Disney Buys Penguin For $350 Million +
Wow! I pee'd my panties when I read the news a couple of days ago that Disney just bought that kid's virtual world called Club Penguin. CP had been in the press a lot last year with huge growth rates. The deal is something like $350,000,000 cash and about the same about in bonuses if certain target goals can be hit. Here is the website and here is one of the stories. Let's do some of the math....
Club Penguin has 700,000 subscribers paying around $6 a month which is $4,200,000 a month and let's call that $50M a year. I would say then...the buy price of $350M is not that bad at all as a 7 year payback or 14 year if goals are met but remember if the goals are met...the income will be much larger as well. What do these numbers mean for the value of Second Life, IMVU or a Virtual Laguna? Are they worth 7X gross? The numbers are getting big fast and I think this is going to be the start of two to three years of virtual world buyups.
Site's like Barbie and Penguin are easier buyout targets than Second Life; with Second Life you have more legal questions with regards to copyright, sex, and gambling. SL is like a thorny rose, kind of like the profitable adult sites in the dot com buyout era. Who will be the next big buyout target? Who will be doing the buying?
Multiverse Makes The Move
Here is a story from Wagner James Au on Multiverse. Multiverse has been an ongoing project from some ex Netscape execs and every few months I see a story on it. The last few times I tried the alpha or beta...things were on the clunkety clunk side. I am eager to try some of the worlds out again. Multiverse builds commerce tools into the software and makes 10% of everything but anyone can create their own world from tools.
http://www.multiverse.net/
Blizzard Says NO to Real Money Transactions
Drat. I think Blizzard makes some good points here but I would argue...why not just test RMT on a single server or a couple of servers...you and I both know those servers would be the two most popular WoW servers! I would love the ability to buy and sell gold and items freely, for hard US cash. I think we will see a giant MMORPG go to RMT in the next 2 years.
