Club Penguin, the wildly popular kids-orientated virtual community recently sold to Disney for a whopping US$350 million. What a success story for virtual communities!
A bit of background. A little while back I did some research into club penguin for my work at Subversive Games. It is what is known as a virtual community - a place people go to, create an account, and walk around and play games with other users. The game is entirely penguin themed, complete with their little waddle as they move across the snow. Club Penguin is free to join and play in, however they sell upgraded accounts that let you do more in the world (you wear special clothes that identifies you as a paying member too) for a small monthly fee. I personally know a couple of kids who are into the world of club Penguin, and its pretty big with them.
Why is this all interesting? Well, people have being saying that virtual communities will be the ‘next big thing’, the sort of next step from mass multiplayer online games (MMO’s) - your warcrafts, etc. Virtual communities really take the facebook/myspace world and meld it into an interactive, walk-around-with-my-avatar experience. The community is huge too - 700,000 users. I have a feeling that a few years from now, rather than being contracted to design websites and games for the web, we’ll be looking at media portals and games for existence *inside* the virtual community programs.
Club Penguin is particularly interesting to me for two reasons. One, its front end is built in flash. For flash it’s pretty ‘big’ in terms of users and technically what it provides. Being made in flash, it runs in the browser, which means no extra programs have to be installed - great for kids, and for logging in anywhere you go. Also means its platform agnostic; being a mac advocate, I hate being cut out of the loop with windows only products. Secondly, its built on the backend Smartfox server, which is something I happen to be researching soon. Smartfox provides all the heavy lifting with a multiuser framework. Looking forward to getting into that down the track.
Just a few little things to get through first…