Wonderland: BlizzCon pics

It’s very big, bigger I think than I was expecting, but also very anti-social: everything that you could want (clothes, food, playmachines) has a MASSIVE queue, and then there’s lots of blank space in between.

It’s funny how apt a description this is of World of Warcraft itself, in some ways. Like game, like con? A pity that the con can’t be instanced. 🙂

I had dinner with the folks from Kingdom of Loathing just the other day — they play quite a bit of WoW — and we spent a long time talking about the ways in which design choices select for players and the way in which players gravitate towards design choices.  Referencing WoW specifically, we talked about how much the game selects for people who come to it with friends, and how unsocial it can feel for someone there by themselves. The case was made by them that you don’t want to meet all those people anyway. 🙂

No one game fits all, of course.

Just a reminder, I’ll be at Sandbox: an ACM Video Game Symposium tomorrow. The panel has now gained Warren Spector as an additional panelist. Should be fun! I’ll probably be around much of the afternoon, so if you see me, say hi. 🙂

Congrats to the Multiverse guys on releasing version 1.0 of their platform.

Techcrunch article.

$35m in profit next year, on $65m in revenue. Yes, that’s a 50% profit margin. 700,000 paying people and 12m registered.

The WSJ says the purchase price is $350 million in cash. Disney could pay up to another $350 million if certain performance targets are reached over the next couple of years, until 2009.