Kitley – cloud based OpenSimulators

… seem to catch up.

 

A little bit of history first:

The guy who started it in 2008 was Balaji Sowmyanarayan (known as labsji on twitter). He started Sim-OnDemand based on Amazons EC2 services.

Then came Pixelpark with the OpenSim-in-a-box which was partly funded by the KoPIWA research project (see Justin Clark-Caseys blog and our blog for some details), opening up OpenSimulator based worlds to the cloud and open source.

Now, according to New World Notes and HyperGridBusiness we have a tenant-capable cloud based solution with Facebook Connect: Kitely.

I didn’t have a chance to test it myself yet, but according to Maria Korolov it rocks. Big time.

Check out her articles

• When do cloud-based sims make sense? and
• Tipodean and Kitely should talk. Seriously, guys!

Kitely – all the best of luck to you!

Minecraft (the game of the decade)

… ok, I admit that it was only a matter of time that I write about Minecraft. But this post from the (excellent) RockPaperShotgun website actually made me.

Minecraft world of my daughter - I am so proud of her in so many ways :-)

For those of you who lived under a rock for the past year – here’s the news: one bold developer (Markus ‘Notch’ Persson) had the idea of a voxel-like,  cube-based virtual world that is procedurally created by some clever algorithm of his. Any business person would have called him crazy if he pitched this to anyone – but as a matter of fact he simply did it all on his own.

So he created Minecraft. A virtual world containing cubes that make up the world. A day lasts 10 minutes and at night the monsters come so you have to craft yourself into a self shelter.

Doesn’t sound like fun?

As of the beginning 0f 2011 3 million people registered on his website to play the free alpha. And over one million decided to pay for the beta. Which cost 10 Euros when it came out and 15 Euros now (will cost 20 Euros when it’s ready so you better hurry up). Ok, one million users shelling out something between 10 and 15 Euros on a beta game from a single developer? You do the math.

Ok, besides being a great game developer he is rich now.

Oh, and you can run a minecraft server and invite other play

And this must scare the [DELETED] out of the triple A game publishers.

I can’t stress enough how important the role of this game is, business-wise. You don’t need a team of 200++  people working for a year. You can go into your garage, develop your game and you have the chance to be rewarded for it without a big publisher.

If this can be done with a game, it can be done with virtual multiplayer worlds.

I cite Justin Clark-Casey (of OpenSimulator fame):

“The build tools in Minecraft are simpler and better.  I think the constraints of building blocks really help here, as well as the fact that Notch is an excellent interface designer (I love the crafting box, that idea is a work of genius, though very game-oriented).

Minecraft also doesn’t inherit other constraints, such as security.  Anybody can come and burn down your house, it’s very wikipedia.  Yet this simplicity gets rid of an awkward interface layer and makes the flow experience far better.”

’nuff said.

Let’s create the virtual world of the decade.