$1 billion invested in virtual worlds
Virtual Worlds Management, the organizers of the Virtual Worlds Conference this past March in New York and the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference next week in San Jose, CA, recently conducted market research on virtual worlds, and estimate that about $1 billion has been invested in 35 virtual world projects within the last 12 months, with much of that accounted for by Club Penguin (acquired by Disney for $700,000,000) and Havok (acquired by Intel for $110,000,000). With the debates about how broad the participation in virtual world applications really is, I’ll be curious to see what will be coming out of some of the conferences this fall and whether investment will continue to grow in 2008.