Years after the rise of World of Warcraft, the birth of Second Life and IMVU, new trends are emerging in online gaming.
Kids, twins & teens, have dramatically shifted the demographics of virtual worlds to a younger audience keen for immersion as well as more casual involvement as they carry expectations mixing games, communities and socializing.
While scenarios driven MMO’s imply large development investments, subscription based models and target core gamers, recent virtual worlds tap into larger audience and expand along the same trend as casual gaming on all other platforms.
Both their development and operational costs are significantly lower, as they are partly powered by user generated content and marketing. But to the contrary of generalist universe like SecondLife where people have nothing really in common with each other when they first join, new worlds are based on themes or categories. They are in a sense vertical and affinity driven.
Hence they may keep closer relations with the real world and allow all forms of cross marketing and business with real world counterparts and partners.
The models and the revenue streams have also changed. Free to play models combined with item selling, premium pass and advergaming are becoming mainstream, because they dramatically reduce marketing costs, are more adapted to communities and allow gathering of players with various spending capacities.
As the whole offline gaming industry will be shaken by the economic downturn, players will move on all platforms to « free to try » or « free to play » games and change from being just gamers to dwellers of gaming communities.
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