New Unity API + IMVU market

Clinton_Matos

Hey everyone,

I'm a journalist over on htxt.africa.

I recently attended a talk about some pretty cool new stuff from a producer at the social network IMVU.

You can read it here.

If you have any questions I'll gladly answer them. I also have Nate's email if you want to speak to him.

Tuism

Ah yes, this is the thing that us Joburgers completely missed. Tsk tsk.

So I was there and it seems like a pretty interesting platform, it's a platform like Second Life and Home, with the current ambition being to branch beyond the platform itself. What I was really surprised was how solid it seems - as in it's been around since 2004, 3 mil monthly active users and around 100k concurrents at a time. And I'd never heard of them before.

What they're offering is to use its API to create games which players can instantly form a connection with via their own avatar that they've already invested a bunch of time into on the IMVU platform itself.

Also they're creating tools that generate gifs from users's avatars, which make pretty cool personalised emotes.

There are various stuff that was talked about, give the article a read for more details than I'm giving because I'm not a journo :)

francoisvn

I have kinda mixed feelings about this. It seems kinda interesting, and getting people to engage with your stuff is terrific, but I wonder how useful it would be for someone making a game unless they specifically target it towards this framework. Like, it isn't gonna to directly help you make a better game (or even make a game for that fact). It feels like trying to integrate Steam achievement into a prototype.

From some of their correspondence I saw, they said they were a "publisher." After hearing their talk, was that a bit of a misnomer or are they looking to fund projects that utilize their framework? That would be quite interesting.

Tuism

They're looking for people to make use of their framework in two ways:

1. Outside of IMVU, so appstore/steam whatever games that uses an IMVU login to pull in personalisation.
2. Inside of IMVU, where that integration is pretty much mandatory, and people play games with the personalisation as a default. There is an existing currency of virtual economy which people already spend on a regular basis in IMVU, so it's kinda like getting into a platform. Right now, there's only 3 games on there and they're betaing the whole thing, so getting in now means getting in ahead of the curve. Whether that curve will grow or not, I have no idea.

dislekcia

For what it's worth, IMVU have been relentlessly spamming these boards for months. You just don't see it because it triggers the spam system.

I'm not inclined to work with people that spam advertise, personally. But if I wanted to find out the business impact of all this, I'd want to know numbers:
-Players of third-party games inside IMVU, how many people play, how many people pay, what do they pay.
-Earnings of top, median and bottom earners using this stuff.
-Do they pay to SA? They mentioned a whole bunch of systems that don't, and only Paypal that does.
-How much IMVU is going to pay to be part of my games.

If anyone here is a dedicated IMVU user that would love to make something for the system, this is your chance.

I'm curious to hear if anyone is interested in this and, if they are, why.

dammit

dislekcia said:

For what it's worth, IMVU have been relentlessly spamming these boards for months. You just don't see it because it triggers the spam system.

I'm not inclined to work with people that spam advertise, personally. But if I wanted to find out the business impact of all this, I'd want to know numbers:
-Players of third-party games inside IMVU, how many people play, how many people pay, what do they pay.
-Earnings of top, median and bottom earners using this stuff.
-Do they pay to SA? They mentioned a whole bunch of systems that don't, and only Paypal that does.
-How much IMVU is going to pay to be part of my games.

If anyone here is a dedicated IMVU user that would love to make something for the system, this is your chance.

I'm curious to hear if anyone is interested in this and, if they are, why.

All of this was pretty much answered at the talk they gave on the 13th, which I think was pretty valuable*. We're Skyping with Nate when they get back to the states to ask more questions. I think it's a good opportunity to take a game that isn't doing well elsewhere, fit it with their api and then earn an extra stream of cash to help fund further projects.

*I'm not going to put the numbers here because I didn't write them down and don't want to misrepresent information.