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''Club Penguin'' is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities, created by New Horizon Interactive (now known as Disney Canada Inc.). Players use cartoon penguin-avatars and play in a winter-set virtual world. After beta-testing, ''Club Penguin'' was made available to the general public on October 24, 2005 and has since expanded into a large online community —growing to the extent that by late 2007, it was claimed that ''Club Penguin'' had over 30 million user accounts.〔 As of July 2013, ''Club Penguin'' has over 200 million registered user accounts. While free memberships are available, revenue is predominantly raised through paid memberships which allow players to access a range of additional features, such as the ability to purchase virtual clothing, furniture, and in-game pets called "puffles" for their penguins through the use of in-game currency.The success of ''Club Penguin'' led to New Horizon being purchased by The Walt Disney Company in August 2007 for the sum of 350 million dollars, with an additional 350 million dollars in bonuses should specific targets be met by 2009. The game is specifically designed for children aged 6 to 14, however, users of any age are allowed to play ''Club Penguin''. Thus a major focus of the developers has been on child safety,〔 with a number of features introduced to the game to facilitate this — including offering an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode, whereby users select their comments from a menu; filtering that prevents swearing and the revelation of personal information;〔 and moderators who patrol the game.〔 The game has been criticized for teaching consumerism〔 and allowing players to "cheat".〔 == History and development == Lane Merrifield, Lance Priebe and Dave Krysko started Club Penguin in Kelowna, BC, Canada. Merrifield and Priebe approached their boss, Dave Krysko wanting to build a safe social-networking site their kids could enjoy free of advertising. They financed the start-up entirely with their own credit cards and personal lines of credit and maintained 100 percent ownership. And without a marketing budget, in three years they attracted 700,000 kids around the world paying a $5.95 US a month for a subscription – and 11 million others who signed up for more limited free access. As Merrifield later described the situation, they decided to build ''Club Penguin'' when they were unsuccessful in finding "something that had some social components but was safe, and not just marketed as safe" for their own children. Merrifield and Priebe approached their employer, David Krysko, with the idea of creating a spinoff company to develop the new product. Prior to starting work on ''Club Penguin'', Lance Priebe had been developing Flash web-based games in his spare time. As part of Rocketsnail Games, Priebe released Experimental Penguins in 2000, which featured gameplay similar to that which was incorporated into ''Club Penguin''. Although Experimental Penguins went offline in 2001, it was used as the inspiration for Penguin Chat, which was released shortly after Experimental Penguins' removal. Thus, when Priebe, Merrifield and Krysko decided to go ahead with ''Club Penguin'' in 2003, they had Penguin Chat on which to base part of the design process. Penguin Chat's third version was released in April 2005, and was used to test the client and servers of ''Club Penguin''. Users from Penguin Chat were invited to beta test ''Club Penguin''. The original plan was to release in 2010, but since the team had decided to fast-track the project, the first version of ''Club Penguin'' went live on October 24, 2005.〔 ''Club Penguin'' started with 15,000 users, and by March that number had reached 1.4 million—a figure which almost doubled by September, when it hit 2.6 million.〔 By the time ''Club Penguin'' was two years old, it had reached 3.9 million users. At the point when they were purchased by Disney, ''Club Penguin'' had 12 million accounts, of which 700,000 were paid subscribers, and were generating $40 million in annual revenue.〔 Although the owners had turned down lucrative advertising offers and venture capital investments in the past,〔 in August 2007 they agreed to sell both ''Club Penguin'' and its parent company for the sum of $350.93 million. In addition, the owners were promised bonuses of up to $350 million if they were able to meet growth targets by 2009. In making the sale, Merrifield has stated that their main focus during negotiations was philosophical,〔 and that the intent was to provide themselves with the needed infrastructure in order to continue to grow. On March 11, 2008 ''Club Penguin'' released the ''Club Penguin'' Improvement Project. This project allowed players to be part of the testing of new servers put into use in ''Club Penguin'' on April 14, 2008. Players had a "clone" of their penguin made, to test these new servers for bugs and glitches. The testing was ended on April 4, 2008. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Club Penguin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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