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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Right now three major features of the new Xbox 360 dashboard update — Facebook, Last.FM and Twitter — are inaccessible to users under 18. Major Nelson says that will change weeks after the update launches.
If Facebook and LittleBigPlanet got drunk and had an illegitimate offspring it might be Sackbook, a fan-created community website dedicated to connecting sack people with sack places for sack fun.
Typical — you wait years for a social network for gamers, then two roll up at once.
Yesterday we had Dennis Fong’s Raptr but this fine evening/afternoon/morning (delete as appropriate) we shall be looking at Vigster.
While Raptr was all about sharing your game scores and profiles from different networks (LIVE, PSN, Steam, etc.) Vigster has a more modest aim – a virtual games shelf, like a gamer’s version of book lover’s sites like Shelfari and WeRead.
After free signup, you can assemble a list of games that you own or play and find like-minded fellow gamers for fun and frolics. You can add reviews, videos and screengrabs of games, and submit tips and recommendations to your new pals. A discussion forum is on the way too. Vigster.com
Sometimes Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut and OpenSocial just aren’t enough. Too much real world stuff, not enough gamerscore bragging.
Enter Raptr – a new social network for gamers founded by Dennis ‘Thresh’ Fong (he had to do something with all that prize money) that offers a way of tracking your friends and sharing what you are in to on several popular games networks.
Once you have signed in and chosen a nick, you can enter your IDs on Xbox Live, PSN, World of Warcraft, Steam and others, then start entering the games in your collection.
Where it can, Raptr will pull data from your various networks and update your profile with a list of your current games, achievements and the like. There are plugins for displaying your data on Facebook et al too, of course.
A free client for PC or Mac will display and update data from you and your friends in real time as well as suck data from any games you play on your box — less of an issue for most Mac geeks, presumably.
In China, it’s the glitzy cities that get the attention — Shanghai in particular is the city that garners the most attention in scholarship (and frequently in the press). I was somewhat relieved to see that this is not confined merely to China specialists, but game industry watcher types as well — the most recent ‘China Angle’ column at Gamasutra looks at games outside of the publicized hotspots, where large portions of the user bases are found. Giant Interactive, developer of Zhengtu Online, recently purchased a stake in one of China’s largest social networking sites, in an attempt to grow their market. But that’s not the only way companies are trying to acquire ever greater number of players, oh no:
BioWare’s fan forums have now reached four million user accounts, the company announced today.
BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk began cultivating a fan community around Baldur’s Gate on newsgroups and in chat rooms back in 1996, and its own forums launched in 2001 alongside Neverwinter Nights, which is when it began collecting registrations.
On the heels of Mass Effect, and with Dragon Age up ahead (plus the mysterious “unnanounced MMO”), Bioware said its community usership is at an all-time high.
More users, apparently, have united for social interaction around the work of a single studio than use social networking sites like Friendster and Xanga. EA recently acquired a social network of its own — makes you think, perhaps, about where they might be going with it.
Full announcement follows the jump.
Another game industry vet has set his eye into social networking to support indie development. Greg Chudecke, who was lead tools designer at Zipper Interactive (SOCOM) and worked on Atari’s Backyard Skateboarding and Black Label Games’ Fellowship of the Ring title announced he’s struck out on his own, founding an indie game company and social network.
The company’s called Caffeinated Games, and its goal, said Chudecke, is to create AAA-level titles that have an online community around them. Part of the challenge for both indie and commercial developers in creating concepts and marketing their games is that it’s so hard to guess what the audience wants or will like – and indie devs have fewer resources for focus testing than the big guns.
Because of that, coming up with games can be very financially risky, and so lately lots of savvy industry vets have been looking at ways they can use social networks to connect with gamers, let them try out ideas and test responses in order to better gauge what people will like and whether it will sell.
You may remember just a few weeks back we spoke to Threewave’s Dan Irish, who was launching a similar strategy using Facebook. Caffeinated Games’ full announcement post-jump.
