Up until now wealthy players of virtual worlds and MMOGs like World of Warcraft have been able to expedite their progress through the game by spending real money to acquire levelled up players and other in-game virtual goods in a grey market largely supplied by Chinese labour. According to Information Week China has now [...]
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This post by Bill Gurley of Benchmark in the US gives a great comparative analyis of how social media sites are monetising in Asia and the US. The headline is that the leading western socnets Myspace and Facebook are generating reasonable revenues (Bill estimates current run rate is $650m and $450m respectively), but that [...] Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life yesterday announced the acquisition of two inworld businesses – reported here in the LA Times. These businesses broker the sales of virtual goods – kind of like Amazon market place, but restricted to virtual goods for use inside Second Life. It seems Linden has a strategy to [...] Susan Wu gave a talk on virtual goods at Leweb last week. I have been meaning to post the following excerpts from her talk since then. Regular readers will know how much I like frameworks. Thanks to Susan, we now have one for virtual goods. For her there are three types: Decorative – [...] Copied from a VWM press release (from Blackberry so no link or formatting); London, England – October 15, 2008 – Virtual Worlds Management, the leading virtual worlds trade media company, has announced findings from a comprehensive study of accountable transactions showing that venture capital and media firms have invested more than $148.5 million dollars [...] Jussi Laakkonen of social gaming stealth startup Everyplay has a great post tracking investment in the social games and virtual worlds space. The simple message – there is a whole heap of activity, with roughly $2-5m being invested per week, and some large individual deals, including Balderton‘s investment of $87m into Big Fish [...] I’m reading a Gartner report on virtual worlds which has lots of interesting data (a lot of which is sourced from KZero). Here are some highlights: 300m registered accounts aggregate across all virtual worlds Suggesting 30m active users (based on rule of thumb 1 active for every ten members) – compared with 16m active [...] At the Virtual Worlds London conference in October there will be a fast pitch event where the hottest startups are showcased. If you are in this space and would value a bit of exposure you should think about applying! The announcement for the showcase is here, a description of the process here, and [...] Google has long been rumoured to be working on something in the virtual world space – I think for a year or more now people have been telling me that their friends have been sucked into a top-secret project at the GooglePlex. Yesterday they announced the release of Lively, reported here Techcrunch. The video [...] |
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