Everyplay, a Finnish social gaming startup founded last year, has come out of stealth mode and released a product called Kamu World on Facebook. It is a “virtual hangout place” featuring edgy “Kamu” characters (‘kamu’ also means ‘a buddy’ in Finnish).

http://www.everyplay.com/news.html#bll

Kamu World in its current form is essentially a collection of visualized virtual chat rooms without that many game-like features. It has very polished look and feel already, though. When entering the world, players can create their own Kamu creature, and choose a location around the world (e.g. a game arcade in Tokyo). Kamus appear as small, desktop-size creatures, smaller than for example a drinking glass.

All actions of the player cumulate “Sparks”, experience points, which allow the player to level up and get more features unlocked. Furthermore, all activities of all players in the world also contribute to the status of the whole world, making it a happier and funnier place. Quite interesting feature further engaging the users is that you can print a PDF copy of your Kamu to make a 3D paper doll, then take pictures of your Kamu in real life settings, and gain Sparks from Everyplay in exchange for the pictures.

Jussi Laakkonen, CEO and founder of Everyplay, says Kamu World is a sheer test at the moment – something that getting out of makes the whole thing just more interesting for the firm. Everyplay will keep on building on Kamu World, though, but it is unforeseen how things evolve and they are open to learn as much as possible along the way. Everyplay is fully focused on fixing most pressing issues in the service and learning about usage patterns to build new features. More customization options, virtual items for decorating and games to play are on the way. At the moment there are no other plans, but it is clear also other products may be coming up later.

Jussi commented the firm has no plans to extend to other social networks for the time being. They want to see how well they are able to distribute the game in Facebook considering the competition by the already big startups.

Jussi regards Facebook as a very compelling distribution channel, not least since one can reach an audience of hundreds of million people globally – for free. Jussi isn’t worried, though, about Facebook starting to collect fees (or “rent”) for accessing and providing services for their members — he mentions that one cannot build a business model based on the distribution platform being completely free, and if a minor platform fee is going to kill you the business model has been defective in the first place.

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/05/should-facebook-charge-app-developers-rent