This new gaming site Cafe.com is taking more than a few pages from the Korean model. Its a casual games site with a “game console” — the games are all embedded within this console. This is a common sort of feature in Korean games — the Korean version of Albatross 18, aka Pangya, had a whole desktop, for example. (BTW, I find it amusing that it’s hard to tell the game is about golf from the Korean site anymore… is that a guy drawing a sword over on the right?)

But that’s not the only tip Cafe.com is taking. You play through the “console,” and the reason is that it offers 3d avatars you can use to chat with others. And of course, there’s microtransactions. You can spend money in order to get in-game advantages at multiplayer clones of Zuma, Pipe Dreams, Puzzle Fighter, and so on.

Yes, you read that right — in-game advantages. Read More “Buying your way to the top, again”

Wonderland is wondering about the 67 million figure for NCSoft customers that Robert Garriott gave out in a recent interview. In the comment thread, it comes out that this means registrations, total, ever.

In that case, it’s nice to put stuff in perspective; Sulka Haro from Sulake chimes in with a 70m figure for Habbo Hotel. Which makes the controversy over Second Life’s numbers seem like a tempest in a teapot…

So of course the SLogosphere is all a-twitter over the contingency measures announced by Linden Lab in order to prevent extreme lag. The method? Blocking logins to non-paying players. Plenty of commentary at Clickable Culture (Tony also has a nice reaction round-up post) and 3PointD , plus many more places I haven’t bothered to click through to yet…

ReBang frames the whole thing in comparison with the recently Scobleized new platform Outback Online, which apparently brings in some peer-to-peer technology in order to alleviate network load.

That said, it’s deeply weird to me that given the nature of the issue, the thing that the Outback guys are touting to Scoble mostly involve graphics:

Read More “Going big?”