Virtual Worlds News has the details because they beat me to having the article translated. Ah, the cruel battles of blogdom.
In any case, head over there for the scoop. In short:
The big news today is of course the announcement that Eve Online will allow players to elect an oversight committee, intended as a response to the recent charges of corruption.
I have to admit I feel ambivalent about it. I have been playing with the idea of player-elected representatives for a long time. At one point, I wanted the SWG correspondents to be player-elected. Ironically, players seem to react negatively to this sort of idea when it’s presented — take for example, the player commenter over on Scott Jennings’ blog, who basically dismisses elections of all sorts with the remark
So, players elect people to go check up on CCP. No way will those guys be favored stooges for the resident uber-guilds.
Kinda like Senators are favored stooges for lobbyists, I guess is how the logic goes.
Not many, but there’s some new screens and some commentary about what it plays like over at Centric – Agency of Change. It’s basically a top ten list of notable things they saw in HiPiHi.
What struck me about the list was how full of, well, assumptions it was. As if the template for virtual worlds were more settled than it actually is.
“Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play”, says the New York Times. Among the games covered are ones I hadn’t really paid attention to before, like Stardoll and Cartoon Doll Emporium.
Over at Virtual Worlds News they give this handy table summarizing the growth rates of some of these; I added to the table with additional unique user stats elsewhere in the article:
Site Users in April 2006 Users in April 2007
Club Penguin 794,000 4,073,000
Webkinz 325,000 3,879,000
Cartoon Doll Emporium ~3,000,000
Stardoll 367,000 1,241,000
WeeWorld ~900,000
The NYT mentions that the category has grown 68% in the last year alone; some of the sites report 20% growth monthly.
My list of “the biggest MMOs in the West” is evolving rapidly. With Habbo Hotel and Runescape also clocking in with multiple millions of unique users every month, it may be possible that World of Warcraft is actually sitting around #4 or #5 in the top MMOs in NA and Europe.
Of course, by and large, the gamers and gaming industry will likely blow these off as “not counting” or “shallow” or something. I get that pretty regularly, particularly from folks who are hoping that I am not making something like these games myself. (I’m not — I just find it fascinating).
Matt Penfield, a student at UCSD, asked me a bit ago for help getting this survey out there for his academic work. Here’s the scoop. Go help him out!
This survey is part of a market analysis project focusing on digital distribution. The question I’m interested in answering is “Given supporting evidence from adjacent entertainment industries that both demand and infrastructure exist to support digital downloads, why is adoption so low in the game software segment?” If anyone has any questions/insight about the survey or the project, please email me at mpenfield <at> ucsd <dot> edu. As a special bonus, I’ll be drawing a name at random from the survey respondents to award some factory sealed PSP games. If you’ve got a PSP (or know someone who does) be sure to enter your name and mailing address on the last page of the survey.
