Acclaim testing ‘massively multiplayer community chat’

Online game publisher Acclaim is to test a technology that will allow it to chat simultaneously with large numbers of its customer base.

Using Voon, the company is attempting to create what Acclaim’s US game director David Perry has described as a ‘massively multiplayer community chat’.

Voon is a new community building technology made by Massachusetts company Vivox. Providing a chat widget for online game worlds, Voon has already been adopted by Sony Online Entertainment, CCP, Linden Lab and NCsoft among others.

"The video game industry retail model will be steadily replaced by digital distribution over time – this is already happening – and one major benefit of that change is that the connection/interaction between game-makers and their game-players will reach an entirely new level," said Perry in an open letter to the industry.

"We’re embracing several new technologies to engage our players from all over the world. Acclaim has almost ten million registered players already, and to ‘chat’ with them – and their friends – in real-time is a significant engineering feat."

The publisher will test the technology today at noon Pacific Time (8pm GMT) in Voon’s Acclaim Spellborn room.