65: Trading (Web) Cards

[The Escapist Staff]

"Now in its ninth edition, Magic not only dominates card games and the paper gaming hobby; it also looms large in the history of games on the internet. Magic reshaped net gaming, and vice versa. This caught Wizards off-guard. Adkison the engineer was, by the standards of the early 1990s, remarkably net-savvy; he secured wizards.com the instant he started his company, long before most publishers had ever heard of a domain name. Yet the net confounded his expectations about Magic's players, and the players in turn bulldozed Wizards' early plans for the DeckMaster series."

Trading (Web) Cards

 

[Bongo Bill]

Oh, pshaw. He'd have gotten venture capital.

 

[Meophist]

Reminds me of the in-game card mini-games in video games, starting with Final Fantasy VIII. One that I had particular fun with was Xenocards in Xenosaga.

 

[IanSchreiber]

"SOE has already moved into virtual asset sales with its Station Exchange, launched for EverQuest II in July 2006. Online card games are a natural extension of this idea"

Natural indeed... why no mention of the fact that Chron X was on The Station for a few years before the two gracefully parted ways?


"Worlds Apart founder and president Scott Martins claimed a successful online card game can generate an average of $70 per player each month."

$800+ per year ON AVERAGE sounds excessive; I suspect a typo. Maybe 70/month for the hardcore section of the player base, or 70/year average, or 70 per player lifetime average.

Either that, or Blizzard is leaving a truly obscene amount of money on the table by not adding micropayments in WoW...

 

[APVarney]

Not mentioned? "The first online trading card game was Chron X in May 1997, followed by Sanctum and several more over the years." My article even offers a link to Sanctum's Wikipedia entry.

But I didn't know Sony's station had once carried Chron X. Thanks for the info.