News You Might Have Missed

I'm coming back from a long weekend in LA and my head is not back into social games quite yet, so here's a digest of stories from the last couple weeks that should hold you over until I get wordy again.

Webcarrz Raises $4 million Series A for a Car-based Virtual Flash-Based MMO. Pretty nice round for a company that I suspect is build on a Powerpoint presentation (considering their product is being made by a partner) . Their management team must be pretty strong. Here's a link to the CEO's Linkedin profile so you can decide.

U.S. Retailer Kohl's Partners with Virtual Dress-Up Site Stardoll. Read for the all-to-brief analysis of downstream traffic from the Stardoll site.

Google Announces Android Market, the App Store For Android Handsets. Once again, developers will have to choose where to place their development resources, Apple or Google.

How Much Money do You need to Create an MMO?

As the resident financial projection guy at Tenuki, I have spent a lot more time than I'd like thinking about this question. Weeks, in fact. And now, just as I have finally refined my development budget to silky smooth perfection, Brian "Psychochild" Green posts a pretty accurate accounting of the numbers for the development phase of an MMO (at least if you have a small, tight team of programmers). If he would have posted this in December he could have saved me from a Christmas Eve sitting at my parent's kitchen table poring over spreadsheets. On the plus side, Santa brought me an HP 12c financial calculator.

BTW, Brian also edited a very good book on the business of game development. Eventually, I'll review it here, but then again I say that about all the books I read.

Starbucks Survey: Ever heard of Second Life?

I constantly remind people that despite the massive news coverage of the virtual world of Second Life, the vast majority of people have never heard of it. For instance, the entire Midwest. However, the average Starbucks denizen in San Francisco has not heard of it either. Nor had they heard of There, Habbo Hotel, or Puzzle Pirates. A few had heard of World of Warcraft, from the TV commercials. Everyone had heard of Myspace.

I, of course, look on the bright side. If few people have heard of MMOs and virtual worlds, it means that the space has that much more room to grow. Myspace, on the other hand, may have reached its saturation point.

Admittedly, my sample size was about 15 people. I did not ask the employees. For comparison, I did the same experiment with MacGyver in DC's Union Station. In a 50 person sample, ninety percent knew who MacGyver was.

By the way, this was in a Starbucks in downtown San Francisco, near to Union Square on a Sunday afternoon. Try it yourself. Insert your own particular obsession/company/product. You'll be enlightened.

Top Ten MMOs (according to Xfire Stats)

Xfire, a free specialized IM client for hardcore games, is now releasing daily stats on their users' playing habits. Since they have an install base of over 6 million hardcore gamers, it's likely that it's a pretty accurate representative sample of the online hardcore gaming community.

Right now, the top ten MMOs in average hours played (you'll notice that more than half the list are Asian MMOs. It's easy to tell because you've never heard of them.):

1. World of Warcraft (Shocking!)
2. Guild Wars
3. Silk Road Online
4. MapleStory
5. EVE Online
6. Lineage II
7. Flyff
8. Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided
9. Kal Online
10. RF Online

I was surprised not to see Ragnarok Online on the list, but looking over at Daily Hours Played per Person, it's ranked #3. Weird.

As indicated above, half of the games listed are Asian MMOs. Obviously, Xfire must have a large install base in Asia. However, I'm sure the "massive" popularity of online games in Asia contributes as well.