Picture credit: Stevyn Colgan
Disney purchased Club Penguin ($350 million), Playdom ($763.2 million) and once you throw in Tapulous (makers of Iphone games) that is more than just a passing interest in social free to play and mobile games. Robert Iger (CEO Disney) said social games are a “way to reach consumers in a fragmented media landscape”. He has also gone on record as saying, “Social networks are real, here to stay”. Realtime Worlds, creators of the newly released All Points Bulletin (APB), have already begun “Major layoffs” and rumors of APB being put up for sale are spreading around the internet like wildfire. Earth Eternal, even though free to play, is closing . We could go on but eventually we would run out of bandwidth.
Suffice it to say, that no matter how one may feel about social games, and free 2 play games the handwriting is on the wall. Yes, all you have to do is point in the direction of Star Wars: The Old Republic by Mythic/Bioware and say MMOs aren’t going anywhere – we hope you are right. Still, we will admit that the thought of any more triple-A mmos failing gives us a serious case of the “willies”. This is why we get more than just a bit jumpy when a developer comes along with “We do not want to build the same mmo that everyone else is building… it’s your story, You affect things around you in a very permanent way.” But not because we want ArenaNet to fail – we want them to succeed.
All this is also why when J. Todd Coleman, VP and creative director KingsIsle, developers of Wizard 101 speaks we made sure we listened – especially when he spoke about social games and their affect on his free to play mmo.
Wizard 101, which our own Julie will admit to playing, is not knocking at the door of the Blizzard gorilla – they have opened it and gone inside. Each game has about the same player base. But if you ask J.T.Coleman how many of their players are paying players you will find that even he isn’t allowed to divulge that information. What he did tell Gamasutra was this:
“I can’t give a specific percentage; it’s one of the things I’m not allowed to say. But I can say that a significant portion of our players have been on both sides of the fence. We see ourselves at a really interesting spot, from a market standpoint. The Facebook social media games are hitting a very large market, but the games tend to be very shallow; there is not a lot of content, not a lot of depth and few hours of gameplay. “ – J. Todd Coleman
You and I may look at WoW and see a mass market; but he sees something different altogether.
“And on the other side, you’ve got the subscription hardcore games like World of Warcraft that don’t really have a mass market; they’ve got a huge market, but it’s primarily still hardcore gamers. We sit in between those two and we offer the content and the depth of gameplay and the sophistication that you would see more typically out of a WoW style game but we’re hitting the casual mass market. “ - J. Todd Coleman
What was even more interesting was what he had to say about the big triple A mmos going to free to play.
“At a high level, I agree with him that it is a good thing; one thing I like about it is it levels the playing field to some degree. We’re a relatively small company that no one had ever heard of before, and we are out competing with big organizations like Sony and Microsoft who have tremendous reach, resources, and presence from a PR standpoint. To know that we can go up against guys like that and come out on top is pretty cool. The free-to-play model is a large reason for that, because it breaks those traditional lines of distribution down. “- J. Todd Coleman
Mr. Coleman talks about the days of worrying about “getting on the shelves” being a thing of the past. Digital downloads are, or course, firmly entrenched in the market place. When Paul Barnett was a guest on our show he spoke of his son being perplexed why his father would by anything without buying it online.
Perhaps Disney feels that social games will allow them to dive into a lake of cash (how else will they earn sufficient return to justify over a billion dollars) – It doesn’t matter to us. You can tell us that like King Belshazzar, we are refusing to see the writing on the wall as the doom of mmos. No matter how much the free to play/pay to play hybrids may irritate us, we think they may be what saves the industry…
SO LONG AS THEY ARE DONE RIGHT
…And being done right means taking actions like tearing down the Great Wall of SOE and letting players co-mingle.
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather
[posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]