

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young - pg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/business/31virtual.html?ex=1356757200&en=57047898e7866973&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

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gruseom
A friend recently told me about a guy he knows who sold a web site to Disney
for $700M (it was Club Penguin). I was incredulous at first, as that number is
staggering. But they have 4 million users paying $5/month. Sony offered them
$150M and they turned it down as they were making more than that in a year.

The guy didn't start with empire-building intentions. He just had small
children and couldn't find anything for them to do online. It turned out a lot
of other people had that problem as well.

There was an interesting benefit of being acquired by Disney. Apparently CP
was defending itself against a flood of lawsuits claiming rights to the
penguin brand. When Disney bought CP they called everybody up and said, "You
don't understand. _We're_ suing _you_." The lawsuits stopped.

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henning
1980: (Alan Kay) let's help children build and explore things on their own to
make them passionate about learning!

2008: (Disney) let's help ourselves buy another yacht by blasting pre-teens
with ads!

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jsnx
These games are not about high quality rendering, and really can't be -- the
computing environment they ship to is not homogeneous enough. Pirates of The
Caribbean looks like _Ocarina of Time_.

While snazzy rendering won't really go anywhere with these games, server side
physics just might -- you can control the platform, and as the games move from
"pre-teen" to "young adult" you get into domains where realism (in the sense
of convincing motion, compression of rubber objects and the like) can add a
lot even without fancy rendering.

