Acclaim launches their first MMO

While they previously announced also working on 9Dragons and 2Moon, the first MMO title out of the gate for Acclaim is Bots.

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Player sues MMO… and wins?!

Got this from one of my newsfeeds, but I see Slashdot picked it up as well.

Basically, a player sued an MMO company because their account was banned for long enough that their virtual goods depreciated in real world value.

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Gamers want games

A few years ago, many in the MMOG community foresaw a fairly steady, but shallow, growth in the overall number of players. There were a lot of reasons for this, from the sheer inability to deliver a game with the same polish and stability as an offline title, to the required internet connection at a time when developers still designed for 56kpbs dialup, to the rather unique nature of the concept itself.

As has been said countless times, World of Warcraft proved us (myself included) wrong. Way wrong.

There's a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them, in my opinion, was because at its heart, it's a game. For gamers.

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MTV now also an MMO Importer

According to Gamasutra (by way of Raph), the MTV Networks division of Viacom is going to be the North American publisher for Nexon titles, including the following.

• Maplestory (comments)
• Kart Rider
• Audition

I really don't know anything about Audition beyond what Wikipedia had to say, but the first and second are huge.

Snatching these up for North America while pushing ahead with their alternate-demographic virtual lifestyley games shows a rather impressive degree of diversity for a company new to the game space. Whatever audience Viacom can attract to Laguna Beach, VMTV and LogoWorld will likely be additive to whoever they can attract to the above three, which are already very popular.

This is new? S.U.N. and RMTing

As announced yesterday, Webzen, makers of SUN (and other games), will present "a new payment model".

Trouble is, it doesn't sound new at all.

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Some Maplestory Numbers

Awhile back, I had heard about Maplestory's 50 million registered accounts. While an impressive number unto itself, it's hard to know just how much money that actually means for Nexon. At least with Warcraft's numbers (and anyone else reported into MMOGcharts), we can make vague guesses.

So I took a look around and finally found some analagous numbers for Maplestory.

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Getting what you see

Over at Raph's Place today, Raph posted some thoughts about WYSIWYG loot. Basically, the question is this:

If you see a mob with a spear, leather jerkin and sandals, why are you not able to loot that spear, leather jerkin and sandals when you kill it?

And, if you could, in what game could you best do this?

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Ingame Advertising gets a Metric

As noted in yesterday's Cynopsis Kids newsletter, Nielsen Media Research is launching a new service for companies who buy and sell advertising in video games.

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Designing for the past

People seem to be talking about Vanguard in the past tense, as if the game were already many years old. I haven't been an ardent follower of the game, as I do not feel I am their target player. However, having followed some of what Sigil Games is doing and saying, the game does feel as though it is looking to refine tradition.

And that got me thinking about designing for the past, or at least, designing an old idea during an age of change.

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E3Expo 2007: Smells like GDC

I missed this Gamasutra piece on Friday, but it clearly lays out the future of E3.

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