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Sony, Microsoft Begin Battle of Virtual Worlds
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Oct 10, 2008 04:27 AM
from the who's-your-hiro dept.
from the who's-your-hiro dept.
Slatterz writes "Sony and Microsoft are poised to do battle in virtual worlds. The console kids both announced Second Life-style virtual environments at the Tokyo Game Show today. Both games show striking similarities to Linden Lab's creation. Players are represented by avatars which live a virtual life — engaging in relationships, going about day-to-day business."
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Submission: Sony, Microsoft begin battle of virtual worlds by Anonymous Coward
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"Oh yay" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:5, Interesting)
Trivia:
One of the first (perhaps the first) online virtual worlds was hosted by Quantum Link for the Commodore 64. Connections were made by modems with speeds from 0.3 to 2.4 kbit/s. Q-Link eventually renamed itself America Online, aka AOL.
"Q-Link's Habitat is a multi-participant online virtual environment. A cyberspace. Each participant ("player") uses a home computer (Commodore 64) as an intelligent, interactive client, communicating via modem and telephone over a commercial packet-switching network to a centralized, mainframe host system. The client software provides the user interface, generating a real-time animated display of what is going on..." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link [wikipedia.org]
Note that it says "animated". This wasn't some text-based BBS, but a fully-graphical interface similar to the world wide web, but with much lower resolution (320x200).
.
Parent
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice photos! I like how those old magazines used direct camera shots of televisions. There was no such thing as a "screen dump" back then. Here's me in 1989: http://www.qlinklives.org/qlink-old/me1989.jpg [qlinklives.org] * And here's the 1985-Commodore 64 version of "Miis" - http://www.fudco.com/chip/habitat.gif [fudco.com] - I don't know what this is but it looks cool - http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/1991/c64_11.jpg [gamasutra.com]
Those were the good old days, when computing was an adventure into unknown territories
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:4, Funny)
be as lazy as you like :)
Isn't that a very elaborate way to be lazy?
Parent
Furry playground (disambiguation) (Score:2)
So, two clones of something that is little more than a furry playground?
"Furry playground"? Are you talking about Second Life or the Animal Crossing series?
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yes, I am a furry. But by the original poster's logic, I would certainly know if this was the case, no? :)
Parent
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Who hasn't yiffed in that sim?
Thanks for the advice though.
Re:"Oh yay" (Score:4, Funny)
There may be less of 'em, but, my god, what has been seen cannot be unseen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are more non-furs in Second life than there are furs
There is a MUCH higher (furs)/(non furs) ratio in Second Life than in meatspace and, face it, most of the internet.
Nice try.
you mean, you actually recognized what it was? (Score:3, Interesting)
i'm curious; how could you tell that it was a _badger_ dick rather than, say, a weasel or ferret dick?
Re:you mean, you actually recognized what it was? (Score:5, Funny)
It was well labelled. It even came with a note. Apparantly with some effort for keybinding I would be able to make it urinate *and* ejaculate. Also it was "compatible" with someones sex animation system, or whatever the hell.
I did put it on, scale it to around 12 foot long, and go walk around IBM SOA island for a while, while their foreign outsourced builders told me to "Please wear off that penis".
So I guess the moral of the story is that there is an objective to SL, trolling. I think I won, because I got booted by IBM :P
Parent
Real Moneyz? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now the real question is will people be able to make real income off these clones as many have and failed in Second Life?
Animal Crossing: It prints money! (Score:2)
Now the real question is will people be able to make real income off these clones as many have and failed in Second Life?
Nintendo appears to be printing money with its Animal Crossing series.
Re:Real Moneyz? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people are succeeding making money off Second life. Of course, the people who just go into Second life and have no understanding about it just go about setting up random stuff, trying to make a business without even trying to understand the economy in Second life, absolutely fail.
A lot of people assume making a good amount of money off Second life is easy, it is not.
Parent
Article misleading? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having RTFA, and also having a background as a games dev.
Home is a virtual world, but isn't Microsoft's avatars pretty much just the same approach as Miis?
I think the article's a little misleading in implying that Microsoft are making some virtual world (like Home or 2nd Life), when instead, it's just giving devs a representation of the player to put into their own games, like how Miis are currently handled on the Wii.
Re:Article misleading? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how the article also talks about home like it's only started development, yet it will be out in November. We've been waiting for it for something like 2 years now. If the MS thing is just like Miis then there is nothing like a 'battle' going on..
I hope Home is as technically advanced as GTA with the ability to drive around and play minigames. I wonder if there will be any overlap between the two. Getting your Home avatar into GTA would be pretty cool, and I'd prefer a better method for finding multiplayer servers as well..
Parent
Re:Article misleading? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually another useless article from The Inquirer [theinquirer.net], republished on pcauthority.com.au.
Sure, Home bears a glancing resemblance to Second Life, albeit a homogenized one, but the NXE bears absolutely no resemblance other than they both have avatars and feature text and voice chat. Virtual world, NXE ain't.
Where is slashdot's bullshit filter when we need it?
Parent
I was thinking the same thing. Misleading. (Score:3, Informative)
2nd Life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Stupid.... (Score:2)
If you look at the press, the Second life seems to be doing well. That is because they think they understand it and because fancy pictures are to be had. However if you look at the number of participants in MMO games, you find that second life is one of the worst performers still in business. As it is doubtful that these new attempts will draw more people (they will basically have to to draw people away from Second Life, everybody that is interested in thsi kind of thing is already there) these efforts are
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's precisely inability to get along with the client interface. As a (not exactly veteran) SL player who hangs out where the new players first show up, I can tell you why so many people quit:
1. The client interface just doesn't even work. It's not that they can't get along with it, it's that they sign up for a character and the SL client program tells them that it doesn't work on their hardware. They consider buying a new computer just to play a stupid game, and think "that's really lame"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Second life isn't that bad as MMOs go, I mean, just look at Furcadia, Planeshifts etc.
Maybe you could come up with some actual sources proving it's not as popular as the MMOs I mentioned? Thus proving that it's "one of the worst performers still in business".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Second life might get slashdotted now.
escaping to another world. (Score:5, Insightful)
"engaging in relationships, going about day-to-day business."
Strange how people will sit in a bedroom controlling an avatar which is decorating it's bedroom....
Although I can understand to an extent. there have been times when I was unhappy and being able to spend a few hours in a virtual world completely disconnected from my real life somehow helped and overall made me a happier person. Don't play now that real life is good.
I avoid WOW at all cost though. I want to play it but I've seen what it does to people and I know I'd get hooked.
Because bells are easier to earn than dollars (Score:3, Funny)
Strange how people will sit in a bedroom controlling an avatar which is decorating it's bedroom
And strange how people will buy stuff to decorate a virtual bedroom from a talking raccoon. Dedicated gamers can earn bells, gil, plat, or whatever virtual currency a lot more easily than dollars.
Re:escaping to another world. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Virtual world, virtual boringness... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice avatars to gather along -yeeah-...well I suppose that IRC wasn't enough graphical (or maybe too metaphorical in his representation for most people) and that you couldn't conclude serious business within all those Multi players games /sarcasm.
The problem is that they are wholly boring. the best of the world would be to include a "second world" into an already existing -and even moderately successful multi player game-. Imagine a "low paying" WoW/Eve/Warhammer account where your user would be forced to s
Hurrah. (Score:5, Funny)
Like Second Life? (Score:2, Insightful)
Start with Blockout and MySims (Score:3, Informative)
However its big plus is that you can create anything you like from basic shapes like cubes. This seems highly unlikely to be possible from online console games.
I had a PS1 game where I could build stuff out of cubes, and it came out in December 1995. It was called Geom Cube, a port of Blockout [wikipedia.org]. Nintendo even cloned it on the Virtual Boy [wikipedia.org]. As for texturing those cubes, Doubutsu no Mori (ported to USA as Animal Crossing) explored it in 2001, and MySims refined it.
I'm not a young hippster (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm not a young hippster (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point, this guy does not want to look like a young hipster. He may not want a representation of himself, but he obviously does not want to be a young hipster.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm not a young hippster (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you know that aprox 60% of women wear jeans and trousers that are too small for them?
Did you know 86% of all quoted statistical figures are made up?
Parent
Second Life! (Score:4, Funny)
Apples and Oranges... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sony's 'Home' is really not comparable with Microsoft's new avatars/Xbox UI. Home is a virtual world, MS' UI is just that, a UI.
This is not targeting Second Life (Score:4, Insightful)
What has been described in the press so far doesn't sound anything like Second Life, except at the most superficial level. These systems are targeting things like IMVU and Puzzle Pirates. There are more similarities between Slashdot and Livejournal than there are between Second Life and Sony Home.
what an awful article (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony announced Home a long time ago. And yeah, it does look a bit like Second Life. But given that Second Life is meant to be like real life, it is odd that other things look like it too?
MS didn't announce any kind of virtual world at all. They have avatars now, but no world to roam in. It's not anything like Second Life or such.
Honestly, this whole article reads like more Second Life PR. I can't believe how much PR these guys get. A guy on the plane next to me two days ago was reading an article that said explained how Second Life is hot again, that companies are "moving in" again. Which of course is absurd, Second Life was never hot before and it isn't hot now, and companies "move in" at times, rarely having any positive effect on their sales or Second Life for that matter.
Linden Labs has some of the most amazing PR I've seen.
I vote... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If that's the case, Second life would still be only ten simulators, not increasing every month still.
There is no subscription fee for Second life.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, you don't have to buy a sim, you can just buy a parcel of land. Private sim owners and Linden lab both sell smaller parcels of land for a lot less. No setup fees either.
Additionally, one does not need land on Second life to interact, build, show off things, sell things (places like slexchange
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Its like reality TV, why would my daily business be sitting in an armchair watching other people go about their daily business?
Now I get it: it is a manager's tool!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is one [opensimulator.org] actually. And the Second life viewer is opensource [secondlifegrid.net] too.