Disney Interactive Studios has launched an innovative project called DGamer, which it's describing as an avatar-based community for Nintendo DS, rather than a fully-fledged virtual world. But if it's not the latter yet, it's clearly a step in that direction.
The community is accessible to anyone who buys one of Disney’s DS games, starting with The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Individual games will come with their own avatars for users to customise, while the community will be accessible from PC or from DS, via Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection.
Disney has suggested there’ll be some interoperability with its other virtual worlds too, for example between a DGamer-enabled DS game and the Pirates Of The Caribbean Online MMO. Disney sold 3.4 million DS games last year, so the potential audience is large.
It’s a fascinating development, and one that may have more impact than, for example, Sony’s planned Home virtual world for PS3. Why? Well, so much growth in online virtual worlds is coming from the tween sector, and they’re far more likely to own a DS than a PlayStation 3. Of course, there’s a question around how popular accessing DGamer from a DS will be, if the main time kids have a Wi-Fi connection to hand is at home, where they may prefer to use a PC.
(via Reuters)
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