There Frisky - a fansite for There, the online virtual world

Linden Labs Makes A Move

Linden Labs Makes A Move
A few days back I suggested that if There Inc decides to wind down the consumer game division, some money could be found striking a deal with Maxis or Linden Labs. It could be a Win Win Win. There Inc would win by making a little unexpected revenue, Linden wins with a new client, players win with a new place to go and a super deal at one of those sites. The window of opportunity for this has already closed! :) Linden has taken the ball into their own hands and said "come here Thereians and we will cut you a phat deal." Kyau was the first to send me to the Second Life There page. I played second life in beta and it's a cool game. It's closer to There than it is Sims. What game you like best is subjective. I personally like the games in this order: There, Sims Online, Second Life. That's just me. Each game is different and has their own cool uniqueness.

Ventrella's Cafe
Ever wonder about Ventrella's cafe? I found Leo's old article on TechTV and it states:

"Six years in the making, There is the brainchild of Will Harvey, a Stanford computer science Ph.D. and game developer, and Jeffrey Ventrella, an expert on artificial life from MIT's Media Lab."

I had heard of Will Harvey but had not heard of mr Ventrella. Michael Wilson was the lad that was a big player at ebay. Here is a scetch.

Shameless Plug For My New Book!
In january I decided I wanted to write a book. It was more about the challenge of writing a book, then the business of selling one and making some coin. I decided to try self publishing with iUniverse. Anywone can publish their onw book their, and costs run between $500 and $1,500 depending on how many optional featured you choose. I've always said "it's easy to make a website; it's hard to get traffic to it" and the same is true for writing, "it's easy to write a book; it's hard to sell it." LOL :) It was a lot of fun and quite a learning experience. I made tons of mistakes along the way. From idea to store shelf in four months! Woo Hooo. My book just hit Amazon. I see that iUniverse even has it at the canadian store.

The book is basically how I trade stocks and invest. If you trade stocks or your thinking about an IRA, you might enjoy it. I use three or four internet sites to screen for stocks. My favorites are MSN Investor, BigCharts, and StockCharts.

If you are new to investing and retirement planning, you might enjoy the Motley Fools book or the Wealthy Barber first.

When you self-publish, everything is on your shoulders in terms of promotion. I'm not going to go too crazy since this is more of a fun hobby for me and I don't think I'll sell 17 copies LOL, but I have a three prong sales approach plan.

1) Press Release
I'm not sure if this will work but I will do a press release to various journalist through some of the internet PR sites like PRweb.

2) Google Ads
I'll most like try a couple hundred dollars in google ads, aimed at amazon. I tend to think these will lose money but I want to find out the conversion rate. Here is why it will be difficult mathematically...google clicks are minimum 5 cents. I aim that to amazon and try to sell a book. The book is $15 and I would be paid 5% from iuniverse. oopsy, nice math error here earlier...correcting. This means I need to get 1 sale in 30 clicks to break even. This is impossible. I can actually improve on this because...if I use the amazon affiliate program, they pay me too...say 5%. Now that is 1:60. (essentially still impossible) Even losing money, I will get a figure of how many clicks I need to make one sale on average. You can buy your own book at iuniverse and sell them yourself you can make more than 5%. I think you can make $5-$10 depending on quantity. I can use the amazon math to determine if it would be worthwhile attempting to sell from home. Even at $10 profit you are looking at 1/200. I think I just talked myself out of buying google ads. hahaha :)

3) Blog
You know I love blogging. I might do a few blog posts to get the book and stock terms into the search engine. I have a generic site laid out and will finish it off this week. If you use MT and want my clean default templates, here they are.

It took me a lot of years to develop my trading strategy. I've read close to 100 books on the subject. Here is an old list I used to post to usenet 100 years ago. I need to update it sometime. LOL I made huge coin in the dot com boob, and I lost huge coin in the dot com bust. Ahh the lessons of life eh. :) In the last three years, I am up over 20% per year on average. This year I am up 16.4% and beating all four indexes. I do not day trade, I trade long term. I usually make less than 15 trades in a year. I generally hold 8-12 stocks at one time.

If you are curious and want to read more, check out me new book! hee hee

Game Engines

Advergaming Growing
There is not the only game embracing internal advertising. This trend continues to pick up steam. Article

Survivor 9
Here is the link for fall.

Sims2 Skins
There are only a handful of sites, but Sim2 skins are going to get big - fast. One of the great things that There has given the gamer community is...and incredible group of skilled designers. So many of us learnt to paint or build because of There, while other got even better at the craft. This will spill into new games as they come out. Here is a cute Sims2 skin site I found. It's foreign but pretty. TaiTai's. I never got too into Sims1, but I will buy Sims2. I was chatting with Starley yesterday and she was already deep into the Sims2 skinning land. We both decided to grab a couple of domain names, just in case. LOL Over at Dotster, Starley grabbed celestialstudio.net and simstudios.com, and I grabbed friskysims.com. :) The Sims2 skins are massive, allowing deep detail.

Gamer Engines
3D gamer engines are available to programmers and game developers. These range from noob to ninja pro-level, $0 to $250,000. Cute engine I believe is domation. Torque engine is $100 and $395 commercial license. Quake1 and Quake2 are open source licensing. You can license one of three Unreal engines. The king of them all is the Quake3 engine and is $250,000. Why re-invent the wheel? This is why I always question There's plan to design networking code from scratch. It cost millions and it takes years to get rid of lag. 250 large is not a high price to pay for serious code. One you have the engine, you then build your world or game around that. I also questioned Sims for not going this route. They continually struggled with networking code. id software and others have been doing it for years. Sure you might have to modify the game slightly, but that does ot change the overall flavor. For example, in Sims Online, if you used a pre-existing engine, you might have to make each house one server or maybe limit 2-3 houses per server. You might say "that will take 1,000 servers!" Yes it might, but that is how google is built and cheap strong servers are $500 now. You have 1000 servers for $500k and that is a lot cheaper than what Maxis and There spent on their server farms I bet. And lag would be hella less.

If You Build It, They Will Not Come

first some tidbits, and then some fake-meat and potatos

DodgeBall - The Fad That is Sweeping the Nation
The new movie has triggered a dodgeball resurgence. It may even become an extreme sport on tv this season. :)
http://www.dodgeballusa.com/
Dodgeball is Becoming America's No. 1 Summer Craze!

Gaming Open Market Start Tacking CoH Inspiration
http://www.gamingopenmarket.com/gameSummary.php?gameID=12

If You Build It, They Will Not Come
I've seen this problem time and time again with both internet and brick and mortar businesses -> falling in love with the product. There Inc. was in love with the concept of an advanced virtual world. There is a technical masterpiece. So what? I have never ever never ever seen a product sell itself. I don't care how good it is, a product, or content, never sells itself. You have to put at least half your effort into advertising. In terms of success, you will always make more money with a weak product that has great advertising compared to a great product with weak advertising.

If you build it, they will not come. If you build a better mouse trap, they will not beat a path to your door. Back in the porn days, new webmasters would come up to me and the conversation would always go just like this:

dude: "Twid! I have got this new site and Oh man! We have got the greatest content ever! We have 6' tall buxom blonde sweedish co-eds wearing santa clause suits!"
twid: "dude, that is some ultra rare badass content...so what?"
dude: "what do you mean 'so what'?"
twid: "where are you going to get traffic? where are you going to get hits? how many hits does your site get a day?"
dude: "huh? None of that matters because Twid! We have got the greatest content ever! We have 6' tall buxom blonde sweedish co-eds wearing santa clause suits!"

These new webmasters were always under the false impression that "content" drove sales. If you build it, they will NOT come. You have to hit people over the head with a frypan to get them to your site. These webmasters would get 15 hits a day and you could hear the crickets chirping. I used to say that I knew a lot of poor photoshop experts and new a lot of rich search engine spammers.

Yes, you need a good product or service, but after that, its ALL advertising and marketing. There Inc. was 90% focused on the "product" and 10% focused on the "selling".

There's Website
I hate flash. I dislike java and javascript. xml is ok but I still prefer sites without it. There Inc. loves all three of these things and all three cause excessive website grief. Getting in bed with flash was a huge mistake. Flash gimped There from the word go. All the flash on There Inc's interface could be replaced with simple code, and so many things would be more stable. Flash is cool. Flash is great for cartooning. Flash has no business on a commercial money making website. Flash banners rarely outclick regular banner. I've tested hundreds, even thousands of banners online and flash never wins. Text links always outperform java rollover links. And regular text links always always always outperform text links with decorate tags stripping away the underline. That is just a giant pet peeve of mine, sorry about the tangent. :)

Where the hell am I going with this? Oh ya :) There Inc. chooses to lock the whole freaking site behind a password login. Do you know how insane this is? This is noob of the noob management decision. I can tell that no one in There Inc has made money online with a commercial website. They are clueless with regards to site design. There is one thing that all commerce sites know, porn or mainstream, and that one thing is

Search Engine Traffic Is GOLD

What's that mean? It means that when you get hits from google, they are great hits, and have the highest chance at converting into sales. The way you get into the search engines is with content ie pages. One reason I went into blogging is because each post each day is a single html file and these pages are spidered by google, every damn freaking day! It's a slippery ninja way to get into engines. Want proof? watch this...I made this post two days ago and the google spiders already inhaled it. Click here.

There Inc has over 5,000 pages indexed by google. In porn, we would plop our panties to have 5,000 legitimate pages in google. There Inc, pisses this all away. I want to cry watching this money being pissed away....I'll show you what I mean. Click here. 99.99% of all resuls are locked behind that fucking stupid password screen. I mean COME ON...who cares if someone does not subscribe but wants to read the website! If I ran There Inc, these pages would all be freely accessable. Anytime someone tries to click on those google pages, they can't see them. I would estimate that There Inc is missing out on 10,000 unique visitor hits a day! A Day! and on every damn page on There, I would at the bottom have a small text link saying "click here to try there free". This is how you make money in the land of internet. It's about traffic and hits and search engines.

The Subscription Based Model
I don't give a rat's ass about the sale of $T or house rentals...that is all small money compared to the player subscriptions. What does NCsoft press release? They press release that Lineage2 has 60,000 subscribers and City of Heros has 100,000 subscribers. Why? Because these are the subscription based model! Porn is also the subscription based model! There is 80%+ the subscription based model. How much money is lineage making? It's easy to figure out...if they have 60,000 members at $20 a month, 60k x 20 = $1,200,000 a month, and around $15M a year. Subscription count is everything.

There management once ever stated..."we want to have 80,000 members by next december". So someone must of had a clue. I just don't think total management saw this fact.

You make money with subscription based systems by doing the following

1. Get more traffic and hits to website
2. Test your front-end to maximize the sign-up rate
3. Have the best affilate program

It's all about traffic and signup rates. No, it's not sexy. It's not about MAB DAB BLAB or the dinky. It's about cold hard traffic being converted to sales.

The Dirty Little Secret Of Subscription Systems
I will tell you the dirty little secret of recurring billing systems. This is true for porn, games, ISPs, magazines, and anything else that bills on a recurring monthly basis. Again, this is going to sound cold, but its the mathematical truth.

One of the reasons that subscription based systems make money is because of "human laziness". Yes. I know that is hard to accept, but it is true. How many of you did not cancel your Sims Online account for months after you quit player? That is not the exception to the rule...that is extremely common.

This is one of the reasons that "porn" was so successful early on the internet...it's also one of the reason it's now is collapsing. Let me explain...If you can get someone to give you their credit card for a free trial or to join, the odds are very good that they will be too lazy to quit, at least for 3-4 months, independant whether or not the product is great or just ok. Porn sites are the black ninjas of the "free trial", "3 day free", "join one site and get access to 12"...once you are in the recurring billing system, you are worth about $90 since you will be too lazy to quit. This is exactly true for games, ISPs, and magazines. You get those magazine offers all the time. Why do you think Sims tried so freaking hard to get us not to quit? Sims was using porn tricks! You could not quit online, you had to call in, sit on hold, and then they would hardsell you to stay and then offer you a free month to stay! This is the cold reality of subscription based models. Porn is collapsing because they pushed it too far...they had misleading join pages with tiny small print, they hid the cancel buttons, and charegebacks hit 2%. amex and visa had complete fits and cleaned-up all the crooks, as well they should.

What does this all mean? It means, to be financially successful, There Inc needed to focuse more on getting new sign-ups, and focus far less on new content. This would temporarily make existing members sad, but There Inc needs to make money first, then content second.

The Way To Do An Affiliate Program
There Inc was close on this but late. The move with Commission Junction I would give a 6 out of 10. The best affiliate programs pay out large commission. There are a couple ways to do this. One way, which is riskier, is to determine how much a "join" is worth to your site. You have to take into account the free trials. You eventually get a number...average customer is worth $40. Once you know that, you then offer close to half as commission. You pay out $20, not $3 or $5. You pay out approx 50% and go for volume. I think There might of had better luck with no free trial OR only pay $20 if the free try converts to a staying member. When you pay out high, you then get every gamer site around, putting up your banner. If you run a good business, you should have a strong margin and still be making money since you are making the affiliate do all the work.

A safer way to do this, that is just about as effective, is to pay out 50% of all income. This is easier to track and their is less fraud. So now you say to all affiliates....send us signups, whatever that persons spends at There Inc, forever, we pay you 50%. Again, you would have the most kickass gamer affiliate program. This is how adult has done it for years...smaller margins, greater traffic.

My ideas are questionable in this case because no one knows if There scales. It seems that they do not. There is quiet in terms of people, and laggy as a mofo. It must be game objects or something. I don't think the world, in the current condition, could handle large amounts of signups, and so my ideas may be a moot point.

About The Author
I know I am an opinionated mofo, and much of what I say you can take with a bag of salt. I have been online since the mid 90s and I have run several successful businesses online, mainly in the adult sector. I wanted to give you a few points about me to establish some creditability so folks don't think "aw Twid, you are just blowing smoke out your ass again!". hee hee.

One of my first sites, lips.com (the site does not really exist anymore and is just a traffic funnel. don't go there or you might get a boob in your eye.) that site at it's peak did 40,000 front page unique hits a day. Not raw. Not page views, unique visitors. It's best day ever was in 98 and cleared $700 for the day. My next project was a banner exchange. Many of you old school people will remember Link Exchange. LE was purchased my Microsoft and pretty well destroyed, but at one time, Link Exchanged ruled. I used to be email buddies with the owners there and we would trade notes and ideas. LE was showing 20,000,000 banners a day....and guess what, so was I. They were mainstream, and I was adult. They got bought by Gates for $80M. Holy! Makes me wish I was mainstream. It took 100 or more emplloyees to run LE. I ran SexSwap with me, the wife, and programmer Gus. LOL. Almost 30 servers and close to 10 T1s at peak. Because of these experiences, I know about databases, server loads, traffic, programming and code. My banner exchanges controlled 200,000 unique hits a day at peak, 100,000 I could aim at any website. I know what websites designs make the best signup rates. Code simplicity always wins. As a small aside, Gus wrote sexswap in C++ and was his propriotary database. We ran on NT for years and there is a flaw in the MS TCPIP stack when you severely hit them with traffic. I know that MS tried to convert LE to NT and could never do it...we were able to. Yay! :) I think any single box could handle 70 (or 700 I forogt now) banners a second or something and when we got to 80, we would toss a new box at it to take pressure of the stack. LOL. I think the best peak day for SexSwap was like in the year 2000 and was a $3,500 day. Everything in adult slid downhill in conjunction with the dot com bust and heavy competition.

Sally, I can hear you thinking... "Twid, I don't believe you!" :P OK, let me do some google searches to find some crusty old arrticles. :D September 20, 1999 and this was the start of the dot com boom! Yahooo. Here are the Neilson ratings for top banner showers Sept 1999. Number 5 in the world...in the world, was me. ROFL I created SexSwap banner exchanges. Notice I was showing almost as many banners as Yahoo.

So, ya I occasionally spew-the-fluf :) but I've been lucky enough to have several successful online sites. These sites have handled massive traffic and massive DB hits. I've tested more banners and site front-ends than almost anyone on earth. I've bought programs in just about every type of code. I've got a pretty good idea of what makes money for a site and what doesn't and what code makes a site work and what doesn't.

Holy! This has to be a record amount of blab for one blog post. This has been a FULL PULL. See you tomoorow. ;) Don't forget to watch Pride! from Japan tonight on PPV!

Deep Thanks To The Employees Of There

There is so much to talk about today that I don't even know where to start. If you were under a rock yesterday, There did a press release essentially admitting that the consumer game side of There was not profitable and the future was uncertain. Here is the link. I think I have enough topics to blab until the end of May. Hee hee. Here we go

Deep Thanks To The Employees Of There
I am tired of seeing people go off on There Inc and it's employees. There is not a bad guy. One sentence stood out for me in that press release.

Michael Wilson writes:
All of us at There have poured our heart, soul, and in many cases, significant financial investment into There these last few years.

I remember that half the capital raised for There was from employees. I'm sure many lost their life savings. I don't think we need to cry about $50 or $100 when some of these people lost everything. Can you imagine working on a project for three years, pouring your life into it, and having it meet with failure. It has to be completely horrible. I want to thank the staff of There for trying their best, and for putting out such a creative project that we all really enjoy. Thank you for your efforts, hard work and time.

Slow Painful Death Or Fast Disappear In The Middle Of The Night?
Where is There headed? We can draw from two examples: The Sims Online and Uru. Uru disappeared in the middle of the night without notice, where Sims online still exists. I still have freak friends that play Sims Online! Is There more like Uru or Sims Online? It's more like Sims Online. Sims is the most successful PC game ever and only the online was a flop. Maxis kept online alive since it's cheap and easy once you decide not to develop anything new. Just keep the servers up and cut services to a minimum. There most likely will follow this lead since they have said they need to focus on their profitable markets ie military. They can't disappear in the night since they are still earning incomes that way. I think they will run the consumer game division with a skeleton crew. It's cheap to keep servers up with no service and no new products. Just keep things running.

I believe "There the Game" will be around at least in the short term and people will still be playing, just like Sims Online. Sims Online has bee up for one and a half years already.

Market Crash
In a dark sort of way, watching a virtual market crash is kind of interesting. :) LOL I don't think There market will crash too badly. I think there will be excessive $T sales all this week and a lot more houses will hit the market. The public really has a short memory...in a month, most players will have forgotten about this blib, the routine will return, and business will be like usual.

I don't think 2000:1 can hold. I think a bunch of players are going to look to new games and old players are going to be more cautious and convert goods to cash. I can't see the black market rate holding solid with such huge downward pressures. Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would guess we will see 3000:1 temporarily, then recovering to the 2500:1 range.

Check out GOM today, and you will see that a lot of buyers are fishing around trying to get 40 cents for 2000 when the normal rate is $1. Sellers are looking for 80 cents. My guess is that there may be a bunch of sales at 50-60 range short term, and then recovery to the 75-85 cent range. People still buy simoleans on ebay ;) and the rate seems to be $28 for 500,000.

Numbers Rarely Lie
I have been asking "where is the money" since at least September last year. There Inc. simply was not making enough money to turn a profit. I have so much to say about this and how they could of, but I will save that story for tomorrow, and yes, lots of reference to porn. ROFL :) Here are the signs that There Inc was in trouble:

CEO Tom gets the axe
Tom got the axe because they were in hella trouble then. Tom never would of got the axe if they were printing money. They probably felt a new CEO would give them the answer to profitability.

No New CEO was ever found
Rememeber they were looking for a fancy pants CEO? Well fancy pants CEOs are 500 large or more a year, and I doubt they wanted to give away another half mil, so they probably wanted one that would invest. Next, any pro-level CEO must of said "can I see the books" and then had to think "fuck, you folks are not making any money".

Staff Was Let Go
A bunch of staff then got the axe next. These are bandaid solutions to a giant problem. There was not making any coin and trying to save money.

Houses
You can watch house prices. If you ever wanted a house, I think now is the best opportunity ever to buy ;) Several houses at $T 0.00 bids.

The Platform Is Synonymous with Engine
In the press release There stated:
There is changing its strategic direction to focus on our technology platform.

You may recall that I often spew about the "Quake3 engine" or Unreal Engine...this is the exact same thing. Engine is platform. I think this is a good move and many of us have suggested it in the past. This will not help the game side, but it will help the There Inc Business.

Who Could There License The Engine Too?
There could License the technology platform to lots of places. Here are some ideas that come to my mind.

1) Online Dating
Walk over to Match.com and cut a deal. Then the horny dating crowd can actually meet and chat 3D in game. This is win win.

2) Poker
I have been spewing all week about poker...it's huge. There should make a There-Cards version that is not buggy and license to one of the top poker houses. The games would be fun and social and more interesting.

3) Porn
Porn sites love new ideas. Most big porn companies turn out 5-10 new paysites a year and they are always looking for a unique edge. There could cut a deal with one of the top10 players and ThereXXX would be a big win win hit.

4) Counter Strike
There is already military! Hello! It does not take a rocket scientist to look at this top40 list of games and notice that the TOP7 are all MILITARY. License or build a military game version of There. This is by far the most popular version of games on the web.

5) Swords and Sorcerers
There just watched NCsoft hit two homeruns with Lineage and City Of Heros. Go to NCsoft and say "what can we do together?" Social alone just does not work, it never has. There has to be a core game or competition. Add some code and make there Dungeon and Dragons and have levels and monsters and wandering around exploring. It's not a big stretch.

6) AOL
License to AOL. They need fun content for people. This might be a nice tie in for one of their areas.

There are many opportunities for There Inc business to license the engine.

How Could There Inc Make Some Coin Now?
There needs money and they also don't want to piss off the fanbase. Here is what they should do...make two phone calls: one to Maxis (sims) and one to Linden Labs (second life). You then say "look, we are struggling and want to tailor out our consumer side. Let's cut a deal...we will sell you our subscriber base if you offer our users a deal."

And so you get Sims Online and Second Life to offer a deal something like....one month free for any subscriber to There...or two months free if you give us your credit card for rebilling. In return, There gets $20-$40 per subscriber. There is a fast $500,000 for There (assuming their press about 20,000 subscribers was not hot air). Game players get to play a new game free for a month or two and are not out in the cold.

Tomorrow On There Frisky...
Come back tomorrow because I will be spewing my lips of on:

-why there failed
-the problem of falling in love with the product
-subscription based businesses
-porn
-if you build it they will NOT come

New Ati Drivers

New Ati Drivers
There are new ATi video drivers out. You can download yours now at
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

World Series Of Poker Starts This Week
It's a HUGE record field with $22,000,000 in entries! Wow. Online has grown this sport out of control.
http://espn.go.com/eoe/wop.html

The site I play at gave way 101 entries....entries for the big game are $10,000 a person...they gave out $1M in entries!
http://www.paradisepoker.com/promotions/2004/wsop/updates.html

It will be fun to see if another internet player wins this year or if some old school player wins.

Big Virtual Bucks No Whammies

Bulge Undies
Kyau writes
If you haven't see dinky in there, well there is now!

Big Virtual Bucks No Whammies
From that article on virtual economies earlier in the week, I found these large virtual goods sites. This first site, UOtreasures, reportedly makes the owner over six figures a year. This site, IGE, claims over one million US a year. Simpy amazing. If There Inc stays stable or grows, we will see one or two designers in the six figure range.

Are ThereBucks Locked to the US Dollar?
In one or two economic articles, they state that There locks the currency to the US dollar. Is this really true? I say "no", it's really only half true. Therebucks will never cost more that 1787:1 since you can buy directly from There at this locked rate. This does not stop Therebucks from dropping in rate...and the proof of this is that "it's already happened" since the black market T$ is 2000:1. Now if There sold and bought T$ at that fixed rate, then they would be locked. They choose not to do this and to let the currency swing since There Inc likes to make money on the sale of T$. If they did, you might think of There as a casino and the T$ as a chip. You are buying chips to use in world for entertainment and then sell them back when you are done. I'm still not clear why There choose not to go this route. I am not sure if any game goes this route yet.

Watching virtual economies become big business is exciting right now.

There Dreadlocks

I was catching up with Mojo Mary at Cytra's shack when Skylar and Kimberly showed up, sporting their new dreadlocks. You can buy The Rasta now in There Shops.

King Of All Rejections Continues His Reign
Here is a good one...for some reason I am placing collision mesh incorrectly, thereby planting objects firmly into There soil.

There Submissions writes:
During the submissions review process, we noticed that your BIG 3D Spade did not work in world as it was shown in the catalog image. It did however sink right into the ground, as you can see in the attached image. We did however issue a full refund so that you would be able to resubmit the BIG 3D Spade once it has been corrected. I redid it and tested in world and it seems ok now.

Mary and Monitor
There_Monitor has been lurking around the shack this week. I don't know if I live in a lagzone or what. Mary gave the monitor some frisk and ten seconds later we all screen locked up.

L2 60,000 players, CoH 100,000 players

How did that pic get into the There press release pile? ;) Lots of gamer stories today. Here we go...

The Automated Online Role-Player
Nerina writes:
I thought you might get a kick out of this :-)
http://archive.gamespy.com/fargo/august03/autorpg/index.shtml

The Walrus Magazine | Game Theories
Sid showed me this article and the site is down so I haven't had a chance to read it since it's massive. I believe it has to do with the EQ economy and gamer economies. It looks to be a very cool read on the money of MMORPGs
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/1929205&tid=1

Massively Multiplayer Wild West Sim
http://www.wildwestsim.com
"There is even prostitution!" said a shocked young Sidney, as she showed me this next title. hee hee hee. This game could be cool but the site is very sparse. I don't think they are anywhere near alpha, let alone beta. I wouls expect something in 18 months to 24 months. This game does talk about some really slick features such as being "born" into the game. You are born into an existing player family when you start...sort of like automatic mentoring. Players can get married and the new players are their kids. Here are some features:

Faction wars, saloon fights, "draw" shootouts at high noon
Player towns, homesteads/ranches, marriage, real player offspring
Gambling: slot machines, Player-2-Player Poker
Mining, farming, railroading
Mounts & pets (breeding capabilities)
Player photo uploading

Here are two interviews
http://gamebunny.com/wild_west_sim_int.htm
http://www.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=15&id=102&colid=2588

Hollywood and Video Games
In this third news item sent from Pirate Sid, the line between movies and videos gets thinner and thinner. Major stars are appearing in games and the money generated from games becomes bigger and bigger. Game budgets are getting larger and larger.
Hollywood's Interest in Video Games Grows

Lineage 60,000 subscribers | CoH 100,000
These numbers are freaking HUGE. There Inc. management would plop their panties to get 100,000 subscribers...and in less than like four weeks! lineage is doing awesome and City Of Heros is a pure home run. Wow!
http://www.rpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10077&newsid=28485

CoH is pure word of mouth! I haven't seen an advertisement anywhere. It's truely amazing. I saved a great interview for last...here is the IGN interview with Jack "Statesman" Emmert, Lead Game Designer, City of Heroes. The guy reads 60 comic books a month, works over 60 hours a week on CoH, speaks 5 languages and read hieroglyphics! He is like hella black ninja geek!
http://vault.ign.com/articles/514/514854p1.html?fromint=1

The Kraken and CoV Video
Just a little more CoH. Here is E3 pre bla bla. Here is a video for the upcoming City Of Villians....peeeee.
ftp://ftp.cityofheroes.com/movies/COV_CG_Trailer_320.mov

Few people have seen the elusive Kraken beast of Perez Park. I saw him last night and had to change my underwear. He hides in the upper north west corner and he is not always there. He is the king of hydra. He is massive. 2390 points and 800 endurance. He is only level 14 but it would take 10 strong men, or 5 burly women to take him down.

Just Blabbing

On that Sim's bodyshop, Sid pointed out that it is way more fun with the starter pack you can download right here. I don't have game stories today since I was off the computer for two days, attempting to install my new pool liner. Here are some goofy pics from yesterday where me, Sanya the wife, and Deano the friend, attempt to install a new liner for the pool. The garden hose is still filling it as we speak. :) While in vegas, I saw this store called hatitude with groovy straw cowboy hats...Starley showed me a bunch of them online like this this and this. Sid of the Sass tipped me off to this new Mr Clean magic cleaning sponge. I bought a couple and they work really great on certain dirt. I find they work best on rough surfaces like fridge handles etc. Give them a try! Here is how to install a pool liner btw. In gamer news, Dragon Empire beta is available for singups.

Sims2 Is Due

I know 90% of There players have been eagerly awaiting Sims2. I have to believe that it will be the number one selling game of all time when it hits shelves. Kyau sent in this link to the Sims2 Body Shop! I never really got into regular Sims but I imagine I'll still have to buy 2 when it hits the shelves. I downloaded the fansite kit and it looks to me like they are promoting the dating and relationships. Sims2 is currently holding the number5 spot at amazon top100 and is expected in late august. Looks like the games that catch my eye are coming out in this order:

Doom3.........June15
Half-Life2......September 1
Sims2...........August 31

Sims and Half-life are due at the same time, but they have different buyer profiles.