Newly released MMO-Blog Worlds in Motion, part of CMP Media, recently wrote an article about Coobico: Getting Casual with Coobico. This week we sat down with editor Leigh Alexander to talk about the peculiarities of creating a casual MMO for a non-teen audience:

“‘More’ is the typical game-industry’s approach to everything: more levels, more graphic power, more customization and even moreso, intertwining features. Here is a lesson that the game-industry can learn from the Web 2.0-world — less is more, really,” Winter opined. “Less is what a casual audience of above-30-year-olds are looking for. They don’t want to waste their time and money on upgrading graphic-hardware just to play Crysis in all its beauty. They are looking for some thirty minutes of ease and challenge besides their working-life, their family and hobbies, instead of spending endless hours of grinding in an online-game.”

Communities are the key to online worlds, Winter says — and the current community within MMOs currently reflects, he notes, the industry’s “max-out principle,” where the learning curve to fully engage in the virtual society is steep. “This doesn’t mix well socially with the casual market,” Winter says. “Such social discrepancies — almost like culture shock — are among the biggest shortcomings of recent multiplayer-products.”

Read more at Worlds in Motion: Linking People’s Lutz Winter Talks Casual Adult MMO

Spieletipps, a large german gaming-portal covers Coobico and its development (in german only):

“Knuddels, Habbo Hotel oder ChatCity - die Auswahl an Chats und virtuellen Welten ist in den vergangenen Jahren enorm gewachsen. Allerdings richten sich die meisten an Jugendliche und junge Erwachsene. Genau diese Marktlücke will das Unternehmen Linking People Ltd. nun schließen. Mit Coobico erscheint Anfang 2008 ein kostenloses Flash-basiertes Multiplayer-Strategiespiel, das besonders Gelegenheitsspieler im Alter von 30 bis 44 ansprechen soll.”

The full article is here.

Developmag, the leading UK trade news and community site for all professionals working in the video games development sector, covers Linking People and Coobico:

“The Hong Kong-based company, established last year by three veteran web designers, is focused on creating Web 2.0 communities and shared gaming experiences aimed at players aged 30 to 44, a demographic which according to a recent study constitutes 79 per cent of the game market.”

Read the full article after the jump.

It’s time to unveil one of our more prolific current projects: Coobico. Coobico is essentially a web-community and a multiplayer-strategy-game, running on Flash. Think HabboHotel meets MySims.
It will stilll be a long road till its alpha-stage (which will be launched in Germany and Hong Kong), in the meantime we’re going to post news about Coobico’s progress as often as possible at coobico.com, so drop by and keep yourself updated.

We had quite a long blog-out in the past weeks–partially due to my notebook being in repair for around a week, partially due to heavy workload. Stefan and me have hauled Linking People to its new home in the recent weeks, a linux-server in Canada, powered mainly by green energy (no kidding).
While I’m looking after the German part of our business at the moment, I missed the Web 2.0 Startup Meetup in Hong Kong in August–thanks P.K. from Team and Concept for pointing me to the event. I would have loved to show up, according to Angus Lau’s posting at 852signal, it was seemingly a nice event.
On Sept 16-21, 2007, the Hong Kong web community will meet up at web gathering 3 for some chitchat with Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech of Silicon Valley. Sorry, guys, I’m still going to be stuck in Germany at that moment. Read more here, if you want to attend. I’m going back to my work in the meantime…