A few days ago, I got word that a colleague from Origin days had passed away. Old-school Ultima players probably remember his name, as he played key roles on the later Ultima titles. We intersected only briefly at Origin, as he worked for a little bit on a conversation system for UO. I lost track of him after he left Origin…

A whole bunch of memorials can be found here:

Wing Commander CIC – John Watson Memorial

Note:this is NOT the John Watson whom you see in the SWG credits; that John is alive and well, and enjoying recent fatherhood.

Looks like Virtually Blind is stepping up a bit, as Benjamin Duranske, the author of the blog, is now co-chair of the new Virtual Worlds and Multiuser Online Games committee.

Presumably this means that some of the stuff that Greg Boyd had as open questions in his session at AGDC will start getting ABA opinions put into the mix. 🙂

My sense was that this was a conference in transition, and not just because it was under new management. I said several times that it seemed like two conferences: one where the traditional AAA MMO developers were wondering why their talks on massively concurrent streaming architectures were side-by-side with lectures about Web 2.0 caching.

There was a level of… not disdain, but bewilderment, I think. At one point I was chatting with a friend who has worked on the big games for years, and he said “seems like you’re doing something sort of… webby.” Like it was a term for something minor, or insignificant, or something. He also wasn’t going to attend the Nexon and Habbo talks because they were “webby.”

Read More “AGDC07: overall takes”

Austin GDC 07: Are Microtransactions The Future of MMO Games? – Kotaku (from the comments):

BUT there hasn’t been a single Asian game localized for the US that uses an MT model that’s had even a small degree of success here.

Argh! This is such a myth. It is outright false. *head explodes*

Two words: Maple Story. The question is whether it is bigger than WoW in North America, not whether it has had “a small degree of success.”

Edit: some stats I just found from Minho Kim’s talk:

“$1.6m virtual item sales in February, over 600,000 items. And over 1m in item sales in June.”  Which would be $2.6m in sales if the pricing averages hold, a 61% increase.