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ION 08: Virtual worlds for the masses
What's a virtual world? Why do we even call them virtual worlds when we could easily call them digital worlds, or just simply, worlds? This was just one of the many interesting topics discussed at ION 08 this year in a panel entitled, "Redefining Virtual Worlds for Mass Markert Consumption" which is quite the mouthful. So lets put things in a more understandable -- and far more interesting -- perspective.Whether you're talking about Club Penguin, Gaia Online or Second Life the truth of the mater is that these "worlds" are here to stay and they all share similarities -- social interaction. Not only are they here to stay, but they've only just begun to grow as a market. Which is why this panel was all the more interesting. The panel includes Erik Bethke (GoPets Ltd), John K. Bates (Mindark/Entropia Universe), Craig Sherman (Gaia Online), Rob Lanphier (Linden Lab/Second Life) and was moderated by David Elchoness (Association of Virtual Worlds).%Gallery-22798%
Make way for maintenance day
Maintenance day is underway until 2pET/11aPT and many WoW fans are searching for something to do, while players with day jobs log on to point out that they can never play during these hours. Fortunately, we have lots going on today, as well as some highlights from the past week that you won't want to miss. Wrath of the Lich King: Compilation of everything we know of to date about Death Knights, the new hero class we'll be seeing with the expansion. The new expansion is now in alpha testing! Read on to find out what this means, as well as what it doesn't mean. Arena Season 4: A great analysis of when arena season 4 might begin.
[1.Local]: The best of WoW Insider comments this week
WoW Insider readers are a talkative bunch. All of us here at WI monitor our own posts for comments, but there's not always time to keep up with what's happening on all the other posts. And if those of us who hang around here all the time can't keep up, we wondered how much our readers were missing, too?Enter [1.Local], our new roundup bringing you a smattering of the zingers that may have gotten buried in the peanut gallery. We'll serve up both the sublime and the ridiculous, the thought-provoking and the just plain silly -- definitely a cut above Barrens chat (although we do admit that "Barrens Chat" was a strong contender for the feature's title).This week's reader comments ranged from thoughtful ruminations on gender and modern culture's definition of "beauty" to an ongoing tussle over what constitutes success for an MMO. Be sure to dive into the comments area and add your own thoughts – unlike your mama, we like us some hot, fresh backtalk.Warning: Some offensive language mentioned after the jump.
Craig Sherman of Gaia Online: WoW is "not a success"
See if you can follow this reasoning: WoW has ten million players, which is nice and all, but there are actually 800 million teens in the world. Therefore, since Blizzard hasn't reached even 10% of them (80 million), WoW is not actually a success. That's what Craig Sherman of Gaia Online (a casual, browser-based MMO) said to folks at the M16 Marketing conference in San Francisco this week. He claims that WoW's subscription fee has hampered its growth, and that it would be even bigger if there was a free-to-play model.But his reasoning is unstable there to say the least. Part of the reason WoW is so successful is that Blizzard has had the cash to put up for new servers, new content, and a brand new HQ, and with a free-to-play model, they wouldn't be making nearly as much money as they are. Not to mention the quality of the players -- in my experience, part of the reason WoW is such a good game is that when people pay to play it, you often get a much more interested and involved player base. And of course, while yes, WoW hasn't reached a larger fraction of its "potential" player base (however you define that -- what makes Sherman think that Blizzard is targeting teens at all?), anyone who thinks a 10 million player MMO is "not a success" needs to examine the rest of the MMO market more closely.Will there be a game bigger than World of Warcraft? It sure seems like it -- at some point in the future, there should be a game that does go free to play and does hit on all the marks -- casual, hardcore, serious, fun -- that World of Warcraft does (in fact, maybe WoW itself will someday open up a free-to-play model). But to claim that WoW has somehow suffered from its subscription model is pretty far from the truth.[Via Worldofwar.net]
Gaia Online costs $25 million a year to run
When you take a look at the casual-focused Gaia Online, you probably don't think that the community-central site has been costing around 25 million each year -- well, according to company CEO Craig Sherman. It's kind of surprising to hear, since Gaia was a small start-up and has only been asking for around 100k to 500k for brands that want entry into the world of Gaia. We guess you have to spend money to make money, but that's a whole boatload of cash to throw at such a small start-up. It seems to have paid off for the creators of Gaia Online, at least. They're reportedly starting to see deals in the higher six figures range. We're happy it worked out for them, but this is definitely a good example of how risky the MMO market can be even for any sort of game a developer might want to put out there. We shudder at the thought of how much cash has been dropped on some of the upcoming mainstream titles this year.
GDC08: Gaia Online launching casual MMO
At GDC this afternoon Gaia Online's Craig Sherman announced that Gaia is developing a free, flash-based to play casual MMO. Though you may presume this is just another web-based casual game, Sherman says it will be a "real MMO." It will be launching this summer and Gaia expects it to become one of the top MMOs in the world within the first few months -- after all, they already have a user-base of 5 million players who want this kind of game play, so they aren't starting from scratch. Sherman wouldn't give us a name for the game (saying that they'd solicited names from current Gaia users and received around 20,000 responses), but ensured us that it would be a full-scale MMO (with combat, etc) with a heavy social aspect. Though we're hungry for more details, summer is only a few months away!
