Virtual World Cost Analysis – Diving In
October 7th, 2009
The Virtual Worlds Roadmap Group recently posted a survey on ‘Future Evolution of Virtual World Tech’. One question asked in the survey was: How much money is your organization likely to spend on Virtual Worlds?
<$50k
$50k to $250k
$250 to $1M
>$1M
These can be daunting figures for most organizations experiencing cuts in training budgets. I mean come on- realistically how much can a virtual world really cost? This is why when companies are surveyed about the potential use of a virtual world platform for learning and training they state one of the biggest barriers as the cost of entry. Let me just clarify a few points with regard to the real cost of a virtual world. A virtual world can be built in a variety of ways- as with Visual Purple virtual worlds they are often built from the ground up and customized for each organization. The actual cost varies based upon content, seat time, number of users, etc. Just remember you can start out small and always expand (kind of like remodeling a house). So let’s be realistic here and say that establishing a virtual world beachhead with a shiny, generic and pretty ‘private’ virtual world for training can cost an organization less than 6 figures.
Leave a Reply