via Terra Nova by Edward Castronova on 11/10/10

Virtual-world2 The economy continues to move slowly and economists seem as uncertain as ever about the causes and what to do. Months ago, I began to wonder – could this possibly be the first “exodus recession”? In my first book I sketched out the idea. Suppose economic activity moves from the real world into the virtual world. Human happiness is unaffected or even goes up, however, the goods that produce the happiness are now produced and consumed in a virtual environment rather than the real one. Measurements of economic activity, being all based in the real economy, would begin to show weakness. I argued that contemporary political and economic control systems do not tolerate much weakness, thus, there might well be some sort of crisis in the real world, for no good reason, simply because production and consumption was going “off the books” and into virtual environments. One term for this would be an "exodus recession" - an economic downturn caused by the movement of human attention and energy into virtual environments.

Are we in an exodus recession right now?

First, let's consider the reasoning by which an interest in virtual things would cause a recession in real life. Why would a movement to digital living cause a recession? My point of view has to be preceded by a disclaimer. Despite years of training by macroeconomists, I have to confess that I don’t feel that we (they or I) understand the macroeconomy very well. For better or worse, I tend not to look at macroeconomics using the Keynesian and Monetarist models bequeathed to economics students today. Over the years I’ve become convinced that the macroeconomy is primarily a matter of mass psychology. If we believe that the economy will grow, it will. Employers will invest and hire, workers will borrow and spend. If we believe that the economy will shrink, it will. Employers will hang onto cash and lay off workers, workers will save their money. Log-rolling and self-confirming expectation rule the day, in much the same way that money’s value is a huge social convention. So is the safety of your bank deposit a convention, insisting that the deposit is safe. Convention – think of the economy’s health as a social convention, an aspect of culture. After World War II, Germany and Japan – the most beaten down nations in human history – suddenly became the most vibrant economically. Is it because their governments (and ours) gave them a stimulus? Or was it because their governments carefully preserved the real purchasing power of their currency? Probably not. We call these events “miracles” because the models don’t explain them at all. The economic miracles happened because Germans and Japanese decided, on a cultural level, to be vibrant economies. Workers threw themselves into consumption and work. Companies threw themselves into investing and hiring. The economies grew like crazy. Hope is the thing to hope for; fear fear.

The sensitivity of the state of the economy to our cultural understanding of the state of the economy is greater than ever. We live today in a world where the health of the economy is a widely-reported and narrowly-followed pseudo-fact. Business people focus like laser beams on employment figures, GDP growth rates, and so on. If the GDP growth rate falls from 3% per year to -1% per year – Ye Gods! It’s the end of the world! The impact of such changes on the happiness of an individual person is minimal by itself. But when we read about such things, we all react. Hiring doesn’t happen. Purchases are not made. Lo and behold, the drop from 3% to 1% becomes a drop from 1% to -2%, unleashing another round of anguish. People start to lose jobs – which DOES affect their happiness, a great deal.

The central government responds with stimulus and quantitative easing, none of which will work unless we all believe that a stimulus or QE is just the thing to make everyone believe that the economy is turning around. And if we all have some kind of pessimism about the long haul, if we believe that none of this is going to work, it just won’t – whatever Lord Keynes said.

In such an environment, even a little thing, if persistent, could touch off a prolonged mood of pessimism. Is it possible that the virtual economy is that thing?

George Will recently wrote about the increasing speed with which our experiences are going digital. Using data from Robert Weissenstein, chief investor for Credit Suisse, he notes that “In 2001, the iPod arrived. Less than a decade later, the number of employees of music stores has declined from about 80,000 to 20,000.” And “Three million iPods were sold in 2.5 years; 3 million Kindles were sold in two years; 3 million iPads were sold in 80 days; 3 million iPhones were sold in three weeks.”

Let’s construe the notion of “virtual economy” quite broadly: If you receive an experience by yourself through a machine that runs on digital technology, without doing or buying anything physical (other than press a few buttons), it’s virtual. To download a song and listen to it on your iPod is virtual; to go to a concert is real, to buy a CD and play it is real, to play your own instrument is real. The difference I want to highlight is in the physical nature of the economic transaction. The virtual transaction does not require the movement or alteration of anything physical. Not even physical money changes hands. The real transaction involves material being created, moved, consumed, all by human hands.

Using these concepts, there’s some evidence that an exodus from the real to the virtual is not only already underway (as I argued in my second book) but that’s it’s gotten big enough to affect our sense of a whether the real economy is healthy or not. In support, here’s a series of random judgments about the state of the real world.

TV viewing is down among 18-34 year old males, and movie attendance is flat. Meanwhile, more and more time is being spent online or playing videogames. If you want to get 80 hours of fun watching movies, you need $1000. You can get the same fun from a game for $50. Spending time online or playing videogames simply involves less expenditure in the real economy.

Human eyeballs see a lot fewer ads than they used to. As noted, some people are watching less TV. For most others, the TV they’re watching is increasingly DVR’d or Hulu’d, that is, stripped of ad content. On the internet, we avoid ads easily – they are usually in the periphery, and if not we can click them away, or surf to something else. Advertisers have made an industry on the presumption that ads make people buy things. If they are right, it follows that fewer ads would result in us buying less. Ads are less and less a part of our daily experience. HBO’s success with a show about evil advertisers is perhaps apt now, because we feel we finally have gotten the upper hand on these miscreants. The net result of our power over advertisers, according to their own model, would be a weakness in general real-world consumption.

Facebook is a great way for people to connect. In some FB games, you can buy someone else a beer. You can poke them, write on their wall, friend them. None of this causes anything in the real world to be moved or changed. There are 500m people on FB, hundreds of millions more on other, similar social networking sites. If you’re friending people on FB, you’re ever so slightly less likely to be sending them a real Hallmark card, ever so slightly less likely to write them a note on paper, ever so slightly less likely to give them a call. That’s probably not going to turn around, either. Our ability to socialize online puts a crimp in our general need to move stuff or change stuff in the real world.

People who spend time online don’t have to worry about what they are wearing. Suppose that some percent of a given day can be spent in pajama’s, the rest must be spent in decent clothes. For decent clothes, you need a whole and varied wardrobe. For PJ’s, you need a few comfy ones. Now increase the amount of time that can be spent in PJ’s. The demand for decent clothes falls, if ever so slightly. The internet allows us to do all kinds of stuff in our PJ’s – so it must have an ever so slightly dampening effect on the market for fashion.

One could go on. It is possible, slightly, that there’s a general weakness in consumer spending simply because, to get our social, emotional, informational, and needs met, we just need fewer movies, fewer beers, fewer trips, fewer shoes, fewer things in general. What if the world of human beings suddenly became converted to the idea of consuming less stuff? Why, there’d be a recession, of course. Less buying means fewer jobs and less investment, which means economic contraction. It would mean a general pessimism about the prospects of business.

If our culture suddenly went Green, for example, we would have a recession but we would also understand its cause. We would know that a dissatisfaction with materialism led to economic weakness. But if this conversion to less consumption came from a different and more obscure source, how would we identify it? What if real world consumption refused to grow not because people were becoming hippies, but because they remained selfish materialists who had, however, come to enjoy virtual matter? If an exodus recession were underway, what would the world look like?

For one thing, the general pessimism about the economy in an exodus recession would not extend to the industries that produce virtual experience. Indeed, the video game and social networking industries are booming right now. Computer and digital entertainment hardware and software – doing quite well, thank you. Bold innovations in devices happen every year, and the number of apps is skyrocketing.

Another aspect of an exodus recession would be that consumers, in general, would not be expressing much general pessimism about being consumers. There’d be no sign that people had given up on the idea of buying and selling things. They’d be as interested in money, the economy, and jobs as ever. However, they would consistently say that they’re slightly less interested in buying a washing machine than they were last year. You don’t have to do as much washing when you spend more time living through your avatar. They’re going to be slightly less interested in a car because they’re not going to go driving around quite as much. This has nothing to do with malaise or lack of government stimulus or the conversion of a culture to moderate spending. It begins with people buying digital stuff instead of real stuff. And indeed, we find in the recent US election that people are very interested in jobs and the economy. Yet collectively they seemed to react less powerfully than expected to efforts to stimulate their real-world spending. This would make sense if people are turning their consuming energy to mp3s, FB gadgets, and Xbox Live Achievements. Having a new road is not going to have much effect on an economy based on digital goods.

These are all conjectures, of course. It’s a what-if. Is it possible? I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far future. But I didn’t think about the possibility that the term “virtual environment,” in its economic meaning, might expand to environments as diverse as Hulu and Facebook. Are people now spending enough time fiddling around with digital stuff that their interest in physical stuff has weakened to the point that it catalyzes an ongoing cycle of economic pessimism? Perhaps not. But some trends certainly point in that direction. Even if this is not the first exodus recession, one wonders how far off that first one may be.  

via Gamasutra Social/Online News by research@gdmag.com (Eric Caoili) on 11/10/10

At game engine company Unity's Unite 10 conference in Montreal, Schell Games founder Jesse Schell delivered a keynote called The Future of Virtual Characters, in which he predicted the potential future of interactive characters and the technology requirements to achieve truly compelling and enduring characters.

His company is currently developing multiple games, including The Mummy Online, a free-to-play MMO which uses Unity. "I think there's a lot of reason to believe that a lot of the innovation in the next five to 10 to 20 years will be happening on the Unity platform," Schell said, which is what attracted him to speak at the conference.

While he admitted he's speaking about the future, "making concrete predictions about the future is the best way to make predictions," he said -- in other words, the more he does it, the better he gets at it.

Rolling back to the past, even before games, he said "there's something deep within us that likes the idea of virtual characters." And though we "we often think of virtual characters as something for children," they don't have to be.

Schell used to work for Disney, and has had plenty of chances to observe kids interacting with the characters in the suits at the theme parks. Many kids love them, but for the ones who do not, they often react deeply negatively. "There's always this moment where kids are uncomfortable around these characters... and the kids become explosively angry at the characters. Some kids become very upset, and what they become upset about, as far as I've been able to figure, is that they figure out that this character isn't real, and the fantasy has been taken away from them."

So how do we preserve this fantasy?

Facial expression tracking is one of the core tools -- "the reason this stuff matters is because everything's getting a camera on it." Once devices can track the user's expression, you can map that onto a character and improve interactivity. "You can imagine that in MMOs five to 10 years from now, that every character will map the facial expression, the eye movement of the player who's playing."

Schell also sees this as potentially useful for avatar-based teleconferencing, which could well replace video services like Skype, in his view, because it will be more freeing and also improve interactivity. "Once the technology is there to make decent facial expression... It will be an interesting experience to see who uses which avatar when," he said, referring to professional versus social and game situations.

At this point, Schell found it important to point out that while there are plenty of skeptics about these ideas becoming prevalent, disruptive technologies often leapfrog those that have slowly and steadily developed over time and gained huge audiences.

Using a chart from the book The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen -- "everyone should be familiar with it," he said -- he illustrated this concept. "The reason they blow it because they make the terrible mistake of listening to their customers." The customers end up switching to disruptive technologies, "and I think facial avatars will be one of those."

Now, you have an interactive avatar -- what would improve that? How about a memory? Persistent databases can allow for this.

It's-A You

Referring from 1981's Donkey Kong to today, Schell made this point amusingly: "You think of game characters kind of like your friends, but I'm sorry Mario, you're a terrible friend. Mario, dude, we've been together 30 years. I remember you! You don't remember me!"

"We have persistent characters on per-game basis, but why not do it on a per-character basis? When you sign into a game he could remember you, show you videos of what you've done before. We could switch from 'It's-a me, Mario!' to 'It's-a you, Jesse!'"

Of course, he pointed out, "If we're going to have a long term relationship over time," there's an important stipulation. "We change. Will the characters need to change too?"

Speech recognition is going to be crucial to the evolution of characters, too."It's another one of those below-the-line [of necessary-for-adoption quality] technologies we've given up on," said Schell, but "it's crucially important for us. It may be the most important technology for us of all as game designers."

USC professor Chris Swain, said Schell, draws a parallel between games and movies here. "People did not take movies seriously when they were silent; they were not serious art or serious entertainment. Then they learned to talk and everything changed. And film and video became the literature of the 20th century.

"He suggested we'll see the same parallel with video games. Of course, they can talk, but they can't listen. Once they listen to us and we can have a conversation, games will become the most important medium of our time," said Schell.

And for that, natural language understanding will be key. However, he found it important to point out that discussions of this topic are often framed in terms of the Turing Test -- but this "trips us up a lot because there are a lot of things that wouldn't pass that test that still would be interesting to talk to."

Text adventures were once popular, but Schell thinks it's not just the rise of graphics that killed them. "The text gives you too many options. It opens it up and says 'type anything', but there are only a small number of actions it can respond to. It's acting like it's free, but it's not, and that's what frustrating."

Scribblenauts is another example of this technology -- still incipient, but promising, said Schell.

Facial sensing was already covered. Emotions are easily recognized by humans, but computers must be part of that, said Schell. "Once we can do that we can sense your emotions," said Schell, developers can create "a game where you actually have to act, or feel emotions. A game where someone tells you where there dog just died and if you can't manage to cry then no, you're not getting to the next level!"

Joking aside, that would leave room for "characters who can sense your emotion [and] may want to act differently."

Of course, the best-known example of this so far is Lionhead's Milo demo. "A lot of people were frustrated with this because parts of it were cool technology, and other parts of it seemed to be created out of vapor and lies," Schell admitted. However, "Setting that aside, this is the dream of face-to-face communication with a character... I'm sure that soon it will be very possible."

Here's a question: Who will we talk to? Schell's answer wasn't what you might expect.

"I think this will fundamentally change the way video games work," he said. While the natural assumption is that it will be NPCs and other players -- similar to contemporary game interactions -- "I think we're going to be talking to our avatars. Normally we think that's crazy -- I control the avatar. I would never talk to the avatar."

We already disengage from our avatar in cutscenes, however, he pointed out. Mario talks, and then the player resumes control. This is a process -- "a natural projecting yourself in, projecting yourself out. As such we will develop a relationship with these guys to the point where we may think of them as virtual companions. We may have a relationship with them... and if they have some intelligence they may do some stuff when I'm not logged in."

And as games map to more and more platforms, the character (with its persistent database) will hop from one to the next and continue your interaction. "The number of technologies that run 3D graphics is going to continue to diverge. It's not going to converge because technologies never do that," said Schell. These characters could connect to everything from Facebook to GPS, access your health data, your social graph, examine your emails and online purchase info, of course interface with game data,

He even envisioned a conversation with a character while driving -- the character continues to play in the persistent game and gives you updates while you're unable to interact beyond speech.

Anti-Social Weirdos

Schell also sees these characters as potential "cognitive tutors". Research suggests that "if you create a situation where a student's job where it is to teach the virtual character," they perform better. An application called Betty's Brain invited kids to teach a simple character. "They found that when children are trying to help another character they learn better and focus more."

The people who are told that they are teaching a character, it seems, "spend more time getting ready, prepping, and end up learning better, because it's something people take seriously."

There are currently programs which invite kids to read to dogs at libraries -- because when kids are reading by themselves they read differently than when they read aloud; meanwhile dogs are not judgmental, allowing the kids to learn and improve at their own pace.

An important tech that needs to be developed for this all to come together is "intelligent actors". Schell pointed forward to the conversation game Facade as the best example of this.

While its AI characters have traditional goals and behaviors as in many games, they're also aware of the story arc of the interaction -- and change their behavior and tone as it's reaching its climax. The developers call this "the value arc". Schell concedes that this is a very complicated area of development, even as he deems it necessary.

Augmented reality is another tech he thinks will be important. "One could assume all of these interactions could happen indoors, but there's a lot of reason to believe that soon we can have outdoor virtual experiences," he said. Moving off the screen, even to glasses which overlay virtual characters onto the world, is an area he expects to grow.

In the end, these characters will "be an important part of our social life because they're going to be the one you can always go to." Persistent, growing, and fully interactive, "these characters will serve as meaningful emotional crutches in our lives."

Schell asked, "is this going to be a good thing? Is this going to make us into a bunch of antisocial weirdos?" He's not sure, but seems to think the positive will outweigh the negative.

And while researchers are working on some of the pieces of this puzzle, "the game designers are going to make this first," said Schell. "Think about how Facebook became a game platform -- because 'I'm already at Facebook' ... because people got the Facebook habit, games became a Facebook thing," he said.

By the same token, once game characters begin to reach some of these technological areas needed for meaningfully interactive as Schell describes it, "if you're already interacting with [the virtual character] for games... it will become a habit."

"What starts as a game could become part of people's lives... And while it may have negative aspects, having friends who are always there for you might not be such a bad thing," he concluded.

via networkedblogs.com on 7/1/10
oizys:
 
And the dystopian achievement future begins

via Inside Social Games by Susan Su on 6/9/10

[Editor's Note: The following stats are reposted from Inside Facebook and excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking the global growth of Facebook and Facebook. Click here to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Today, we present recent findings on demographic breakdowns in Facebook’s top country markets around the world.

For years, we’ve observed Facebook capture the US market, demographic by demographic. We know that in the US, Facebook has slightly more female than male users, and that the site boasts a large percentage of users in the middle of the age spectrum, with plenty of users over 25.

But that’s just the US. Other markets look quite different. Now, with over 70% of Facebook’s nearly 500 million users in countries outside of the US, it’s time for the savviest developers and marketers to start digging in to demographic data for Facebook’s many other important markets.

The country market data outlined below is a selected sample of the full data overview, available through Inside Facebook Gold.

The United Kingdom

In the UK, Facebook’s second largest country market, we see a pretty even split by gender. Women outnumber men by just 2.2%.

For age demographics, the 26 – 34 age group rivals the 18 – 25 age group, and holds true across both genders. In the UK, there’s also a substantial number of users of both genders in the 35 – 44 age range, though women lead this age group by 2 percentage points.

43.5% of Facebook users in the UK are under 25. This is a substantial number, but of course the flip side is that well over half of all Facebook users in that country are over 25. In the US, 39% of Facebook users are under 25. Overall, across age and gender, it’s clear that the UK and the US share similar demographic profiles (see the most recent US demographic data we released last week).

Indonesia

In Facebook’s third largest country market, a completely different picture emerges.

Among Indonesian Facebook users, there are substantially more men than women, with men leading by 18.4% overall. Indonesian Facebook users trend younger, too. 45.2% of women are between the ages of 18 – 25, and 31.8% are between 13 – 17.

For men, 45.9% are between the ages of 18 – 25 and 23.5% are between 13 – 17.

Overall, users under 25 make up 72.5% of all Facebook users in that country, with more women in the younger categories than men.

But, men make up most of Facebook’s Indonesian users. What age group are do most of them fall into? A large percentage of men fall in to the 26 – 34 age group, with a sharp dropoff after that.

Notably, older demographics barely register a blip, with users over 35 making up just 8.9% of the total userbase.

Turkey

Like Indonesia, Facebook’s Turkish userbase is comprised of vastly more men than women. Of that country’s total Facebook population, 64.4% are men, while women make up just 35.6%. Turkey’s Facebook users are young, too. Among women, 18 to 25 year olds make up 40.5% while 13 to 17 year olds make up 23.2%. The total percentage of female users under the age of 25 is 63.7%. In Turkey, though, a significant number of female users are in the mid-range of ages, too, with 23.4% of female users falling in to the 25 to 24 age group. After that, the numbers decline sharply, with only 12.8% of the female userbase over the age of 35.

Among Turkish men, the younger groups are also big part of Facebook’s audience, but less so. 18 to 25 year olds make up 38.9% of the audience, while 13 to 17 year olds make up 17.6%. The 26 to 34 contingent is slightly larger with men, reaching 26.7%. 16.9% of the male total are over the age of 35.

Overall, Turkey’s Facebook demographics trends strongly male, but are more evenly split across age groups. Well over half of the total audience is under the age of 25, but the 25 to 44 age range makes a strong showing too.

France

When we get to France, the demographic data again resembles what we’re seeing in US. There are slightly more women than men on Facebook, but the difference is just a few percentage points. Male and female groups show nearly identical age distribution, and total audience numbers are distributed evenly across age groups in general.

A considerable 49.9% of Facebook’s French users are under the age of 25, but of course that also means that those over 25 make up 51.1%! In the US, Facebook is a mature market in many sense, with 38.2% of all users over the age of 35. While Facebook in France is not quite there, the site does appear to be popular with that age group. 25.7% of all French Facebook users are over the age of 35.

Of Facebook’s top 15 country markets around the world, the youngest country is Indonesia, which, as mentioned above, is also the company’s number 3 market globally. The country with the largest percentage of users above 35 is the United States, followed by Canada, the UK, and Spain.

More data at Inside Facebook Gold

The full data overview includes demographic breakdowns for all 15 of Facebook’s leading markets. It’s available as part of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service that also includes stats on Facebook’s global traffic growth, top app demographics, language adoption rates, user behavior, and more.

via Inside Social Games by Susan Su on 6/10/10

Smaller developers have been getting bought right and left this spring, and companies of all sizes are upping their bets on social gaming with new funding rounds.

The industry is well on its way to contribute $835 million to the $1.6 billion US virtual goods market this year.  And even though many developers’ traffic has been wracked by Facebook’s changes to its communication channels, there are still opportunities for investment, as leading social app investors told us recently.

This year, Inside Network held our first ever summit on these apps and games that are transforming how social platforms monetize and continue to engage users. Inside Social Apps 2010 featured speakers from many of the leading thinkers in the social gaming industry, from developers and publishers, to monetization companies and investors.

Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan Partners, spoke with Nick Lawler, Managing Director at Maverick Capital, Rick Thompson, Co-founder of Playdom, Tim Chang, Principal at Norwest Venture Partners and Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research at ThinkEquity on where their companies are anticipating the greatest investment opportunities, and what new players we might see debut on the social gaming landscape.

A clip of the highlights from this presentation:

Maha Ibrahim also spoke with us in an exclusive interview backstage about the specific vertical where she expects the biggest growth to happen. Ibrahim’s analysis falls in line with the trends we’re observing in global traffic stats and demographics data.

All signs point both to new advertising and marketing opportunities for brands and emerging, monetizable audiences for app developers.

Ibrahim’s full interview covers:

* Why she thinks payments — covering both new types of payments and international payments — will see the biggest growth in the coming year
* How payments and monetization companies can jumpstart their international growth using the aggregator strategy
* Her rule of thumb for developers seeking the most profitable markets outside of the US
* How payment vendors can still find opportunities in what seems otherwise to be a crowded market

The full interview is available through Inside Facebook Gold.

via Inside Social Games by Chris Morrison on 6/14/10

A rumored investment in Zynga by Japan’s SoftBank, first suggested by VentureBeat in April, has finally come to light. The Japanese conglomerate has put $147 million into Zynga, as reported by Nikkei.com and confirmed by Bloomberg. [Update: However, a source tells MediaMemo that the deal hasn't quite closed yet -- but is expected to.]

The investment adds to an already-bulging war chest for Zynga. Its last round was $180 million from a consortium led by Digital Sky Technologies, late last year.

As usual with Zynga’s investments, money is not the sole object. A number of American game developers are looking to break into the Asian market, especially larger companies like CrowdStar and Playdom.

Zynga has been quiet about its plans in the region until recently, although it is rumored to have made small, unannounced talent purchases. For example, it may have bought GoPets, a casual gaming company with close ties to South Korea, last fall.

It has been getting more public with its efforts, though, announcing the purchase of Beijing social game developer XPD Media last month. It also made an unplanned gain of a Chinese investor when top internet portal Tencent bought a stake in DST in April.

For SoftBank, the dominant story in the press now is that the company is trying to break into the Chinese market. An investment with Zynga could help there, but non-Chinese gaming companies are limited from running games in the country. In fact, the Japanese market, in which there are fewer customers but a much higher average revenue per user, looks promising for both companies.

SoftBank has obvious strategic advantages at home. One is that it’s the sole distributor in Japan of the iPhone — and Zynga just ported FarmVille onto the popular device. Both companies stand to benefit from bringing the game to mobile users. And, although it has not yet been widely reported by Western press, Yahoo Japan (a partially-owned subsidiary of SoftBank) is working on a social network for gamers. Yahoo and Zynga separately just signed a broader syndication deal; it’s not clear how tightly Yahoo Japan and Zynga are working together, but Zynga’s games could attract new users to the fledgling network.

The conglomerate has been on a tear with new investments, with CEO Masayoshi Son telling the New York Times, “Before anyone knows it, SoftBank will be a step ahead.”

It is likely willing to pay more than most rivals. Zynga is worth up to $4.5 billion, according to recent regulatory filings; while filings may not reflect this investment, they suggest the new money only got SoftBank a small piece of the company.

SoftBank’s appetite is not limited to Zynga, either. The company has also invested heavily in RockYou over the past six months, putting a total of $60 million into the company. Although RockYou’s total monthly active user base on Facebook has fallen below 50 million in recent months, the company reports over 200 million users worldwide across all social networks.

[Image via Flickr / Altus]

via Inside Social Games by Chris Morrison on 6/15/10

Apple Game Center, a set of social networking features intended to help solidify the gaming market on the iPhone and iPad, has finally opened up to developers, according to AppleInsider.

Following this month’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, there was some doubt about whether Game Center would come at all. Apple first announced Game Center in April, suggesting a summer release, but didn’t mention it again at WWDC.

Now developer signups are open, with Apple saying a finalized release will come in fall, along with a significant iPad update. Below are a couple example screens:

The basic concept doesn’t appear to have changed since Apple’s initial release. Game Center is intended to provide a basic set of social features, like leaderboards and friends, providing a baseline experience for all games just as console gaming systems like the Xbox and PS3 do.

But there’s no indication that Apple has moved up the priority of Game Center, or has anything more planned than the fairly bare-bones social network that it initially announced — meaning it’s still not a major threat to other social platforms like Scoreloop or Aurora Feint, both of which are working to help developers with virtual goods, enhanced asynchronous interactions and other features that Apple has yet to mention. We covered the reactions of these companies to Game Center when it was first announced.

[Image also via AppleInsider.]

via Inside Social Games by Christopher Mack on 6/16/10

Gulf CoastWith the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dumping tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the ocean daily, social game developer Zynga is bringing its virtual goods fundraising strategy to bear. Partnering with the National Audubon Society, the pair are seeking to raise both funding and awareness of the crisis with a virtual item dubbed the “Gulf Coast Turtle” within Zynga’s popular virtual aquarium app, FishVille.

Offered for a limited time, and recently discovered by FriskyMongoose.com and Games.com, users can purchase the virtual pet for a cost of 25 or 200 Sand Dollars, FishVille’s virtual currency. With each purchase, 50% of all proceeds would go to the Audubon Society to help clean up Gulf Coast animals. To give an idea on tangible value, 25 Sand Dollars costs $5 while you can purchase 240 for $40.

In addition to the purchase, Zynga has also recruited common social game viral tactics to help awareness as well. Typically speaking, many social games containing a virtual space have random animals “appear” in the player’s game, which they are able to post it to their Facebook feed for others to adopt. One such animal has been a “lost baby Gulf Coast turtle,” whose primary purpose was to virally spread the word on how everyday social network users could potentially help combat the disaster.

HelpSadly, the purchasable Gulf Coast Turtle appears to be gone at the moment, but had only been launched last Friday (June 11th). Moreover, Monday still noted four days remaining to purchase and contribute. Hopefully, it will be back soon.

On a side note, this is not the first time Zynga has participated in such charities. Notable contributions of the past have been their partnership with World Food Programme to fight hunger in places such as Cameroon, its Sweet Seeds program that helped feed children in Haiti, and the sale of a number of virtual goods in the top titles of FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker to send donations to aide in the recovery of the Haitian earthquake disaster. As a matter of fact, Zynga players managed to raise $1.5 million in less than a week for the latter.

[Second image via FriskyMongoose.com]

via www.readwriteweb.com on 6/13/10
A year ago, we covered the global mapping of social networks by Vincenzo Cosenza, a public relations specialists and former Microsoft Italy marketer. Almost a year to the ...