Elvin Li

Multiverse , maker of a free MMO-creation platform has plan to bring FireFly to life by turning The universe of Firefly into an virtual world environment. FireFly the US science fiction TV series that was the Star Trek of 21st-century sci-fi fandom is one of the first TV series to be developed into a MMOG. Even the entertainment media industry is acknowledging the potential of MMOGs. We see virtual worlds as an extraordinarily promising new entertainment medium." - Adam Kline, Fox Licensing's vice president of media enterprises With that Multiverse was contracted to take this project off. The potential of MMOGs is huge and according to sources some 7,000 development teams had registered for the Multiverse beta and more than 150 are making MMOs and non-game virtual worlds on a full-time basis. Considering this being still an expanding industry, it is a significant number of developers and with that many people going into it, it can't be wrong that the virtual industr...

Virtual currencies will become a dominant global curreny. Not possible? These guys in China might be able to do it. In view of this article from Asia Times online , Chinese government central bank is worried that the rise a popular virtual currency in China could affect the value of the yuan. "QQ" coins that what they call it issued by China's largest instant-messaging service provider, Tencent, mainly used for transaction of virtual items. However see the opportunity, many third party websites are expanding its use into other unintended areas. "The QQ coin is challenging the status of the renminbi (yuan) as the only legitimate currency in China." - Public prosecutor Yang Tao, Asia Times Online And it is believe that the Chinese central government would act to "limit the application of QQ coins" and assure that their use is restricted to the virtual world. "QQ " coins can be easil...

eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site. First reported on Slashdot , game currency, items, and accounts/characters are being actively delisted from eBay. However SecondLife was spared in from this delisting. The rationale behind this ban was as Mr. Hani Durzy, speaking for eBay, explained due to the 'legal complexities' surrounding virtual property. Mr Duzy pointed out: "The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner." "For the overall health of the marketplace" the company felt that the proper course of action, after considerable contemplation, was to ban the sale of these items outright. There are a few conflicting points to bring out here: First most if not all MMOGs encourage users to exchange virtual properties, do transactions within the game environments. Where's the legal complexity/ intellectural property rights issu...