New World Notes

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:

Viewfinder, Mind-Bending, Reality-Creating Unity Demo, Now Seeking Publishers With a Graphically Enhanced, Playable Version

Remember Viewfinder? Created by student Matt Stark, that's the synapse-thrashing Unity demo which depicted an interactive world where the user can manipulate their surroundings by taking a picture of them which, once taken, becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

Since showing it off last year, Matt has greatly enhanced the graphics options, added some gameplay features, and has turned it into a short playable version -- watch above! He is now seeking publishers interested in bringing it to the world.  Get in touch with him on Twitter or with his development partner Callum Underwood.

As for how he does this, here is Matt's way of explaining it:

Play Palia, a "Community Simulation" MMO Set in a Fantasy World at Peace

Palia is an intriguing new MMO now in limited pre-Alpha access with a somewhat odd* name from Singularity 6, a startup I last wrote about in 2019, led by many AAA developers who ambitiously promised to create worlds that built "community, friendships and a real sense of belonging.” I was somewhat skeptical at the time, but Palia announces itself as aiming to be just that: 

Palia is a massively-multiplayer community simulation game set in a brand new high fantasy world with elements of open world adventure games. It’s a cozy and welcoming world that we hope fans of the community sim genre will love for years to come.

As all that suggests, there's little or no typical "kill 10 rats" type of gameplay, almost as if it's set in a fantasy world that takes place in between the great battles that get way more press:

Tomorrow: Join a Truly Massive Event With 1000s of Avatars in the Same Space in ScavLab, the Sandbox Testing Platform in Scavengers

Tomorrow (May 29) at 11am PT is the first massive-scale community event in Scavengers, the survival/sandbox game with some Second Life in its DNA.

And I do mean massive, because Scavengers runs on Improbable's Spatial OS:

"We reached over 1,800 players in our closed test in April, so we're hoping to beat that," Rob Whitehead, co-founder and CPO at Improbable, tells me. "However, this first public event will allow up to 5,000 players - although the tech allows for greater player numbers, we found that 5,000 was the max level of density for an enjoyable gameplay experience. We're designing new game modes/events that will go beyond this number."

Here's how to join the event:

• Download Scavengers on Steam or on EGS
• Boot the game
• Go to the main menu (you may need to first complete/leave the opening tutorial)
• Make sure you queue up for the "ScavLab game mode" before the 11AM PT/7PM BST event

Should be a fun and interesting experience even if you're not a hardcore gamer, and are mainly interested in experiencing the latest in Improbable's technology for truly massive, single shard worlds, and the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of avatars. And yes, I do mean surrounded:

New on Steam: First Class Trouble, Like a 3D Among Us, But Onboard a Cruise Ship Where You Can't Tell Fellow Players from Killer Androids

First Class Trouble is a new indie game in Early Access on Steam, and it's next on my list to play. (Soon as I master Fights in Tight Spaces, but that's another story.) To judge by early footage, First Class gameplay is a fairly clever combination of Among Us (but highly immersive) meets BioShock (bloody murder on an Art Deco ocean vessel) meets Blade Runner, in the sense that you're competing against other players and killer androids... but you can't tell right off the bat which is which. (Also reminds me a bit of Spy Party, but in a multiplayer setting.) NPC AI has become sophisticated enough that it's sometimes difficult to immediately tell an NPC from another player, so I suspect we'll see this kind of gameplay mechanic being used more often. 

The developers at Invisible Walls tell me that the live action party game Werewolves was an influence, along with another, more unlikely inspiration:

Rise of Roblox: User-Generated Metaverse Platform Now More Valuable Than Traditional Game Companies Like EA & Take 2

Above: Image from ROBLOX's stock filing, data from the first 9 months of 2020

As expected, Roblox's IPO today was massive:

What makes Roblox different from other online game platforms is that it lets users create their own games on the platform. Developers receive 30% of the proceeds generated from a game, such as the sale of virtual outfits and avatars... As trading began Roblox stock shot up 63%, trading near 73.50, during afternoon action on the stock market today. That accelerated its market value to $47 billion.

Explicitly designed to be a metaverse, Roblox's valuation so far proves the market validity of user-generated content where user-made games (often made by teens still living at home!) are often more popular than the most popular professional games on Steam. Now with this IPO, you can see the dominance of Roblox and its grassroots content as compared to some of the very top traditional game companies. For instance:

Watch: New Gameplay Tests of Seed MMO Gives Us Glimpses of Building, Fighting, Exploring -- And Unexpected Social Emergence

Here's a new look at the latest gameplay test of Seed, the ambitious planet colonization MMO from Klang Games, featuring resource-gathering, world exploration, combat, and more. I'm somewhat biased but so far I'm admiring the streamlined elegance of the user interface and the art. Klang's Sabrina Seltenreich tells me the team is already seeing some interesting, unplanned player emergence, even in these early play trials: 

"We had put several people into the same world, and asked them all to work towards an individual goal of processing resources and building certain machines for their own progression," she tells me. "Everybody had their own little base and a container, which other players couldn't access or interact with. Still, after a short amount of time, they figured out that they could put items into the Kernel and other people could take them -- so they started to share resources, which wasn't something we had planned for or expected." (That was during a previous test, not the one featured in this new video.)

 Seed's Discord server is also becoming an integral part of players' experience of Seed: