New World Notes

Decentraland Getting Prim-Based Creation System from SL Scripting Veteran

The private beta release of Decentraland, the open standards virtual world which raised USD $25 million in Ethereum sales of virtual land to fund its development, is looking pretty good so far. Even more important, it's starting to see some notable projects from third party developers. For instance, a prim-based creation building block system:

The idea for this scene was simple: I wanted to be able to intuitively build things while actually standing in the scene, not in a separate Builder or with an external text editor and modeling software (as one does with the SDK). Also, I’m not a 3D artist, so it had to be made entirely of primitive shapes... Overall, the scene has a bit of a Minecraft feel, but where most of the blocks are bigger than the grid size, and are carried around in front of you rather than in an inventory. Per my main goal, you can totally build some fun things without ever leaving the scene.

Check out an early web-based version of this project here. Created during a recent Decentraland user hackathon, the prim creation system is currently, well, primitive, but that can quickly change. Also notable:

Seed, the Persistent World-Colonizing MMO, Gets $22.3 Million in Funding

Great news for my colleagues at Klang Games:

Klang has raised $22.33 million in funding to develop a massively multiplayer online space colony simulation called Seed. The Berlin-based game studio is making a large-scale, persistent virtual world, hoping to redefine the MMO landscape... Seed is an online life-simulator where each player manages multiple characters. Set far in the future, players work together rebuild society and create a new home in a vast world similar to the Earth. The simulation is persistent and continuous, meaning that when players go offline, their characters will continue to live their lives within the simulation.

Seed's Discord server is here. I've been working with the Klang team on Seed's launch since last year, and I'm pretty psyched (in a very biased way) for their next big announcements coming soon. Until then, here's some of the writing I've done for them, to help set the stage for what they're creating:

Roblox Now Reports 100 Million Monthly Users, With 3x Growth in 3 Years

Amazing new growth and revenue numbers from Roblox, the virtual world creation platform for kids and young teens:

A week after gaming platform Roblox  announced its new milestone of 100 million monthly users — topping Minecraft — the company said at its fifth annual developer conference that its developer community is on track to earn $100 million in 2019. Roblox also introduced a new set of developer tools for building immersive, more realistic 3D experiences; detailed its plans to make its developer software fully cloud-based; unveiled a new Developer Marketplace where creators can set their development assets and tools to others; and more. Over the past decade or so, Roblox has grown to become a $2.5 billion company, with roughly half of U.S. children ages 9 through 12 playing on its platform.

Roblox reported 30 million monthly users at the end of 2016, so this is amazing, strong growth. As Roblox users grow out of their early teens, they're bound to look for a platform with better graphics, more capability, and a more mature outlook. I'm even more amazed that Linden Lab's new ad campaign for Second Life does little to show off its unique capabilities to this potential market.

Decentraland Looking More & More Like a Virtual World -- But Maybe Less Than What Investors Hoped

Ryan Schultz has an in-depth, in-world look at Decentraland, which in 2017, raised USD $25 million In Ethereum to fund development of the open standards virtual world. In the two years since, many have speculated that Decentraland might be vapor or mere tulip-mania over virtual land that with no actual world. But Ryan's embedded reporting reveals it looking more and more like a thriving virtual world -- though maybe not as full-featured as its many investors expected:

AR Gaming Played Out? Harry Potter Wizards Unite Popularity Falling Far Short of Pokémon Go's Peak

With the continued success of Pokémon Go -- yes it's still huge worldwide -- the common wisdom in the AR/VR industry is that augmented reality games need to have a major brand to go mass market. With the recent launch of Harry Potter Wizards, an AR game that's also from the creator of Pokémon Go, that common wisdom is not looking so wise:

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite generated an estimated $1.1 million in player spending over its first weekend of availability and was installed by nearly three million new players, Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data shows. Based on its performance over the period of June 20 through June 23, and its impending launch in Japan and South Korea, the two largest markets where it remains unavailable, we project that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite stands to gross more than $10 million in its first 30 days. Niantic’s previous release, the smash hit Pokémon GO, generated more than $28 million in player spending during its first four days post-launch on 24 million installs in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand alone. It went on to gross $206 million and see close to 173 million downloads in its first month.

I'm seriously surprised at Harry Potter's tepid results, because I fully expected it to be a big hit. There's still a good chance Niantic can turn this around by tweaking the game -- some early reviews suggest it feels like a Pokémon GO knockoff without the organic charm -- but the relatively small number of downloads suggests some more fundamental problems.

I mean, just watch the trailer:

Things We Lost in the Flood: A New, Massively Multiplayer Loneliness Simulator Where Players Can Only Share Messages in Bottles With Each Other -- And If Enough Players Win, Self-Destructs

Things We Lost in the Flood is a new, free-to-play indie MMO with a brilliant twist: It's a massively multiplayer "loneliness simulator" where each player is set adrift on a boat in a post-apocalyptic world that's been flooded over. So instead of forming into groups or communicating via chat or instant message, players can write and send messages in bottles for other players to find. Some of those messages can advance the game (more on that below), or simply just be personal expressions, anonymously shared and set adrift into the pixelated sea.

Created by indie developer Dean Moynihan of Awkward Silence Games (who also created the acclaimed, deeply moving game One Chance), Things We Lost was first conceived to be massively multiple storytelling game: 

"The original idea was for players to find notes that I had written, to tell a short story out of order," he tells me. "However, I'm no writer... Once I figured out a way for the players to be doing all the prose work, it was smooth sailing from there." 

That decision enhanced his intent to simulate loneliness: "The only thing that could feel more lonely than floating in the middle of the ocean by yourself," he explains, "would be floating in the middle of the ocean by yourself -- and reading notes from other living people."

Though the game has only been out for a short time, players have written over 6,000 notes to each other, running the gamut of useful to the game, to creatively discursive, to surprisingly profound:

Google Gets Back Into Virtual World Creation Game With Game Builder

Game Builder is a fun-looking game platform free on Steam for Mac and PC from Google's Area 120 incubator.  With block-like graphics and easy to use tools for creating games from scratch without having to know any coding (though you can add code to any game with Javascript), it's more or less a direct competitor to Roblox and Minecraft. But as explained on Google's blog, it's also a persistent virtual world: 

Multiple users can build (or play) simultaneously. You can even have friends play the game as you work on it.

As virtual world veterans might remember, this isn't Google's first foray into the virtual world/online game business:

Seed, the World-Building MMO, Has Yet to Launch, But Fans Have Already Created Competing Political Factions & Other Groups for When It Does

My latest story for Seed, the world-building MMO with a political system designed by Larry Lessig, delves into the many fascinating fan groups that have already formed around the yet-to-launch game:

They're inspired by government systems throughout history, including a dictatorship in which the scars of memory are still fresh. Many got their start in other online games, and are now in search of a new world. In real life, they're from across the European Union, North America, Australia, New Zealand and beyond - from Iceland and Russia to South Korea and Vietnam. Some even drive big rig trucks across America while they plan a new society. Between them, they make up the player-created groups of Seed.

While some factions got their start in game worlds like Grand Theft Auto Online and Second Life, others have  also been inspired by real-life governments throughout many eras, including feudal Japan and the Austria-Hungarian empire. And as its name suggests, the government structure of the Usamgov faction is inspired by the United States - just without some of its key flaws.

"For example," says founder Michael Weston, "we do not have an Electoral College."

More on the group that originated in Second Life:

With Worlds Adrift Closing, Promise of Ambitious, Improbable-Powered Single Shard MMOs in Peril

Oh this is heartbreaking and more than a bit frustrating:

Worlds Adrift was an ambitious undertaking for us: a community crafted MMO built on freedom and player agency with multiplayer physics, set in a huge world...

However, Worlds Adrift just hasn’t reached the level of popularity it needs to continue. The challenges that came with our ambitious project meant that all our work went into making the game work rather than making it the experience we wanted it to be. As a result we failed at making a game that could capture the imaginations of millions. Creating an MMO like Worlds Adrift is a huge financial commitment and unfortunately the game is just no longer commercially viable.

I've been following Worlds Adrift as a fan for years, because it had all the markings of an incredibly ambitious MMO/virtual world crossover that could potentially bring hundreds of thousands of players together; in fact, it's arguably the most ambitious single-shard MMO that's currently playable on the market right now. Or rather, was.

Even more disappointing, Worlds Adrift was among the most ambitious MMOs deployed on Improbable's Spatial OS technology, which was designed to make truly massive, single-shard MMOs possible. But as I reported last March, the company has mostly been moving away from single-shard MMOs:

Cajsa's Flickr Pick: Horizon Zero Dawn Screen Shots As Artful Portraiture

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Mandalorian Captures takes excellent screen captures from several different games. Luckily for us, he organizes them into albums such as this album of pictures from Horizon Zero Dawn. This one expresses emotion so well; Mandalorian named it “Dreamer” but I would call it “Askance.”