The Future of Virtual Worlds Speakers: - Fill later
Cory Bridges, multiverse. Cofounder and CEO at multiverse. Creating a development and distribution platform for MMO and non-game virtual worlds. Free SDK, license for revenue sharing. Many people on Multiverse were early day netscape guys. What they see as the future of virtual worlds is metaphorically similar to the web. What they are doing is use this universal multiverse client to allow every consumer to experience every game built on the multiverse client. - Annot: Apparently this also totally cuts out your ability to enhance the engine from the client end standpoint. Want to apply the same mentality that Ralph Koster – Just got funded with a new startup to take the MMOs beyond the core gamer market. Expect to hear something in like 6 months. Mark Wallace. Freelance journalist, 3.D.com. Writes about game type MMOs as well as mirror type technologies such as Google earth and things like that. Also runs SecondLifeHerald which covers events in the game Second Life. *** from Second life. Second life is not a game, it is a platform for user driven content creation. “We are due for a shift in virtual worlds. We will see more scrappy academic types. ….” Since 1997 it can be hard for us to look back at what happened: What all were created Kingdom of the Winds, Lineage, Meridian59, Ultima Online, Asherons Call, Everquest in a short 95-97 timespan. The previous dominating players for online gaming all underwent at the very least, very radical shifts. Some like Mythic made that transition, but many did die out. If you can trace this back even further we have had these types of shifts before. The previous one before this that is easy to point out is the shift to user content created Text Mud gamespaces in the late 80‟s. Prior to that all text muds were games, but this opened the door to non-game MUDs. The view is that WoW is the pinnacle of current MMO game technology, and that this mirrors the text MUDs of the later 80‟s. (oncoming extinction?) Larger Online worlds in the west then WoW: Habla Hotel, RuneScape, Gia Online. The reason these are longer
(he alleges) is that they are NOT game industry polished content. They are not doing what companies since 97 have been trying to do. It is possible to take Google sketchup models and pull them into Multiverse. What are some of the other interesting beta projects that are perhaps not game MMO. Social, academic, etc worlds that people are creating. “its very gratifying that the worlds people are building on the Multiverse platform. There are a lot of worlds being built in the „traditional‟ gamespace (RPG, SCIFI, etc). There are however people who are taking topographical data from earth and mars to create virtual fieldtrips” Shakespear world and indie MMOs. Team called Oooglio, top talent from Hollywood creating content for young children (specifically girls). There are a wide range of things like this.Over 100 teams are building worlds in the private beta. A number of those are building social spaces fostered by user created content. User created content in Second Life is legally owned by Second Life users. Furthermore users were encouraged to transfer Second Life credits between real life and such. At GDC a bet was made that Second Life would have more virtual users in two years? The bet was for „a quarter‟. - Cory, Why did you make the bet? If they catch them later then GDC 2008 that is not a stab against user created content. The humor of having to gang up on second life is very different from what was predicted. Second Life has not followed the Spike and falloff of standard MMOs, but apparently Second Life has been on a gental exponential growth continually, perhaps now it is becoming far sharper. The internal economy is about 12 million a month, and about 1.7 million of that are converted into USD a month. Second Life users (as a whole) are making more money then they are paying to Linden Labs. 400,000 distinct items exist in the user created space. A 160thousand user hours a day and about a quarter of that is spent creating content. Do the math and this is 7200 person contact creation time per year not beind done for free, but rather paying Linden Labs. If growth continues linearly they will catch WoW by 2008, however they believe that growth will continue to spike exponentially. They do not believe they have nearly peaked. Demographics: 50/50 male female, largely non-standard gameplayers.. Looking at the growth segment that second life is heading into is not attempting to compete head to head with Blizzard. Will the industry, developers, etc keep pushing 3.D onword? The blog gets a lot of traffic, which is gratifying, but it is also cool to know there are so many people looking at this space. If you view the topic manner you wouldn‟t expect a huge readership, but it does bring in a huge swath of things that are not obviously connected like Web2.0, Virtual Worlds, traditional MMO/games. There will be this „3.D‟ moment where it will be completely sustainable.
Second life is gradually opening its self to be more and more interactive with the web, but you don‟t yet have robust social applications that go back and forth between Second Life and the web. There are a a lot things you can‟t do that you can from the web (constrains) on the flipside there are a lot of things happening online that don‟t need a 3D space (and perhaps are BETTER without being shoved in a 3D world), but there are also a lot of things online that might be better served in a 3D space. Web 3.D came about by discussions about Web 2.0 and wondering, is there a Web3D? Is user content driven applications going to be something that can take off? Web 2.0 is driven by the social driven sites that have occurred, will 3D virtual worlds follow and is this successful? It will depend a large extent on how the technology develops, because the web was able to become a development platform because it is completely open. A completely open protocol, really there is no barrier of entry to „joining the web‟. If you look at all the 3D platforms out there that are not games and are not multiuser being done for demonstration purposes there are so many you can‟t count. Somewhere between 2/