Greetings friends and best wishes for the New (solar) Year to you and yours. Another quick update on items on interest;
– Andrew Chen and I did a lecture (y’know, those things with actual content) at this year’s Virtual Goods Summit. The video is embedded below, or can be seen here. Jussi Laakkonen did some awesome mind maps of the talks at the show and also links to more visible slides. The conference was again a resounding success, demonstrating that we’ll see a lot of innovation in virtual goods models in 2009, not least because many folks originally building to an advertising model are fleeing towards virtual goods as the ad market deteriorates.
– We went to New Orleans for Halloween with Because We Canners Jeffrey and Jillian and Instructabots Christy and Eric. It was a lot of fun, featuring a great deal of tasty and often fried foods, graveyards, parades, side parades, cafe burlot and $0.03c martinis! Highly recommended. Eunice and I also took a trip back to London for profit and pleasure (well, a couple of small conferences and visiting the family).
– Having completed (most of) the heavy lifting, we announced that Whirled is Open for Business (numerous press linkies from that page). This means that Billing is in place, with our three currencies (coins for playing, bars for buying, and bling for creators and affiliates earning) and some creators are making money! For extra bonus credit, check out the interviews with Massively and Gamasutra. Thanks to all the folks who covered the news.
– Whirled grew by leaps and bounds. At the end of October we started a Design Your Whirled contest in partnership with deviantArt which was very successful with awesome entries — so much so that we’re having new Contests for room-making and a big Game Developer Challenge with $25k in prizes! Tell your game making friends to get busy, the latter ends January 31st. I’ll be making another post with more detailed Whirled metrics before the end of the (calendar) year.
Let us all take a moment today to thank the sun for returning, and to focus ourselves on indomitable spirit and fearlessness through what may be adverse conditions in the year ahead! With cheerful willingness, we shall prevail… even in the event of Zombies.
– Daniel
Ah, but zombies are a limited bunch, vulnerable to the belaying pin, the spear, and in Far East waters, the naginata.
Glad to kow you are in good spirits, sir. Please keep innovating! The talk was highly informative, though it is unfortunate that the graphs fell victim to the limits of recording technique.