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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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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The ‘First’ MMORPG?

In reading this article about Nexon, I'm reminded of the perennial:

What was the worlds first graphical MMORPG?

The problem, of course, is what constitutes "first".

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Numbers Game part 2: Comparisons

Many have long dragged out their calculators, multiplied a games number of subscribers by that games flat monthly fee, and arrived at an assumption of how much revenue that company is collecting each month. They've extended this practice across all games in the genre, attempting to use the number of subscribers as the basis by which all games are measured, thinking this was an apples-to-apples comparison.

In this conversation with Dellaster though, I feel like it's high time we ask the fundamental questions:

What is the apple?

And, is there one by which all games can be measured?

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Second Life- Economist Article

While visiting the in-laws, my father-in-law mentioned he had held aside for me an Economist article about Second Life (did I ever mention how with-it they were?) Unfortunately I left the article down with them. 

Fortunately, The Economist is with-it as well.

Some interesting data-points are mentioned within.

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Where’s the next ‘big’ MMOG?

Today Speck asked,  "is the "WoW Killer" that is on the horizon? Which game is getting the hype now?"

Unlike the old days, when AO, DAoC, SB, AC2 and so on were all going to dethrone the then-dominate Everquest, there's just too many games out now, splintering the playerbase into discrete sub-groups.

It's like other features of bygone days: the magic has been replaced by sheer quantity. And it's not just lots of people playing WoW.

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Supply and Demand at IGE

Over at Grimwell Online, Mank points to a post by Edward Castranova over at Terra Nova in which he mentioned IGE has stopped buying WoW gold. That post, and the thread at Grimwell, cover some of the significance of this.

I have some other thoughts.

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