101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs sold for $24m

 "The popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection made a splash in the art world this month with its own Sotheby’s auction for a lot of 101 of the Ethereum-based profile pictures. And the recent hype around the randomly-generated ape illustrations extended into the auction, with a winning bid that smashed expectations.

The auction closed today with a winning bid of $24.39 million, well ahead of Sotheby’s estimated range of $15 million to $18 million. That works out to about $241,500 per Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. The average sale price for a Bored Ape on leading secondary marketplace OpenSea over the last seven days is just above 46 ETH, or nearly $164,000."

Source:  Decrypt, 9th September 2021

Online game Moshi Monsters has 50m registered users

"Moshi Monsters, the UK based social network aimed at kids that takes many a visual cue from Nintendo's Pokemon series, has hit a landmark 50 million registered users. The figure means that now 1 in 2 UK children aged between 6-12 own a Moshi Monster account, with 1 new sign up every second from over 150 nations across the globe.
Letting kids interact and play online in safe, colourful environment, Moshi Monsters lets kids care and nurture for their own little online monster pet."

Source:  Tech Digest, 6th June 2011

3 million new characters are created in Habbo Hotel each month

"Habbo Hotel has just joined the exclusive club of websites that can claim ten years online. The public beta of the first incarnation, Hotelli Kultakala, rolling out on 28 August 2000, followed by the English-language beta on 16 January 2001. The combined platform now claims 170 million users in 11 countries.
Some Habbo stats, as of last month:
• 172m avatars created
• 3m new characters created each month
• 120m user-created rooms
• 15m monthly unique users
• Average user session is 42 minutes"
Source:  The Guardian, 5th July 2010

World of Warcraft generated $2m in 4 hours from the sale of Celestial Steed 'pets' to players

"If you haven’t been surfing through Bilzzard’s pet store in the past two days, you might have missed one of the new pets for WoW: Celestial Steed.
This horse has generated $2 million in a little over 4 hours and people were still lining up to get it. These figures are just based on the first four hours since the Celestial Steed was released, but Bilzzard certainly earned a lot more from selling this horse. You will have to spend $25 if you want to get it and the upgrade is purely visual because mounts don’t improve the ability of the character."
Source: GossipGamers, 17th April 2010

Club Penguin is the most popular virtual world among EU kids aged 7-10

Click to enlarge

Source: Dubit, reported by the Kzero Worldwide blog, 8th April 2010

Some stats on The Sims

"The Sims franchise celebrates its ten year anniversary this year and an impressive more than 125 million units sold since its launch in February 2000. Now translated into 22 different languages and available in 60 different countries, The Sims has quickly become a universal gaming and cultural phenomenon. Since its June 2009 launch, The Sims 3 has sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide to date and holds the #1 best-selling PC title for 2009 in North America and Europe. Fan intensity is evidenced through the 130 million downloads of player created content including: Sims, houses, stories and more. The Sims 3 community site, www.thesims3.com, welcomes up to four million unique visitors monthly, handles 300 content downloads every minute and nearly 2 million uploads have been made to date, including 20 movies each hour. The Sims 3 YouTube Channel is in the top ten most viewed sponsored channels of all time with more than 28 million video views. Visit The Sims 3 official website to see what the players are creating at www.TheSims3.com or the official YouTube Channel for The Sims at http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSims."
Source: Press release from Electronic Arts, 19th April 2010

Teens would rather save money by cutting back on clothes and accessories than console & PC games

"Shopping for clothes and accessories is the first thing that teens cut back on with 23%, followed by console and PC games (19%), food, sweets and beverages (16%), going to the movies (15%), online entertainment (13%) and music (9%). However, staying in is clearly not an appealing option to teens as only 33% say that they are in more in the evenings."
Source: Research by Habbo on 61,000 12-17 year olds across 30 counties, reported in a press release, 16th September 2009

There are an estimated 400,000 'gold farmers', mainly based in China

"In basic terms, gold-farming [the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games] is a sizeable phenomenon. The rather wobbly-legged best guesses for 2008 are that 400,000 gold farmers earning an average US$145 per month produced a global market worth US$500m; but we could easily more than double the latter to over US$1bn. There are probably 5-10m consumers of gold farming services. The main uncertainty of estimation relates to the gold-farming market in East Asia, which appears much larger than that in the US/EU. That uncertainty in part arises because gold farming operates at four levels – local, national, regional and global. We should encompass all four but, to date, the focus has been almost entirely on the global trade."
Source: Page 66 of Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming":
Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games, by Richard Heeks, Development Informatics Group, IDPM, SED, University of Manchester, UK
2008, citing Wang, R. (2008) The Truth Behind Gold Farmers, WoWMine, Wilmington, DE
This excellent paper will tell you all you need to know about gold farming!

Habbo has 144 million registered users

Some stats about Habbo (August 2009):
"# 31 local communities
# Registered users: 144,000,000
# Unique visitors: 13,000,000 / month
# Page impressions: 990,000,000 / month
# Age distribution: 90 % between 13-18 years old
# Average visit: 43 minutes / session"
Source: Sulake.com, retrieved 26th September 2009

Over 118 million avatars have been created for the video game Spore by it's players

Source: Official 'Sporepedia' site retrieved 27th August 2009 (see the box in the top left hand side for the most up to date figure)

Players of the video game LittleBigPlanet have created over 1 million of their own levels

"Each week the data-miners in our IT department here at Sackboy Central send us a big spreadsheet full of numbers. Some of the numbers mention stuff like “concurrency” and “peak measures”, which are all very nice, although not, for the most part, tremendously exciting. But there is one number in particular that we’ve always kept a close eye on: the number of levels uploaded by the LittleBigPlanet community. And this week, that number became awesome indeed. The community has now uploaded over one million levels.
One. Million. Levels.
Amazing, isn’t it? Just think, this means that a new level has been published roughly every 21 seconds since LittleBigPlanet launched."
Source: Playstation blog, 22nd July 2009

Membership of virtual worlds grew by 39% in Q2 2009

"The consultancy kzero.co.uk reports that membership of virtual worlds grew by 39% in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million."
Source: Kzero, quoted by The Guardian, 29th July 2009
More data:
"Almost all of the 39% growth came from children. Girls used to grow up with their dolls; now they are growing up with their avatars. This goes largely unreported because the users don't read newspapers, but as Kzero reports, poptropica.com – aimed at five- to 10-year-olds – has 76 million registered users. If you move up to 10- to 15-year-olds, users rival the populations of countries – led by Habbo (135 million), Neopets (54 million), Star Dolls (34 million) and Club Penguin (28 million). It starts tailing off among 15- to 25-year-olds – apart from Poptropica (35 million) – but it underlines the likelihood that as youngsters get older they will be looking for more sophisticated outlets and for ways to link existing social networks such as Facebook or MySpace to more immersive virtual worlds."

Chinese site QQ generated an estimated $500m in profits from avatars and virtual goods in 2008

"In China, a number of services rely on avatars and virtual goods. The most successful is QQ
(Tencent, 1998), which recorded an estimated 1 billion USD in sales and 500 million USD in
profits in 2008, making it the leading avatarbased service by users, revenues and profit
worldwide."
Source: From Virtual Worlds to The 3D Web report by PlusEightStar, March 2009
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