Tricks of the Trade: The Rise of the Virtual Marketplace
Posted by Jakstone | Filed under Tricks of the Trade
In the past fifteen years selling your unwanted goods has gone beyond a simple yard sale and directly to the web. With the advent of sites like Craig’s List and Ebay buy and selling has become quick, easy and cheap. But recently a new trend of selling and buying has started with the monetization of virtual goods.
In the past virtual goods been over looked by many entrepreneur and big business but has recently started to turn heads and many company’s have started to scramble to jump on this growing marketing. According to a report by Inside Network, its estimated that the virtual goods market will hit $1.6 billion in revenue the U.S. in 2010. This is only a quarter of the estimated $4 billion in revenue that will be generated this year in South Korea where the virtual good market started over a decade ago.
Facebook, Myspace, and others are driving this new market. Their massive user base have allow companies like Zynga, the creator of popular games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, to capture audiences with there virtual offerings and has create a viable business model from which to profit from. Max Lechin, CEO of Slide and co-founder of PayPal, in a recent interview told TechCrunch they now almost make all there money from virtual goods.
Even if you haven’t heard of Zynga or Slide, other big companies have started to ramp up production there virtual offerings in hopes of new revenue streams. Companies like Sony, Activision Blizzard, and even Microsoft have all started to expand or experiment with offerings in the virtual market by taping into there existing services and adding “premium content”.
You maybe thinking to yourself “I’ve never bought a pet for a game!”, but at one point or another you have bought some type of virtual good.
Virtual goods are not limited to just items for games for FarmVille or WoW, but can be found in places like Apples own App Store with there new in app purchase system. Apple is another example of seeing the potential growth of the virtual goods market and expanded their payment platform to include functionality to allow purchases of premium content and services. Now that Apple has announced the iPad and there intent to keep with the iPhones App Store model virtual goods can be seen as the foundation of their new business strategy. Services like Xbox Live, Playstaion Store, Apple App Store and more will help ignite a virtual goods boom the the coming years.
But virtual goods have not always been at the for front of a companies business model. In the beginning they where uses to entice customers to buy a certain product and acted as a bonus. Blizzard has been known to give vanity pets for there World of Warcraft game as a bonus to people who purchased a collector edition, usually tagged with a premium price. But in late 2009 Blizzard announced they would open up there online Blizzard store to accommodate 2 new vanity pets that could only obtained buy purchasing them at $10 each. Also a recent Blue Post stated Blizzard it intent to bring their in-game auction house online on World of Warcraft Armory portal and would be considered a premium service with a separate service charge.
So how do these new “goods” and services affect our real lives? At what point does the meta become an integrated part of life and is important enough to us to track, pay, and consume on a daily basis? What drives us to decided to pay for new cloths for our avatar, or to be granted access to these new tier of “premium content”?
For whatever the reasons maybe it is seemingly becoming clear that the line between our real lives and our life in the meta is starting to blur and become one.
Tags: Facebook, FarmVille, Meta, Virtual Goods
Making a blog into a home
Posted by Jakstone | Filed under Copy and Paste
For sometime now I’ve had multiple sites and domains but have never taken the time to concentrate on building them out. It was mostly do to a lack of content and time. This time around I thought I would try to concentrate on a single concept instead of trying to create a personal blog.
Starting in 2008 I started to get back into online MMO’s and was hoping to find a game that was enjoyable and could distract me from the drama that real life brings. As the months progressed I found that some online communities just didn’t seem to fit my personality or were too complex. I figured it would be best to join the same communities that people I knew in real life were a part of. So I joined World of Warcraft since I knew of a couple of people who currently played it.
I had previously played WoW but never got too deep into it because I didn’t understand the complexities of the game nor did I have the time to dedicate to it. But knowing that I had friends already in game I was willing to give it another shot and dived right into this new online experience.
As time passed I wanted to learn more about the people in WoW community and their online experiences. To my surprise there was a large following with wikis, blogs, portals, movies, and even podcasts all dedicated to WoW. So wondered what drives people to create so much content and have so many discussions about a game? To try to answer my question I started to listen to different WoW related podcasts and blogs. One podcast really struck me, a podcast produced by a female WoW player named Alachia called WoWCast .
Her views on MMO’s and communities that revolve around a fantasy world intrigued me and caused me to reflect on my life and experienced with in these worlds. She described these worlds as the meta, a fictional world with in our reality that we become attached to and try to make our reality. I dont want to go too much more into it but you can read Alachia’s explanation or look up the word on Wikipedia for more insight.
Come back to present day and I am still playing WoW and have become immersed in the community and the game itself. But WoW is only a small part of my metaverse. The Internet itself fascinates me and has become my home. So with this website I hope to post my insight into this constantly changing and evolving online world that connects us all and even separates us. But we’ll talk about that in another blog post.
