What do the top 20 virtual worlds have in common? And what can you learn from them?

100% of the top 20 virtual worlds have some form of chat, achievements, and virtual currency. Nearly half (45%) have pets, over 4/5′s have user home rooms, but only 18% integrate with social networks.

How do we know this? We meticulously studied and catalogued every single feature in each of the top 20 virtual worlds, including Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, Chimpoo, Poptropica, Barbie Girls, WeeWorld, Build-A-Bearville, Bin Weevils, and Hello Kitty Online. If you’re thinking this sounds boring and tedious, you’d be right! But the good news is we’ve shared the results, so you don’t need to.

We collected all this data to help us, and the folks building on our virtual world platform make better design decisions. Designing games for children is really hard! I’m pretty sure everyone reading this is way past their “kid-time” (like bed time, but past the time you stopped being a kid). So if we’re not kids any more, how do we know what kids find fun? What do children want? Should your players have a pet to care for? How important is chat? What about forums? Should there be a story?

We figure there’s two ways to answer those questions, we could ask the children what they think, or we could learn from natural selection; these are the top 20 virtual worlds, if they have features in common it’s likely not just a coincidence!

But asking children what they want isn’t easy! Most adults, let alone children, don’t know what they want until they see it!

Children are not game designers so don’t expect them to tell you how to make a game fun. Having said that, I firmly believe children should be involved in the design of their games. The key is to find the right research methodologies that bring you into their world, and to see things from their perspective (I’ll share some of those methods in another post).

Back to the top 20 worlds. Before we started cataloguing features we created a scale from which we compare virtual worlds. The scale has 8 vectors. The first four, creativity, achievement, narrative, and nurturing, are dedicated to fun, because if a world is not fun then it doesn’t matter how great the monetization streams are, the player’s wont stick around long enough to spend any money! The next three, social, community, and safety are dedicated to social, because virtual worlds are a place to have fun with friends. The last vector, business, compares the monetization options.

So what did we find? First let’s take a look at the charts.

Worlds targeting 5 to 8 year olds (full size)	Worlds targeting 8 to 10 year olds (full size)	Worlds targeting 10 to 13 year olds (full size)	Worlds targeting 13 to 15 year olds (full size)

Creativity

Achievement

Narrative

Nurturing

Social

Community

Safety

Business

I could write for hours about the trends here, but for this post I’ll stick with the highlights, in the next post I’ll explore what this means for new worlds:

• Unsurprisingly the social and community features become increasingly important as the target audience ages; older children value social interaction more than younger children. While not surprising it is interesting to see that the safety features decrease as children become older.
• Nurturing mechanics become hugely popular featuring in half of all worlds targeting 8 to 10 year. Creativity and customisation seems to be more important for 10 to 13 year olds.
• Worlds targeting 8 to 10′s have explore significantly more revenue and offline opportunities, be those comics, mobile apps, comics, toys, and so on. Is this because older children can more freely spend through their cell phones, or simply less innovation in the 10 to 15 age range?

Lastly, lets take a look how three of the most popular worlds compare.

Club Penguin	Moshi Monsters	Hello Kitty Online

Again, a lot of interesting trends. Hello Kitty out performs all the averages, Moshi Monsters (unsurprisingly) is built on engagement through nurturing and creativity, while Club Penguin is strong is strong everywhere but narrative; perhaps an a weakness that can be attacked?

In a future post I’m going to dig in deeper and share how this data can be used to drive your product decisions. I’ll look at the weaknesses that can be attacked, trends seen in recent popular worlds, and areas that have yet to be fully explored. Before then, if you’d like a copy of the spreadsheets and the data so you can compare your game, see how your rivals match up, maybe even get a little competitive edge, then fill out the form and I’ll email it through!

Thanks for reading.