GotMMOG?

Gamsutra’s reporting that Champions Online has been delayed from July to September. Cryptic says they want to polish the game and who are we to deny them the ability to bring a more solid game to market so we don’t have to wait for game update 27 to finally have a game we’d like to play. As long as they don’t get Duke Nukem Syndrome, we should be fine…

After all, with the new build your own adventure functionality in CoH/CoV, die-hard comic book MMO fans will still have plenty to do while they wait.

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No surprise here: Funcom’s reporting its revenues are matching its subscriber base as both level off and stabilize for the long haul. Of course, it’s what you’d expect (though I expected them to be on a slippery slope to closure). While they didn’t share the same popularity (or rather addiction) as EverQuest, they still managed to hold on. The question is, why? What’s so compelling about game play at this point with all the alternatives out there beyond naked breasts and an M rating? The next question is how long will devotees hold out and pay Funcom’s bills?

The scary thing? The company’s started working on a new MMO, The Secret World. I’m sorry guys but if you take your track record with Anarchy Online and this one, what’s the point? You’re gonna take a few years to get that new one out the door, it’ll cost you everything you’ve got, it’ll be more buggy than a rotting corpse and you’ll end up firing your CFO again. Maybe you should look at what you’re doing WRONG first and make it right? Just a thought…

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GigaOm had a post on a new company trying to hock their virtual currency, called Zeev, for both social net sites and gaming. Supposedly, the killer app here is the fact that you can trade currency on their site.

They say they’ve got seven games interested in the currency but I’m sorry, why are we supposed to care? Something tells me those seven games are going to be all miscellaneous Korean or Chinese MMOs that are free-to-play microtrans games that already have established ways to get money in and out of the game.

Maybe instead of trying to find games, they should be working on relevancy. Why can’t these idiots just partner with Visa or something and create a real friggin virtual currency card that you can use at a bricks and mortar store and also transfer to a bank account? Now, you’d be talking.

Here’s how it’ll work:

You start with a gift card like the ones you can find EVERY-FRIGGIN-WHERE, at Starbucks, Target, wherever. Next, you tie it into a virtual currency exchange you manage on the Web. Buy a card and it carries whatever you paid ($5, 10, 25, 50, 100). Go to the site and enter the code on the back when you register with the site to get a real-time display of the card balance (in dollars and in virtual units) and recent transactions. You can even maintain an exchange rate that you control but that can fluctuate against the dollar or whatever currency you want.

Meanwhile, you tie into player auction sites and games that want a part of it. Want to buy gold in a game? That’s 500 GMD (GotMMOG Dollars…I mean, c’mon, we invented the system right here, right?). PayPal it or whatever and bam, your gift card now has 500 more GMDs which at the current exchange rate of 10 GMDs to USD 1 gives you $50. Now, you can go use that gift card, because you partnered with VISA or MasterCard, into ANY friggin store–even GameStop if you’ve courageous enough–and buy a new game or buy a t-shirt or buy some prons. Your choice.

Sure this isn’t something that Jim and Joe can do in their garage but neither is creating something called Zeev and trying to hock it at your local street corner while dodging apartment for rent sign throwers and bums. Someone make it happen so we can get past this stupid stage in the MMO timeline and move on to something better (cross game character transfers?!?).

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