Pileated Pictures Expands Hasbro's Littlest Pet Shop, Preps Planet Cazmo

Hasbro's Littlest Pet Shop VIP world, which launched in September last year, continued its work with PIleated Pictures to expand internationally last month, adding new features in nine languages. Hasbro also unveiled 11 new toys for its world at Toy Fair as a part of a convention-wide trend towards virtual worlds.  As reported in Hasbro's 2007 Q4 earnings call, those toys are where the money is. The site itself hasn't generated revenue yet (ed: through microtransactions, subscription, ads, etc.), but the company plans to expand its presence.

Pileated Pictures President Michael Levine told Virtual Worlds News in November that PIleated would be helping make Littlest Pet Shop into more of a true virtual world come February--"Phase two is coming out in February to up that multiplayer experience. We're calling it sort of a kids' Spore or Animal Crossing"--but it looks like Hasbro is looking for additional partners. In its conference call it also reported that "At a later date, EA will certainly develop a much richer like persistent state world based around Littlest Pet Shop which will be a revenue generating site for EA."

In the mean time, Pileated has been working on its own world that Levine discussed with us: Planet Cazmo,  a "sort of Hip Hop meets Animal Crossing" world aimed at providing an MTV virtual world without MTV. While the world has been in a quiet beta in preparation for a rollout in the second quarter of 2008, it's been picking up viral steam after users posted about it on Club Penguin forums at the end of 2007.

The company reports that after the six-week beta, Cazmo has seen "hundreds of thousands of unique users from 94 countries" that have "started almost 700 online discussions and posted more than 100 online videos which have been viewed more than 8,000 times."

"Perhaps the most interesting result to come out of the test period," reported Levine, "is that we never had the chance to officially announce the program -- it took off as a result of just a couple blog posts, followed by the enthusiasm of a crowd of players. Its just been growing steadily in a true viral nature since then, and is showing no signs of slowing down."

Comments

[monica]

Hi, i play planet cazmo and i luv it, thnx for all the hard work you put into this game, the effort really shows!
<3Monica (my cazmo is Monicaoxox)