Entries by Diane

Virtual Collectibles

As micro-payments rapidly become the mainstream model for most new online games,  there is a massive rise of business models offering collectible items. From games where the collectible elements are at the very center of the gameplay, like Magic The Gathering Online, PoxNora, Urban Rivals, Bella Sara, all the games from ChallengeGames,   the recent UpperDeckU […]

The Xbox Live subscription

Gamasutra relays a report by Seattle Post that shows Microsoft numbers for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. The more recent figures are from February 2008, showing that 56% of all Live members were Gold (60% in the US). The percentage was actually down 4 points yoy. At that time there were 10M announced Live members , […]

Virtual MTV moves to browser based

As reported by Virtual World News. The linking of accounts is always something tricky,  it looks like users have 2 weeks to transfer their virtual currency and can’t claim what they already spent in the client-based version, and they have to start over with a new avatar and crib in the new world. This should […]

9 online games/MMO trends for 2009 – part 2

The first part of this post can be found here. 5.Rise of cloud computing This is the corollary of trend 4, and of the difficulty of scaling hardware investments. As launches of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have shown recently, it is a risky position to invest in hardware when you have a lot […]