Vivendi, Marvel to Take Superheroes Online

Vivendi Universal Publishing, eyeing projections for the future of the
nascent online massively multi-player (OLMMP) games space, took a further
plunge into the arena Thursday when it forged a 10-year worldwide licensing
deal with comic book juggernaut Marvel Enterprises , which
holds the rights to characters like Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, and
the X-Men.

While no OLMMPs currently on the market have been able to overtake Sony’s
EverQuest in popularity in the U.S., Vivendi was the distributor behind
Mythic Entertainment’s Dark Age of Camelot, which was one of the fastest
selling online games of all time, according to David Cole, president of DFC
Intelligence, a research firm focused on interactive and digital
entertainment.

Vivendi has also signed on to distribute World of Warcraft, the first
online entry in Blizzard Entertainment’s highly-popular Warcraft franchise.
In addition, Vivendi is developing an OLMMP based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings.

Through Thursday’s deal with Marvel, Vivendi gains access to Marvel’s
universe of more than 4,700 superheroes, and will also be able to tap
Marvel’s worldwide fanbase as customers, a demographic the company said
already largely overlaps with the core gaming audience.

The video gaming market is an attractive one: millions of dedicated game
console platforms are already in homes worldwide, and together with the PC
gaming market form a multi-billion dollar industry that has already
surpassed Hollywood in terms of revenues.

The online gaming market is currently only a small percentage of that
industry, though it is growing. Top online games, like EverQuest, are
already capable of generating revenue in excess of $100 million each,
according to Cole.

The Korean massively multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG) Lineage
boasts more than 2.5 million subscribers, and EverQuest, which is notorious
for players who use online auction sites to sell characters and equipment
from the game world, is reported to have a virtual economy that makes its
setting the 77th largest economy in the world. In his paper, Virtual
Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian
Frontier, Professor Edward Castronova, from California State University
at Fullerton, calculated the numbers and found that Everquest’s kingdom,
Norrath, has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, making its
economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughly
comparable to Russia’s economy.

DFC Intelligence’s Cole predicted in June that 114 million people worldwide
will be playing online games by the year 2006, and that online game usage
is expected to increase nearly six-fold in that period.

“Online games should garner significant usage over the next few years,” he
said. “The major question mark is whether individual companies will be able
to monetize that usage.”

Vivendi has taken that message to heart, which explains why it has gone
after intensely popular licenses like Marvel’s Universe, or Lord of the
Rings, as well as proven franchises like Warcraft.

“We believe there are only a few franchises existing today that are
compelling enough to be a leader in the massively multi-player games market
and Marvel’s universe of superheroes is clearly one of them,” Vivendi
Universal Games Chairman and CEO Ken Cron said in a statement Thursday.

Vivendi plans to release the first game based on Marvel’s license in 2005,
and plans to update the game with releases as Sony does with its EverQuest
offering. Further details have yet to be hammered out.