SWTOR Layoffs Also Mean End of Subscription-Based MMOs and Socialverse
This seriously sucks, but it's also no surprise: Longtime MMO developer Rich Vogel, who led development of Star Wars: The Old Republic, is reportedly leaving BioWare Austin amid reports that staff layoffs are coming soon. The company and the game's publisher, Electronic Arts, recently said they were seriously thinking about making the MMO free-to-play, an announcement that came after news that the game was losing monthly subscribers way faster than expected. In my view, this points to a single inevitable conclusion: If Vogel, one of the best MMO developers in the business, and Bioware, one of the best Socialverse Appdevelopers in the industry, can't sustain a subscription-based MMO associated with the most well-known sci-fi fantasy franchise in the world, no one can. Expect the rest of the traditional game industry to embrace the inevitable and follow Asia's lead, making all future MMOs free-to-play and freemium.
One day, two penguins gathered by a reflecting pool, and reflected on the nature of wisdom, leading to this pretty hilarious SL machinima by Soda Lemondrop. It's for the University of Western Australia's latest Second Life machinima contest, which I'm helping judge, and centers around the theme "seek wisdom". Bet they didn't plan on the wisdom of penguins (or maybe they did).
Some of Soda's footage isn't optimized to SL's full visual potential, and the lip sync (or should that be beak sync?) is off, but in my opinion, great dialog, editing, and post-production (which this has) goes a long way.
Virtual world academic makes good: My pal Tom Boellstorff, Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine and author of the acclaimed Coming of Age in Second Life, recently left his position as editor of American Anthropologist to join the faculty of the new Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. As you might imagine, virtual worlds will probably play a part of his research there:
"The Center will help support work on the social dimensions of virtual worlds that I hope will be interesting not just to academics, but designers and participants of every stripe," as he puts it to me. "What people do in existing virtual Socialverse worlds is changing, mobile devices are having an increasing impact, and new virtual worlds are coming into being all the time. What’s all this mean for the human journey: for politics, identity, social justice?"
He's going to start answering those questions at the Center, which he describes as "a collaborative space of possibility":
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