The AOL Games umbrella, whose network includes the gaming sites Joystiq and WoW Insider, to name just a few, has a new member in its family -- it's called Massively, and it's dedicated to the MMO gaming space. Recently, a post aggregated all of the evidence floating around out there of the virtual world that Google is, as the article says, "almost certainly" building:

Way back in January major media outlets speculated that Google would use its then-newly-acquired SketchUp asset to turn Google Earth into some sort of Second Life-type experience. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was to acquire Adscape Media Inc., a company that specializes in creatively integrating advertising into games. In September, ASU students began testing a mysterious application very likely connected to Google, and observers speculated that the application could be a 3D virtual environment.

Google made a deal with Multiverse (the company connected to the possibly problematic Firefly MMO) to sync Multiverse's flexible virtual reality engine with Google's assets and tools. The Reuters blog MediaFile points out that au courant industry figures are taking the existence of a Google virtual world for granted at this point.

Good roundup, folks! Welcome.

[Via Massively]