they saw in HiPiHi.
What struck me about the list was how full of, well, assumptions it was. As if the template for virtual worlds were more settled than it actually is.
“Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play”, says the New York Times. Among the games covered are ones I hadn’t really paid attention to before, like Stardoll and Cartoon Doll Emporium.
Over at Virtual Worlds News they give this handy table summarizing the growth rates of some of these; I added to the table with additional unique user stats elsewhere in the article:
Site Users in April 2006 Users in April 2007
Club Penguin 794,000 4,073,000
Webkinz 325,000 3,879,000
Cartoon Doll Emporium ~3,000,000
Stardoll 367,000 1,241,000
WeeWorld ~900,000
The NYT mentions that the category has grown 68% in the last year alone; some of the sites report 20% growth monthly.
My list of “the biggest MMOs in the West” is evolving rapidly. With Habbo Hotel and Runescape also clocking in with multiple millions of unique users every month, it may be possible that World of Warcraft is actually sitting around #4 or #5 in the top MMOs in NA and Europe.
Of course, by and large, the gamers and gaming industry will likely blow these off as “not counting” or “shallow” or something. I get that pretty regularly, particularly from folks who are hoping that I am not making something like these games myself. (I’m not — I just find it fascinating).
Matt Penfield, a student at UCSD, asked me a bit ago for help getting this survey out there for his academic work. Here’s the scoop. Go help him out!
This survey is part of a market analysis project focusing on digital distribution. The question I’m interested in answering is “Given supporting evidence from adjacent entertainment industries that both demand and infrastructure exist to support digital downloads, why is adoption so low in the game software segment?” If anyone has any questions/insight about the survey or the project, please email me at mpenfield <at> ucsd <dot> edu. As a special bonus, I’ll be drawing a name at random from the survey respondents to award some factory sealed PSP games. If you’ve got a PSP (or know someone who does) be sure to enter your name and mailing address on the last page of the survey.
First the French, now Korea. The technolibertarians are getting it on all sides…
The gist of the story: the Ministry of Information and Communication is issuing some guidelines for comment. The comment end date is June 29th. They include a code of conduct, some legal rules for people to follow, and a checklist for users to ue when creating and uploading content.
The code of conduct concerns the responsibility of the UCC creator, respecting UCC copyright and the prevention of defamation. The legal guideline offers detailed information on copyright, protection of user privacy, prevention of defamation and the circulation of adulterous content.
