Massively^™

At E3 today, Disney Interactive Studios announced their lineup of new titles releasing later this year. All of these titles were developed with family in mind, and most are exclusive to the console market. Yet, in relation to MMO news, they've also shown off their new Club Penguin expansion which will be released for the Nintendo DS.

Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force will introduce kids to all new adventures in the Club Penguin world. They will be able to connect with friends via DGamer, Nintendo Wi-Fi connection and ad hoc play. They will be able to wirelessly connect with the existing virtual Club Penguin world using the Nintendo DS to unlock special features and upload coins to their online penguin account. Elite Penguin Force is set to release just in time for the holiday season later this year.

Friday the 13th: An inauspicious day for the superstitious crowd, but a great day for attendees of the Social Gaming Summit, held in San Francisco. The day saw a schedule full of great panels, populated by some of the industry's finest movers and shakers, among them representatives from Gaia Online, Nexon, Three Rings, and Gamasutra, among others too numerous to list here.

A particular highlight of the conference for this blogger was the panel entitled "Casual MMOs and Immersive Worlds", which provided a lively discussion on what it means to create a virtual social space, how to monetize free-to-play content, and what exactly is a casual MMO? Trying to divide attention between listening raptly and taking notes is difficult; here is the result, along with the panelists, after the jump.

Players and pundits alike have been pointing to NPD figures as an indicator that PC gaming is in a decline compared to console sales. However, as pointed out by Randy Stude, PC Gaming Alliance president and Intel gaming program director in a recent interview, these figures ignored MMO subscription sales, something NPD hadn't been tracking until earlier this year. "And lo and behold, after just a quarter of research, they found -- under a rock that they hadn't looked at before -- a billion dollars."

While Stude was essentially calling for the PC gaming industry to come together to clear up this sort of confusion, there is more at work here than simply saying that PC gaming is hale and healthy based simply on MMO subscription numbers. For one thing, MMOs are merely one arm of the industry, not the industry itself. World of Warcraft alone must count for a significant total of those NPD numbers, not to mention virtual worlds like Club Penguin.

One dollar per user per month may not sound like a huge revenue for any game, but when you start thinking in the terms of the user base of games like Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin and RuneScape you start to realize how much a dollar is really worth.

Lightspeed, a venture capital firm, recently did a few calculations to come up with the figures of how much revenue is generated by a single user in today's most successful free-to-play, microtransaction supported MMOs. What they came up with is a pretty interesting look at how much a "successful" MMO will make. For example, Habbo Hotel pulls in around $1.30 on average for each of their active users per month, while RuneScape pulls in 84 cents per active user per month.

The one figure that stood out from the pack was Second Life, which pulled in 9 dollars per user per month thanks to things like land ownership and the premium subscription that land owners have to buy to be able to own property. Even with Second Life in the mix, it's interesting to see that these types of MMOs don't make much per user, yet still can pull in great amounts of revenue by entertaining huge player bases.

[Via Kotaku]

Anyone who has ever listened to a teenager on Xbox Live knows how it goes. He's saying WHAT? Racist, homophobic, bigoted language ... and that's just in their handles. Given easy voice chat, conversation heads straight to the lowest common denominator. But unfortunately perhaps, it's not possible to censor voice chat as easily as it is to censor text in order to make the chat safe for children.

That's a pretty difficult design problem. Given you have written a game for children where chatting is possible, is it even remotely possible to make sure conversation stays friendly and helpful? This very question is the subject of this week's Game Career Guide Design Challenge. Now, this would be a hard enough challenge for text alone, and luckily, that's all the challenge covers. With the growing pervasiveness of voice chat, though, even the best text-based filtering solution will fail utterly. SOE has promised to integrate Vivox voice chat technology in its future games, including its "M"-rated The Agency and its "G"-rated Free Realms. This is a challenge SOE will face at launch. How would you guarantee a safe environment for a child, one where they could not give away any personal information, where they wouldn't be exposed to hateful speech or threats, but where they could speak freely with the friends they know?

David Craddock at our sister site, Big Download, reports about a group of kids who are monitoring chat and reporting unhealthy chat or just tasking the game publishers themselves to monitor chat. Club Penguin's developers claim two-thirds of their staff is devoted to monitoring chat and customer service. Kids will always find a way around restrictions, and the only real solution is for parents to closely monitor their kids when they are online in any capacity. No other system can possibly take their place.

[Via Gamasutra]

KingsIsle Entertainment was founded way back in 2005 -- and since their inception, they seem to have stayed quietly sequestered in their offices, hard at work on unknown projects. With a team consisting of industry veterans from Wolfpack (creators of Shadowbane) and Ion Storm, it was hard not to be curious about their work. If you're one of the many who have been wondering what the team has been working on, you're in luck, because they've just announced their first project: Wizard101.

We recently had a chance to visit KingsIsle's Austin studios (they've taken up residence in a corner of the complex formerly inhabited by Origin Systems) and enroll in the Ravenwood School for the Magical Arts for a day to get a feel for the game. Though this game is aimed at kids ("tweens" that are too old for the likes of Club Penguin but too young for their parents to feel comfortable letting them loose in Barrens chat), its turn-based combat system and trading card game elements may interest you, too. So what makes Wizard101 different from the proliferation of MMOs on the market? A few elements of the game caught our eye...

For those not keeping up on their Club Penguin developments (and why not, it's a fairly amusing and eminently kid-friendly flash-based browser game), they've recently implemented a new "Big Screen" version of the client. The gameplay area used to be about 760x480 and now clocks in by default at a robust 910x575 (rough estimates using our Print Screen-fu), allowing us to see our online penguin counterparts in greater detail and clarity than ever before.

Much to our surprise however, there was not universal praise for this graphical upgrade. Mesagirl over at Ten Ton Hamster lamented the larger size playing field, saying higher resolutions are for the elderly and that the bigger size gives her headaches after extended play. They ran a little straw poll to get readers' thoughts on the subject, and the vast majority of them agreed with us that the bigger size is a positive development. It's a moot point anyway, since you just change the screen size with a push of a button. You don't hear most people complaining about the default resolutions for games like Age of Conan; the same rules apply here in this blogger's mind.

An interesting report on social media by the Nielsen group recently found that Club Penguin, the kid-friendly browser-based MMO acquired by Disney last year for a robust $350 million, may be plateauing or even declining in growth in the face of newer, more competitive social media experiences. While the Nielsen methodology is never made expressly clear (and no direct competitors managed to crack the Top 10), the report does indicate that using the same methodology, they found a 250% growth rate year-over-year just last August.

MMO vet Raph Koster is less than surprised by this development, attributing the slight decline in unique visitors more to the increased competition in that space, rather than any specific detriment in Club Penguin itself. Raph speculates that we'll continue to see the market fragment as more kiddie MMOs enter the market. And, judging my store shelves these days, they're coming in droves. While he seems to be of the opinion that the days of these niche MMOs competing in the same arena as MySpace and Facebook are over, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of money to be made and kids to be entertained.

There's always a lot of discussion about what's going to be the next big thing in the MMOs industry. We all love to talk about the future and that's largely because it's a very interesting topic. So we just had to attend the "Online Games in 2013" panel at ION 08. This panel was actually introduced by Peter Freese, the ION Conference Director. It was easily one of the most packed panels I've been to thus far which is saying a lot since all the panels have been pretty well populated already.

The panel consisted of Erik Bethke (GoPets Ltd), Scott Jennings (NCsoft), Bridiget Agabra (Metaverse Roadmap) and Damion Schubert (BioWare). With a group of people like this I was expecting some varied and compelling conversation on the topic of MMOs in 2013. In the end we got just that and a quite a bit more.

What's a virtual world? Why do we even call them virtual worlds when we could easily call them digital worlds, or just simply, worlds? This was just one of the many interesting topics discussed at ION 08 this year in a panel entitled, "Redefining Virtual Worlds for Mass Markert Consumption" which is quite the mouthful. So lets put things in a more understandable -- and far more interesting -- perspective.

Whether you're talking about Club Penguin, Gaia Online or Second Life the truth of the mater is that these "worlds" are here to stay and they all share similarities -- social interaction. Not only are they here to stay, but they've only just begun to grow as a market. Which is why this panel was all the more interesting. The panel includes Erik Bethke (GoPets Ltd), John K. Bates (Mindark/Entropia Universe), Craig Sherman (Gaia Online), Rob Lanphier (Linden Lab/Second Life) and was moderated by David Elchoness (Association of Virtual Worlds).

Frustration and disappointment was squarely behind the creation of the kid-friendly online space Club Penguin. Co-founder and general manager Lane Merrifield was sick and tired of the MMO industry's "cynicism" when it came to children. Merrifield and his partners went forward with the gamespace as a side project, a world unsupported by VC money or expectations.

GamesIndustry.biz sat down for a chat with the man, and delved into the context behind one of the most successful kid-oriented titles on the market. In his words, he'd be "silly" not to be surprised by the game's runaway success and the purchase by Disney. The human element, he offers, has been critical to their success. "Merrifield also thinks that there is an over-reliance on technology that ignores the human element, which is why they've decided to devote two-thirds of the company's staff to positions such as safety moderators and customer service. 'We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody's, especially because of that human element - we're adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.'"

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and spend some quality time with the CEO of Mind Candy, Michael Smith. I picked his brain about Mind Candy's newest game, Moshi Monsters, how they're going to attract and protect the kids that play it, and what some of Michael's favorite past-time activities are. Plus, we even discussed a little background on Perplex City, and the status of the anticipated alternate reality game, Perplex City Season 2.

Interested in what goes on in the mind of one of Britain's most innovative game developers? Read on after the break and find out!

It's always a little odd to hear someone talk about gaming as 'hardcore' or 'casual' because it is, after all, still just game. When we log out of the game and turn off our computers, we've come to the same place no matter if we spent our time clearing Karazhan at record speed, or spent it in a tavern discussing the finer points of blood elf hair-styling over tankards of ale. When someone announces they are making a casual MMO, what do they mean by that? World of Warcraft was at one point described as a casual MMO, and perhaps compared to EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, it was. It set up a milestone for casual gaming, but gaming has moved on and now even WoW is considered too hardcore for many. How is it possible to define what a casual MMO is, when the definition keeps changing?

Fluid Entertainment, a game company that employs only 14 people, has raised an impressive $3.2 million in funding for the development of a Flash-based online social game for kids aged 6 - 11. The game has an environment-friendly theme.

After the successes of Webkinz and Club Penguin, these kid-oriented games and virtual worlds are hot items for venture capitalists, according to VentureBeat. Fluid is one of many companies aiming to enter that sector of the industry, but its game is particularly intriguing because it aims to use the medium to "[affect] real-world behavior around environmentalism and sustainability."

This is one more example of the virtual world and MMO phenomenon expanding beyond the hardcore role-playing game niche and "just for fun" design. Fluid is aiming for a summer release of the new game, and its business model will combine subscriptions, micro-transactions, and apparently the sale of real-world merchandise. With $3.2 million in funding, these guys could end up notable players in the kids' MMO space, so we'll be watching them.

[Via Mashable]

Our Robin Torres writes a column called Gamer Interrupted, about mixing real life with gaming, and it's a wonderful read. In a recent post, the subject turned to how to make MMOs more child-friendly. A few specific titles were covered as well, including WoW and ToonTown Online, but it's worth asking if there are other good first MMO titles that are not only child-safe, but actively worthwhile for a kid to play, either alone or with a parent.

Obviously, we can mention Webkinz and Club Penguin, but are there others? Are there, in fact, any non-child MMOs that are safe for children to play?