Kzero compares the traffic rankings of various virtual worlds.

Activision is launching an online music platform, based on the Guitar Hero franchise, that will compete with iTunes. Great idea. I’d love to know how they intend to handle portability between devices and between games.

For those of you looking for an extremely quick recap of the console makers’ E3 highlights:

• Nintendo announced Wii Motion Plus (a hardware add-on that makes Wiimotes more precise), Ubisoft’s Shaun White Snowboarding, which uses the Wii Fit board, the long-expected Wii Music, and the even longer-expected Star Wars lightsaber game. Nintendo also unveiled the WiiSpeak microphone, which allows a room full of players to converse with one another.
• Sony showed Resistance 2, unveiled a movie download service for the PS3 and PSP, and announced an original Ratchet & Clank game for PSN. There was also mention of a “massive action game” that would accommodate 256 players simultaneously. And of course, additional glimpses of Little Big Planet were a big hit.
• Microsoft unveiled an avatar system for LIVE, an updated dashboard, a party system (that enables friends to jump from game to game together), and integration with Netflix. On the retail games front: the next Viva Pinata, and a movie-making game that uses the Vision Camera called You’re in the Movies, and a karaoke game, Lips, which uses music on your Zune or iPod and ships with motion-sensitive microphones. Finally, the news that Final Fantasy is, well, finally coming to Xbox. On the LIVE games front: Primetime interactive game shows like 1 vs 100, the true sequel to Geo Wars, an all-new Galaga, and an original game in partnership with South Park.

Speaking of E3: You may agree or disagree with them, but the guys at Penny Arcade really know how to poke fun at the platforms. :-)

Raph calls out the McDonald’s Line Rider commercial, which I hadn’t seen yet. It’s a neat idea for an advertisement, and Raph draws on a few numbers to make the interesting point that Line Rider might be better known than the TV shows that host this advertisement.

Also from Raph, word that Habbo has reached 100m registered users worldwide. Quite a milestone.

Soren’s been on a bit of a “Spore creature watch” since the free creature creator was released. These particular creations will make any fan of Star Wars smile. (Take one guess as to the identity of the creatures before clicking the link. You probably won’t guess correctly.) Soren also points out that 500k creatures were created in two days. An auspicious beginning for a product that I really hope does tremendously well, commercially-speaking!

An account of the first meeting of CCP’s Council of Stellar Management, a democratically-elected group of players who meet with CCP twice a year to inform the future development of Eve Online.

An interview with Neil Young, who left EA to found an iPhone game publisher called Ngmoco. This quote caught my eye: “The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.”

The guys who made Duels.com (a mind-numbingly tedious — but very popular — web game) have taken their simple, asynchronous multiplayer design philosophy and applied it to baseball. The new game is called Baseball Boss. It’s in closed beta, so I haven’t had the chance to play, but something tells me Baseball Boss will be very successful. Accessible, short-session, asynch multiplayer gameplay and baseball (with its wide audience) seem like a good match to me.

Lots of people made fun of Activision for porting Guitar Hero to the DS. Looks like Activision got the last laugh: it sold 300k units, in North America only, in the first week.

Too wonderful for words. (Kim and Raph already beat me to it.)

Jeremy Liew posts an estimate that most successful free to play MMOGs will generate $1 to $2 monthly ARPU. Some commenters dispute that, claiming up to $5. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in between (though I’d lean towards the higher end for free MMOGs that do a good job of serving niche audiences and/or that have more creative revenue-generating mechanisms.)

Majesco becomes the first publisher to capitalize on the opportunity created by Nintendo when they stunted Wii Fit by not including streamlined, customizable fitness (and especially cardio) modes in the game. Hopefully Majesco doesn’t go too far in the opposite direction and forget the fun.

And speaking of Wii Fit, Nintendo claims that they didn’t create this video, but if they did, it’s one of the most brilliant marketing gimmicks ever. (And it looks like copycat videos will bring Wii Fit even more attention; Playboy just posted one. No nudity, but still maybe not safe for work.)

Ummm… and speaking of Wii Fit (again…) Danc writes an eloquent post accurately labeling it a great example of game design as a “transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters.”

The LA Times, which has historically been quite critical of Second Life (at least, in regard to its usefulness to businesses) published an article last month showcasing the increasing use of SL as a corporate meeting space.

Ubisoft is making a game for the DS based on Allan Carr’s “Easyway” to Stop Smoking. Love it. Really hope it works. This could be great for our industry.

Valve’s Steam Cloud has been unveiled. Steam users will now be able to access game-generated data (such as save and configuration files) from anywhere. Nice.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, DOTA is a hugely popular Warcraft 3 mod with an interesting development story. Very fun, too. A nice article about it can be found here.

Forbes publishes How Technology Can Save Retailers, which, in fact, is all about online games, not technology in general. The topic — using games as marketing and consumer research platforms — is something that I cover extensively in my upcoming book.

Sandra Day O’Connor is working on a video game that will teach children how the judicial system works. (Lots of great serious game-related links in this post, I’m realizing. It feels like an inflection point of sorts.)

When games give way to interactive art. (Cryptic description, I know. I’d also thought of calling this “the most unique reason to purchase a game I’ve ever seen.”)

Everyone should read this post on email communication. Long story short: 78% of email senders believe they are communicating clearly, 89% of email receivers believe they are interpreting the message correctly, but only 56% of receivers correctly interpret the message.

Good article by Bill Fulton on reducing anti-social behavior in online games. I took my own stab at this about a year ago. I couldn’t agree more with Bill - our efforts (as an industry) to address anti-social online behavior are insufficient and not proportional to the damage caused by that behavior. Too many developers are willing to throw up their hands and say “it’s a hard problem” or “jerks will be jerks.”

First the news that Stormfront is shutting down, now the news that Mad Doc has been acquired by Rockstar. Soon Valve and Epic will be the only big independent developers left.

Some research indicating that people seek more game-like (or perhaps “curated”) experiences in the virtual worlds they frequent.

Danc writes a thoughtful theoretical piece on how to leverage your player community for tasks like localizing your online game. (It’s a long article, but worth reading!)

Another long article, but a nice read for those of you interested in community management.

Kim writes a thoughtful post about EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company, and the rumor that it will enable players to purchase more advanced weapons with MS points. Kim makes a comparison to paintball (i.e. some players have an advantage because they can afford to purchase more paintball pellets) that had never occurred to me.

Via Raph, news that players of Eve Online will have the opportunity to elect the members of a player council that will dictate in-game policy. Seems like an exciting experiment in MMO democracy — looking forward to hearing more about it.

I just heard about Grand Theft Childhood. which appears to be a rare, thorough, and balanced look at the issue of violence in games. And it has a great pedigree (its co-authors are co-founders of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital, and are also on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School.) Check out the book’s website — it’s full of interesting information that could be useful in combating stereotypes about video games.

A “Club Penguin-like” virtual world called Handipoints, which rewards kids for doing chores, was apparently launched in beta form back in November. When kids complete activities such as cleaning their room, they gain either “handipoints” that can be redeemed for real-world toys (distributed via Amazon) or “bonus points” that can be used to buy virtual items. Parents decide which type of point is rewarded. Handipoints as 150k users (don’t know what percentage of those are active), with 3.5 users per family on average.

Now this is really cool: a company called Brand Experience Lab has developed AudienceGames, which are basically advergames that get played in movie theatres before a film begins. Audience members play the game by waving their hands to the left or right; a camera captures the activity and majority rules. An AudienceGame created for Volvo enabled theatre-goers to steer a virtual car around obstacles, scoring points when they did so. (Via Ilya.)

In response to the recommendations made by a commissioned report, the UK will require all packaged games to display BBFC ratings in addition to the now-standard PEGI ratings. The BBFC ratings are described as “cigarette-style health warnings.” A step backward for the game industry, but at least the BBFC has shown itself to be a thoughtful organization in the past, re: games.

McDonald’s is sponsoring an ARG called The Lost Ring in partnership with the Olympic Games. It may prove to be the most diverse ARG ever launched (no surprise, given the context.) Lots of puzzles in different languages and set in different countries, requiring international cooperation. Cool stuff. :-)

Accenture Careers, a Second Life-based employee recruiting initiative, launched this month. It offers “fun tests” that visitors can take, and it is implied that Accenture’s HR people might well be watching and reaching out to visitors who catch their attention.

BuildABearville.com hit one million users after its first month, and has now surpassed two million. The toy-turned-virtual-world trend continues. I wonder how many toy brands will NOT have virtual worlds associated with them five years from now? (I also wonder how many will flame out in the face of such intense competition, given that many of these virtual worlds won’t do much to differentiate themselves?)

Apparently Xbox 360 sales have jumped 36% in the UK since March 14th’s price cut. Hooray for us. ;-)

Too much “big news” broke over the past week. I can’t keep up:

Sony announced its own internal in-game ad unit, but says that PlayStation Network will remain open to other ad firms.

Phil Harrison, president of Sony Computer Entertainment worldwide studios, resigned from Sony and joined Atari.

EA seeks to acquire Take-Two for $2.0 billion. And Take-Two’s board of directors has rejected the offer, seeking more cash. Is it petty to keep quoting John “no longer ripe for mergers” Riccitiello at times like this? It is, I know.

Nintendo has announced Wi-Fi Connection Pay & Play. Players will use Wii points to pay for undisclosed Wi-Fi services (such as paying for online multiplayer time in certain games?) I’ll reserve comment until I know more about this, but it seems quite strange to me.

It seems that the number of active monthly Second Life users has not grown significantly since July 2007. That’s going to put one hell of a dent in the SL hype engine. Time to fix that crappy SL UI…

The Sims Online is reborn as EA-Land, a free-to-play game with virtual object sales (natch.)

Every year, one of my friends inevitably leads me to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report and letter to investors. This year, it was Kim. As always, reading the letter makes me want to give Warren Buffet a giant hug. If there was ever a more intelligent, honest, charitable, and humble person, I don’t know of him. Good lord, do I have a crush on Warren Buffet??

As always, GDC was a great experience. I highly encourage those of you who have never attended the conference to do so next year. This is especially true for students who are looking to break into the game industry — the educational (as well as networking) opportunities at GDC cannot be overstated. And with that, here are just a few examples of the great stuff that GDC had to offer:

The IGF winners were announced, and — no surprises here — Crayon Physics scored the grand prize. Petri Purho, the guy behind Crayon Physics, writes about it (and more) on his blog, Kloonigames. Keep an eye on Petri. As I’ve noted on this blog in the past, he’s always cooking up interesting ideas. The man is going places.

The annual Rant is always fun. Clint Hocking wins my vote for best quote: “Why isn’t Medal of Honor about honor? Imagine what it would be worth to you if you could put honor in a box and sell it. What if you package the experience of what it means to be honorable?”

I missed David Jones’ session, and I’m sorry I did. He presented one of the few upcoming “big budget” MMOs that I’m actually (semi-)excited about.

Plenty of Microsoft-related news. Community-created XNA games will, sometime in the future, be made available to all Xbox Live users. Games will be processed via peer review, not a managed portfolio process. Very, very exciting stuff — I’m glad the news is finally out! Other interesting revelations: XNA Game Studio can now be used to build games for the Zune. And last but not least, Fable 2 is blazing trails on XBLA — earn virtual gold in a related XBLA game, and you’ll be able to spend that gold within Fable 2 itself. For the record, I think there are so many cool ways that XBLA and retail games can be linked — this is just the start. It probably doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of XBLA games, but for a select few, there’s great potential.

Another session I wish I hadn’t missed: Game Studies Download 3.0, liveblogged by Raph Koster and revealing “the ten most interesting research findings of the year.” Some real gems in there.

LeapFrog has unveiled the $50 “Tag”, a plastic stylus that turns paper books into interactive playthings. It will be available this summer with an 18-volume library of children’s classics. Seems to me like a really neat learning tool for kids! And hopefully, more successful than its predecessor — the $100 “Fly.”

Valve has introduced Steamworks, a suite of (free) publishing and development tools. It includes real-time sales tracking, an encryption system, auto-updating, territory control, voice chat, multiplayer matchmaking, social networking, and development tools. Notably, it can even be used with games released through digital distribution services other than Steam.

Kim writes about the DRM-free tactics of Stardock Games, which recently published Sins of a Solar Empire, and Galactic Civilizations II before that. Both are big-budget retail titles, the latter of which apparently sold quite well. Key quote: “if you provide reasonable after-release support in the form of free updates that add new content and features that are painless for customers to get, you create a real incentive to be a customer.” Speaking of piracy, check out this interesting debate. Piracy may be rampant in Asia, but Nexon Director Min Kim is right to point out that used game sales in the US play a similar role in the market.

Three cheers for Seattle, my current home and, apparently, the new Silicon Valley. Maybe this will prevent my house’s value from dropping 25%+…

I like occasionally playing the part of Second Life cynic. I also like pointing out when something really cool pops up in there… like a detailed replication of Yosemite Valley in 1883. Or a giant, floating 1790 World Globe.

Moviestorm is a free machinima development tool that will generate revenue by offering $10 asset packs. It will focus on offering better camera controls and significantly more character animations than found in typical game engines.

Brenda Brathwaite takes a hatchet to the H&R block advergames on Facebook. In particular, I agree with her criticisms of “The Financial Match Quiz.” Who could think that a “compatibility quiz” based on questions like “how do you feel about debt” and “do you know what tax deductions you qualify for” would be fun? One lesson for advertisers: get a reasonable number of people to test your game before launching it… preferably in a context that encourages them to behave naturally, not tell you what you want to hear.

I just discovered I’mInLikeWithYou.com, a vaguely game-like online dating site that enables you to potentially meet people by answering their random questions, which you can only do if you’re willing to bid more points than the previous person who answered the same question.