As InformationWeek reports, Mainland China has declared that they are (finally) banning trading virtual currency for real goods and services.

“The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services,” China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce declared.

While this might have repercussions for quite a few MMOs and virtual worlds — and especially gold-farmers thereof, this move seems to be more specifically targeted at Tencent’s QQ and their virtual currency QQ-coins. Due to the popularity of QQ in Chinese young population (QQ currently boasts around 220 million users, and around half of them seem to actively trade their coins), QQ coins gradually got more and more accepted as currency in online stores and gaming sites in exchange for “real” merchandise such as small gifts, thus raising the concern of inflation.
This issue already has a longer history, PlayNoEvil already reported about insider reports of the People’s Bank of China hinting at financial regulations of QQ coins and similar currencies back in 2006.

I nearly missed this piece: Facebook lost its lawsuit against German competitor StudiVZ. FB claims that StudiVZ infringes on FBs design and features, and that StudiVZ illegally stole source-code from Facebook. Well, at least the first claim seems to be pretty obvious; the only even more blatant FB-clone I can think of is its Chinese copycat Xiaonei (they did not even change the colors, like StudiVZ).

IMO German jurisdiction concerning Internet cases is inconsistent and weird at best, maybe a reason for this verdict. The court seems to have argued that “StudiVZ isn’t trying to trick users into thinking they are actually on Facebook. Another factor in favor of the German site: When StudiVZ went live in Germany in November 2005, Facebook was virtually unknown in that country.”
Hmm, so it’s okay to clone a web-service in Germany as long as the original is not really that well-known here, and as long as you do not pretend to be them; this seems to contradict normal German trademark-law — I need to keep this in mind…

The mainland government is soon to introduce a new local censorship software, called Green Dam, which is going to be required on all PCs sold in the country. The even lesser funny news here: Green Dam contains a serious security loophole, which can be exploited by any website the user visits — issues that were discovered at the University of Michigan in less of 12 hours of examining Green Dam. As their report has it:

“Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process.
We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg. Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities.”

37signals cite Reid Hoffmann in their blog Signal vs. Noise: “If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” — my initial thought: you can only make a good first impression once.

It was always obvious that German social network StudiVZ is a blatant copycat of Facebook. But yesterday Facebook has filed for injunctive relief because StudiVZ allegedly has even stolen FB’s source-code. I would find it absolutely jaw-dropping if this would turn out to be true (irrespective if the original owner of this intellectual property is really Facebook or rather ConnectU).
Read more about the case at Heise (German only). Commenters at Heise suspect that interns at FB have copied the code.

Mong Kong based toy manufacturer and distributor Hot Toys released a new pair of Chris and Sheva Resident Evil 1/6 scale figures, which are — as Kotaku puts it — insanely-detailed. The level of detail is really jaw-dropping. Hot Toys works with several Hong Kong collectable toy designers like Eric So and Brothersworker to produce mainly film-related products.

Check out Kotaku’s gallery after the jump.

At this year’s GDC, Sulake lead designer Sulka Haro talked about plans to move their teen virtual world juggernaut Habbo more into the direction of gaming:

“Habbo has been trying to boost the game mechanics within its world while still maintaining its socially-oriented open-endedness. There’s a key reason behind the decision: in the highly competitive free-to-play social world space, user retention is key.” (Worlds in Motion)

Haro, who kept calling Habbo a “game-less game” in the past years, emphasized his point of view that Habbo is “most definitely not a game”. Still, Sulake seems to have realized (just as Gaia Online with their new MMORPG Zomg), that social worlds only take you so far — which seems to be a change of focus for Habbo (or a change to loose focus?). The take-away seems to boil down to:

-Users expect more from Habbo
-Game-mechanics like Achievements bridge that gap for newbies and create new scarce goods for power-users.
-Your users don’t easily understand new social tools so you better don’t listen to their opinion.

Aha… some more thoughts about this can be found at Adam Martin’s T-Machine.

At least that’s what John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, claimed at DICE summit, according to Game/Life: “Riccitiello said that while big players like EA will be able to ride out the recession, others will not—which will help to keep ‘junk’ off shelves, he said. ‘A lot of the riff-raff is going to go bankrupt,‘ he said.“

Riccitiello’s statement about the “big players like EA” and the rest, the “riff-raff”, seems to imply that small indie-producers are the omnium-gatherum of crap. I give it to Mr. Riccitiello, that there is a lot mediocrity in the market and that the current financial meltdown is a time of survival of the fittest, more than ever. But I beg to differ on his somewhat high nosed implication: during the past few years most of the innovation in games notably came from small-scale production houses (Braid, Okami, Portal, you name it).

A lot of original ideas might be put on the back-burner until the recovery of the global markets, while big players will be sticking to the tried and true. It’s sad to see a company loosing touch with its very own roots. Riccitiello would be well suited to remember the early eighties, when EA was still a small start-up going by the name of Amazin’ Software.

Soure: Wired’s Game/Life

There has been an interesting meme recently on how to fix the broken parts of most contemporary MMOs (grinding, accessibility, unfinished and buggy features, you name it).

First, Fidgit’s renowned Tom Chick covered his top five reasons why MMOs are broken with a roundhouse kick ranging from subscriptions fees to too static worlds, to problems with grouping. Answering Chick, Scott Jennings rebutted at Broken Toys that Chick generalizes problems which are mostly specific to WoW: “Tom Chick’s core problem: MMO = World of Warcraft… And you know, when one of the most influential game writers in the industry makes this mistake, and essentially writes a piece on “Why is World of Warcraft Like World of Warcraft?”, I think we have a problem bigger then aggro management.“
Trembling Hand’s Tim Dean then in reply suggested his top ten on how to fix the given situation, which lead Scott Jennings weighing in again on Tim’s article.

Given the long industry experience of the three parties, it’s a conversation really worth reading, don’t miss it.

恭喜發財, Gung Hei Fat Choi, we wish everybody a prosperous lunar new year of the ox.