second-life posts

After a couple of years of teases and months of closed beta testing, the Gaikai streaming PC game service is now officially live. The CEO of Gaikai, Dave Perry, announced that the service was open to anyone to try out on his official web site late on Friday.

The streaming service is concentrating only on limited game demos, at least for now (unlike the OnLive service which has full games to play). The official Gaikai web site is offering a streaming demo of Mass Effect 2 (access to the demo pops up on the right hand side of the site after a few seconds). Gaikai is also being used to demo other EA games such as Spore and The Sims 3 which didn't have traditional PC demos released for them. Most interesting is that Gaikai is the only place to play a PC demo of the recent sci-fi horror game Dead Space 2 (after you fill out a survey). We've played it and on our connection it's pretty smooth. There's also a way to try out the quasi-MMO game Second Life via a Gaikai connection.

On his web site Perry states that at GDC next week he will be demoing a Gaikai-powered game running inside a Facebook page. He also states that " ... we will show some really high-end, high-performance games running at 60hz with no work needing to be done by the publishers / developers."

Linden Lab's people sim-MMO "experience" Second Life has pretty much kept to its own path with little development contact from the mainstream PC game community. That's about to change. Today the company announced that it has hired Rod Humble to be its new CEO.

Humble is well known for his long time work at Electronic Arts where he headed up the EA Play division which included being in charge of the publisher's mega selling Sims game series including the launches of The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. Before EA he worked at Sony Online on the first Everquest game. He has also made a few "experimental" games himself including one called The Marriage.

Linden Lab's press release doesn't make clear what changes, if any, Humble plans for Second Life. Hopefully he has learned some lessons from what went wrong with EA's own attempt at a sim like MMO, The Sims Online.

Southpeak Games' management are not going to have a good Thanksgiving. Gamesindustry.biz (free registration required) is reporting that the game publisher has run afoul of the he US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is attempting to issue a cease and desist order against the company and two of its executives; chairman Terry Phillips and CEO Melanie Mroz,

According to SEC documents, it alleges that the company violated the SEC's rules for revealing company details in the first quarter 2009 financial report. This also apparently involves Southpeak's now former chief financial officer Reba McDermott. She left the company after just nine months and now is prepping to take legal action against Southpeak Games.

Southpeak is still dealing with a lawsuit filed against it by Timegate Studios who alleged that Southpeak withheld royalty payments over the sales of its 2009 first person shooter Section 8. Timegate's upcoming sequel, Section 8: Prejudice, will now be self-published by the developer.

It's looking like Friday is going to be a busy day for PC gaming with the first day of BlizzCon. How many of you are lucky enough to be going?

• Champions Online's new free expansion pack Demonflame is now available for the MMO's subscribers.
• New bug patch updates are now available on Steam for Patrician IV, Garry's Mod, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, and Railworks 2.
• Linden Lab's founder Philip Rosedale is stepping down as the company's interim CEO as the team behind Second Life looks for a permanent replacement.
• Dungeons and Dragons Online launched its latest update today with two new playable races, new quests and more.

Second Life. Club Penguin. Habbo Hotel. For millions of users worldwide, these virtual worlds are their homes-away-from-home, and for many, the realms in which the majority of their time is spent. Yet for outsiders, these environments represent nothing more than a niche for hobbyists with nothing better to do, or a fad for people with too much time on their hands. It's likely that there is more misinformation regarding virtual spaces out there than there is actual fact. However, one of the phenomena that the pundits have been debating for years is the idea that eventually, everything and everyone will be connected 24/7 via some form of virtual world or another.

The questions are: when will this happen, and how? Why hasn't it happened already? What does this have to do with games?

Spore. LittleBigPlanet. Second Life. What do these titles have in common? Each of them allows a regular user to utilize embedded tools to create content. Although it's clearly too early to say that this is a trend, it's definitely an interesting development in game design.

Why should games offer users the ability to create in-game content? Are the risks worth the benefits? In today's column, we'll take a look into user-generated content, and whether or not it has a lasting place in video games.

Linden Labs has happily revealed second quarter results for its popular Second Life title, claiming that resident-owned regions grew by an astounding 44 per cent. "Our growth was due to the popularity of our newly launched 'Openspace' land product," said a company representative, "along with a change in pricing to make the purchase of land more accessible to first time buyers."

According to an Openspace blog announcement, Openspaces are private sectors of land "intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource." Plunking down an upfront fee of $250 and a recurring monthly charge of $75, an Openspace grants users 65,000 square feet of virtual real estate.

The 44 per cent growth came about due to Linden Labs decreasing the price "for full regions by 40% to $1000 upfront (the recurring monthly fee remains $295). We also launched a new Land Store that instantly provisions new regions. Pricing changes plus a dramatically improved purchase experience fueled land sales in the quarter."

According to a massive 27-page report released by Strategy Analytics (authored by Harvey Cohen and Barry Gilbert) one billion people will be logged into virtual worlds by 2017. That's strictly non-gaming virtual worlds, places like Second Life and Habbo Hotel, not MMOs or multiplayer frag fests.

The report ("Market Forecasts for Virtual World Experiences") predicts that 22 percent of all global broadband users will sign up for at least one virtual world over the next 10 years. If one billion real people do log in virtually they will bring with them eight billion real dollars in service opportunities. Someone somewhere is going to make a lot of money in the future.

Do we hear The Matrix calling?

Blizzplanet has received word from Vollee, a company dedicated to "fast-paced, sound-blasting, in-your-face 3D mobile games that connect to rich worlds of gameplay," debuted their streaming games service via Second Life for mobile phones.

According to a statement Blizzplanet received from Vollee, "The new, free application allows anyone with a 3G or Wi-Fi enabled handset to explore, interact and communicate across the entire 3D virtual world right from their handset." Vollee goes on to claim that their proprietary technology "is the only one on the market that can stream any high-end PC title to mobile, including popular massively multiplayer online role playing games."

Blizzplanet, of course, is primarily interested in the possibility of playing World of WarCraft on their cell phones -- as are many of you, no doubt. While Blizzplanet asserted that no official word has been given, "Vollee has confirmed negotiations with Activision."

Second Life-ers interested in trying Vollee's service can download World of Second Life from the company's website.

For those unfamiliar with the term, RMT, or Real Money Trading, is the practice of converting real-world dollars into in-game cash, predominantly in virtual worlds such as Second Life. It's a controversial phenomenon, accused by some of ruining virtual economies and supporting illegal sweat shop-like activity in foreign countries. However, there are a few legitimate, publisher-supported RMT trading houses, among them Live Gamer.

Already providing RMT services for players of Sony Online Entertainment's MMO EverQuest 2, Live Gamer has announced the expansion of its services to SOE's upcoming MMOs The Agency and Free Realms. This is welcome news, as it confirms the likelihood of the two titles' free-to-play nature, as opposed to a subscription-based model. For a little more in-depth look at this announcement, check out our sister site, Massively.