Mira Burri-Nenova has just posted a working paper on SSRN: "User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity"

User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment.

• Add new comment
• Read more

New York Times has an interesting story about Virtual Greats, a company that focuses on bringing licensed content to online environments:

For celebrities, licensing virtual products is a new way to make a buck and stay hip with a young crowd. Snoop Dogg’s manager, Constance Schwartz, said she did not have a clue about virtual worlds when Virtual Greats approached her this year, so she and her team spent a week exploring Gaia Online.

Virtual currency issues have been on the table for a while now: Sulake introducing dual currency system to Habbo and Three Rings launching Whirled with three separate currencies. The purpose of this post is not to go into much detail, but to encourage discussion on this issue.

I just quickly wanted to point out what implications different currency implementation currency design choices may have on different sub-business models.

Virtual World News has now launched a sub-site on news concerning virtual goods, covering issues in a more targeted scope. This is a well reasoned developement as the amount of emerging information is quite huge. Virtual assets sales is also one of the primary topics here at VERN and forms a well grounded, independent perspective to virtual worlds.

Charles Hudson over at his blog posted an estimate of the virtual goods market size in the United States.

More links to such estimates can be found here at VERN forum. Feel free to add your links.

Bubbles, a "rental"Sulka Haro, Lead Concept Designer of Habbo, informs us that Sulake is introducing a dual currency virtual economy model for Habbo:

As of today, Habbo is a dual currency economy. Credits are bought and used to purchase persistent value, and you can earn Pixels by doing Achievements and just hanging around online. We're piloting the change in UK, and if it's working fine, the other countries will get it at some point in the future (as usual).

More details and screenshots below.

So in 2009, Google Lively will be Google Dead-As-A-Doornaily. 

We never got too excited about Lively's current form around here.  I was always confused about how it aligned with Google's core business. Still it's too bad to see the big G moving out of this space and admitting defeat. More news via Google.  A brief post-mortem after the fold.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, an online journal that started this year, has just published its second number, titled Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds. Also, the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, a more established online publication, has published a special issue on virtual worlds. Most of the articles from these two publications fall into the familiar group of Second Life -based qualitative studies and essays. There are also a couple of surveys. Below, I briefly introduce four of the papers that touch on VERN's topic areas.

According to Korea Times, MMO publisher Nexon "is preparing to repay users who own paid items" in ZerA, an unsuccessful Korean MMO that is due to be closed in January. The game was launched in 2006 and peaked at 40 000 concurrent users. According to Korea Times, ZerA took three years and 10 billion won (approx. 7.5 M USD) to develop. Plans to launch in Japan were dropped after lukewarm reception in Korea.

We rarely blog about new games and services, but I will make an exception since Whirled by Three Rings seems to be an intriguing concept, design and research -wise.

"Whirled is an in-browser virtual world that is open to player creations and customizations; anything can be uploaded to the Whirled, from simple image furniture to mini-MMO games. Sophisticated avatars, pets, toys and games are coded to Whirled's Flash ActionScript APIs, which support multi-player games with arbitrary numbers of players driven by client or server-side code."

• 3 comments
• Read more