As a former artist for WW I’m sad to see the visual turn they’ve taken.

Whuddleworld has always been primarily a pixel based site. All of the major graphics are done pixel by pixel with the pencil tool. These new items were made with the use of the dodge, burn and smudge tools etc.

Tooling (as it’s called) can look very nice, but it does not match anything else on the site and just seems wrong.

whuddle World is back in business. Someone bought out the site and now the graphics look crap, but a well.

I’m still remaining hopeful.

I agree with Darren that the site should be hosted on AWS for less expensive hosting and greater scalability. Any potential acquirer should first port the whole shebang to AWS, settle on micropayments vs. membership, then spend all resources on growth and get that 78k member into the millions.

I spent time testing out the site and their execution, particularly the art direction, was top-notch. There’s a reason they still have members asking them when they’ll be back up. I think this is an excellent buy for any children’s brand that wants to expand their presence online.

-@#23 – Mark, representing a company that holds an attractive investment opportunity for a browser-based MMO myself, is this something I can contact you about for possible exposure on Techcrunch?

Sometimes its about the heart…and how that resonates with consumers. And there definitely is a great deal of “heart energy” that went into the creation of this property, and that in turn was picked up and carried forward by our users. Check out the still existing fandom, the ongoing barrage of emails we continue to receive requesting we “find a way” to bring the site back up and the numerous remaining links back to the now dormant property.

You may “pooh pooh” that type of “sentimentalism” as pure business idiocy – but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. We’ve got something special embued in our “whiddle whuddles (see @12)” and it definitely resonates.

We did indeed offer a micro payment system (though it was in early infancy at the time the site shut down) and it was a large portion of our planned revenue model. It fact it was the single piece projected to eventually become our operating cost “coverage” and then some, with brand advertising and merchandising following closely on its heels.

However, your final summary I think is on par. Whomever picks up WhuddleWorld – if anyone – is going to do so because they see merit in the conceptualization used to create the property more than anything. We just weren’t “alive” long enough to have an opportunity to PROVE solid risk resolutions or prove our revenue models. Remember, we were forced to come offline while we were still putting the finishing touches on our development. So yes, still a risk – but if you could see the user response and feedback we received, I’d say it’s really no risk at all.

Most Web 2.0 coders don’t realize that most sites have boring, unimpressive code that isn’t particularly innovative. Execution is far more important and clearly, this virtual world has failed to get anywhere.

She also included this disclaimer about the traffic stats:

“NOTE: There is a great disparity in hit counts and page views that occurs in
October 2006, this is due to our system administrator re-writing the way webalizer tracked our stats to be a more accurate. Because most of our site was served up inside I-Frames and CSS div overlays, a good deal of the raw hits we received prior to October 2006 were exponentially higher than they should have been. Hence the reconfigure of Webalizer (and the huge dip in stats at that point), so the picture of hits and growth in those from October 2006 – April 2007 is pretty on par and accurate.”

Micro-payments being so rapidly adopted by consumers within the browser-based multi-user gaming market is what makes this such a financially lucrative market and thus what makes it so attractive to investors. According to an article from Milwaukee’s ‘The Business Journal’ WhuddleWorld has taken at least 300k investment so far.
I can only assume they’re in the dead pool because they can’t afford to host the service any more – may be some of this funding should have been put toward a self-maintaining revenue model perhaps?

Apparently ‘dodgy’ site stats aside, what it really comes down to is the lack of sensible business direction that makes this totally uninvestible from a partnership perspective. The businesses best bet would be acquisition, but unlike the ‘youtube’s’ of the 2.0 boom these games success depends on a certain amount of creative and artistic flair from the founders.
Whether it’s possible to find an investor would really feel confident acquiring and attempting to turn around a business that relies heavily on another individuals conceptualisation amd intellectual property is what remains to be seen.

Since Whuddle doesn’t seem to be listed as part of your previous roundup, do you know what type of functionality and features these guys offered before they dove into the deadpool?

Was the site a Penguin clone, or were they offering anything worthwhile that couldn’t be built quickly by another dev team?

What amazon does save you is staffing costs for maintaining your own infrastructure. It allows you to scale fast should you achieve any instant success.

This doesn’t mean that the site did in fact have 20M page views in April, but I don’t think we can rule the possibility out yet. I have sent Dee a message and hopefully she will get back to us to explain how she came up with that number.