The legal frameworks of the different countries around Europe contribute to the complexity of the territory. It is quite a challenge to establish a service and its rules and have them actually comply to all the different requirements of those various countries. When they don’t contradict each other, even in the same country, as it sometimes happens.

The other real pain, is, like for any proper persistent world, the fact the legal system is always evolving and it is important to keep an eye it. What was fine and perfectly legal yesterday might be forbidden tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

Gamasutra relays a report by Seattle Post that shows Microsoft numbers for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. The more recent figures are from February 2008, showing that 56% of all Live members were Gold (60% in the US). The percentage was actually down 4 points yoy.

At that time there were 10M announced Live members , so that was about 5.5M Gold subscribers – if the proportion was still the same today (it might have increased since thanks to the NXE, which has brought them 3M members since November 08) that would be 9.5M Gold subscribers (there are 17M Xbox Live members). According to the latest numbers on VGChartz there are 28.5 millions of Xbox 360 distributed worldwide -the total Live members accounts are about 60% of that. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a new Comscore study (users aged 15+, Dec 08 vs Dec 07). Good news for social games !

UK, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Italy were the countries with the biggest penetration of social networking.

Also in the study : Facebook grew 443% in one year in France thanks to localization, and has now overtaken Skyrock.

The social networking landscape still remains pretty diverse in Europe – that isn’t shown in the study- but the overall usage is very high. For comparison, Emarketer recently published a similar study showing that the penetration rate was 41% in the US. That encompasses all year 2008 though, not just December as the Comscore figures.

As reported by Virtual World News.

The linking of accounts is always something tricky,  it looks like users have 2 weeks to transfer their virtual currency and can’t claim what they already spent in the client-based version, and they have to start over with a new avatar and crib in the new world. This should make difficult to convince all of the users to take the leap (maybe preventing to buy any more new currencies in the client based world and offering a better exchange rate  would have been a better incentive), but it should give them much more opportunities for growth thanks to the improved accessibility.

The new VMTV can be found here.

A few links of news for today :

• Nexon closes HumaNature studio (based in Canada, developers of Sugar Rush). As there were no news of the game since the end of Closed beta in December, we would be suprised if the title wasn’t cancelled.

ERRATUM :  HumaNature was producing the game, not developing it, the developer is Klei Entertainment, which is not closing. HumaNature was working on unannouced new IP games. Thanks Daniel for the corrections!

• Online gaming gets 27% traffic growth yoy according to a new Comscore report. The online gaming display ad market grows with it, and gets upmarket as the ad clutter for the category diminishes. Most impressive growth is Spil’s network with +269% growth.
• Rumour : AOL selling Bebo? (were apparently disappointed by monetization vs projections)
• Paypal joins OpenID (that can give OpenID more credibility)
• GOA adds another True Games title to their portfolio by taking care of European operations for Possibility Space’s WarriorEpic .
• Gamigo brings Hanbitsoft’s steampunk MMO NeoSteam to Europe
• New study by DFC compares  offline and online games publishers’ business models, online makes better profits , less risky.
• Gmail will have an offline option. (Convenient for anyone with a laptop, and helps overcome barriers to cloud-based service usage.)