The Nintendo Wii took the #1 spot in eBay’s 2008 tech toys and gadgets top list, with over 2 million related items sold on the site. The Xbox360 was next at 1.3 million, followed by the Sony PSP and iPod touch.
The full list is below.
1. Nintendo Wii: 2,056,866 related items sold
2. Microsoft Xbox360: 1,297,903 related items sold
3. Sony PSP: 350,591 related items sold
4. iPod Touch: 281,361 related items sold
5. Nintendo Wii Fit: 266,584 related items sold
6. Apple iPhone 3G: 212,837 related items sold
7. BlackBerry Pearl: 207,688 related items sold
8. BlackBerry Curve: 193,788 related items sold
9. Sony Playstation 3: 103,333 related items sold
10. Guitar Hero III: 98,159 related items sold
11. Halo 3: 91,067 related items sold
12. Grand Theft Auto IV: 43,005 related items sold
13. MacBook Air: 12,423 related items sold
14. Guitar Hero Aerosmith: 3,749 related items sold
15. Rock Band 2’s: 1,650 related items sold
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Gaming powerhouse Blizzard Entertainment has issued a press release announcing that the number of subscribers for World Of Warcraft has surpassed the 11 million mark.
For the record: subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access.
The milestone for the popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) represents a 10% growth in 10 months and shows signs of slowing. If you consider the fact that the online game debuted in November 2004 and took only six months to go from 9 million to 10 million subscribers, you can conclude that it took Blizzard much longer to add this last million subscribers to its user base than in the past (the company announced it reached the 10 million mark in January 2008, up from 9 million in July, 2007).
On the other hand, WoW was estimated to hold an impressive 62% of the massively multiplayer online game market back in April.
On 13 November, the second expansion of WoW, dubbed “Wrath of the Lich King”, will launch in several regions around the world. Maybe that will help reignite growth, or at least help it hold onto its massive lead in market share.
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Despite the fact that males have long accounted for the majority of online gamers, there is a surprising shortage of casual online games directed at men aged 25-45. Beyond fantasy football and online poker there is little variety, with nearly every game failing to take advantage of advanced graphics or any interactivity beyond clicking “all-in”.
World Golf Tour is looking to fill this gap. The site has launched a free, full-featured Flash game that offers 3D graphics, an advanced physics engine, and user-customizable characters – it’s not as good as EA’s Tiger Woods series, but it’s going to be close enough for most people. The site launched a beta version last year, and is now introducing a new course, expanded customization options, and multiplayer support.
CEO YuChiang Cheng says that his team recognized early on that it wouldn’t be able to compete with EA’s massive development team and art department, so it took a few innovative shortcuts. To create the game’s graphics, the WGT team went to the famed Kiawah Island Golf Resort, where it took geo-tagged photographs spanning the entire course. The team then went through and mapped the photos to a 3D model, which makes the world seem three dimensional while telling the physics engine how each part of the photograph should affect the ball. Using technology similar to Google Earth, WGT allows users to move through the course by seamlessly displaying photographs that are adjacent to each other. The result isn’t as immersive as the 3D worlds crafted by EA’s huge dev team, but it’s very impressive.
While users will be able to play games on their own, the game allows for multiplayer sessions, and tracks stats across all games to produce a network-wide leaderboard. Along with the game itself, the WGT homepage allows users to create profiles, befriend and challenge other golfers, and participate in massively multiplayer tournaments. Tournaments will include cash prizes as well as virtual goods prizes, like new clubs and clothing that can be used to customize an in-game avatar. WGT will generate revenue through microtransactions for these virtual goods, as well as sponsorships for their virtual tournaments.
World Golf Tour will likely do very well – it’s polished, free, and will appeal to millions of golf fans. It may not stand up side-by-side to a console game but its target audience won’t care, especially given the fact that WGT can be played from nearly any browser with no download.
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