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Gaia Gold has built one of the biggest online hangouts for teens over the past five years. Think of it as an online shopping mall full of kids who express themselves through cartoon-like avatars. On July 1st, it was taking the hangout one step further by revealing the details of a more elaborate, connected virtual world with its own storyline and missions.
The company's Gaia Online Gold 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 Online Gold (like meet other teens and play casual games), the place is currently not a single, continuous world.
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 Online'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 Online'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 Gold 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 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.