Friday Fullscale Bla Bla

Small Metallic PortaHome Over 50 Large
The auction for one of the first portahomes has passed 50 large today! Check out the auction.

Gmax Submissions
I submitted 3 items yesteday. Yay! I did a giant spades shape deck, a large verticle spade statue shop, and the notorius Fruity Pebbles Bunnies for skirts! In caramel to start :) Here was some of the pre spades torture. The shapes get ugly fast as you walk away from the object. LOL. Coming Soon.

Sex Games Update
Cotton Candy IMd a great story on some of the sex games coming out. It reports on the game "Single" which Sidney told us about back in april. It seems that adult games are going more mainstream. Porn games have been around almost as long as real games but most sucked turds. Here is a classic if you ever find it in the bargain bin ;) keep your eyes peeled for Virtual Valerie2. Oh My. If games like Single and Playboy Mansion take off, we could see There and Sims follow the lead. I just read a story in Investor's Business Daily today that stated the average age of an onine gamer is now 29! People gaming has gone up close to 40% in 2 years. Yahoooo. :D

The First Expansion Pack For City Of Heros
This was sent in from Kyau. I am ready to pee my panties...everyone likes to be a hero, but I think we all entertain the idea of being the bad guy ;) City Of Villains. Peeeeee.

Last Day For Guildwars
Check what Sid found hiding under a big rock Woah! I want my mommy.

The Business Of There Inc. Continued
I enjoy guessing what businesses make, and guessing There's income stream is a favorite hobby. :) Sometimes information leaks or I hear some rumor and it helps with better estimates. Here is my latest attempt to see if There is making coin. There has three income streams: shops and auctions ie the sale of T$, House Rentals, and montly subscriptions. You could add a fourth and say licensing to the military, but I see that as a one time sort of deal. Perhaps it will be a yearly contract...I don't know. We can now make guesses at each of these.

Subscription
How many people do you think are paying for There monthly? There did not appear on that MMROPG chart a couple weeks back...perhaps an indication they are smaller than the rest. I forget what article we had a few weeks ago, but I seem to remember a figure of 20,000. I know at download.com, There had 27,726 DLs total. Not a huge number since only a percent of those convert to pay. I think 20,000 is a good to optimistic number. Let's push the pencil for yearly revenue...20,000 x $5 a month x 12 months
= $1,200,000

House and Zone Rentals
I don't know how many houses and zones are in There. I remember checking once and now I forget. Let's say 500? Average rent...Let's go high with T$20,000 and so a year's worth is 20,000 x 500 x 12 / 1787
= about $70,000

Auctions And Shops
Let me use some data at Tarah's to make up some crud. Using the 80/20 rule, my guess is that the top20 designers are making 80% of the income. That chart adds up to 35,318,868. I'm gonna make sweeping estimates and say that the whole market is twice this...but there only gets about 50% on costs and submissions....so There Incs income is about this...let's say 40m for easy numbers. That is 40,000,000 / 1787 x 12 months
= approx $300,000

Total Yearly Gross Revenue
= about $1.5M (1.2 + 300k + 70k)

Now what are the costs?

Employees
100 emplyees...and these are not $5 a hour employees...these are programmers. Say avg sal $40k, and it's probably higher
= 40,000 x 100 = 4,000,000

Rent and Servers and Crud
no idea...probably500k-1M

I remember reading an article when Sims came out and some lad stated "no one in the social mmorpg industry is having solid bowl movements". ROFL I would state the same for There. OK...you want me to add in the military 6M....well There used 38M in venture capital so I will use it agains that...say they have 30 million in VC money to pay back.

Is it me, or does it look kind of upside down? Do you think I have mis estimated? 1.5 in revenue and 4M in costs is some serious red ink. OK, let's say I am on crack and am way way off. Say revenue is 3M and costs are 2M. Even 1M a year pure clean income pretax, is a long long ways away from paying back 30M in VC money...like 30-100 years. What The. I think There Inc as a business is viable from a cashflow perspective, but when you drop the VC sledgehammer down, then it tends to crush smaller levels of income. I think this is one of the reasons that Second Life might make it...I think they used minimal capital getting started...and they run with a skeleton crew staff.

I've said it before...if I ever attempted to create a There...I would not be interesting in re-inventing the wheel. The wheel is hell. I'd march over to idsoftware, licence the Q3 engine, and grab 3-5 texture wizards, 2-3 C++ coders, and build from that. Have you ever played the game Alice? Based on alice and wonderland...very creepy beautufil...all Q3 engine. It's easy for me to sit back and play armchair quarterback...game developement is difficult at best and There does an outstanding job. My biggest concern with There Inc always comes from the massive VC budget. Sims Online also ran into this problem. The market for any one game does not seem large enough to recoup this initial funding. Sure, some big hits like Lineage1 could do it, but those games are very rare.

Let me know if you think my estimates are on crack. :D

CoH Emots
Here is the big lost of CoH emots. You can run them with a semicolon like ;emot or you can make a macro button with them like /macro point "em point" yes, they have the Sims point :O

attack
bigwave
bow
burp
cheer
clap
cointoss
crossarms
dice
disagree
dontattack
explain
flex
flex1
flex2
flex3
hi
jumping jacks
kata
laugh
lecture
lotus
newspaper
no
overhere
paper
point
praise
raisehand
roar
rock
salute
scissors
shrug
stop
tarzan
taunt1
taunt2
thumbsup
wave
wavefist
whistle
yes
yoga