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Another large, well-renowned virtual world is shuttered next week: There.com, a virtual platform co-developed by Forterra Systems and the U.S. army, and later acquired by Makena Technologies. There attracted large business-partners like Coca-Cola, CosmoGirl, Bebe, K-SWISS, and SPIN.

As CEO Mike Wilson announced, Make will continue with “some exciting educational projects in process, which [it] will continue to service. The entertainment-driven, branded space, though, will close.“ Wilson gives the bad general economical situation as reason for the closure of There.com:

“While our membership numbers and the number of people in the world have continued to grow, there has been a marked decrease in revenue, which, in these economic times, is no surprise… Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were ‘directionally correct’ and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.“

According to Alexa (taken with a large grain of salt), There’s traffic spiked during early 2008 and then gradually fell back to a meager daily reach within 2009 and early 2010.

With the closure of large virtual worlds like There and Metaplace and several MMOs changing their revenue-model to free-to-play, the field of online worlds appears to be volatile at the moment.

Via VirtualGoodsNews

Information Sercices Group has been commissioned by Popcap Games to perform a survey of the demographics of players of social games. The findings:

“55% of social gamers are female and 45% are male. Females are more avid gamers, too; 38% of females said they play multiple times a day, but just 29% males said the same. Women are more likely to play with people they know (68% vs. 56% for males), and men are more likely to play with strangers (41% vs. 33%) than women are…
There were more insights in the survey beyond gender. Facebook is the most popular destination for online games, with 83% of respondents saying they have played games there. Twenty-eight percent have purchased in-game currency with real-world money. The average gamer has played six social games, and more than 50% of gamers started playing a game because a friend recommended it or because they saw a friend playing it in a news feed or other social stream.“

Compare this to the player demographics of MMOs (as reported by the great Daedalus Project, Gamasutra and BBC, among others), where “the most hard-core players are female… Despite gaming being seen as a male activity, female players now make up about 40% of the gaming population.“

Females thusly account for a 15 percent higher proportion of players of social games in comparison to the audience of MMOs—they do seem to hit a nerve of a female audience a bit better than the standard formulas of traditional MMOs.

Engage Digital has published a virtual goods forecast for 2010, based on responses from over 30 industry executives, analysts and observers. The key-findings are:

“The amount of money spent of virtual goods will rise…
Triple-A brands will invade the virtual goods marketplace in order to tap the appeal with an increasingly broad consumer base, as a means to drive reach and engagement (though not necessarily revenues).
As the virtual goods marketplace reduces friction among buyers and draws more participants along the entire value chain (more goods creators, more infrastructure solutions, more dollars), it will inevitably draw greater scrutiny from government regulators and also be the driver of disputes that will end up in court—either seeking redress or prompting regulation… 

Among the most basic views of the sector is that it is bound to grow in terms of how much consumers are willing to spend on digital good.“

The PDF can be downloaded here.

via Virtual World News