Ho hum. Another day, another major toy brand creates a virtual world. This time it’s Barbie’s nemesis, the Bratz doll.
In the meantime, BarbieGirls.com, which is Barbie’s own take on this space, has registered a half million kids already. That’s since April 26th.
There’s a part 3 coming eventually as well.
F13.net – Usefully Cynical Commentary » GDC07 – Raphing It Up #2
f13.net: Well, you’ve gone for a lot of user customizability as opposed to full-on genesis, full user creation.
Raph: Well, yeah, I’ve always… even if you go back through old GDC sessions. There was the one with the big inflammatory statement where I told the movie guy “Get over yourself, the rest of the world is coming!” But part of that was saying that the rest of the world is coming, but they’ll be working with Legos instead of with atoms. So, you can extrapolate from there. Nothing there is something new that I’m saying, I’ve been saying similar things for a while.
The march of worlds outside the gamespace continues:
Timeless Cities just landed $1m in funding. No word on what exactly it is.
I got pointed to FakeTown today, which I had seen before but not in a while. I dig the map view, but couldn’t find anyone else.
Plain old avatars are also booming — Voki is a new system for this which seems to have some similarities to Sitepal.
Via The Forge, here’s a TechCrunch article about Sony maybe buying Club Penguin for half a billion dollars.
I met the CEO of Club Penguin while at Web 2.0 Expo. He struck me as a very nice guy — and also very committed to the charitable, help-the-world, have-great-kids’-entertainment side of things.
As TechCrunch comments, that may be a bit of a stumbling block for Sony. I don’t know for sure, but I have heard that Club Penguin donates a large amount of their earnings. Sony certainly has a charitable heart, but they also don’t exist for that reason, whereas Club Penguin is founded on that sort of idealism.
