The company's Gaia Online site already generates 3 billion monthly page views and has more than 5.9 million unique users a month. While there are a dozen different things you can do when you log into gaia gold (like meet other teens and play casual games), the place is currently not a single, continuous world.
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That's going to change in the late summer as the company rolls out its "massively multiplayer online" (MMO) game, said Craig Sherman, chief executive of the San Jose, Calif.-based company. Users have been demanding this game as the top thing they want for a couple of years.
The pattern with gaia gold 's evolution is similar to what happened with the evolution of competitor WeeWorld. At first, WeeWorld enabled teens to create their own characters, or avatars, which were called WeeMees. Last month, the company went a step further in unveiling a WeeWorld virtual world. gaia gold 's other competitors, Sulake's Habbo and IMVU, also operate a series of user-customized rooms where users can chat, but not continuous worlds. (See our IMVU coverage).
The evolution of these communities makes them difficult to classify. You can play games or you can watch a movie in a virtual theater. Hitwise said that gaia gold was the No. 2 virtual world in May, next to Webkinz. But Sherman said that Gaia Online is more a cross of a social network and a game.
It's more expensive to maintain such games. But it's not as hard for gaia online gold to make the leap to an MMO because it has simple two-dimensional avatars and background environments, not high-resolution 3-D graphics as with IMVU or Second Life. Gaia Online's software runs in a browser and is based on simple Adobe Flash animations.
"We think we did this the right way by starting it as a social experience first," Sherman said. "Now we're adding the world that goes with it."
David Georgeson, senior producer at the company, heads a team of about 15 developers in San Jose who have been working for the past year on the PC-based MMO. gaia online gold, as members are called, can use their existing avatars as their characters in the virtual world