Eagle-eyed Worlds In Motion readers may recall that we've previously taken Virtual Worlds Management to task for somewhat hyberbolic comments about the 'virtual worlds' business - with their last report on investment, in January 2008, suggesting that venture capital and media firms have invested some $425 million dollars in 15 different virtual worlds companies during Q4 of 2007.

As we pointed out at the time, a number of the investments only bordered abstractly on what is traditionally described as 'virtual worlds', actually going quite some way into the MMO, online, casual gaming and even in-game advertising space, leading some to look quizzically at the claims.

Well, the company has issued another report, on the first quarter of 2008, and their optimistic ways seem to be continuing, with a new report suggesting "that venture capital and media firms have invested more than $184 million dollars in 23 virtual worlds related companies during the first quarter of 2008."

Amusingly, this is significantly less than the Q4 2007 figure, and the justification appears to be that "$300 million of [the investment for] that period went to Zenimax Media, which we acknowledged might be considered more part of the game industry than the virtual worlds industry", according to commentary on Virtual Worlds News' site. Which brings up the question of why it was included in the first place under strict definitions of the phrase!

This time round, the $100 million investment by Temasek in Chinese company 9You is again suspect on the virtual worlds front - the firm has big holdings in casual and online games in China and we've previously covered them for online dancing and soccer games which are a world away from the traditional 'virtual world' definition.

There are also notably semi-offtopic investments such as IGA Worldwide - an ad network for games and online worlds, not a virtual world itself - listed in there, indicating a pretty high level of kitchen sink-style bundling.

Anyone would think that Virtual Worlds Management has a vested interest in hyping the 'virtual worlds' space by that name. There's no problem with acknowledging investments in the broad space, but why shoehorn it all under the 'virtual worlds' name when it clearly doesn't work?

In the meantime, we intend to cover the business of online worlds - all the way from subscription and microtransaction-based games to virtual worlds - in a sensible and non-hyperbolic way at Worlds In Motion.