club-penguin posts

According to this MSNBC article, there are no less than 200 youth-oriented virtual worlds and MMOs either in development or on the market. Some of these titles even boast account numbers that rival Facebook and MySpace as analysts estimate 30M users in Club Penguin, 52M users in Neopets, and 90M in Habbo.

Is this really surprising though? Probably not when you consider that kids today aren't totally different in this generation than previous generations. 'Tweens have always liked to socialize, play, and simply "hang out." The difference nowadays is that parents tend to have looser restrictions and the kids can accomplish most of the things they like to do without even leaving a computer chair. The rules and tools have changed.

The article also talks about a 89/10/1 rule that most F2P/RMT games aim for. This rule assumes that 89% of people will play your game for free, 10% will pay the minimum, and 1% will spend lots of money. Apply that rule to the recent announcements that both Free Realms and Runes of Magic have surpassed 1M users. If the rule applies, it means 100,000 people are paying the basic fees (~$5/month) and 10,000 are spending oodles on extras ($15+/month). That's roughly $650,000 per month, which isn't half bad depending on your development costs.

These realms may not be completely free, but darn if the New York Times loves them anyhow. It's a little strange to see a major publication like the NY Times reviewing Free Realms, let alone any review for an MMO from any outlet. Still, the fact that SOE's little free-to-play game-that-could smacked down the one million accounts mark in record time probably has a little to do with this much attention.

As far as reviews go, this one is highly positive and praising of both Free Realms and SOE, and its not very surprising at this point. Just about everyone has had nothing but good things to say about the title -- not that any game is without its faults, especially at launch.

The message the NY Times' review ends with is one we agree upon. Free Realms is definitely a triumph for the company that lost much of its EverQuest thunder to Blizzard's World of Warcraft. And really, there's no greater proof than having everyone talking about the game. Well that one million account record is also good proof, we suppose.

I wont bore you all with words and phrases strung together to create some form of coherence, instead I will jump right back in! I am extremely proud to invite you once more to join in with the fun right here at Massively that is TurpsterVision!

After last time trying to sell you all on a new form of entertainment media, I thought I'd return to something a little more traditional. Something that all the MMO fans out there, all the World of Warcraft fans, could really get behind. A game that's on everyone's lips and dancing right into their hearts. That's right: Club Penguin.

Join me below the cut for a special deluxe edition (complete with tuxedo) of TurpsterVision!

Wizard101 launched just yesterday, and it's enough to get us thinking about the growing field of youth-oriented MMOs. Despite their intentions, these 'kiddie' games are actually great on a number of levels. Not only do they fulfill the obvious demographic needs (games for young kids, games for teens, games parents can play with their kids) many of them are quality enough to be worth playing by adults.

So we wanted to ask today: what 'kiddie' games are you playing? Do you think the new crop of kid and teen-oriented MMOs is a good thing, or a bad thing? Looking forward to SOE's Free Realms as much as the Massively crew is? And most of all, what MMOs would you suggest for folks looking to get their kids into games?

Pancakes, just about everyone loves 'em. They're deliciously light and fluffy and can be sweetened with everything from blueberries to chocolate chips. Just like their flat 'n tasty counterparts, Pancake MMOs are light, fluffy and sweet all over. Hello Kitty Online, Go Pets, Neopets, Free Realms, Club Penguin and the near bouquet-size of franchise-based MMOs coming from Disney seem to be piling up on our proverbial plates. These MMOs can taste great and do tend to venture into fun, experimental game design territory. However, are they also like actual pancakes in that too many will cause everyone to grasp their collective stomachs and painfully moan, "Too many pancakes!" or can we stomach endless amounts of soft, tasty sweetness?

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).