Information Engineer

If you are still dubious about whether virtual worlds can make for real businesses, the numbers may convince you otherwise.

According to a report out Tuesday, Virtual Worlds Management, the trade group that puts on the spring and fall Virtual World conferences, there was $184 million of total invested in such businesses in the first quarter of 2008.

That money was spread across 23 companies, the report stated.

The biggest investment listed in the report was a $100 million round from Temasek Holdings in a company called 9You, which is in the virtual world and casual games space.

Other notable investment included $7 million for EveryScape from a series of A-list investors and $6.5 million from DoCoMo Capital and ngi Group for Gizmoz, an avatar creation company.

However, the $184 million figure is far less than the $425 million invested in 15 companies in the fourth quarter of 2007 and the $1 billion invested in 35 virtual world companies over the year prior to October, 2007, according to previous Virtual Worlds Management studies.

Of course, the term “virtual worlds” itself is hard to define, and many of the companies in the space are actually building casual games. But, overall, it seems clear that there are a lot of investors with serious money interested in the space and that can only be a good thing for the entrepreneurs gearing up to be the next Blizzard Entertainment or Sony Online Entertainment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.