Internet in China: Virtual Worlds Roundup

BusinessWeek published a special report on virtual world recently, with one article on virtual World in China which featured Hipihi, Novoking and UOneNet (a.k.a. uWorld).

Hipihi has announced the beginning of its public beta testing phase, after over a year private test. The private test was much longer than they previously expected. Hipihi’s homepage shows it has just over 50k registered users and growing.

uWorld, another virtual world on BusinessWeek’s article which we first profiled in October 2007, finally started its close test in March. As Hipihi, uWorld also partnered with IBM on virtual world development.

Though Hipihi has a lot of buzz on the media, it is still struggling in attracting more users to reside. Kaiser Kuo is more optimistic on it, he thought “deep-rooted MMORPG culture” in China and “willingness of Chinese to strike up online friendships with strangers” will help them in the long run. But virtual world and MMORPG have quite different culture, one could doubt that MMOPRG culture among Chinese youth will let them migrate into virtual world. To exploit the culture of online networking with strangers, you need to create more value which only virtual world can offer. Novoking might be a good example. Its strategy of focusing on entertainment, esp. music and dancing, may help them to target more females, and attract users of online games as Audition.

Even though virtual world in China did not see high growth, there is more company see its potential. Yaolan.com, a community targeting parents with kids under 6 or parents-to-be, plan to launch its virtual world soon. Wang Ruibin — Yaolan’s PR manager — watched the demo and said on his blog, Yaolan world will target mommy and mommy-to-be as well. Each user will have a kid for them to experience what will happen when bringing up a kid, sounds like a 3D life simulation game.