Interview: VastPark Partners with TwoFish for Inter-World Item Trade

Hot on the heels of announcing a partnership with NICTA to introduce P2P distribution for its worlds, VastPark announced a deal with TwoFish to provide creators the option to create robust virtual good economies within and throughout their worlds.  "What VastPark is looking to do is work within an ecosystem of virtual world technologies to create value for ourselves and for our partners in the money that flows through these worlds and through any value adds that we can bring with extra tools," said VastPark CEO Bruce Joy.

VastPark itself already provides the technology to bring items and content across its individual virtual worlds, but TwoFish brings a way to make the value of the object portable.

"He's looking to deliver to his development partners a set of Lego blocks that will let them dream grand dreams and experiences," said TwoFish CEO Lee Crawford. "TwoFish's idea is that virtual goods and the consumer ability to move value between games and accounts is essential to priming the pump and getting that going."

 

The possibilities, according to Joy, are revolutionary for the way we approach virtual worlds and economies:

For example, a friend will be able to gift you a virtual good such as a black car door (weird present, I know!) that has value through its scarcity – you click on the door and discover 300 other people are requesting that door (also weird!) - and now you are drawn into a quest to discover the other missing pieces of the car that you must find spread out across many worlds and through swapping pieces with other players you aim to be one of the first 100 to build your colour car. If you succeed in time you win some fabulous prize but even if you miss that date with destiny you can still complete your virtual car and drive it in various official racetrack worlds where you actually race others who have also built their own car. These worlds could be built by an agency but they can just as likely be built and maintained by fans who earn sponsorship dollars based on the traffic they generate through their unique race tournament fixtures. I really think that’s the sort of brand immersion that is going to connect brands with consumers in the next decade.

The business side of things hasn't been nailed down, though Crawford explained that they were looking at a revenue sharing model when real currency comes into play and a licensing model when goods carry only virtual value. Part of the issue is simply that VastPark is so open-ended that nailing down a specific business model is almost counter-productive.

"It's an incredible Petri dish in which I think a lot of interesting lessons about the next generation of online worlds are going to be learned," said Crawford. "A consistent virtual item might not apply across the entire portfolio of worlds, but it often will across one publisher's profile. It's really another testbed of working with object portability whether it's a virtual pet or badge or what have you. What we're able to do together is really lower the barrier of entry and reduce the friction for these types of interactions."

Joy sees the same potential, with applications ranging from major studio worlds selling virtual goods to worlds built and maintained by fans who generate revenue through unique goods.

"That’s obviously pretty revolutionary stuff as it puts the power of creating in-world commerce into everyone’s hand," he said. "But also imagine how this can be used for objects that exist across many worlds and how this can affect the nature of things like interactive advertising."

VastPark is exhibiting at Virtual Worlds 2008,  Booth 25