• More on China and virtual currency

    Hours Categories Game talk

    The PlaynoEvil blog has the best summary i have seen of the key issues — and they still have wideranging implications!

    – If the service is shut off, customers are entitled to a refund of unused currency.

    – “virtual currency should be exchanged only for virtual goods and services provided by the issuer of the currency” (this would cause problems for a lot of the third party currency folks here in the US and elsewhere)

    – Companies already involved in virtual currency trading are required to register with the local cultural affairs bureau within three months.

    – Minors may not buy virtual money. THIS IS POTENTIALLY HUGE. If enforced, this would essentially shut down most MMOs that use the Free-to-Play business model.

    — via Chinese Government DOES NOT ban Gold Farming – Puts Free-to-Play in Jeopardy Instead – PlayNoEvil Game Security News & Analysis.

  • China Hasn’t Banned Gold Farming

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    What it has banned is spending virtual currency for real world items. In other words, it is more about defending the real world currency than anything else. I have mentioned in the past that many people in China regard the QQ coin (Tencent’s virtual currency) as solid enough to put savings in. Sounds like maybe the government thinks that is a bad idea.

    This is a government restriction on the use of the quasi-Paypal-like currencies (mainly QQ coins) that are used extensively in China to pay for virtual game stuff. As announced they can now only be used to pay for virtual stuff, and you can’t buy real things with them as game companies were allowing to happen, nor can you gamble. This therefore is not about what gold farming clients do: use real money to buy these virtual currencies; it’s the mirror image. And it’s not about the major trade in gold farming such as World of Warcraft, which relates to other types of virtual currency. And it’s not about buying/selling in-game items. And it’s not about the power-levelling of avatars. Bottom line: it’s not about gold farming.

    —ICTs for Development

    [via a commenter, via Blue’s News]

  • Gaikai Video Demo

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 12 Comments

    Dave Perry has a pretty compelling video demo of Gaikai, his new venture, on his blog. Like OnLive, this is also a “play a game remotely, stream a video and send controller data back over the wire” system, apparently just using Flash as the delivery mechanism.

    (1) No installing anything. (I’m running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)

    (2) This is a low-spec server, it’s a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.

    (3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that’s where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it’s not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don’t notice it anyway.)

    (4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I’m not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.

    (5) We don’t claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn’t take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don’t need them, and so our costs will be much less. 😉

    (6) We designed this for the real internet. The codecs change based on the need of the application, and based on the hardware you have. (Like Photoshop must be pixel perfect.)

    (7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)

    — DPerry.com: Gaikai – Video Demo.

    Vid after the break:
    Read More “Gaikai Video Demo”

  • On Stage with Cory Ondrejka @ 2pm

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 3 Comments

    [mp2wp]TheStage,640,550[/mp2wp]

    I’m doing a fireside chat sort of thing with Cory Ondrejka as part of the Metaplace Creative Series. You can log in to TheStage above at 2pm Pacific to participate — we’ll be taking audience questions too. We’ll be having a nice conversation about the future of virtual worlds. Cory, of course, was a prime mover at Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, and today is at EMI (yes, the record company!). The chat will be embedded on his blog as well.

  • Embed virtual worlds anywhere

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    Today is a big day. We’ve released a feature that I personally think is highly significant for both Metaplace and for virtual worlds in general. As of now, you can embed a virtual world on pretty much any webpage, just like any other widget. It’s a small embed code, much like a YouTube video — and in fact, it’s smaller than a YouTube video in terms of download size. And because of the capabilities Metaplace offers, you can do some very interesting things with it:

    Check out the CNet Webware write-up of the feature here! Or you can head to the Metaplace Wiki to learn more about it.

    There are some limitations yet, of course; you can do communication between the world and the web, but it’s still a bit hard. There’s no SNS apps just yet. And yes, you do need a Metaplace account at the moment. But as more usecases emerge and we get more virtual worlds splattered all over the Net, I expect we’ll see these limitations fall away as we keep marching towards making virtual worlds a first-class citizen of the web.

    I’ll be talking about this and other virtual world issues live with Cory Ondrejka (EMI, formerly Linden Lab) at 2pm Pacific on TheStage — and I will have it embedded right here! 🙂 In the meantime, stop by my place in Metaplace, embedded here using the freshly released WordPress plugin by Dara Roesner (Miki in Metaplace), which makes it incredibly easy to drop a world onto a WordPress post or page:

    [mp2wp]raphdev,600,500[/mp2wp]

    Press release after the jump:

    Read More “Embed virtual worlds anywhere”