Web Playgrounds of the Very Young

A friend recently told me about a guy he knows who sold a web site to Disney for $700M (it was Club Penguin). I was incredulous at first, as that number is staggering. But they have 4 million users paying $5/month. Sony offered them $150M and they turned it down as they were making more than that in a year.

The guy didn't start with empire-building intentions. He just had small children and couldn't find anything for them to do online. It turned out a lot of other people had that problem as well.

There was an interesting benefit of being acquired by Disney. Apparently CP was defending itself against a flood of lawsuits claiming rights to the penguin brand. When Disney bought CP they called everybody up and said, "You don't understand. We're suing you." The lawsuits stopped.

1980: (Alan Kay) let's help children build and explore things on their own to make them passionate about learning!

2008: (Disney) let's help ourselves buy another yacht by blasting pre-teens with ads!

These games are not about high quality rendering, and really can't be -- the computing environment they ship to is not homogeneous enough. Pirates of The Caribbean looks like Ocarina of Time.

While snazzy rendering won't really go anywhere with these games, server side physics just might -- you can control the platform, and as the games move from "pre-teen" to "young adult" you get into domains where realism (in the sense of convincing motion, compression of rubber objects and the like) can add a lot even without fancy rendering.