Big Corporations Aim at Kid-Friendly MMOs

Forget MySpace. That is like, so 2006. Today’s tweens want to socialize in virtual worlds that are specially tailored for them. Such is the appeal of sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz.

Now comes word from Graham Charlton at e-Consultancy.com over in Britain that Nickelodeon is looking to tap into the trend with a $100 million investment in virtual worlds and multiplayer games.

New offerings will include myNoggin, a subscription educational service for pre-school kids; Nick Gaming Club, a multiplayer subscription service; while the existing Neopets site will be relaunched as Neostudios, with the focus on online virtual worlds.

Charlton states that Webkinz has grown by 13 times its size from a year ago while Club Penguin has tripled in the same period. In the UK, Club Penguin is the third most popular children’s site, and the third most popular gaming site behind RuneScape and Miniclip.

The idea behind Club Penguin is very clever - it provides a safe way for children to get into social networking, as messages between users are carefully monitored by the site.

Finally, Charlton notes that Sony has been talking with Club Penguin about buying it out, for around half a billion dollars.

So, now that Nick and Sony are looking to jump into the kid MMO fray with multi-million dollar efforts, will there be additional educational efforts any time soon? The myNoggin effort sounds very interesting, and I’ll be looking forward to checking it out. I hope that additional educational efforts expand beyond preschool. Surely Scholastic or one of the other major publishers would like to get in on this.