Virtual Goods News

Will Wright, Creator of Spore and The Sims, To Deliver Opening Keynote at Engage! Expo at Toy Fair

Will Wright, Founder and Chief Executive of Stupid Fun Club, Creator of Spore and The Sims, will deliver the opening keynote at Engage! Expo® taking place February 16-17, 2010, at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. Engage!®, operated by Engage Digital Media (publisher of this blog), runs concurrently with American International Toy Fair (February 14-17, 2010) and provides companies the critical information they need to engage and monetize kids and youth online. The two events will bring together more than 25,000 attendees and 1,000 members of the media. Through his SimCity, The Sims, and Spore game franchises created at Electronic Arts, Will Wright generated over $1 billion dollars of value. At Stupid Fun Club, a design studio Will maintained throughout his career as chief designer at Maxis Studios and Electronic Arts, advanced toy designs are among Will's primary focus.

Legends Of Norrath Virtual Loot Creates EverQuest Controversy

Over the course of the last week a controversy begun in the player community for the Sony Online Entertainment MMORPG EverQuest, driven by a virtual "loot card" item called the Dragon Brood Crypt Key. The item can only be obtained by playing the freemium SOE virtual trading card game Legends of Norrath, where the players can spend real money to buy randomized "booster packs" of cards. Occasionally a player can obtain "loot cards" from these boosters that can be redeemed for virtual items in EverQuest. 

The Dragon Brood Crypt Key is unusual among Legends of Norrath's loot items in that it grants the possessor access to an exclusive dungeon in EverQuest. Someone with the Crypt Key can take up to five acquaintances into the dungeon and can receive some items from completing the dungeon that are otherwise very difficult to obtain. As a result, players of EverQuest who do not play Legends of Norrath have expressed offense and anger over what they feel is in-game content they arbitrarily can not access.

Virtual Charity Goods Come To FarmVille

Over the weekend Zynga introduced a new virtual item into its FarmVille social farming sim, which is currently the most popular social game on Facebook. The new virtual item is called Sweet Seeds for Haiti, a seed that costs 25 FV. The virtual seed lets users grow a virtual sweet potato crop that never withers and sells for 125 coins per harvest while also conferring XP bonuses. Zynga promises that 50% of the proceeds from each Sweet Seeds for Haiti sale will be donated to the Haitian charities FATEM and FONKOZE. 

News Brief: Runes of Magic Hits 2M Users

Today the freemium MMORPG Runes of Magic announced that it has registered over 2 million users combined across the US and Europe. The game surpassed the 1 million users milestone in May of this year. Since that time published Frogster Online has released an expansion called Rise of the Demon Lord in both English and German that probably helped drive continuing interest in the title. 

A second expansion called The Elven Prophecy has been released in English, French, and Spanish. Frogster Online is currently preparing the game for a fully localized release in Russia. Runes of Magic is developed by Runewaker, a Taiwanese company. The game monetizes through its cash item shop, which sells both enhancement and customization items to players. 

PopCap Takes $22.5M in Funding

With an eye toward expanding into the fast-growing are of social games, casual game developer and publisher PopCap Games has raised $22.5 million in late-stage funding from Meritech Capital Partners; Larry Bowman (formerly with Apple Computer and Fidelity) and mobile entrepreneur John McCaw. Popcap says it will use the funds to make strategic acquisitions in the social gaming space. This is the first time Popcap has taken on outside funding. 

"We've been pursued by investment firms for many years and have resisted taking outside capital, but we liked Meritech's style and believe there's a tremendous opportunity to grow and evolve our business at a time when many other video game firms are retrenching," David Roberts, CEO of PopCap said.

This story originally appeared on Virtual Worlds News.

News Brief: Warrior Epic Prepaid Cards In Stores Now

Today True Games Interactive, publishers of freemium MMORPG Warrior Epic, announced that Warrior Epic prepaid digital currency cards are now available in retailer outlets throughout North America. The cards are produced by GMG Entertainment as part of an exclusive, multi-year deal. Cards for Warrior Epic are sold in a single $25 denomination that grants a player 20,000 in-game gold and 20 Double XP Potion virtual items.

True Games Interactive's deal with GMG will also make the company responsible for prepaid cards for Mytheon, a highly anticipated freemium MMORPG developed by Petroglyph. Warrior Epic launched in the spring of this year while Mytheon is expected to launch early next year. Details of the Mytheon prepaid cards are not known at this time. 

GMG Entertainment produces prepaid cards for a wide variety of freemium online games. GMG's partners include Gravity Interactive (publisher of Ragnarok Online), Redbana, GamesCampus, OutSpark, and the Suba Games portal.

DUST 514 To Bring Microtransactions To Consoles

Over the weekend MMO publisher and operator CCP announced that its latest project, massively multiplayer online FPS DUST 514, would not only be a freemium game but would make its in-game cash item shop compatible with console versions of the game. DUST 514 is planned for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. The game takes place in the same universe as CCP's MMORPG, EVE Online. DUST 514 and EVE Online players will be able to communicate with each other both in-game and through CCP's New Eden social network, which will also allow DUST 514 players to join the same player-controlled Corporations and Alliances available to EVE Online players. 

Quick Stat: Users 14-29 Bring in 93% Of All Virtual Goods Revenue

Today Gambit's Susan Su announced (via the Andrew Chen blog) that according to Gambit's data, 93% of all virtual goods revenue is generated by users between 14 and 29 years of age. The data dynamites the growing myth that female users in their 40's are the "real" audience driving virtual goods revenue in social games. While older users do tend to generate better ARPPU numbers than users in their teens and twenties, older users simply do not generate the volume of transactions needed to make a virtual goods business a success.

Su reports that users between 14 and 29 account for 91.5% of the total userbase of online games and other apps featuring virtual goods. ARRPU associated with this group ranges from $2.58 for teen users to $3.07 for users in their twenties. The group is able to generate massive revenue though the sheer volume of transactions it generates. Su advises online games to focus on attracting and retaining users in this key demographic in order to find success. Su's data certainly squares with the sheer number of youth-oriented online games offering virtual goods.

Virtual Goods Wrap-Up For The Week Of October 2

Welcome to the Virtual Goods News Wrap-Up for the week of October 2, 2009. The Wrap-Up is where VGN spotlights stories that we didn't get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the virtual goods industry.

Calculating How Playdom Is Making $50M From 28M Users

An Inside Social Games guest post by Eric von Coelln that astutely observes that Playdom could be monetizing better per user than Zynga thanks to Playdom being stronger on the MySpace platform. Payouts per user tend to be higher on MySpace due to 60% of its users being in the US, as opposed to only 30% on Facebook. 

McDonald's Happy Meal To Again Feature Plush Build-A-Bear

From October 2 through October 22, McDonald's Happy Meals will feature Build-A-Bear "mini-plushes" with removable clothing and an assortment of codes redeemable for virtual items in the buildabearville.com virtual world. The items include a "mini Cub Condo house," a "jump rope move" animation for an avatar, and a code that lets a user pick one of six different virtual gifts. 

New Mass Effect Avatar Items

Official Xbox Live community blogger Major Nelson announced that a suite of avatar clothing items based on the BioWare RPG Mass Effect are now available for purchase. The items include futuristic body armor outfits and simpler items like branded logo t-shirts and caps. 

Underworld: SweetDeal iPhone MMO Gets Microtransactions

The Underworld: Sweet Deal $.99 iPhone app has come up with a novel way to circumvent Apple's restrictions on virtual currency in iPhone games. The cash item shop recently implemented in the game is quite literally a cash shop, simply charging for virtual items in USD. 

Why Do People Buy Virtual Goods? (On Motivations And Compulsions)

Giff Constable, VP at the Electric Sheep Company, here attempts to begin codifying the reasons why people buy virtual goods and, through that, the sorts of basic virtual goods most people want to buy. It's an insightful analysis that should be helpful to developers thinking of building a game or app that uses a virtual goods business model. 

Why Giant Interactive Is A Good Short

A Seeking Alpha analysis of earnings and projected revenue for Chinese online game publisher Giant Interactive. Right now Giant's earnings are declining due to new Chinese government regulations outlawing one of its most popular virtual items. The company is not expected to recover in the near future. 

Zynga's New Cafe World Game Takes On Playfish's Restaurant City

A social app to keep an eye on will be Zynga's very new (as in "it has 32 players") social game Cafe World, cloned from competitor Playfish's Restaurant City. Zynga's current most popular app, FarmVille, began as a clone of SlashKey's Farm Town and grew explosively thanks to a blend of Zynga's viral growth techniques and a huge fad for farming games on Facebook. Cafe World may have the same viral growth potential. 

New Yahoo.com Open To Third-Party Devs, Virtual Goods

This week the Internet services company Yahoo redesigned its Web home page, Yahoo.com, for the first time since 2006. The new design features support for the Yahoo Application Platform, a software platform that allow users to install third-party apps to Yahoo.com in much the same way one can install apps on Facebook. According to Yahoo Director of Product Developer Xavier Legros, these third-party apps will be able to monetize both through display ads and by microtransaction sale of virtual goods.