The news is out about Live Gamer, an independent, VC-funded platform for player-to-player transactions using RMT. And it’s got publisher backing. Gamasutra has a Q&A that answers some questions.

They kick off with a slate of MMO and virtual world operators including Funcom GMBH, Sony Online Entertainment, 10Tacle Studios, Acclaim, GoPets and Ping0 Interactive, all of whom will work with Live Gamer to provide the transaction platform to their users.

Of course, they are backed in part by the now-ubiquitous Charles River Ventures (who are also backing us over at Metaplace).

My thoughts? There’s a large and thriving ancillary services market that has sprung up around MMO publishers and developers — and some percentage of the users’ dollars have shifted from going to publishers to going to these service providers. Over time we have seen services aimed directly at users for the following:

Read More “Live Gamer: an official RMT platform”

Dean Takahashi has a nice article up on the makers of Warbook. It’s a great example of games built under that “design for everywhere” pattern that I have been talking about for the last few months.

Exclusive: Webs.com comes out of nowhere with Facebook games with a billion page views

For instance, Street Race is a new SGN game that has no graphics. You simply sign up, get $1,000 in play money, buy a car, then race. In the race, you click on another user. Then nothing happens. Nothing. The next screen that comes up tells you if you won or lost, how much money you earned or lost, and the skill points you earned. As your skill points grow, you win more races and get more money to spend souping up your car. The social part comes in where you can get more money by inviting 20 friends to join.It’s simple and easy. That’s why the game has gotten more than a million page views on its first day. You can play a round in about one second.

So I got an email announcing ChatBlade, a new MMOG chat system middleware package; a specialized enough need that it would have been kind of inconceivable a few years ago as a business. Which leads to speculation on where we are headed in terms of innovative virtual world tchnologies. And now, I have to open this post with an anecdote (even though they say to write for blogs the way you write for newspapers: put the lead first!).

Once very long ago (“long ago” here defined as circa 1995), I logged into some random LPMud. I don’t remember which one it was, but it had an idea I liked a lot and decided to steal for LegendMUD. In that mud, you see, they had simple moods & what today gets called by some “say alts” — commands that were exactly like the SAY command, only you could grunt or groan, wail or whine, and these say alternates carried emotional content that you didn’t get with plain old SAY, WHISPER, SHOUT, and TELL. I went back to Legend and designed a speech system that handled moods and say alternates.

Read More “The march of commodification”