sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged runescape
Why The MMORPG Subscription-Based Business Model Is Broken
Famed game developer and analyst Scott Jennings recently announced on his blog that he’s quit online game publishing giant NCSoft to join John Galt Games. His new home is the small casual game startup developing Web Wars, a sci-fi game played via a browser plug-in, where web sites themselves are territories to fight over. (Sort of RocketOn meets battle cruisers.) The move is a bit like a top Hollywood producer quitting the movie business for an obscure online-video startup; it’s such a big jump, you want to know why.
Known by gamers as “Lum the Mad,” Jennings is practically synonymous with the subscriber-driven MMORPGs that major game publishers still largely favor over free, web-based virtual worlds. But now Jennings says that business model is broken — “an arms race that few can even hope to compete in, much less win,” he says.
To fix the online gaming model, Jennings said some innovative thinking is required. “Embracing open source development, crowd-sourcing content, targeting different platforms such as the Web or mobile phones, all of these are valid,” he suggested. With few exceptions, however, game publishers have been unwilling to take risks. “They aren’t responding to the changing market because they don’t understand how to work things like web technologies into their current income models,” he said. “So instead they keep doing the same things– just more of them, and with higher budgets.”
Jennings points to the ballooning costs of MMORPGs — World of Warcraft is estimated to have cost $40 million to $50 million to develop, and while Age of Conan cost just $25 million, the game is having retention issues, largely because the budget wasn’t big enough, he says. By contrast, he notes, small companies produce low-budget web-based MMOs like Club Penguin and RuneScape that post far higher profits.
So with Jennings making the jump, I suspect we’ll see more developers following his lead. Especially if publishers refuse to evolve.
Image credit: www.webwars.com.
Web
jennings
Warcraft
runescape
Technology-News
conan
rocketon
RuneScape Moves to Come Out of the Shadows
RuneScape is one of online gaming’s biggest success stories, but unless you play it or know someone who does, you’ve probably never heard of it. Launched in 2001 by Jagex Software, an independent studio based in the UK, it’s a traditional fantasy role-playing game that boasts six million active monthly players, almost all of them in the English-speaking world — making RuneScape more popular in the West than World of Warcraft. (Over half of WoW’s 10 million players are based in Asia.) Do a Google trend comparison of RuneScape to World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, the latest MMORPG darling, and you’ll see that the web traffic of Jagex’s indie title outstrips both of them. Despite all this, it’s received comparatively little coverage, even by the gaming press.
That may change soon, because this week Jagex will make its first appearance at one of gaming’s biggest trade shows — the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles — where it will debut a graphically upgraded version of the game called RuneScape High Detail. Ahead of the launch, I sat down with the Jagex team last week to find out how, with so little attention, the modest-looking RuneScape has attracted so many players.
Originally created by Andrew Gower and his brother Paul while Andrew was still an undergrad at Cambridge, RuneScape runs on Java, making it accessible to anyone who can get on the web. It’s also free, though 60 percent of the world’s content is restricted until you upgrade to a $5 monthly subscription, which some one million RuneScape players currently pay. And while even RuneScape High Detail won’t win Jagex any graphics awards, the developers have compensated by creating a game world with depth and variety of play. “In terms of gameplay,” influential game developer Raph Koster notes, “RuneScape is a very worldy world, offering a diverse array of activities that frankly, resembles Ultima Online.” (Koster was that classic game’s lead designer.) At the same time, the Java code makes it easy to add new features and make quick fixes. As Jagex CEO Geoff Iddison noted to me, “The beauty of Java is it’s platform independent.”
The result? Tremendous viral growth, especially from very young gamers on a limited budget. Jagex won’t give out specific numbers, but Iddison told me their greatest expense is payroll for 400 employees; he also said their profit margin is well over 50 percent.
More details on Jagex/RuneScape:
- New content (questions, items, etc.) added to RuneScape every two weeks
- 1.2 megabyte Java app
- Peak concurrency: 250,000
- Average player time: 12.5 hours/week
- RuneScape is a sharded MMORPG (i.e. copies of the world run on separate servers)
- 250 RuneScape shards for up to 2,000 players each. Unlike many MMORPGs, player characters are not bound to a single shard.
- 200 servers total
- Main player demographics: 60 percent are from the U.S., 25 percent from the EU, smaller percentages from Australia/New Zealand and Canada. Player age typically 8-20, approximately 80 percent between 10-16.
- RuneScape HD feeds graphic data to computers with 3D cards for dynamic rendering. Displays at 15 frames per second on minimum spec computers, but can optimize up to 50 FPS. Can display in full screen.
