• Club Marian launches

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Gene Endrody wrote to let me know that MaidMarian.com has launched Club Marian.

    A massive multiplayer social hangout where users from around the world can chat, dance, drive and create music in a fun 3d environment. Club Marian features three islands to explore, a cool music maker, emotes, customizable avatars and a sports car to drive.

    Like Sherwood Dungeon, it’s a full-screen 3d Shockwave experience.

    Gene specifically says, “check out the dance floor by the Tiki Statues with disco lights on.” 🙂

  • A perfect storm

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 12 Comments

    One kind of perfect storm is BoingBoing, the BBC, and Slashdot all linking to a site at the same time. 🙂

    Another kind is the kabillions of questions scattered all over the Net that I have no hope of answering piecemeal. We’re going to be doing regular blog posts over at Metaplace.com and expanding the FAQ based on the stuff we see. but I can’t possibly keep pace with everything everyone is asking… so please be patient. Answers will emerge given time…!

  • Metaplace!

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 104 Comments

    It is an amazing relief to finally get to talk about what we are making.

    It’s been interesting to see the reactions everywhere. Lots of folks “get it,” some don’t (and that’s fine, no need to persuade everyone with just a FAQ and an eight minute demo!). Lots of folks saying “exactly what I predicted!” — which is fair. 🙂

    For me, the bottom line is this: man, I have never had as much fun working on something as I have had working on this.

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  • Monday Mailbag: a neat graph, producers, UO, UO…

    Hours Categories Mailbag
    Comments 6 Comments

    Gene Endrody of MaidMarian.com pointed out this cool Alexa graph that shows how much seasonal trends matter for virtual worlds:

    Alexa traffic graph

    I did an Alexa compare of traffic for the last six months for MaidMarian.com, ToonTown.com and Habbo.com. Habbo’s traffic is from the US site only – compared with MaidMarian.com’s worldwide, so it’s not a fair comparison per se. What I found very interesting was how close the three correlate. You can see the boost that summer holidays provide, however the ebb and flow of web traffic is really obvious. I would be really cool if we had a Dow Jones Industrial Average for web traffic to compare against.

    Yeah, I think any of the operators who have been running more than one world have noticed this. There’s definite seasonal trends to virtual world usage. We need some worlds popular in the Southern Hemisphere to even out the curves! 🙂

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