Today Israel-based Funtactix launched Moondo. It's not a virtual world, but it's peripheral: Moondo provides an avatar-based social network of casual games that let users acquire points for their avatars to level up and acquire virtual goods along the way. That's something, as TechCrunch points out, that's part of the big hook for MMOGs. VentureBeat goes a step farther and puts Moondo in the context of Second Life and OpenSim's recent interoperability announcement and directly into competition with virtual worlds that offer similar experiences like Gaia Online.
The big hook for Moondo, and the one that makes it interesting from a gaming perspective, is that the items are persistent across games. For example, if you pick up a shield in a fantasy game, you might later use it in a driving game. VentureBeat actually argues that the feature gives Moondo a leg up on Gaia.
They sound like fairly different value propositions, though. While each emphasize the metagame of the avatar, environment, and community on top of the individual games, the balance seems fairly different. In worlds like Gaia, ourWorld, Dizzywood, and too many more to list that all incorporate casual games into a larger virtual world, the games are activities inside the larger environment. As Nickelodeon's Kyra Reppen has pointed out, the games may be what kids spend their time on in sites like Neopets, but the reason they come is the world and the avatar.
It'll be interesting to see how Moondo develops, though. Right now it's a fairly hefty, Windows-only client download, but it plans to go browser-based in October. If nothing else, it's part of the rising trend of promoting avatars in gaming.
And for investors at Benchmark Capital, which also invested in Habbo Hotel and Linden Lab, the community is almost as important as the gaming functionality.
"Cross Gaming is a huge deal. It lengthens engagement with players, and amortizes the gamer’s investment in Moondo games," General Partner Michael Eisenberg told Video Game Venture Capital. "The social network is important as well since it is the first social netowrk to be deeply tied to a multiple-game experience. Think of it as the personal expression leg in the cross gaming since it is 100% integrated with the cross gaming environment."
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