Category: computer games

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computer games design dev-process devdiary games design iphone

Dungeon Master Clone for iPhone – Concept GUI

(c.f. my original post here: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/28/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone/)

I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them.

The first three are all assuming a single-character RPG, the fourth is something more like DM / Wizardry (could be 6 chars, could be 3).

Everything is clickable – small maps become full screen map, blue buttons fire spells, character portraits go to the inventory screens.

Screens with no arrow buttons require you to drag your finger forwards/backwards/left/right to move, and allow 360 degree movement. Screens with arrow buttons assume you can only turn 90 degrees at a time (like the original games), although they smoothly animate the rotations (UN-like the original games – because I have access to OpenGL to do the 3D for me).

What do you think?

concept-ss-1

concept-ss-2

concept-ss-3concept-ss-4

Categories
computer games design games design iphone MMOG development programming

Want to help write a simple RPG for iPhone?

Now I’ve recovered from GDC illness, I’ve got a little free time again, and I’m starting one of the iPhone games I wanted to write. This is a “for fun and learning” project, so it’s deliberately chosen to be low maintenance / easy to make a first version / easy to extend later / etc. I need artists, designers, quest-writers, and programmers.

Well, I don’t *need* anyone; I can do this all myself. But I’d rather do it with other people, and I thought there might be some hobbyists reading this who’d like to do something similar.

EDIT: there’s now a googlegroup for people working on this. You *must* contact me first via email (see below) or your request to join will be automatically rejected. http://groups.google.com/group/dmclone

Continue reading “Want to help write a simple RPG for iPhone?”
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computer games design games design

Bartle explains himself

Richard has often been accused of being “arrogant”, “insane”, and even, simply, “wrong” for his comments along the lines of:

  1. He hasn’t “played” an MMO in decades (possibly “ever”) … because he can’t stop himself from interpreting as he uses them
  2. Surprisingly many MMOs are just WoW by another name
  3. He only needs to play the first few levels of a new MMO to see if it’s really new; he needn’t bother with the rest of it

He’s explained before, in abstract terms, why this is all true *to him*, and pretty much left people to stew if they don’t understand that (while always actively engaging them in conversation to try and explain further).

Now he’s blogged a concrete example of what goes through his head when playing a particular quest-chain / zone: WoW’s STV. If you’ve ever wondered, and/or been confused/horrified/dismayed/insulted by Richard’s statements online and haven’t had the chance to speak to him about it all in person, then I’d highly recommend reading it. I suspect that this concrete analysis will elucidate to a lot more people most of the meaning that the abstract explanations failed to convey. Well, we’ll see…

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computer games games design games industry marketing massively multiplayer

A better way to review video games

Reviewing video games is hard. In some ways, it’s an impossible mission: a reviewer has too many conflicting interests:

  1. please the publishers or else be denied access to the materials they seek to review
  2. please their editor or else don’t get paid; but the editor’s primary source of capital is often advertising … from the publishers
  3. answer the consumer’s main question in a way that earns their trust: should they purchase this game or not?
  4. stand out from the crowd of a million game players who decide to write about their hobby

Who’s your Daddy?

This has been a problem for as long as I can remember (20+ years of game playing and reading game reviews); the consumer *believes* that the reviewer is answerable to them – but it has been a very long time (10 years now?) since consumers were the paymaster of reviewers; nowadays, it’s advertisers (which usually means: game-publishers).

Of course, consumers still wield huge power. The virtuous value circle – the only circle that matters – is driven by consumers:

  • A reviewer has a “readership” of consumers who are influenced in their purchasing decisions by those reviews
  • Publishers therefore court the reviewer to try and curry favour with the consumers and increase sales of the publishers’ products (to those readers, and anyone they themselves influence – friends, family, colleagues, etc)
  • Reviewers earn more money, and get deeper access to development teams (courtesy of the publishers), so produce more reviews

But that power is – clearly – both indirect and hard to quantify. A consumer – even many of them – threatening to “stop reading a reviewer’s reviews” is not particularly effective.

Publications like Edge helped along the indirection of consumer-power when they decided to go out of their way to obscure the identities of their individual reviewers, turning reviews into as much of a crap-shoot as buying games was in the first place. Since the web rose to prominence, it’s been eroded at the other end – there’s now so many reviewers around that, well … who has the time to remember who any individual reviewer is?

Qui custodet custodes?

But if journalists/reviewers are supposedly there as a watchdog on the publishers’ marketing depts, supposedly helping the consumer determine which are the (non-refundable) purchases they ought to be making, then who’s checking that the journalists themselves are honest?

No-one, really. And that’s where the rot begins. The storms of outraged public opinion are nothing new: examples of journalists writing reviews of games (reviews both scathing and rejoicing) they hadn’t even played go way back into the 1980’s.

A case study in lies, damn lies, and video game journalism

In case you hadn’t heard, this week a “staff writer” from Eurogamer (a games review / news site) ripped to pieces one of the most recently-released MMOs – Darkfall. At which point Aventurine, the developer of Darkfall, responded with increasing anger and dismay.

But the really interesting thing here is that Aventurine didn’t merely rant “you bastards! Our game is Teh Awesum!!!111! STFU, Beotch!” (well, they did that as well) … no, they dropped a little A-bomb in the middle of their reply:

“We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator”

Pwned. MMO developers *actually know whether your journalist played the game before reviewing it*. What’s more … they have proof…

The EG reviewer (whose “references and background are immaculate”, according to the editor – but from reading his only two EG reviews, I’m afraid it does rather sound like he knows little about MMOs), responded (via his editor) with the claim:

“the logs miss out two crucial days and understate others, … and he insists he played the game for at least nine hours”

It would seem that someone is lying (and it could be either party). Worse, someone is being particularly stupid. Because the journalist is claiming “your computers lie”, and the developer is claiming “your journalist is a lier”; either way, it’s not a subtle, small, mistake – whoever is wrong, if they get discovered, they’re going to create themself a good amount of long-term trouble (bad reputation).

Lots of MMO developers write shitty server code, and honestly don’t know what the hell is going-on inside their own game-world (but fondly imagine that they do – and proudly boast to the press (in the vaguest terms) that they do). But the rule of thumb is that devs who don’t know … don’t even know what it is they ought to be claiming that they know. The specificity of Aventurine’s claims suggests that they do have the stats, and those stats are mostly correct.

(I say “mostly” because there is a bit of vagueness about what – precisely – the reviewer was doing in-game. That reeks of holes in their metrics/logging. They clearly know when the player was logged-in, and what they did/said in chat, and how many characters were created – but apparently not what they were doing in the client, e.g. how long did they spend in character creation? Implicitly: unlogged; unknown)

Whereas it’s quite likely that a non-knowledgeable journalist, accustomed to buggy games, would assume that they could safely claim “your server is buggy, those figures are wrong”.

Unfortunately for any such journalist, server logs are generally either correct, or absent entirely – there’s rarely any middle-ground. If he knew a bit more about MMO tech he might know this; very few journos (any of them?) know that much about the games they review, though.

So … based on nothing but casual observation and intimate knowledge of the tech issues (and several decades of reading game reviews…), I’m leaning in favour of Adventurine and against Ed Zelton. My guess (pure *guess*) is that he’s been caught out being either incompetent or perhaps a bit lazy as a reviewer, and he’s thought he could get away with blaming it on buggy code. From reading the review, I get the impression he wishes he were Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (from Zero Punctuation) – although he clearly isn’t funny enough – but he seems to like saying “it’s shit; you’re shit; you’re all shit; STFU” instead of reviewing the game, and seems to think that’s good enough. As an MMO player, my feeling was that the review was, well … useless – without even playing the game, there is so much more I would want to hear in a review, and so much of his wanky whining that I couldn’t care less about. As an MMO developer, it felt downright insulting, as if he’d made no effort at all to play the game as a game. Actually, it felt like he’d hardly played MMOs in his life, and didn’t really know what they were.

(NB, from the review: his apparent ignorance of some of the most important *and best-selling* RPG + MMORPG games of all time – the Ultima series – suggests that he really isn’t much good as a game reviewer. YMMV.)

Reviewing the reviewers

Up-front I’m going to point out that I don’t believe all MMO developers are currently capable of doing this – many people would be amazed to discover the true state of metrics collection in this industry – although *all* modern MMO developers ought to, and it’s not too hard to add-on later (add it to the list of “things MMO developers ought to do as standard practice, but many of them don’t do”). But it’s a general thing that I think we should move towards.

MMO developers (well, actually, the Operators, but that’s getting pedantic) are in an excellent position to help guard journalistic honesty, in a way that traditional game developers have never been able to. I would like to start seeing the following published by *every* MMO developer each time their game is reviewed:

  1. What level the account(s) started at
  2. What level the account(s) peaked at
  3. How many hours the reviewer spent at the lowest levels, levelling-up manually
  4. How many hours the reviewer spent at the highest levels
  5. What percentage of time was spent on each of the different primary character classes and factions
  6. Which areas of the game / aspects the reviewer actually engaged in (hours of combat, hours of crafting, hours of chat, etc)

…but, honestly, this isn’t so much about “journalistic honesty” (I used that phrase tongue-in-cheek above) as it is about starting a virtuous cycle of developers being more cognizant of what, actually, players “do” in their games – preferably *before* gold launch. In particular, if publishers (developers) started supplementing reviews with this info (as a matter of course), I think we’d see a sea-change in industry staff appreciating three key things about metrics:

  1. How little metrics they’re actually collecting compared to how much they think they’re collecting
  2. What metrics actually matter, and/or are useful?
  3. How players actually play the game; by extension: how fun is the game, really, and which parts suck horribly?

Does this work / matter?

At NCsoft, I got into the habit of asking prospective partners, hires/employees, and external studios which MMO’s they played (fair enough) … and how many characters they’d got to the level-cap with / what level their characters had reached. It started as an innocent question, but I quickly noticed how often it gave early warning of failures of honesty among individuals, and how much it presaged the problems they would have in the future.

The two worst problems were “complete ignorance of the MMO industry (either of pre-existing design practices, or tech practices)” and “personal self-deceit about what the person knows, and what they don’t know”. The latter tended to be a far worse problem: when someone is deceiving *themself*, it’s doubly hard to re-educate them, because first you have to get them to accept their own deception.

Of course, it turned out to lead to a lot of defensive responses and a spew of self-justification, which made us both uncomfortable. In those situations, it can easily lead to making assumptions that certain people’s opinions are “worth less” because, say, you know for a fact they’ve never really played an MMO – at least, not in the way that most of that MMO’s players would/will/do play it. I hate that tendency, since it’s part of a snobbishness that lies at the root of a lot of oyster-like, head-in-sand behaviour in our industry. On the other hand, it’s important and useful to know when someone’s ideas are random conjecture and when they’re based on fact (and very few people in a design meeting or publisher/developer meeting will honestly tell you their ideas are conjecture :)).

On the whole, though, it turned out to be a really useful line of questioning – even bearing in mind the additional (smaller) problems it created. There are obvious problems that come from the statistical supplementing of free-form prose game-reviews – but I’m confident that these will be outweighed by the advantages (and the problems that will be shrunk).

PS:

Despite the TLC of good friends, I’m still weak and sapped of all energy from my month of illness. I’m triaging like mad to deal with urgent issues, but there’s plenty of highly important stuff that’s been pending on me for a while that I still haven’t had the time + energy to deal with. So, if you’re still waiting … I’m sorry.

Categories
computer games GDC 2009

GDC09: Taking Spore seriously

Margaret Robertson

[ADAM: I missed the first quarter of the talk because I was at a long meeting, and missed the Q&A because I had to rush to another. Sigh]

Common Elements

  • No-one is using the game, they’re all using the creature-creator
  • Nearly all working with under-12 year-olds (7-12 years)
  • Teaching collaboratively because they can only afford one shared copy/laptop, so the whole class has to share
  • Exporting data digitally was key to making use of it – e.g. http://mashon.org/spore

Why are they not using the game?

  • no educational discounts from EA
  • too slow to play the game through and see the final effects of early choices [ADAM: it’s very non-casual – the game doesn’t allow you to jump in, doesn’t allow you to choose to play the bits you want, doesn’t let you speed up / fast-forward etc]
  • too complicated, user-interface keeps changing from game to game
  • prejudice against using “games” in the classrom
  • TTP (time-to-cock) is short enough that teachers are afraid of letting kids have that freedom in the classroom

Spore API

  • competition is still running [ADAM: also see my previous post on the API here]
  • it’s a laboratory, but not for the consumers: for *EA/Maxis* to learn how they could/should have made / should modify the game going forward [ADAM: it’s like an in-game-engine version of MMO forums where you get to see many things that players want, don’t want, how they are metagaming the intended game, etc]

What can crossover games learn?

  • subject-specific advocates are necessary pre-launch to avoid PR problems and knee-jerk reactionaryism from communities
  • teaching materials: pre-made save-games for teachers, etc
  • “free” saved not just teacher budgets, but also spared teachers from filing lots of paperwork to get sign-off for it. Free was overwhelmingly popular in education, but not as a philosophical thing, just a practical thing
  • lots of teachers couldn’t install the game on school PC’s because they’re not allowed admin rights [ADAM: this is amusing – Runescape learnt in 2002 that this made an orders-of-magnitude difference in success in schools. Ironically, Runescape was just a clone of an EA game (Ultima Online), but maybe EA still hasn’t learnt the lesson?]
  • it takes a long time to evaluate the outcomes and effects of using this in teaching. It’s going to take several years, not several months

What’s the most-requested feature from schools/educators?

  • easy to use, cross-game, machinima tools
Categories
computer games design GDC 2009 massively multiplayer

GDC09: Making of Little Big Planet (ups, downs, mistakes, successes)

Alex Evans, Media Molecule
Mark Healey, Media Molecule

Summary

The MM guys are funny as ever, although Alex’s “I made it myself on the way here” presentation tool would perhaps have been more usefully replaced with something like Presi (or whatever it’s called – the “interactive” presentation tool that is like Alex’s thing, but on steroids. Ask Jussi, he’s a fan of it).

The overall impression I got is: here’s another studio that has “by trial and error and cunning and talent” independently discovered something very similar to Scrum. They don’t do Scrum, and I’m sure a lot of people will scream at me for even saying it, but … I went through similar “find a process that worked for game development” (not carried so far, and on much smaller projects), and I recognize a lot of the lessons they learnt and things they incorporated in their processes and approaches. And from my experience, I think they’d find it relatively easy to switch over to Scrum, and that they’d get a lot of benefit from having a more polished version of their processes. Not to say that Scrum is universally better – there’d be losses too – but for people considering their own processes to use – or trying to “understand” Scrum – you’d do well to read this liveblog and try to internalize some of the lessons and attitudes. And then consider this and scrum as alternative to each other, but both near-relatives. And … if you are *not* MM, and don’t have all the details of precisely how they work, you’d probably find it much easier and more effective to adopt the well-documented Scrum instead.

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alternate reality games community computer games design GDC 2009 reputation systems

GDC09: Meaningful Social Reality Games

Austin Hill, Akoha

Summary

Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”.

I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time taking a very “Don’t worry, be crappy” approach to core game design: lots of classic mistakes made, obvious stuff. Is this a case of being brave enough to deliberately make the mistakes they understand (because they’re easy to fix later when you’re more successful – and it leaves you more spare time to focus on fixing/avoiding the mistakes you don’t understand yet) – or just naivety?

Interesting to hear the philosophy that fed into the creation of the game, the speaker’s personal journey and how it informed the design. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed how little actual content there was in this talk. It was perhaps 50% or more made up of a few long video clips. They were long and very little was pulled-out / emphasised from them. Most had very little information content per minute. Worst example was a mildly entertaining video of one of their players giving an intro to the product – but, frankly, so what? This was “new” and “interesting” 4 or 5 years ago, but by now it’s happened thousands of times over, and we’ve all seen it for many games. I didn’t understand why we were watching it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that – given he’s a VC – the speaker was pitching that video stuff to show “look, we have players who love our game”. That’s interesting and exciting to investors who have little or no immersion in the online world, but IMHO for game developers that’s just par for the course these days. No?

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computer games entrepreneurship games industry massively multiplayer recruiting startup advice

Culture, Reputation, and Running a Game Studio

What’s the biggest single challenge to a Studio Director? Or to the VP of Development / Studios who oversees a handful of publisher-owned studios?

Recruitment

In the games industry there are no raw materials of variable quality, there is no variety of base services to build upon; everything that distinguishes one company (and set of products) from another comes solely from the people they hire.

In the games industry there are no raw materials to pay for, there are no service charges. There are only salaries and employee-support costs.

Recruitment is where the studio heads find their hardest problems, and see their biggest successes/failures as the studio grows in size. Eventually, all their own experience and ability at design, marketing, sales, programming, art, etc become subsumed by their ability to attract, recruit, retain, lead, and motivate their people.

Recession

…is the best thing for new game studios to happen in the past 5 years. It’s achieved four things:

  1. Removed lots and lots of people from their comfortable jobs, by force
  2. …simultaneously…
  3. …indiscriminately w.r.t. quality of personnel…
  4. …and made even the supposedly “secure” games companies (EA, Microsoft, Sony) suddenly look as fragile and short-term as the riskiest of startups

The VCs have been blogging about the benefits to startups wrought by this recession, and I’ve put it to a couple of them now that, for the game industry, this one – recruitment – is the biggest by far, and each time met with straight agreement. Our industry is very like Management Consultancy: it’s driven by the people. Nothing else matters.

Culture

I’ve worked with a lot of experienced managers who’ve been adamant that “no-one leaves their job because of (too little) salary”. Also with slightly fewer who were convinced that “no-one accepts a job based on salary” (more often, that was rephrased with a rider to be: “no-one good accepts a job based on salary alone“).

In that case, why do people accept / leave a job?

“Culture” is the catch-all term that describes not just the direct environment which people experience each day in the office, but also the emotional and psychological experiences that they go through while there.

It describes how their colleagues think and act – and how those actions effect the individual. But it also describes how the “teams” within the organization think and act, which can often be very different from the people within them. You often see teams of smart people “acting dumb”, or teams of nice people act like assholes when taken collectively. Group think is powerful, very powerful.

But it’s hard, very hard, to really see the culture of a company until you’ve worked there for a couple of years, and in a couple of different divisions, and perhaps a dozen different departments. Which is not an option for most of us. You can work somewhere for just a few months and pick up the culture if you know what you’re doing and really work at it – but even that requires skill and dedication, and can only be done AFTER accepting a job offer.

(this is one of the reasons I posted my Manifesto for a Game Studio online – you can get a strong taste of the culture of my next startup, and decide if you want to work with us, without having to sacrifice a year of working there first)

Reputation

Game industry staff often worry about reputation. The companies (as represented by the senior management) themselves often don’t.

The former care how their organization is perceived, and assume everyone else does too. They assume that a “better reputation” will lead to “more sales”.

The latter have access to the actual sales figures, and have convinced themselves that this is a nice idea but simply not borne out by fact (in some cases this is true, in some it isn’t – but it’s much easier to look at the figures on paper and believe it’s true than to see the flaws in that logic).

But the truth is that it IS important, very important. It’s the external reflection of the internal culture. As such, it’s what most people use to make a decision about whether they want to work there.

Obviously, it varies. The older and more experienced you are, the more you come to use a company’s reputation as a barometer of its culture – and the more heavily you weight this in your decision about accepting a job. The younger, more ignorant staff generally haven’t been burnt by terrible culture, or haven’t yet learned what to look for / avoid in their next employer.

Back to the issue of Recruitment: the biggest successes/failures are going to be from the more experienced people you hire (and, remember – hiring a “bad” person into a senior position is not just a loss, it can easily cause negative productivity, by screwing up lots of other staff who were doing their jobs better before that person arrived and started interfering / roadblocking them / etc).

So … you probably should care about your reputation, somewhat in proportion to the size of your company.

Blizzard

Pre-WoW, Blizzard had an exceptional reputation, for a handful of common reasons (amongst others):

  1. Never shipped a game that wasn’t really good fun
  2. Frequently invented + defined large sub-genres with their games (Warcraft was one of the first RTS’s, Starcraft created the “truly strategic” RTS genre, Diablo re-invented the hack-and-slash RPG, etc)
  3. Publicly talked about “finishing” their games, and then deliberately deciding to spend another whole year (or similar) working on them before shipping, to make sure they were really polished
  4. All of their games were best-sellers – i.e. they didn’t just make cool stuff, they made cool stuff that the market appreciated and paid for, too

Now, I’m not so sure. If a recruiter called me tomorrow with an “amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to work at Blizzard, my first reaction would be hesitation: would I really want to work at the place that Blizzard has become?

While people have queued up to defend them, the history of their actions against Glider, and now this absurd crackdown on World of Warcraft add-on authors, have left me with a sour taste in the mouth.

In my opinion, using the law to beat over the head people who discover flaws in your basic business model / acumen is the last refuge of those who recognize their own incompetence but would rather not go to the effort of raising their own quality bar. Blizzard seems to be making a habit of it. That’s not encouraging. Ten million paying players for one MMO is great, but … the sales figures of their games were only ONE of those bullets I cited above about Blizzard’s reputation traditionally. Money buys a lot of forgiveness, but not infinitely so.

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amusing computer games design games design iphone

iPhoneSexGame … as an MMO?

I’m very tempted to make this:

http://gizmodo.com/5172615/iphone-os-30-will-turn-your-phone-into-a-revolutionary-sex-toy?skyline=true&s=x

…with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features.

Categories
computer games design games design marketing web 2.0

Web 2.0: Games, Creativity, UGC, and Socialising in Spore

Maxis (part of EA) has a great competition up right now – use the public APIs for the Spore creature / user account databases to make “an interesting widget or app”.

I had a quick look at the API’s – they’ve got the right idea technically (use REST, provide PHP versions, etc), although the set of queryable data is pretty mneh (they could easily have done a *lot* more interesting stuff too). I’m impressed that they’ve got that right, and they appear to have done a great job of presenting it nice and clearly. Most importantly, because the selection of data is lame, the challenge is there – in your face – to be very creative with how you’re going to use it. Go for it.

I had a look at some of the demo apps that had already been done, and they show great variety. If you’re trying to break into the games industry as an online designer, you should try your hand at using their content (and this is *legal*) to design something cool. You (probably; I haven’t checked the legals) won’t own exploitation rights – but it could make a great portfolio piece.

So I was rather saddened that it’s taken until now, and a random glance at a newsfeed item, for me to be aware of this. Which isn’t so bad, except … I was one of the first wave of purchasers of Spore, and I played it heavily, and checked out the Sporepedia for the few months after launch.

But they launched with most of the Sporepedia either “broken completely” or “not implemented yet”. Having paid $50+ for a full price game, to discover that even after several months the Sporepedia was “mostly not implemented yet, watch this space”, my reaction was : “I have better things to do with my life than wait for you to pull your finger out and do your job properly and give me what *I’ve already paid for*”.

And because of the mind-numbingly stupid DRM decisions by EA, I’ve point blank refused to install their viruses – without which, the system isn’t going to let me upload any of my own creatures / UGC. Which takes away a lot of the other cause of interest that would have rapidly lured me in.

Finally if it had been a “real” online game (why wasn’t it? No-one really seems to know. My theory is “fear and shame over The Sims Online catastrophe”) of course … my friends relationships in-game would have meant I’d have been pulled-in to this new cool stuff as soon as it went live.

So … it would seem that when it comes to boundary-pushing game design Maxis is managing to go 2 steps forwards and 3 steps back. That’s a real pity, because I suspect a lot of people who would love what Sporepedia was *described* as being (rather than the massive short-sell it actually was) have already given up, gone home, and don’t care any more. Only the people who don’t know about the good games out there (the non-gamers who happened to pick up a copy – of whic there are many many of course, thanks to the Sims juggernaut) are still around to enjoy it.

Am I being too pessimistic here? Certainly, not a single professional I know has shown any remaining awareness or interest in what Spore’s doing for the last 6 months. That’s pretty damning, in my eyes, for a game with such big sales and the Sims driving marketing and sales for it.

(PS: in case it’s not clear – as far as I’m aware, there’s still literally zero socialising in Spore. That’s the irony of the title here. The only socialising is 1995-era “the players are doing it anyway despite the developer+publisher going out of their way to stop them”)

Categories
community computer games design games design massively multiplayer network programming

Tabula Rasa: Going down in a burst of glory

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22528

“It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.”

(also … If that article is accurate, sad but unsurprising to hear that (apparently) the underpowered server tech for TR yet again managed to make a misery of gameplay, even at the very end. If that article is accurate, then well done to the ops for managing to get some instancing sorted out, but note to self: never let this happen with future twitch-based / FPS MMOs)

Categories
agile community computer games entrepreneurship games industry massively multiplayer

How can we make a Europe-wide MMO Publisher?

(4 posts in one day? Yeah! Too busy to be regular right now. GDC is on the way)

At the end of my commentary on the formation of NC West, I added almost as an afterthought a little comment about Europe and the MMO industry:

there’s a gaping hole in the MMO sphere. For someone bold enough to step into that hole, you could “own” Europe’s online gaming industry for the next decade.

Since I wrote that, surprisingly many people have commented on it both by email and in person, either along the lines of “look who else missed the opportunity” (Jagex, Ankama, Bigpoint, Gameforge), or along the lines of “yeah!” (count me in) … or both.

So, I wonder: what *would* it take, right now? If you have ideas, post them here. I’ll be at GDC in 3 weeks time, and I’d be more than happy to pitch this as a credible plan, if you come up with a comprhensive-enough plan. It’s a lot more expensive than any of my own humble plans, but in many ways I find it a lot easier to justify, financially. And I’m not even trying (it’s just a game for me right now, idly imagining what I’d do, if I were Jagex, or Ankama, or Gameforge, etc).

Wishlist time. Over to you, Dear Readers…

Categories
computer games games design games industry

Jagex: Runescape is not Freemium / Free-to-play,pay-for-stuff

This is IMHO a very important point. I don’t normally tell people this – I’m quite happy for them to go around misunderstanding RS, Club Penguin, HH, et al and screwing up instead of providing credible competition for me :). But since the new CEO has just said it:

“RuneScape is different from all other MMOs in that the free game has an epic amount of content (we’d estimate over 2,000 hours worth to get all your skills up to 99 and complete all the quests) and isn’t merely a demo for the members’ version. If anything, we see the members’ version as an expansion pack for those that really love the game”

If you’re citing Runescape *anywhere* in your design, development, funding, or revenue models (or even in your secret dreams of success), you’d do well not to miss this distinction of what the RS free version is. Remember this: it was designed and built as a free game, not as freemium game. The subscriptions were never part of the plan, and the extra content for them was added on as an afterthought. If you want to go head to head with RS with your own “free” content, that’s a high bar you have to hit.

Speaking of the new CEO, Nicholas Lovell has some thoughts on what happens when you have a CTO and and a CTO run an MMO company together.

Categories
amusing computer games design games design

Tabula Rasa: A Plot Summary

Ironically enough, from the LotRO forums:

“You know the only analogue I can come up for this is to imagine a WWII FPS where the opening cinematic tells you that the Nazis have destroyed Great Britain with a giant laser and you’re one of the few English to escape via a magic portal to Russia at Stone Henge which was planted by ancient mystics from China. However the rest of the game takes place in relatively normal WWII FPS style while the Nazis throw paltry attacks into the steppes, and yet most of the people you meet are also British and no one seems to care that Jolly Ol’ England is smouldering black glass. Occasionally you stumble across more ancient Stone Henges to learn Mandarin to gain super powers. The Nazi country-destorying laser is never brought up.”

ROFLMAO. And … excellent plot-summary there.

(remembering that I did actually *like* TR. But the OP has a point)

Categories
alternate reality games computer games entrepreneurship

The Secret of Viral Marketing

The secret of Viral Marketing (VM) is that it’s all about popularity. Which is to say … sooner or later, it’s all about sex.

When we made Perplex City, the Alternate Reality Game, I learnt a lot of basics about VM just from going out there and trying so much new stuff on a week-to-week basis. It was a small startup, so (at least at first) everyone got involved in everything, and you got to see the things that crashed and burned in as much detail as the ones that shone like gold (this was before the company grew enough that people started covering-up the failures).

Continue reading “The Secret of Viral Marketing”
Categories
computer games design dev-process games design games industry massively multiplayer

We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa?

In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?

Continue reading “We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa?”
Categories
computer games education games industry massively multiplayer

Online Games cause Students to drop out of US Universities. Maybe.

In the best tradition of ignoring 100 years of the Scientific Method and the concept of a Control Group, the FCC Commissioner has been talking about American students dropping out because of computer games, MMOs especially.

Continue reading “Online Games cause Students to drop out of US Universities. Maybe.”
Categories
computer games games industry massively multiplayer

Oh, OK, so … *another* reason Age of Conan failed…

…could be that the “beat your staff with a stick, and if that doesn’t work … beat them harder” style of management was de rigeur for the Norwegian games industry:

AoC, in the words of an (alleged? ex?) employee:

the problem with Age of conan is that the game was in “crunch” for almost 3 years.

…who had *great fun* working for a company called Funcom:

then i was sick for a week, after having worked so intensely. i’ve never been that sick before, says “theodor”.

after having researched if the workers rights are after the work environment laws, and talked to his colleagues about this, he was asked in by the management. there he got a lucrative quitter-package if he stopped working the same day, which he agreed to.

…and Anarchy Online:

Keskin tells that he chose to leave Funcom because he was treated very badly by person in management. as he was being laid off, he claims that lies were spread about him from the management to his earlier co-workers.

i worked on anarchy online, and played that game for several years. it was a joy to work on the game, but if you ask questions, either about what they say to the public, or about something ethical– there’s a lot of strange things going on there– they turn around very quickly.
even if the whole thing is about if you want to do improve projects you’re working on, keskin says.

Of course, it could all be a big misunderstanding (mistranslation), since I don’t speak Norwegian, and I have no idea where any of my Norwegian friends are these days to ask for a second opinion on the translation (PS: Bjorn, if you ever read this blog, get in touch :)).

Categories
computer games entrepreneurship games industry jussi vc deals europe massively multiplayer

More than 1 billion people play online games in 2008

Someone asked me:

How many people play online games globally in 2008?

A simple answer

…and with a quick mental calculation I estimated 1 billion *unique registered accounts*. (I’ve been tracking and calculating this stuff a lot recently). That wasn’t good enough – they wanted something to put in a press release, so they wanted a methodology and verifiable data.

So, I went and did the calculations properly, and found:

There are approximately 1.5 billion unique registered accounts (virtual players) of online games around the world in 2008.

They still needed to see the methodology and the figures, of course … here goes!

Some … wrong … answers

Someone at Techcrunch claimed last year that “217 Million People Play Online Games”, by misusing the research that they were referring to. You only have to follow the link to the *press release* of the actual research to see how wrong that is.

The research merely claimed that 217 million people visit a selection of American and European websites that have content that talks about online games, and which *in some cases* actually have some web-games on their site.

The majority of online games were not included in the research. The figure isn’t particularly useful on its own.

A simple question?

The first thing to realise is that there’s no sensible way of answering the question literally. A couple of years ago, Raph Koster did an updated version of the explanation for this problem (it needs updating again by now to take account of how the industry has continued to evolve since he wrote that last version). If you haven’t read it, and want to understand the details of why people argue this stuff endlessly, go have a quick look at his post.

But there is a sensible way we can re-phrase the question to become one that we CAN answer:

How many unique virtual identities are there that are playing online games this month?

Virtual Identity … what? No, that’s not what I wanted to know about

Actually, maybe it *is* what you wanted to know about.

In the real world, we never actually count people for anything (except if we’re physically smuggling them past Border Control, I guess); instead, we count Identities: verifiably unique records that each correspond to no more than one person.

In the real world, one ID does not equal one physical person, even though it is “approximately” that way (bear in mind that even governments have so far proved incapable of legislating + enforcing that concept, despite having tried for the last few thousand years).

In the online world, the concept of Identity is abstracted. This is all the fault of “computers” and especially “programmers” and “database vendors”, who couldn’t cope with the amount of info required to fully represent a single Identity (and as time went on many realised that they did not want to). They cheated. And so, from the earliest days of the internet (and before – back in the days of BBS’s), everyone has had multiple ID’s.

On average, each of you reading this probably has something like 200-300 separate online identities. On average, each of you reading this probably BELIEVES you have something like 2-3 separate online identities. Factor of 100 difference (have fun counting them…).

Those virtual identities are the lifeblood of online services. They are countable, they are serviceable – and they are uniquely and individually chargeable (even when several of these identities may represent just one real-world human: if the identities are separate, then you can charge multiple times, and many people really do willingly pay several times over!)

Many of those identities are “inactive”, and unlike people, the corpses of Virtual Identities do not naturally rot and disappear, they live forever – and can be brought back to life at any moment by the owners. They’re all real – they are still verifiably there – so for now we’re going to count all of them.

(personally I prefer counting “active identities within the past month”, but more on that in a later post. Counting in billions is fun for now…)

How many virtual identities play online games?

Start with the big guns, going from their own official announcements.

Individual games: 400m

Kart Rider = 160 million
Habbo Hotel = 100 million
Neopets = 65 million
Maple Story = 57 million
Club Penguin = 20 million
Runescape = 10 million

+ others I didn’t bother looking up

Subtotal: 412m

Publishers who declare registered directly: 1200m (or 800m)

Then add in the big publishers, going from their official announcements

9You = 120m
Acclaim = 3m
Bigpoint = 30m
CDC Games = 140m
CJ Internet = 23m
Disney = 12m
Gameforge = 60m
Gamania = 10m
GigaMedia = 9m
Gpotato = 2m
HanbitSoft = 8m
K2 Network = 16m
Mattel = 11m
Moliyo = 7m
NCsoft = 2m
NeoWiz = 7.5m
Shanda = 700m (*)

(*) (note: using the active and paying ratios below, this would be approx 150m or 300m, which is such a huge difference (and stands out as massively anomalous compared to industry standard – even for other Chinese operators) that I’m going to treat it with extreme suspicion and go with 300m instead)

Subtotal: 1158m (or approx 800m if we downgrade Shanda by 400m)

Publishers who declare active or paying: 100m

Then add in the big publishers who declare “active” or “paying” accounts instead of “registered”:

As well as just general industry knowledge on this stuff, I have official figures from half a dozen publishers that let me calculate Registered:active or Registered:Paying ratios, so from averaging those I get conservative multipliers of approx:

Registered / Active = 4
Registered / Paying = 40

Gaia = 24m (6m active)
Giant Interactive = 68m (1.7m paying)
NetDragon = 14m (3.5m active)

Subtotal: 106m

Facebook + Web gaming = 200m

Then look at the big Facebook games-publishers, and the online gaming sites from the comScore study:

Yahoo Games = 53m
MSN Games = 40m
Miniclip = 30m
EA Online (inc. POGO ?) = 21m
SGN = 40m
Zynga = 55m
…
Others (from comScore report) = 78m

Subtotal: 173m

Final tally

There are approximately 1.5 billion registered identities in online games in 2008

How many “real people” is that? Well, as noted above, the percent of registered accounts that are active is around 25%, so I would guesstimate (really really rough figures now!):

There are approximately 375 million people in the world who play online games.

The theoretical current maximum playerbase for a subscription MMO would be somewhere in between those two figures (plenty of people pay for 2, 3 – or as many as 10 – accounts, as Raph noted).

The theoretical current maximum playerbase for an F2P game would be the bigger of the two figures, obviously.

WoW (World of Warcraft) still has a long way to go, people…

Exclusions – what did I miss?

There are plenty of operators that are not counted in the above which run games in countries not often associated with online gaming (e.g. Vietnam, Russia, etc) – and yet their figures are significant (I’ve been tracking them for a while and they’re growing very fast).

I didn’t bother including them because even in aggregate right now they probably wouldn’t be able to shift that 1.5b figure any higher.

There are also some who are using a combined service only part of which is games, e.g.

Tencent = 350m users of the IM client which integrates many online games

…which I haven’t included at all. Feel free to take my headline figure and add that on! (and add back in the 400m accounts from Shanda that I discounted / didn’t believe)

Categories
computer games dev-process mmo signup processes Web 0.1

Web 0.1: How NOT to run an open beta stress-test

1. Ask people to join the closed beta 6 months before the open beta happens

http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117

Dinowaurs Beta Testers Wanted

We’re now inviting Kongregate members to sign up to test the Dinowaurs Beta. If you don’t know what Dinowaurs is, go here for more info: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/3350.
Simply pop in to this thread and say that you want in and I’ll put you on the list for the test. Please, no conversations, as it makes it more difficult to pull all the names out.
We’d like to thank everyone who helped us test the alpha! Anyone who signed up for the alpha in the previous thread will be first in line, so no need to sign up again if you already did in the alpha thread.
Thanks, everyone!

(posted may 1st 2008)

2. When you start an open beta, don’t tell players they’re accepted until 2 days before the beta happens

Hello!

Thank you for volunteering to test Dinowaurs, an upcoming game on Kongregate. As of this email, everyone who volunteered to help test Dinowaurs will now get a chance to do so. We’re very grateful for all your help!

For those of you who have tested before, this is a different request than usual, and for all you new faces, welcome! What we need to do is load test the server – that is get as many feet stomping on it as possible and see if it crashes! Because of that, we’re going to try to stuff as many testers into the game at one time as possible. For this test, Dinowaurs will only be open on Monday, November 17 from 12 noon-2pm Pacific Time (All you non West-Coasters, take notice of the time!)

So we hope to see all 4000 of you Dinowaurs beta testers in here and playing the game on Monday! Don’t be late – our doors will close tight at 2pm.

Thanks again!

Kongregate and Intuition

3. Make it last 2 hours only

(Fair enough, normal practice for stress tests, although it’s usually a good idea to let people in a few days in advance to ensure that they have working clients etc (less of an issue for a web game like this, but still probably worth doing).)

4. Don’t tell anyone the secret link to the beta

Read that email again. Do you see the magic URL? No? That’s because THEY FORGOT TO INCLUDE IT.

Some googling turns up various people asking for it, and some friendly Kong players answering with the URL here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/flamingbait/dinowaurs

EDIT: they just sent another email which remembered to include the link.

Hello!

Today’s the day! At 12 noon Pacific Time (3pm Eastern), the doors to the Dinowaurs Beta on Kongregate will be flung open!

At that time you should make sure you’re signed in to Kongregate and go here to test: http://www.kongregate.com/games/intuition/dinowaurs-beta_preview

Make sure you’re on time! We will be closing doors promptly at 2pm (PST). If during gameplay you encounter any bugs, please click on the little bug icon at the top right of chat and fill out a bug report. The more actual bugs you find, the better the game will be!

We really want to thank all you beta testers. We really appreciate all your help!

Kongregate and Intuition

Could be they intended this all along. Given that the beta starts less than an hour after that email was sent out, I doubt it :).