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Holiday Games: The GigaOM Gift Guide
The holidays and Black Friday are rapidly approaching. If you’re looking for video games to give your friends and loved ones, here’s a cheat sheet of must-have titles, categorized by giftee: for the hardcore gamers you know, for your family, and of course, for your high-tech industry colleagues:10 For High-Tech Execs (And Other Grown-Up Gamers)
Age of Empires: Mythologies
Available Platforms: Nintendo DS
MSRP: $29.99
The beloved resource-management strategy franchise (one of Om’s favorites!) is a turn-based strategy title for Nintendo’s handheld, with Egyptian, Greek and Norse civilizations to rule over.
Rock Band 2
Available Platforms: Wii, PS3, Xbox 360
MSRP: $59.99
This sequel to the smash hit game comes with a set of simulated instruments, so up to four friends can jam on hits from the Grateful Dead to Interpol.
Spore
Available Platforms: PC
MSRP: $49.99
The long-awaited game from SimCity creator Will Wright may require a time commitment, but the pleasure of evolving an entire civilization from a single-celled organism can’t be underestimated. (Featured on GigaOM here.)
Populous DS
Available Platforms: Nintendo DS
MSRP: $29.00
Originally a PC classic from the ’80s, the original “god game,” now revived for Nintendo’s handheld. Become a god with different elemental powers, perform miracles, control your minions and unleash Biblical wrath on your friends in multiplayer mode.
Tetris Party
Available Platforms: Wii
MSRP: $12.00
Russia’s most popular export returns with a Wii game that takes the classic Tetris puzzle to new dimensions, allowing up to four people to play at once, either competitively or cooperatively.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09
Available Platforms: PS3, PS2, Wii, Xbox 360
MSRP: $29.95-$59.95
The latest installment in the best-selling, ultra-realistic golf simulation is especially appealing with the Wii’s motion sensor control.
Top Chef: The Game
Available Platforms: PC, Mac
MSRP: $19.99
Bravo’s hit cooking show now has a spin-off game that puts players in the kitchen with Tom and Padma, mixing ingredients to create thousands of unique dishes in multiple culinary challenges.
Wii Speak
Available Platforms: Wii
MSRP: $29.99
Not really a game, but a Skype-style VoIP interface used to communicate with other Wii owners (previously featured in GigaOM.) Also comes bundled with Animal Crossing: City Folk (see below)
Texas Hold ‘Em Poker for iPhone
Available Platforms: iPhone
MSRP: $9.99 for 40,000 playing chips
Zynga’s popular cross-platform poker game gets an iPhone version, so you can challenge folks on Facebook and other social networks while on the go; offers intuitive gameplay with fun multiplayer elements, like chat and drink buying for table mates, all nicely optimized for Apple’s phone.
World of Goo
Available Platforms: Wii, PC
MSRP: $15.00 / $19.99
Part executive desk toy, part fiendishly clever puzzle, this unique game entirely created by just two guys has you constructing towers of malleable blobs; gameplay features realistic physics and a clever sense of humor.
10 For Your Family
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Available Platforms: Wii
MSRP: $49.99
The latest in Nintendo’s bucolic, goal-free series lets Wii owners move into Animal Crossing, interact with the residents, and furnish their virtual homes with all kinds of collectibles
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Available Platforms: Xbox 360
MSRP: $39.99
The newest iteration of British developer Rare’s long-running series sees the funny animal mascots
using an Erector set of parts to build and pilot hundreds of comical vehicles.
Cooking Mama World Kitchen
Available Platforms: Wii
MSRP: $49.99
Utterly wacky with irresistible graphics, think Guitar Hero for chefs: use your Wii remote to slice, dice and prepare meals in time with minimal mess.
Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2009
Available Platforms: Wii (with Balance Board)
MSRP: $39.99
Getting bored with Wii Fit? The gym bunny/Biggest Loser star coaches you through a new regime of exercise mini-games for the Balance Board.
High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dance!
Available Platforms: Wii, PS2, PS3, PC, Xbox 360
MSRP: $69.99
The insanely popular teen franchise gets a Dance Dance Revolution-style rhythm game, but made easier for kids, so they can control the feet and hands of their movies’ favorite characters in various choreography challenges.
Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore 2
Available Platforms: Wii, Xbox 360, PS3
MSRP: $49.99 (mic peripheral required)
The immensely popular karaoke rhythm game franchise once again links up with the mammoth TV hit; comes with co-op mode and dozens of pop classics for impressing virtual Paula Abdul.
SingStar Legends
Available Platforms: PS2 (requires mic peripheral)
MSRP: $29.99
The Playstation 2 remains the world’s most popular consoles, largely due to games like this: a singing game franchise that challenges you to hit the right pitch, tone and rhythm to win.
Skate It
Available Platforms: Wii
MSRP: $49.99
The user-friendly version of Electronic Arts’ skateboarding hit lets gamers use the Wii remote and Wii Fit balance board to grind and ollie all over a realistic, interactive city.
Sonic Unleashed
Available Platforms: Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
MSRP: $49.99
Sega’s furry blue hedgehog returns in an adventure suited for both new gamers and experienced ones, featuring the dazzling speed and beautiful environments for which the series is known.
You’re In The Movies
Available Platforms: Xbox 360
MSRP: $69.99
Use the Xbox 360’s included camera to put yourself and your family in one of multiple B-movie scenarios, share them over the Internet with friends, and have the game console judge you on your performance.
5 For The Hardcore Gamer On Your List
Mirror’s Edge
Available Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
MSRP: $59.99
This much-praised action game takes place entirely in the first-person view, with your character, an acrobatic assassin, nimbly jumping and running across the rooftops of a futuristic city.
Gears Of War 2
Available Platforms: Xbox 360
MSRP: $59.99
The sequel to one of the most popular action games of 2007 promises bigger battles, more dangerous enemies and of the “destroyed beauty” that made the first so fantastic.
Left 4 Dead
Available Platforms: Xbox 360, PC
MSRP: $49.99
Valve follows up its hit puzzle game, Portal, with this innovative cooperative zombie survival game, where players (either in multiplayer or solo, assisted with AI-controlled characters) must work together to outwit and outlast the hordes of very clever undead.
Little Big Planet
Available Platforms: PlayStation 3
MSRP: $59.99
One of the most charming and creative games to come out in some time, Little Big Planet lets gamers not only run, jump and climb through captivating worlds, but also create them with simple tools.
Nerf N-Strike
Available Platforms: Wii
MSRP: $59.95
A rare non-violent first-person shooter from EA (you only fight robots armed with foam darts) comes with an actual fuzzy dart-shooting Nerf gun that doubles as a Wii remote peripheral.
Top Three Virtual Worlds for Election Day
Say you’re looking for the perfect place to watch the election results pour in tonight, but your living room seems too lonely, your favorite blog seems too impersonal, and (depending on how the vote goes) your neighborhood bar may break out into a fight.
How about a virtual world space, where you can follow and discuss the tally live with avatars from around the globe? Here’s a handy traveler’s guide for doing just that:
WeeWorld (free reg. required)
For the election, the avatar-based chatroom/social network has released McCain and Obama WeeMee characters, created in its distinct, South Park-esque style, so you can add the Presidential candidate of your choice to your WeeWorld room. (While decking your avatar out in campaign gear, of course.) With a simple “Who else has this” search, WeeWorld users can find others who’ve also added McCain and/or Obama to their room — a good way to find and meet up with like-minded avatars.
Barely Political on Vivaty (Plug-in installation required)
The web-based 3-D scene platform Vivaty recently partnered with Barely Political (the Obama girl people) to create official rooms for the viral video producers.
You can watch BP’s many election videos with other avatars in their loft-style hangout; assuming enough fans show up, a potentially nice place to be during the final outcome.
Second Life (Free reg. and software download required)
Of course, there’s only one virtual world where your avatar can actually look like Obama Girl or Sarah Palin. Linden Lab’s metaverse is teeming with political activity and real world social advocacy groups, so it’s no surprise that election day will be rocking in SL. An unofficial Obama group is 1,500+ members strong, while a McCain group is much smaller (450+ members) but also active. Both will be following election results from their respective headquarters. There’s also a dynamic electoral college map that will be updated through the night at Capitol Island, while Info Island will host a bipartisan blow-out starting at 4pm, with mud-wrestling matches for avatars who want to release pent-up partisanship.
Teleport links to the above locations (launch SL and take you directly to designated spot):
Obama Headquarters
McCain group’s Straight Talk Cafe
Capitol Hill Island
Info Island
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Virtual Protest Threatens Linden Lab’s Profitability
The denizens of Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life are a passionate lot, so when the San Francisco company recently announced a steep purchase and maintenance fee increase on popular regions of their virtual land, sign-waving avatars were soon gathered outside Linden’s SL office, in protest. Some even set themselves on fire.
There have been protests like this throughout the world’s five-year history, but without a competing virtual world offering all the unique features of Second Life, angry customers have largely stayed put, despite their grumblings. Now, however, there is an increasingly viable alternative: OpenSim, an open-source platform for developing virtual worlds, that was, ironically, made possible after Linden Lab released its viewer code. Though still in beta mode, OpenSim has attracted developers with IBM, Microsoft, and numerous startups, so it’s bound to rapidly improve.
Within 24 hours of the price hike announcement, more than 800 frustrated SL users, including influential members of the community, had registered with an attractive OpenSim variation. That might not seem like much, but Linden Lab is profitable primarily through virtual land sales, and less than 17 percent of its 507,000 active users are premium subscribers who can own SL real estate. (Economic stats here, SL reg. req.) That number has been slowly but steadily decreasing — there were 93,000 premium subscribers in December 2007, but in August 2008, the last published figure, less than 85,000. So if a few thousand of its land-owning users quit SL for OpenSim, accelerating this slide, the company will likely feel the pressure.
I contacted freshly minted Linden CEO Mark Kingdon for his comments about the protest. In a statement provided by his publicist, Kingdon told me, “We understand that this price adjustment will affect businesses and other projects of some our Second Life Residents,” and emphasized the cost increases were only directed at select landowners, who have until January 2009 to adjust themselves to the new rates. “To be clear,” Kingdon continued, “this price adjustment affects only a portion of land in Second Life; it does not apply to private islands or regular mainland property. We made this change to ensure an optimal Second Life experience for all Residents.”
That may be, but anger over this increase (which many consider unfair) and concern over future price hikes have become added incentives for users to consider OpenSim grids that charge less for virtual land. Second Life does retain a lot of goodwill among its supporters (including me), which will dampen any calls for a general exodus. Still, one thing remains clear: “I’m moving to OpenSim!” has already become the metaverse version of the “I’m moving to Canada!” threat we hear every U.S. Presidential election.
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Crispy Gamer Launches With $8.25M Funding, 1M Uniques
Watch out, CBS Interactive and News Corp: Your game news sites, Gamespot and IGN, respectively, have ruled the web for over a decade, but as of today, you’ve got competition. In development over the last several months with $8.25 million in funding from Constellation Ventures, the editorial/community site Crispy Gamer, which already boasts a million unique monthly visitors, is coming out of beta.
According to President Chris Heldman, who visited the GigaOM office last week with Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief John Keefer, the site gained this enormous early popularity by word of mouth from gamers who’ve embraced them. That’s probably in response to Crispy Gamer’s stated revenue model. Unlike Gamespot and IGN, which greatly depend on advertising dollars from the very publishers whose games they cover, Crispy Gamer flat-out refuses to run publisher’s ads.
As Heldman put it, “We’re not anti-game publisher, we just don’t want their money.” Instead, they’re using their community’s coveted demographics (males ages 18-49 with average household incomes of $60,000-plus) to attract non-game advertisers, like movies and fast food. By refusing publisher ads and fostering a stable of opinionated writers, their reasoning goes, they’ll build up gamer trust — and eyeballs.
At his former gig, as head of Media and Entertainment at Google, Heldman noted a curious paradox: The game industry was growing in terms of both revenue and mainstream popularity, but the audience for corporate sites like Gamespot and IGN remained flat (and in some cases, even fell). Such stagnation, he reasoned, was a result of audiences viewing the sites as mere promotional platforms for the publishers who provided most of their ad revenue — and thus abandoning them for more opinionated fan sites like Penny Arcade and Kotaku. (We saw this most vividly last year, in the gamer outrage that erupted when Gamespot fired their longtime editor Jeff Gerstmann after he panned a game from a major advertiser.)
While I support Crispy Gamer’s approach, I wonder not only if they’ll be able to remain true to this vision, but if it will prove economically viable, especially during an economic downturn. Some argue that the game industry is recession-proof, but online advertising, as we’re painfully aware, is not. And many of Crispy Gamer’s potential non-game advertisers, like movie studios, belong to parent corporations which also own game publishers. So challenges remain. Then again, it’s a bit easier to stay pure when you already have a million fans.
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Koster’s Metaplace Gets $6.7M in Series B Funding
As we noted last week, virtual world startups seem to be weathering the global financial crisis. There’s more evidence of that out today, as Metaplace, the user-created, web-based virtual world from visionary game developer Raph Koster, is announcing $6.7 million in Series B funding from new investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The round, which also included original investors Charles River Ventures and Crescendo Ventures, brings Metaplace’s total amount of funding to $9.4 million.
When Koster first gave me a detailed demo of Metaplace, back in September 2007, the MMO was still in alpha and the company (which he co-founded with John Donham) was still called Areae. Today the MMO moves into closed beta, and the company itself has been renamed Metaplace.
Since that demo, Koster told me in a recent interview, they’ve been working to improve the system’s usability. “The tools should not look like techie tools,” as Koster put it, “but something your mom can use.” And while the virtual world’s main building options will still be user-friendly, “if you push on the door…you get to see the guts of it and really take control.” That way, advanced players will be able to tinker and add complex scripted interaction to their works.
The improvements have already paid off, according to Koster. Metaplace is seeing impressive creativity among its users, who are building not just games, but, for instance, animated cows with an AI system that lets them do the conga, and a tribute site to a Scandanavian folk music group embedded with a Norse mythology role-playing game. Another enterprising user figured out how to connect Metaplace’s chat system to Babelfish, so avatars’ text conversations are automatically translated into multiple languages. “Blew our minds,” says Koster.
Koster from the very beginning has touted the web-centric nature of Metaplace, so it’s notable that they’re now backed by Marc Andreessen, who kinda sorta invented the web browser. Andreessen first approached Metaplace by cold-calling them, according to Koster, who believes the Netscape founder’s interest is related to his more recent venture, the user-created Ning social network. “If you look at what we’re trying to do,” Koster observed, “I think there’s a lot of similarities there.”
Metaplace is also giving out free invite codes to the closed beta to 100 GigaOM readers. The code is “MPGIGAOM“– go here to redeem it.
Image credits: Metaplace.com.
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Wii Fit on Track to Outsell GTA IV This Year
The market for video games is changing profoundly, and a comparison of two prominent titles’ recent sales figures shows just how much: Wii Fit, a game largely marketed to women, is outpacing the latest installment of one of the industry’s biggest franchises, Grand Theft Auto.
With some 8.7 million units sold worldwide, Nintendo’s Wii Fit has already grossed far more money than Take-Two’s Grand Theft Auto IV. (Roughly 10.6 million copies of GTA IV have been sold for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 combined, but that game retails at about $60 vs. $90 for Wii Fit.) And though both titles went on sale in the U.S. within three weeks of each other last spring, GTA IV has long ceased to be a top seller. Nintendo’s exercise game, meanwhile, continues selling phenomenally well– about 225,000 units a week for the last couple of months.
At that rate, Wii Fit will outsell GTA IV in absolute units before the end of 2008. Since I whipped up the rough forecast chart below with data from VGChartz.com, a valuable but imperfect reference, I double-checked my prediction with Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter, who is considered by many to be the best gaming sector analyst around.
“Wii Fit is attaching at around a 30 percent rate,” he said via e-mail, meaning that nearly one in three owners of Nintendo’s console are buying Wii Fit, “so I suppose if that continues, it will outsell GTA.”
A blockbuster franchise for nearly a decade, Grand Theft Auto’s fantasy world of antisocial behavior has helped solidify a stereotype of gamers as 18-34 males, but the market has expanded far beyond that sector. Wii Fit’s success is the most prominent, emblematic example of that shift. And an ironic one at that: Every edition of GTA has aroused complaints over its portrayal of women. Yet this year, it’s women consumers who will help steal Grand Theft Auto IV’s thunder.
Michael Pachter characterized the notion of Wii Fit outselling GTA IV as “less of a comment on GTA than a comment on the potential for other games to thrive.” In that regard, he’s even more interested in the Wii Fit’s Balance Board peripheral, for which other developers are making new titles. “I consider Wii Fit more of a platform than a game,” he wrote me, “as I think the compelling feature is the potential for other games like Shaun White, Rayman, or even a new Tony Hawk game. And don’t forget Jillian Michaels Fitness.” Most of those titles (sports, family, and fitness games) come out this holiday season, and if Pachter is right, many more will follow. Then Wii Fit won’t just outsell GTA IV– thanks in large part to the women who bought the game in droves, its domination will drive much of the industry’s future development, too.
Image credits: TheAge.com.au, rockstargames.com/IV.
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Where’s the Money In Casual Web Game Development?
For years, developing web-based casual games was little more than a hobby, a means of creative expression for game enthusiasts. Then advertising revenue started to reshape the casual gaming landscape — now, multimillion-dollar deals, flourishing startups like Mochi Media and Kongregate, and the attention of media giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are the name of the game. Sustaining the stream of quality games to play is now a business venture in itself, and with ad revenue streams at their disposal, developers stand to make a real profit off of their work. But just how much money can these new revenue streams bring to casual game developers’ pockets?
Ad revenue usually comprises only a small portion of a game developer’s revenue, acknowledges Ada Chen, product marketing manager of Mochi Media, but there’s a growing ubiquity to web-based games “that’s become extremely interesting to advertisers,” she tells me. Advertisements paired with web-based casual games have remarkably high engagement rates, according to Chen: In-game ads have a click rate of up to 5 percent, while most Internet banner ads have click rates of less than 1 percent. The unique advertising landscape already makes it possible for some games to quickly become profitable. As an example, she cites Bloons, created by NinjaKiwi, which she says rakes in $30,000 or more a month through various ad revenue streams.
Emily Greer, co-founder of Flash game portal Kongregate, remains skeptical as to just how significant advertising revenue could become — at least for the average developer. She points out that for the vast majority of web-based game developers, sponsorships alone comprise 50-70 percent of any income they earn; these days, a good game can net between $1,000 and $3,000 in sponsorships and a great game — something like Desktop Tower Defense — can take in as much as $20,000. By contrast, only one or two developers within the Kongregate community earn $1,000-$2,000 a month from ads; some five to 10 of them earn roughly $500 while between 40 and 50 take in a mere $100 each month. And that’s out of a community of about 2,500 developers. She does, however, admit that those numbers are on the rise.
Mochi Media was unable to divulge any hard statistics, but given the viral nature of their advertising — ads are embedded into the game and thus earn the developer revenue no matter where the game spreads — I’d expect even higher numbers. And Chen notes that advertising revenue actually comprises the bulk of the revenue that the top games earn.
But what does this mean in terms of profit? Most web-based games are still being made by enthusiasts; their investments aren’t money, but time. Mochi Media CEO Jameson Hsu tells me that most games, and some of the best ones out there, are made by a single hobbyist, working less than full-time over a course of about four months. So if you assume a base pay of about $80,000 a year, that would mean that for one of these average developers, it would “cost” about $3,000 to make a game. In other words, a few months of good ad revenue, sponsorships, and contests winnings could easily make an indie game profitable. Greer says that dozens have already quit their day jobs to pursue web game development as a full-time career. Mildly worrisome, however, is the fact that startups are being created with the sole purpose of churning out new web games as fast as possible — sometimes at the astonishing rate of a new game every week.
What if these new revenue streams, by making what many developers consider an art form actually profitable, usher in a flood of sub-par web games as businesses tried to milk this new cash cow? Here’s hoping that quality – not quantity – will remain the ultimate determining factor of a developer’s profit.
ChessCube.com - Powering the Chess Community
Virtual World Investment: $148M in the Third Quarter
The real-world economy may be teetering on the brink, but investment in virtual worlds is chugging along at a fairly strong clip. Austin-based Virtual Worlds Management calculates the total at $148.5 million this quarter invested in more than a dozen virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), slightly down from the last two quarters but adding up to nearly a half billion dollars all told in this year alone.
Most of the money went to startups with worlds yet to launch, like the one featured here, a steampunk-themed MMO called The World of Gatheryn. In other words, look for a slew of new titles in the coming years– and, just as likely, a market glut. The bulk of the yet-to-launch sites are aimed at the teens and tweens market. (No surprise, as MMOs for the under-18 set remain the most popular.)
The largest single investment in the third quarter was $70 million in Series C for Trion World Network, which is developing a fantasy MMO and a project for the Sci-Fi Channel. That seems like a gutsy (or foolhardy) move, because both markets are risky: World of Warcraft continues to almost entirely dominate the swords-and-sorcery fantasy space, and science fiction-themed MMOs have historically performed poorly. On my initial read, I’d say the third quarter investment with the most promise is RobotGalaxy, a virtual world aimed at boys, who’ll be able to buy customized real robots in stores, then hook them up to their computers (and the world) via a USB cable.
Disclosure: My Second Life blog is frequently a media partner for Virtual Worlds Management conferences.
Image credit: www.mindfusegames.com
Confirmed: Obama Is Campaigning on Xbox 360!
Last week we noted unconfirmed sightings of an “Obama for President” billboard in the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise. Today we’re able to report that it is, in fact, an official advertisement placed by the senator’s campaign team.
“I can confirm that the Obama campaign has paid for in-game advertising in Burnout,” Holly Rockwood, director of corporate communications at Electronic Arts, the game’s publisher, told me via email, noting that EA regularly allows ad placements in their online games. “Like most television, radio and print outlets, we accept advertising from credible political candidates,” she continued. “Like political spots on the television networks, these ads do not reflect the political policies of EA or the opinions of its development teams.”
To my knowledge, this Burnout ad is far and away the most prominent use of a major online game to promote a presidential candidate’s campaign. There have been near-misses, of course: In 2006, for example, when he was seriously considering a run for the Democratic nomination, ex-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner made an avatar-based appearance at a press conference in Second Life.
Of course, detractors could accuse Sen. Obama of sending out mixed messages; earlier this year he was telling audiences that parents need to “turn off the television set, and put the video games away.” Then again, since the Burnout billboard specifically advises gamers to vote early, maybe it’s his subtle way of trying to get them off the couch.
Image credit: 360 gamer “Jeffson”, from his Rooster Teeth journal.
Obama Campaigning on Xbox 360?
This is either a brilliant Photoshop job, some canny viral political campaigning, or both: An Xbox 360 gamer playing Burnout Paradise spotted an Obama campaign billboard with a “Paid for by Obama for President” caption as he whizzed by in his turbocharged sports car, Game Politics is reporting. The site was unable to confirm the ad’s authenticity with Burnout publisher Electronic Arts; I’ve left messages with both EA and the Obama campaign and will update this post if we get confirmation either way.
Its veracity aside, the virtual billboard raises an interesting question: Are political ads in video games a good idea? In terms of eyeballs, I’d have to say yes. Roughly one-third of American households own an Xbox 360, Sony PS3 or Nintendo Wii. In terms of effectiveness, Brandweek recently detailed a survey undertaken by its fellow Nielsen Games division in which 11 percent of gamers said they bought a brand after seeing it advertised in a game.
Of course, buying a brand of shoes or soda is a totally different prospect than buying a politician’s brand in the polling booth. And young voters — the kind most likely to notice an in-game ad — are also the least likely to show up on Election Day.
At the very least, however, several gamer sites are now excitedly talking about the Obama billboard, which translates into some level of viral messaging success. It’s certainly a better idea than John McCain’s Pork Invaders, a knock-off of a video game that was popular when Sen. McCain was already in his 40s.
Hat tip: Broken Toys.
The MMO Post-Launch Period: Do’s and Don’ts
The massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) business is a lucrative one, as consumers typically first pay for the game, then are charged a monthly fee of $10-$15 to keep playing it. At least that’s the case for huge productions like industry leader World of Warcraft, and despite what some people say, it’s a model that still works.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to build a sustainable business; many MMOs fail during the crucial 1-2 months following their launch. However, the ones that play it right have every chance of carving out a profitable niche — maybe even of taking a chunk out of the WoW pie.
Funcom’s launch of Age of Conan was successful by any measure, selling some 1 million copies. But they were soon bombarded with complaints over the instability of the client as well as numerous bugs. So while they claim to have more than 400,000 paying subscribers, that’s just 40 percent of the number of games that were sold at launch.
With that in mind, here’s a list of do’s and don’ts aimed at MMO developers and publishers preparing for that critical post-launch period:
The Do’s
- Make sure that the game is stable. Too many unfinished products are being pushed out prematurely.
- Include a significant amount of content for players of all levels, not just the initial ones, because players will advance faster than you think. If the game gets boring, they’ll leave.
- Add new content on a regular basis — frequent, small chunks at first, to really show commitment.
- Make it easy for players to network, form guilds, go on raids, or whatever is fitting for your MMO. Remember, these are social games, after all.
- Let players move characters between servers. This option should be there from the start, so that you can join your friends playing on other servers without having to start with a new character from scratch on that particular server.
- Keep an open dialogue with the players via forums and blogs, and listen to their suggestions. This not only makes it easier for you to improve your game, it also looks good for curious would-be players, and might prove to be a selling point.
The Don’ts
- Don’t promise features that are months away. It doesn’t matter how amazing your new PvP system is, it’s frustrating to hear about features of a brand-new game that will involve still more waiting.
- Avoid having apparent portals and exits to parts of the world that you haven’t made available yet. Limit the world in a seamless manner.
- Don’t rebalance the game too much, too fast. Players pick their classes, skills, weapons and armor after the framework you’ve given them, so when you alter something drastically you’re essentially breaking their characters.
- When gamers start to complain, don’t just ignore them and fix the issues in secret. Publicly acknowledging problems makes you more credible and inspires another level of loyalty — as long as you follow through with them, that is.
Image courtesy of Age of Conan.
Cross-Platform Social Gaming Now On the iPhone
Social Line Connect is a simple iPhone game with a cross-platform backbone. The free app, which looks similar to Connect Four, was added to the App Store over the weekend. The real point of the no-frills game is playing it with friends — even if they don’t own an iPhone. To that end, it’s a also proof-of-concept title for SocialDeck, a new middleware startup that’s created a server architecture for people to play games across several platforms.
Based on the premise that “social interaction is much more important than the actual game play,” as co-founder Anish Acharya put it to me during a recent demo at the GigaOM office, SocialDeck’s games can be played between people using an iPhone and on the web via Facebook, with a Blackberry version said to be on the way as well.
If you have an iPhone, it’s worth a try. Once you install the app, you’re given the option to log into Facebook and sync your friends list with your address book and vice-versa. (Social Line Connect is also the name of the company’s Facebook app, so you can challenge friends from there, too.) Voila, instant game network on your web browser and/or your phone, with a leaderboard and chat window for competing with pals.
As a middleware provider, SocialDeck plans to make money by offering targeted demographic data of users for advertisers, advergaming apps, and rev share with game developers. I just hope they come up with cooler titles. How about a SocialDeck version of the strategy classic X-COM, dudes?
Wii Speak Channel: Think Skype for the Living Room
Nintendo held a media summit here in San Francisco yesterday, and while the biggest buzz was centered around holiday games and the upcoming DSi, I’m way more excited by the announcement that a Wii Speak Channel will launch this November. I’m calling it “Skype for the living room.”
The Wii Speak peripheral, a multidirectional “community microphone” with a reception radius of up to 12 feet, was mentioned this summer, but only in relation to the upcoming online game Animal Crossing: City Folk. Now Nintendo tells us they’re also going to sell Wii Speak separately, and that it’ll come with its own non-game Wii Channel, where you can communicate simultaneously with up to three other Wii owners. (Assuming they also have Wii Speak, and you’ve all exchanged friend codes.) You’ll also be able to use the channel to leave voice mails and exchange image files.
The reason I’ve dubbed the Wii Speak Channel Skype for the living room, however, is because it’s a VoIP communication device that doesn’t depend on a computer or a headset mic. If it works as billed, it could be used not only to make free person-to-person calls, but to hold conversations between entire rooms full of people. Of course the Nintendo exec who briefed me kept emphasizing the gameplay possibilities, and those are nice. But considering the tens of millions of people around the world, from every walk of life, who already own the Wii (it’s forecast to be in 30 percent of all American homes by 2011), the Wii Speak Channel has the potential to become a popular communication alternative over the next decade. Throw in a large enough networking effect, and it could even wind up as pervasive as Skype itself. That’s on the highly optimistic end, of course; at the very least, it’ll be a fun-and-games speakerphone for Wii owners.
Image: Geek.com.
Why a War on Virtual Gold Sellers Makes No Sense
Call me a radical, but when launching a big-budget online game, it doesn’t strike me as a very good idea to risk alienating nearly a quarter of your user base right out the gate. That, however, is likely to be the consequence of an extreme anti-gold selling policy at Mythic Entertainment, the studio that developed Electronic Arts’ new MMORPG Warhammer Online, which is widely seen as World of Warcraft’s best competitor.
As part of the launch, co-founder Mark Jacobs said Mythic had unleashed a “strike team” against gold sellers, individuals and companies who sell an MMORPG’s virtual currency to other players for real money — in fact, they’ve already banned some 400 of them. “I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING,” he wrote (caps his) in a post outlining the new strategy — and many share that sentiment, especially against sellers who spam “gold for sale” advertisements in the game’s chat channel.
But much as gamers claim to hate gold sellers, almost one in four patronize them, which is wh