Thanks to countless videos of the Iranian uprising now being streamed on its system, YouTube may suddenly seem to be at the center of international news. But from the company’s perspective, YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin insisted to me in a phone interview this afternoon,… Read More »
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Wagner James Au
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Twitter got an interesting tech support call from a highly unique customer today: The Obama Administration, via the U.S. State department, which reportedly asked the microblogging service to delay a system upgrade in order to maintain the tsunami of history-making tweets about and emanating from… Read More »
We’re playing more online games than ever before, but we’re paying less for them, interactive marketing firm Future Ads said today. Of the 8,000 online casual gamers surveyed by the company this spring, 61 percent reported gaming more than last year, while nearly 80 percent… Read More »
When Google launched its O3D browser plug-in for displaying rich 3D graphics last month, I was dubious that the virtual world industry would eagerly embrace it as a platform for future MMOs. Most of the larger casual virtual worlds, like Habbo and… Read More »
Team Fortress 2 has already been on the market for 18 months, but the multiplayer shooter from Valve Software didn’t reach the peak of its popularity until last weekend — thanks in part to this month’s release of Meet the Spy, the latest… Read More »
Second Life creator Linden Lab will announce on Wednesday that SL users have generated 15 billion voice minutes on their internal avatar-to-avatar VoIP service since the product was launched 18 months ago, and are now forecast to do 15 billion total voice minutes in 2009.… Read More »
The best way to describe Blerp, now in open beta, is a social network that looks like it’s swallowed the entire web. Once you create an account and log in, the network is represented in a frame around your browser display, so every web site… Read More »
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There’s a new entrant in the rapidly growing market for retail cards and virtual goods for online games today: the Zeevex Virtual Currency Exchange. The coin of the realm is Zeev Tokens, which can be purchased via retail cards sold at thousands of brick-and-mortar stores,… Read More »
While in Hong Kong on a business trip recently, Oliver Goh was on his laptop playing around in a virtual world, when he realized he’d left the water running in his home back in Switzerland. He noticed this because the virtual world contained a recreation of… Read More »
Confirming early reports from last week, Sony just announced a machinima tool for use in PlayStation Home, the virtual world for its PS3 videogame console. Dubbed the “Living Room Stage Set” and selling for $4.99 in the PlayStation Home Mall starting today,… Read More »
Booyah, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup developing a “playful life companion” for the Apple iPhone/iPod touch, just scored $4.5 million in Series A financing from the iFund of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (Om wrote about KPCB’s $100 million… Read More »
When it comes to MMOs, freemium worlds for kids are enormously popular and lucrative; for the most part, however, the major game publishers have done little to pursue this market. That changes this month with the launch of Free Realms, a colorful… Read More »
Thanks to online video sites and the mass market appeal of games like World of Warcraft, “machinima” (movies created from video footage captured within a game) has become incredibly popular, viewed by millions daily. (The videos hosted by Machinima.com alone garner 35 million+… Read More »
They say numbers don’t lie, and in recent months the number of people populating virtual world Second Life has started to rise again. Mark Kingdon, CEO of parent company Linden Lab, has been touting the return to steady user growth; to back up his claims,… Read More »
While everyone in the game industry was following the latest news from GDC last week, I happened to notice an MMO milestone happening on Facebook: a casual virtual world called YoVille passed 5 million monthly active users. Launched in May of last… Read More »
When it comes to gaming, the most popular platform isn’t the Nintendo Wii, but Flash, the interactive browser plugin that now boasts 99 percent market penetration on nearly a billion PCs. (Flash game advertising network Mochi Media currently counts 100 million players across… Read More »
Will Nintendo be able to sustain its dominance in the rapidly changing handheld game console market? That’s the main question I was looking to get answered when I attended today’s Game Developers Conference keynote from Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. And while Iwata announced a… Read More »
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