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It always surprises me to see these imvu.com posts on HN. They are often insightful and interesting, but when you see the website you wonder who pays money for
by kristianp 13y ago
It always surprises me to see these imvu.com posts on HN. They are often insightful and interesting, but when you see the website you wonder who pays money for this. Do they sell virtual goods for their own virtual world, similar to secondlife?
- teemo_cute 13y agoThey do. I was once an active IMVU user. Outward appearances can be deceiving, but believe me they are profitable. If you read Eric Ries book 'The Lean Startup' you can have a glimpse of IMVU's back story there.
- piokuc 13y agoYeah, IMVU is a company behind a product which most people know about because of the "Lean Startup" book, not because they used the product itself. I must say I read the book with great interest but I never found the product itself interesting enough to even have a look at at :)
- Pxtl 13y agoThe target market is pretty clearly teenaged/tweener girls. I'm not surprised to learn that Hacker News doesn't have many of those.
- doesnt_know 13y agoHere is the shop: http://www.imvu.com/shop/ http://www.imvu.com/shop/ Clothing, Furniture, Rooms, Avatars. I've never heard of imvu before but I don't see how it's any different than micro-transactions within a MMO. If anyone plans to make the argument that MMO's are different because they have "gameplay", then you're probably someone that has never played a very social MMO before. As an ex-EVE player, I can say with extreme confidence that at least 80% of our alliance ("guild"/social group) was not there to actually play the game. It's pretty common that after a certain amount of game time, you just see the "game" as a glorified chat room. It was an ongoing joke to point out how most of us paid $15 to CCP every month for the ability to talk to each other over XMPP.