New World Notes

Watch: How BONELAB Could Become the Garry's Mod for VR

Via VR scout Adeon, here's a very good case from YouTuber ThrillSeeker to keep an eye (and a haptic finger in the wind) out for BONELAB, from indie studio Stress Level Zero, creator of the unexpected VR hit BONEWORKS from 2019. Like that game, BONELAB has highly responsive physics and avatar customization, with this new version compatible with the Quest 2 and its install base of some 11-12 million consumers. Even more intriguing, BONELAB's teaser trailer strongly suggests that player modding will be a major feature to the game after it rolls out. Or to put it another way: BONELAB could become the Garry's Mod for VR.

Teaser trailer and feature description below from the Steam page:

Buy a Bundle for Ukraine: Donate $10+ to NGOs Helping Ukrainians, Get 100s of Indie Games Including Acclaimed Titles SUPERHOT, CrossCode, Baba Is You -- $3M Raised Already!

Bundle for Ukraine is an epic sale of indie games with all proceeds benefiting the International Medical Corps in Ukraine and Voices of Children, a Ukrainian NGO which helps kids in the region. The Bundle comes with nearly 1000 games valued at $6520, all for a minimum donation of $10. (But you can and should pay much more than $10, of course.)

Click here to see the full list, which includes hits like the excellent bullet-time masterpiece SUPERHOT, and the critically acclaimed Baba is You.

About 14,000 People Watched Geoff Keighley's Game Awards in Geoff Keighley's World in Core

I told you about Core hosting a live in-world viewing of Geoff Keihley's Game Awards show which streamed last night, so here's a pretty good data point on user interest right now:

Based on the "total played" count of Axial Tilt (the Core experience where the show was streamed, which also has Geoff in the credits) about 14,000 people showed up for the Awards. (Only a few hundred had played before the show.) That's not too bad, given that Core probably has monthly active users in the mid six figures. It also suggests not many new people joined Core to watch the show from there, but that's not surprising, as gamers are already accustomed to watching it from their streaming option of choice.

Speaking of the Awards themselves:

Expensive Virtual Items for Worlds With Few Users: Pricey NFT "Metaverse" Sales Give Me Serious Entropia Universe Déjà Vu

Remember Entropia Universe, a niche MMO launched in 2003 where players can buy and sell in-game items for real cash? You'd only really read about it when there was a breathless report about another record Entropia Universe sale -- like this one, from 2010:

How much would you pay for a string of ones and zeroes? How about a string of ones and zeroes that grossed you $200,000 a year? Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs made history by selling virtual property for a reported total of $635,000. Club Neverdie is a virtual asteroid in the online game Entropia. 

... but despite all that money being spent on virtual items in Entropia, hardly anyone seemed to actually be playing Entropia -- then, or now. (Entropia currently counts less than 100,000 players, according to MMO Populations.)

That very same thing seems to be happening again, with a new NFT/Metaverse spin. For instance, most recently:

Free Fire: The Little-Known, Potential Metaverse Already Played by 1 in 10 People in the Entire World

Free Fire is a cross platform online battle royale game which on the surface, is largely dismissed by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and Fortnite. But AR/VR investor Julie Young has been looking much closer for well over a year (months before the current Metaverse buzz reached fever pitch), when she observed that the game, from Garena -- a game studio/publisher owned by massive Singapore-based conglomerate Sea Limited -- has the early makings of a metaverse:

In Brazil, they partnered with DJ Alok for a live set in Free Fire. In Colombia, they held an event where two of the country’s biggest soccer players hosted a live tournament for charity. These are perfect examples of Sea’s incredible agility and execution. But on a more philosophical level, they demonstrate that Garena could actually become more than just a very profitable gaming platform - perhaps Free Fire, down the road, will become a new type of platform altogether.

... and based on current user numbers, Free Fire is already well positioned to be The Metaverse, if it wants to become that. As she tweeted yesterday, reporting recent user numbers: "Free Fire has 700 million quarterly active users concentrated largely in some of the highest growth regions in the world (or as @nachkari pointed out today, 10% of the world plays the game quarterly."

Yes, nearly 1 in 10 of everyone across the entire earth already play Free Fire. And for purists who scoff at the idea of the Metaverse emerging from a casual combat game, it's worth remembering that Neal Stephenson's original Metaverse also had a heavy combat game component. 

I chatted with Julie a bit about Free Fire last night, and from that, my sense is that the platform is very much moving in the Fortnite Creative direction that Epic is taking, adding monetization mechanics for user creators. And the thing is, Free Fire has some considerable advantages against Epic -- namely eyeballs:

Guest Post: Why a Longtime Roleplayer Left Second Life For Fortnite Creative

Longtime urban fantasy author Victor Ziblis is -- or rather, was -- a longtime member of the Second Life roleplay community, who first joined the world to promote his novels. 

"[I]t was actually a marketing stunt suggested by my publicist," he tells me, "The advertising stunt went off pretty well, but I found Second Life to be so enjoyable that I stayed for over three years.  I remember Club Caribe/Habitat on Quantum Link, and this gave me the same feel except it was 3D." And so he stayed in Second Life, even becoming entrenched enough in the community that he was promoted director of medical services on a major collection of roleplay sims.

But he recently left Second Life, "because it occurred to me that I was spending a lot of money on a thing that wasn't really returning me with anything but an hour or three of roleplay a week, and mostly was just my character lounging around in front of his home.  I'm not trying to get laid, and clubbing is played out to me so what was the point of sticking around?"

Before completely leaving, however, he posted a long and passionate rant on /SecondLife cheerfully entitled "Fortnite is eating our lunch." And while I don't necessarily agree with it all, it's worth considering by other members of the SL roleplay community -- and for members of Linden Lab itself, as they consider how to better serve that community.

Reprinted with permission (with some editing by the author), here's Victor's rant in full below: 

Surprising Gamer Study: Avatar Gender Preference Remains Unchanged for Over 20 Years -- And Very Few Female Gamers Choose Male Avatars

Here’s a fascinating new report on avatars and gender from longtime game culture researcher Nick Yee, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 gamers. Nick’s topline takeaway is that 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars, which is more than many might assume.

Two other learnings stand out to me even more:

Avatar gender preferences among players have remained basically the same since Nick started studying questions like this during the peak of Everquest -- over two decades ago! This despite the fact that MMOs have become much more mainstream since then, attracting many millions of players where they once only drew hundreds of thousands.

“This implies that whatever is causing this to happen (for both male and female players) has been consistent for the past 20 years,” Nick tells me, “so it's a function of some stable sociological dynamic and/or how we've been making games/avatars for the past 20 years. 

“Back in EQ days, I think it was easy to imagine that this phenomenon was idiosyncratic to MMOs, because the genre was more niche back then. But perhaps the MMO findings were always pointing at deeper, stable findings given that much of MMO mechanics and the live services model is now everywhere.” (In other words, online games like Overwatch and Fortnite also have heavy MMO features.)

Nick’s other standout finding: Very few females want to play as male avatars. Seriously few:

Avakin Life: Another Mobile Metaverse That Gained Millions of Users When You Weren't Looking

I remember chatting with a metaverse developer early last year on a potential project in Avakin Life, a mobile-based virtual world in the IMVU category, and it seemed like another niche also-ran. Avakin Life has a limited social media footprint, to judge by the relative dearth of user-made YouTube videos. (This build tutorial/speedrun above is one of the few out there that quickly pops up.) But as with Rec Room, this seems mainly to do with Avakin Life being targeted at young teens who aren't yet on social media in a major way.

But good lord it's large:

Avakin Life has more than 200 million registered users [note, see below - ed.] on iOS and Android and more than a million who come back at least once a day. Previous investors Novator Partners, David Helgason, and Hilmar Pétursson also participated in the funding round. All told, it took about a year to close the deal, said Lockwood Publishing CEO Halli Bjornsson in an interview with GamesBeat.

Registered users aren't the same as monthly active users, but with 1 million daily actives, I'd estimate the MAU as being about 10 million give or take. (I.E. a bit larger than IMVU's 7 million monthly users.)

Reminds me that longtime reader "Pulsar" mentioned it as a way of thinking about virtual worlds apart from the Second Life model -- and a mobile alternative to it:

Upland, Blockchain-Backed Mirror World, Attracts Hundreds of Thousands of Players, Earning Cryptocurrency Worth Many Millions USD Every Month

San Francisco HQ of Tilia owner Linden Lab already owned by an Upland high roller 

Let's briefly check in on Upland, the virtual real estate acquisition game that's sort of Monopoly meets a mirror world, where virtual real estate is registered on the EOS blockchain, and is the first paying customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service. Since I wrote about it in June 2020 (shortly after launch), it's become an online world with a pretty large virtual community -- and some nosebleed-serious real cash flowing between its users.

According to Sensor Tower, the game's app garnered 100,000+ downloads and earned $200,000 last month on Google Play alone, but that's only part of the story. Upland's website (where the game can also be played) racked up over 5 million views last month, according to SimilarWeb; I'd estimate that as monthly active players in the mid-six figures. 

But the level of transactions already happening in Upland are even wilder:

This user-run site tracks Upland transactions and leaderboards, and they're fairly amazing. Last month, for example, the top 100 Upland players earned proceeds worth several million USD.

"You need to understand that they marketed to the Crypto and NFT guys," as Upland player Octavius explains, "many of which are a new fairly wealthy group of crypto money."

IncrediMarble, Physics-Based Marble Slide Construction Game from Linden Vet, Now Available on Steam & Google Play

There are players who create inexplicably crazy loops, trying to find the Higgs Boson of earnings and breaking the laws of physics in the process. #indiedev #indiegames #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/FVvbXwaEKt

— IncrediMarble (@IncrediMarble) July 1, 2021

Just in time for the long July 4 holiday weekend, IncrediMarble, the physics-based, marble slide construction game from veteran Linden Dave Kap, is now available on Google Play and Steam:

• Get it on Google Play here.
• Get it on Steam here.
• And get it for free for iOS here.

Since I wrote about it last October, the game has generated a pretty cool coterie of creative players coming up with all kinds of did-not-see-that-coming constructions, Dave tells me: