It’s been a crazy week leading up to E3. This week has been all about Google’s Lively, Rockstar Games potential ban on their Bully: Scholarship Edition game. Then you’ve Yahoo, Microsoft’s new love interest, shacking things up as the team with Double Fusion and NeoEdge Networks.
I really want to check out more of Google’s Lively and look at the potential that is containted within. Has anyone tried Lively yet?
Over the weekend The Blue Book for virtual worlds launched. The book is free to download and should be required reading for anyone wanting to get into virtual worlds. You always want to pick the best virtual world or social network that is going to fit your brand. At the same time a report released this weekend said that 184 million was invested into virtual worlds in Q1 of 2008.
John Porcaro, Manager of the Online Community at Microsoft’s Xbox division talks with Marketing Voices about online trends and where the world of online is headed. He bring up Facebook & social networks, hiring from the community and what it takes to walk that fine line between transparency and secrets.
I was sitting in my Introduction To Management class the other day and some how we got on the topic of Second Life. We were talking about different industries and how some have monopolies in them. The prof asked how many people have heard of Second Life and mines was the only hand to go up. I was shocked at first and then I begin to realize that Second Life has barely made it out into the mainstream… regardless of all the press it has gotten in the last few years.
This got me to thinking that maybe Second Life is only the first stage in a multi-level game. Maybe Raph’s Araea or Conduit Labs might have the right idea about the future of MMO/virtual worlds and help get it mainstream attention. I think Second Life has reached its potential in the long term and can only get better if they were to rewrite some of the underlining code within the system. Second Life has plateaued and I think we all need to move on and find our third life.
CMP’s Worlds In Motion is a new blog dedicated to virtual worlds including World of Warcraft and Second Life. A unique feature they added to the mix is an online world atlas for virtual worlds. I’m looking forward to seeing how this evolves over the longterm. This could become a great resource for marketers looking to find out about virtual, besides the usually suspects, and which ones might fit their brand, demographic and psychographic.
They have covered Disney’s Toontwon, General Mill’s Millsberry and Habbo Hotel. You should check out the Atlus and see what other worlds you might uncover. It’s always better to be a big fish in a small pound then a small fish in a big pound.
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