Current state of social MMOs

Hey Everyone, it's been a long time since I've been on this forum. Glad to see its still up though. Last I posted I was stopping the development of my game, Port Galaxy, to go to college.

I moved across the country, and I've successfuly completed my first year in Game Development. I mainly learned 3D modelling, animaiton, texturing, and UDK. Next year we'll dive into Unity which is actually what Port Galaxy was developed in, so that should be good for me. Since I left I've gained a lot more knowledge of the game development process, and have launched a new project.

But I'd love to hear from you guys about the current state of Social Games, Virtual Worlds/MMO's outside of facebook. Are they popular, moving to mobile platforms, whats going on in general? Is Habbo still on top?

I ask because I'm considering rebooting Port Galaxy.

It's a dying market, a big part of the reason is that children/teens can now access games on their iPads. A lot of people are moving away from desktop computers, especially teenagers and children. It's a different way then how I grew up(given I'm still very young).

Habbo I guess, could still be considered the king, but Habbo isn't even a shell of its former self anymore. Lasuni has a lot of potential with social aspects. But, recently has been failing to make any major releases to all users and I also believe that they will have a hard time attracting the fan base they want with the graphical style. As for BittyBay, probably would have been a good idea 7-8 years ago when Club Penguin/Webkinz were hot.

If you want an honest opinion, I think you should move away from PortGalaxy.. I followed the project for quite a while, the whole concept as it was left, felt like some IMVU/Sim's game. It would most definitely be hard for you to get the game's feet off the ground without a good amount of money. I don't necessarily think the concept was compelling enough to warrant much time to playing it.