In the future, everyone will be in the virtual world business for fifteen minutes. UK game industry pub MCV reports that Atari, the venerable company that launched the videogame industry, is now developing a user-created online social world of its own. With Atari’s announcement, there are now at least eleven upcoming virtual worlds which emphasize user-developed content, or at least cite Second Life as a role model.

For those keeping track: Atari is joining an already overflowing roster that includes Sony’s Home, Viacom’s as-yet-unnamed world, along with start-ups Areae, Croquet, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Multiverse, Ogoglio, Outback Online, and Whirled. (SL blogger Onder Skall just posted a marvelously helpful guide to most of these worlds and more.)

With the market so crowded, nearly all of these projects are almost certainly doomed to fail, or just as likely, modestly succeed as niche metaverses. And why are three major multinational media corporations trying their hand in this upstart genre at all?

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As part of some restructuring within the Giga network, this blog is going on indefinite hiatus. Fear not, however, because the GigaGamez team will continue covering the business of games in the broadband era. In the next week or two, look to GigaOM for that coverage, along with the usual wealth of tech industry insights and reportage from Om and crew.

Meantime, here’s a selected hit list of favorite features and popular posts from GigaGamez’s first four months of operation. In subsequent months, we’ll hopefully return the site to live operation. For now, however, look for us on GigaOM.

GIGAGAMEZ HIGHLIGHTS
Nintendo Denies GameStop CEO’s Managed Scarcity Claim
PS3 Outsells Wii in the UK While Breaking Sales Record
John Carmack Offers to Advise on NASA’s Proposed MMO
NPD: PS3 Selling “Slightly Faster” Than 360 Did at the Same Stage in Its Release
New Site Aims (Sorta) to be “the YouTube of Gaming”
Sony Marketing the PS3… in Second Life!
Report: Video Games’ Audience Reach More Than Originally Thought
New PC Gaming Standard Based on Open Source
Heyday for Indy Developers? GigaGamez Checks With Two Top Devs
How Xbox Hackers Make Microsoft Seem Cool
MySpace’s Tila Tequila To Become Second Life Avatar
Five GigaGamez Questions for Epic’s Mark Rein
VonGuard’s Top 10 Overhyped Games
Game Mags Gone Because of MySpace Spam?
Avatars: Web 2.0’s Most Undervalued Asset?
Three Rings Estimates $7 Mill+ Revenue in ‘07
Sony Adds Social Software, Second Life-ish World to PS3
Indy Dev Debate: Online, or Check-out Line?
First Looks at a “Chinese Second Life”
Smart Thoughts on Shawn Fanning’s MMO Social Network Start-up
Crackdown in Review
EA CEO Steps Down After Stock Dips and Criticism of Sequel-itis
CBS Plows $7 Million Into 3rd Party Metaverse Developer
XBox 360: Exceptionally Defective?
MMOs on Your Cellphone
Rated M becoming the NC-17 of Games?
Wii: What to Do When the Magic’s Gone
Gaming for China Gold: Expert Advice on the World’s Biggest Market
Nintendo’s Back… But Can They Hang On?
WoW 2.0: Lord of the Rings, Everquest Creator Challenge Warcraft
eBay on RMT: World of Warcraft, No… Second Life, Yes
Second Life: Ponzi Scheme, or Mayberry Gold Rush?
Pyramid of Confusion: The Latest Second Life Backlash
Windows Vista: Indy Game Killer?
Can the PS3 Be Saved?
Second Life Backlash: A Story Too Good To Check
Boosting TV Ratings– With Gaming
XBox Domination: 360 Double PS3 Sales
Second Life Goes Open Source– First Thoughts, With Linden Lab’s Replies
Mii So Horny
Second Life: People Light, Cash Heavy?
PS3s Being Traded For Wiis
Study Shows In-Game Ads Not Effective
Q&A With Raph Koster
Second Life: Hype vs. Anti-Hype vs. Anti-Anti-Hype

This week, the Wii’s Internet Channel became fully operational, boasting improved features like manual zoom and collapsible toolbars, powered by Opera; judging by gamer site commentary, the reception from Wii owners is largely positive, with the only major gripe being it doesn’t (yet) support all the standard Web plug-ins. From one angle, this is just a nice online feature for Nintendo fans. But I think it’s a lot more than that — this could be the day when the PC begins losing its centrality to the Internet. (So goes the Wii, so goes the Web.)

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Last week, the Hamburg-based research firm Komjuniti published the first extensive survey of Resident attitudes toward real world marketing in Second Life. It’s been a long time in coming: a British branding agency established a forward operating base in SL back in early 2004 (and for their efforts, were greeted by throngs of sign-waving protesters threatening to boycott their island.)

In succeeding years, a miniature dot com boom has attracted a slew of big name companies and established brands, from MTV and Coke, to Dell, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker, among many more. Up until now, few have asked hard questions about what these companies were gaining for all that effort and cash (other than any publicity hit from the announcement.)

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This week, New York City was the white hot center for discussing the business of marketing in online worlds. I wasn’t able to attend, but I’ve been following the copious notes of Mark Wallace, who live blogged many of the sessions at 3pointD. Personal highlights after the break.
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Can a realistic space exploration roleplaying game inspire an interest in the real thing? Last week, NASA announced they were calling for proposals to develop an MMO for the young that would be “the front-end of a larger synthetic environment”, with a budget approaching three million dollars in as many years. They were explicitly looking for proposals from teams that included “a partner with commercial-quality game development experience”, and naturally, I thought of John Carmack, perhaps the only person who happens to be renowned in both rocket travel and game design. (In rocketry, through his self-funded Armadillo Aerospace, and for the latter— well, since you’re reading GigaGamez, you already know.)

On a lark, I e-mailed Carmack to get his take on the NASA project.

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The metaverse has finally imploded in on itself. Starting tonight - right now, actually - the official European release of the Playstation 3 is being touted in Second Life, on a couple of virtual islands owned by an Italian marketing firm, in conjunction with two bigwig ad agencies.

This is strange and seismic on several levels. Most obviously, Sony just announced the online world Home for PS3, widely seen as a console-based competitor to Second Life. To make things even stranger, the event features the avatars of several characters from a web-based video also created to promote the PS3’s EU release. (Pictured: Swedish temptress “Cherrie”, in both real world and metaverse form.)

I just took a quick visit to the PS3 site in Second Life, and it’s already crowded over with a capacity crowd of avatars (i.e. over a hundred), mostly speaking to each other in Italian. Given the relatively modest audience of regular Second Life users (now about 360,000), it’s amazing that an international media conglomerate would make such a concerted attempt to market to them. Some might see this as a sign of desperation - but then, Sony’s Phil Harrison has cited Second Life as an inspiration for the PS3, and as Raph Koster noted, we’re in an era where user-created content rules, and the tail wags the dog. What happens next is anyone’s guess. This is living, all right - in a remarkably topsy turvy industry.

The extended announcement from Virtual Italian Park’s Bruno Cerboni, after the break.
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That’s the word from the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, reporting on FlowPlay, a Seattle-based startup from Derrick Morton, formerly an exec with RealNetworks. Aiming for a public launch in June, FlowPlay is described as a virtual world centered around casual games. The PI’s John Cook notes that Philip Rosedale is also an alum of Real— he was CTO in its dot com heyday, before going on to found Linden Lab/Second Life. The implication is that this new startup will be playing in the same space, but not a thing about user-created content is mentioned in the PI article, so the analogy seems like a bit of a stretch. FlowPlay sounds less like Second Life, and more like a teen-oriented version of the enormously successful Puzzle Pirates from Three Rings. But that could be a very good thing.
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… and the Web 2.0 marketing mash-ups keep coming! To promote her latest video, the Internet celebrity who rose to fame almost entirely through her insanely popular MySpace page is becoming a Second Life avatar next week. This according to an announcement I just got from Endemol, the Dutch television company who’ll be co-producing the video and the Second Life site. “On Monday,” the Endemol rep promises me, “you will receive a press release about the Tila Tequila Mansion in Second Life.”

Stop and ponder the strangeness of that sentence, and what it says about the state of Web 2.0.
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Kudos to Mitch Wagner of Information Week for blogging my morning SXSW panel, “Web 2.0 to Web 3D” in the space of several hours— it’s a nice summary of the conversation, with lots of nuggets of insight from Robert Scoble, Susan Wu, and Electronic Arts designer Robin Hunicke. I love playing host to several stellar minds. When he wasn’t Twittering Eric Rice in the audience, Robert offered this lovely metaphor for thinking about virtual worlds:
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