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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Remember Entropia Universe, a niche MMO launched in 2003 where players can buy and sell in-game items for real cash? You'd only really read about it when there was a breathless report about another record Entropia Universe sale — like this one, from 2010: How much would you pay for a string of ones and…
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Free Fire is a cross platform online battle royale game which on the surface, is largely dismissed by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and Fortnite. But AR/VR investor Julie Young has been looking much closer for well over a year (months before the current Metaverse buzz reached fever pitch), when…
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Longtime urban fantasy author Victor Ziblis is — or rather, was — a longtime member of the Second Life roleplay community, who first joined the world to promote his novels. "[I]t was actually a marketing stunt suggested by my publicist," he tells me, "The advertising stunt went off pretty well, but I found Second Life…
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Here’s a fascinating new report on avatars and gender from longtime game culture researcher Nick Yee, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 gamers. Nick’s topline takeaway is that 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars, which is more than many might assume. Two other learnings stand out to me even more:…
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I remember chatting with a metaverse developer early last year on a potential project in Avakin Life, a mobile-based virtual world in the IMVU category, and it seemed like another niche also-ran. Avakin Life has a limited social media footprint, to judge by the relative dearth of user-made YouTube videos. (This build tutorial/speedrun above is…
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San Francisco HQ of Tilia owner Linden Lab already owned by an Upland high roller Let's briefly check in on Upland, the virtual real estate acquisition game that's sort of Monopoly meets a mirror world, where virtual real estate is registered on the EOS blockchain, and is the first paying customer for Linden Lab's Tilia…
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There are players who create inexplicably crazy loops, trying to find the Higgs Boson of earnings and breaking the laws of physics in the process. #indiedev #indiegames #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/FVvbXwaEKt — IncrediMarble (@IncrediMarble) July 1, 2021 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Just in time for the long July 4 holiday weekend, IncrediMarble, the physics-based, marble slide construction game from veteran…
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Remember Viewfinder? Created by student Matt Stark, that's the synapse-thrashing Unity demo which depicted an interactive world where the user can manipulate their surroundings by taking a picture of them which, once taken, becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world. Since showing it off last year, Matt has greatly enhanced the graphics options, added…
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Palia is an intriguing new MMO now in limited pre-Alpha access with a somewhat odd* name from Singularity 6, a startup I last wrote about in 2019, led by many AAA developers who ambitiously promised to create worlds that built "community, friendships and a real sense of belonging.” I was somewhat skeptical at the time,…
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Tomorrow (May 29) at 11am PT is the first massive-scale community event in Scavengers, the survival/sandbox game with some Second Life in its DNA. And I do mean massive, because Scavengers runs on Improbable's Spatial OS: "We reached over 1,800 players in our closed test in April, so we're hoping to beat that," Rob Whitehead, co-founder…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 