Massively^™

The Social Gaming Summit, held in San Francisco last Friday, has been explored here on the site by our own Akela Talamasca. Today the Worlds in Motion blog has a great writeup of a panel on user-generated content, with an emphasis on how that concept applies to online gaming. Industry luminaries including Three Rings' Daniel James touched base with attendees on what makes user content so compelling, why users create, and what game makers can do to incorporate player creations.

Most interesting was their observation that virtual spaces were more important than virtual worlds per se. Jeremy Monroe, Director of Business Development for the makers of Habbo Hotel, offered this: "You have to make sure that you're bringing content that is suitable to all players in the world. So when we bring a piece of content that skews to one demographic we have to make sure that we bring more content that skews to the other demographics. Some games try to create different servers, such as a PvP vs. PvP situation. You have to give everybody equal opportunity and an equal number of tools to express themselves."

Ah, the ever-debated subject of MMO subscription models. We've seen a lot of discussion on the subject, some good and some bad. Gamasutra just so happens to be running a pretty good discussion featuring SOE's John Smedley, Three Rings' Daniel James and EA Mythic's Mark Jacobs all chiming in with their opinions on the matter. The selection is also a good one as Smedley represents a company hybridizing its models, while James is from a company that's more or less full-on microstransactions and Jacobs is firmly for sticking with subscriptions.

Each of the three mens' reasoning for their companies' model choices all make sense when you consider their reasoning. From what we can gather, all three viewpoints have their merit and really no one subscription model is going to win out anytime soon. Subscription models were a hot topic this year at ION and of course Massively discussed it as well in one of our podcasts. So if you'd like to dig deeper on the current state of the argument we highly recommend those features to you.

Icon for indie games businesses and designers alike, the piratical Daniel James has more details on the recently beta'd Whirled available on his blog. Whirled is, as we've previously discussed, a social games platform in development for some time now by Three Rings, makers of Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy. The large investment Three Rings landed last year has assisted in the further development of their existing titles, and has pushed Whirled to the tantalizing position it exists in now.

Daniel's blog has numerous tidbits on the platform's background, for the curious. At the moment the service is still kind of resource intensive, and you'll need Flash 9.0.115 and FF 2/3, IE 7/8 or Safari - Firefox 3 beta 4 might help. They made most of the games, and implemented an 'attention-based' currency that can be obtained from playing those games. Most of the avatars, furniture, and pets, though, have already come from the community. Plenty more details (esp. those for the technically inclined) are available at the Whirled Wiki.

A few thoughts on the project below.

The Venture Beat site is reporting that Three Rings, the developer of the fantastic Puzzle Pirates and the unique microtransaction title Bang! Howdy!, landed a big chest of gold this past summer. I imagine the gold was given to them in the form of American currency, as the company negotiated for some $3.5 million in venture capital money. The site also notes that the company's unique virtual currency platform is enormously successful, with $4 million in revenue reported by the company for 2007.

Though the site's article on the investment is light on what that VC money will be used for, they do briefly discuss Three Rings' work on the Whirled platform: The success of [the virtual currency] model has helped propel the company to 30 employees and is planning its new social networking game world, Whirled, where users will be able to create their own avatars, games, rooms, music, and pets.

[Via Next Generation]