Saturday Night Recap
Even this is too bright. I may have sunburned my eyeballs.
It’s closing in on 3am on what would technically be Sunday morning. Since I had nothing covering my dome except suntan lotion, and thought it’d be a great idea to spend the sunny afternoon working in the backyard, it’s entirely possible I’ve given myself thermal brain damage of some kind. The following is simply the surviving synapses firing random thoughts into the nether.
– While listening to the latest podcast coming from Twisted Nether, Fymlis and Nibuca were interviewing Psynister of Psynister’s Notebook fame. Psynister discussed his altaholism and how he often levelled up alts and blogged about his progress. That gave me the idea to do something along the same line, to help out folks that might want to level as a Fury Warrior. The experiment is afoot!
– Over on his personal blog, Daniel Howell broke the news that BRK is coming back for the Cataclysm alpha. What this means for the future of Big Red Kitty is uncertain at the moment. I sincerely hope Daniel knows what he’s doing, and wish him nothing but the best.
– I was a little shocked when MMO Champion dropped a whole mess of Cataclysm screenshots from the Alpha on us. I was not so shocked when Blizzard gave them a smack and told them to smarten up.
– When I close my eyes, it’s like rubbing my cornea with sandpaper.
One can get the same result by reading the WoW Forums.
– I keep thinking there was something else, but other than everybody recycling the same Cataclysm goodness there isn’t much else going on.
– I was wrong. Nerdtacular wrapped up for another year, and by all accounts it was a great success. I’m saving my nerd-gasm for Blizzcon 2010.
You can almost taste the gamer funk.
This is Herc the Merc, putting the lotion on its skin.
Blizzard’s Booty Call with Facebook
World of Warcraft is capital H huge, with an eleven million account subscriber base. According to their 2008 numbers, WoW made a 72 million dollar profit. These days, with all the pets and such for sale, that number is probably more. Impressive for an online video game. I’m sure Bobby Kotick thinks so.
Bobby loves him some World of Warcraft, spelled $$$
However, there’s a game on the horizon that may have already begun to change the face of online gaming. That game is Farmville.
If you have a Facebook account, you are most likely familiar with this game. It’s free to play, no subscription necessary. In it, you’re given a plot of land that you farm. That’s more or less the whole thing. I don’t play it, and that’s all I’ve been able to glean from people who play it. They spam their friends list, looking for fellow players to help them out with raising a barn, sending them seeds for crops, and other most fascinating things that people would never do in real life.
Sounds barely like a game at all. And yet, Zynga (the company responsible for this time-killer) boasts a claim of 70 million unique monthly visitors.
Look into the face of true evil.
Farmville also has RMTs. You can earn money by selling crops, then using your Farmville bucks to buy things like tractors. Or you can use real cash to buy the tractors yourself. According to Zynga, five hundred thousand tractors are sold per day at twenty bucks a pop. And you thought twenty-five dollars for a sparkling horse was crazy!
Now you see why Blizzard wants to simplify the game and draw more players. Same reason that Nigerian Prince emails tens of millions of people – a one percent success with these money-making schemes rakes in more cash if you’re trolling an ocean of fish rather than a puddle, or even a lake.
So to increase their exposure even more, Blizzard has reported that they will be integrating Battle.net with Facebook. Their first step will be to allow Starcraft 2 players to add their Facebook friends to their Battle.net friends list and share in-game achievements with them. This will mean that you can expect even more spam on your Facebook account. However, given the size and popularity of Facebook, saturating users with their product is a great way to increase their advertising exposure.
Everyone loves spam!
They may not pull in Farmville subscription numbers, but Blizzard is gunning to challenge them in the annoying Facebook announcements.
