Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: New World Gaming
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Sorry not sorry for the title for this news: My preview of New World, Amazon Game Studios’ forthcoming massively multiplayer online PC game, would be limited to eyes-on, thanks to my stone-age potato of a gaming laptop. This is a game that touts 50-on-50 smackdowns, after all. Even if a new MMO sounds like as much…
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Gridiron, the first physics-based, fully multiplayer football game that I briefly mentioned last year, launched on Steam a few weeks ago, and has already gained impressive traction, especially as it's still in Early Access. Player reviews run Very Positive (difficult to achieve with Steam's highly critical userbase), and even more notable, has been embraced and…
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Update, 8/16: Bumped up for weekend conversation! Epic posted this Fortnite-made machinima inspired by Apple's 1984 ad very soon after Apple banned Fortnite from the App Store This may be surprising news to some except it was definitely not a surprise to Epic Games' Tim Sweeney: In an announcement this morning, Epic Games implemented permanent discounts…
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Pictured: Jeff "AM Radio" Berg's famed Second Life art recreated by his son in Fortnite Good conversation responding to Tim Sweeney's belief that there should be many competing metaverses rather than just one world that's The Metaverse. My response to that was calling for shared standards for 3D content that enable virtual goods and other…
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Lots of conversation last week around what it would take to upgrade 17 year old Second Life, with an intriguing point of comparison made by longtime virtual world user Jumpman Lane, who contrasts SL's performance with that of a 6 year old virtual world: I just recently returned to Second Life after 3 years of…
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My recent post on the massive growth of IMVU, the mobile-based metaverse, provoked a lot of conversation and curiosity. And so if you’re interested in trying it out — or you already have an account, and want to see what’s new — Lindsay at IMVU just let me know about two special Credit offers this…
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Pictured: Today's top played games on Steam via SteamDB; inset is today's top played game on ROBLOX, Adopt Me I get the impression many virtual world enthusiasts don't quite grasp how massive ROBLOX is, so here's a comparison: Adopt Me, a user-made roleplay pet care game on ROBLOX, created by a small team of grassroots-level…
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In a recent chat with New World Notes readers about the future of Second Life, many wondered whatever became of IMVU, the 3D chat-based world that once was seen by some as rival to SL itself — and by others as a low-end version of the metaverse. Let me tell you what's happened with IMVU…
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1867 Historical Role Play is a simulation game in ROBLOX with a fascinating virtual world history. It began as a Second Life-based project sponsored by a real life museum, and then expanded to Sansar… but then hit some cost and platform barriers. As Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder explained to me last year: [T]he problem lies in…
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Hyperbolica is an indie adventure game coming out later this year on Steam and its rudimentary graphics hide an amazing innovation: The game world is set in hyperbolic, non-euclidean space. In other words — and please correct me, math-minded readers, if I'm not explaining this correctly — it does not take place on a virtual…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 