$1 Billion Invested in Virtual Worlds

Now that’s big money by any guess, from October 06 to October 07. That’s what Chris Sherman of Virtual Worlds Management reported recently in his Virtual Worlds Weekly email newsletter. He or somebody also created a chart showing who invested in whom and how much. If you’re interested in the business side of virtuality, this is pretty interesting. I pulled a few of interest to Second Lifers, but the whole chart is here.

Now about that $1 billion: A lot of that came from Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin ($700K) and Intel’s acquisition of Havok ($110K). But I found some familiar names, including Anshe Chung Studios and Electric Sheep, development companies best known so far for their SL work. Both received money from Gladwyne Partners of New York City: an unstated amount for Anshe and $7 million for ESC from both Gladwyne and the TV giant CBS, which will be airing a “CSI: NY” episode Oct. 24 in which a murderer escapes into SL. More on that here.

Also, development company Millions of Us was listed on the chart as having received investment money, but the chart didn’t list the money or the source.