“Their reasoning made sense, until Richard Garriott announced he was going to be making an Online Poker Game. Geez oh man, the last time I saw a career switch that crazy, Michael Jordan was trying to snag fly balls out in center field.” – Vercarrion

Not so open arms

Just this morning we received a lengthy missive by a reader (and perhaps listener) who goes by the name Vercarrion. You can read the entire letter here which was posted as a response to our article One Big Bandwagon. Vercarrion, it seems, has been “huffing and puffing like a grampus” (a line from the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead), distraught over the ever growing spate of social games.  Some of the issues that are raised by this distraught, old school gamer, are interesting in themselves, revealing much about those among us who are not quite happy about this new direction the industry seems to be taking.

“Is it no longer just about making great games? Isn’t that supposed to be what its all about? I realize traditional MMOs take boat loads of money and countless hours to make, but at the end of the day, wouldn’t Richard Garriott be better off designing a rich world like Ultima Online than rehashing Ultimate Poker? Does he really believe this is the exciting future he was destined for?  Along those lines, do you think Disney makes this genre viable in the long term? If so, how would it impact your passion and/or interest for the genre?” – Vercarrion

Anti-social butterfly

Like it, love it or hate it, the social game fad seems to have become a tsunami gaining strength as it heads up the beach toward what developers and publishers alike seem to feel are the waiting arms (and wallets) of adoring customers. Ironically, as anyone knows who has played both MMOs and Facebook games, saying Facebook games are “social” makes as much sense as claiming a prisoner in solitary confinement has an active social life because he sees a pair of hands slide his meal to him through a slot in bottom of the door three times a day.  Play Mafia Wars and the only contact you have with other players is a perusal of the aftermath of an attack by another player done when you log back on. There is also the possibility that Facebook fans consider the avalanche of “gifts” from other players, often for games they don’t play, a form of socialization.  The comparison that strikes me is that this would be like looking forward to dealing with the spam that inundates our website on an hourly basis. Color me callous if you will, but this doesn’t exactly strike me as being the epitome of all that goes in to the making of a social butterfly.

Work Hard – Strike Oil

“No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or ‘get rich’ in business by being a conformist.” – J. Paul Getty

Two quotes spring to mind at this point. The first is by J. Paul Getty, famous oil billionaire of days gone by (back before companies with initials like B.P. started destroying the fishing industry and the environment wholesale). The bandwagon may be big enough to hold the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with plenty of room to spare, but that doesn’t mean that it’s headed in the right direction.  The song that starts playing in my mind at times like these is Smuggler’s Blues, by Glen Frey…
“There’s lots of shady characters, lots of dirty deals. Every name’s an alias in case somebody squeals. It’s the lure of easy money; it’s got a very strong appeal.” – Smuggler’s Blues, by Glen Frey

One of the standard plot devices in literature (and usually a trite one) is the character with a get rich scheme. Ralph Kramden was in constant pursuit of the easy dollar on the Honeymooners , Oscar from Shark Tales  announces his scheme when he exclaims “bottled water” (which apparently fish aren’t short on). Real world equivalents exist of course (I know at least one such individual) – but they would not persist unless every now and then someone, somewhere really was in the right place at just the right time.  J. Paul Getty offered this advice for success…

“Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.” – J. Paul Getty

Open the newspaper (or news feed) on any day and you will find a story of someone who actually has caught the carrot they were chasing after, causing everyone else to run all the faster. It may simply be that those making the decisions, the people with their fingers on the dollars and their ass on the line, don’t want to be left behind. Such is the fear represented by Richard Garriott’s quote…“either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” It might be tempting to see Richard Garriott, one of the founders of the mmo industry, as being a Michael Jordan trying to break into break into baseball.  Many people, myself included, would love to see what this man could come up with if one of the determinants of success wasn’t being able to pay the bills, while ensuring that the ink used for the bottom line is black and not red.  The last time out that Mr. Garriott took a try at the brass ring was Tabula Rasa and that didn’t turn out so well.

The different drummer

At this point I haven’t checked the news feeds so I don’t know if Disney’s deal with Playdom has gone through.  Whether it has or hasn’t, it is still cause to cry “viva la difference” – and what a difference it is.  While I am indeed a fan of the mighty mouse, he isn’t necessarily King Midas. But whether the magic mouse touch turns into gold or camel dung doesn’t matter.  Media moguls can tell me what they feel I should be enjoying all they want but that doesn’t make it matter. But there are plenty of people to whom it does matter.   By way of example, to me techno music has its place on the dance floor or the back beat of a movie scene – but that’s it.  If the music industry suddenly refuses to produce anything but techno music that doesn’t mean I have to delete all my ZZtop, Aerosmith and Rolling Stones mp3 files. Call it marching to a different drummer but I endorse what I enjoy, and until the media moguls are paying my bills it doesn’t matter what they think.

Money to burn

We have all seen players (usually those who break land speed records reaching level caps) come crashing on the shores of any new game like a mighty tsunami – only to leave the developer and publishers high and dry a month or two later.  And while we can see a comparison to the race between the tortoise and the hare in the success of any mmo, with social games there is another factor involved.  In fact Scott Hartsman talked about this issue back on show 42 .  The difference between the way the media moguls at Disney  have chosen to get involved in social gaming and long time industry insiders like Richard Garriott and Brad McQuaid is found in one word…

Overhead.

If Mr. McQuaid and Mr. Hartsman develop a social game and find it isn’t popular, the development cost will be so low that it won’t matter.  But at this point both Playdom and the mighty Disney mouse have invested millions. What is worse, they are dealing in a product that is the pinnacle of luxury items.  Think of it this way – free to play/social games are so prevalent that they are like cow patties; you can’t walk through the pasture without hitting one. Publishers of social games are counting on the willingness of players (or parents of players) to spend real dollars for virtual dollars. In the case of Disney that pile of dollars would have to scrape the sky before the ink on the bottom line goes into the black.

 As the old adage goes, the bigger they are, the harder the fall and at this point the Disney has a long, long way to fall when they hit the ground – I can only assume they have money to burn.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Ps. Hi to Vercarrion from everyone at the NPNM team

[posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]

One BIG bandwagon

Social games (read Facebook applications if you must ) are one of those aspects of life of which no one seems to have no opinion.  Many in the mmo community, like myself, would rather crawl a mile over broken glass and hot coals than spend any appreciable time with them.  When Scott Hartsman was on the No Prisoners, No Mercy s Show we were interested… then we let it pass like thoughts of last week’s dinner.   When Richard Garriott announced his Portalarium Company with the umpteenth iteration of virtual poker many of us rolled our eyes.  When Brad McQuaid announced his intention to start down the same path we were all sure he was simply hopping on the Zynga Bandwagon as it faded into the distance.  Now we here at NPNM find ourselves taking another good hard look at the words of Richard Garriott we quoted in our article And I shall call it the wheel .

Recently Steve Jobs announced a future bereft of PCs and cast upon a sea of mobile applications (and he is in a position to “make it so”) – and the Wall Street Journal took him seriously.

“So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represent the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” – Richard Garriott

While I was pondering those words, and the fact that even one of my favorite pastimes, The Sims, has gone mobile, word crossed our news feed, via Techcrunch  that Disney is set to acquire Playdom.

Playdom has been acquiring social gaming developers like they were giving them away free  -Metaplace,  Green Patch and Trippert labs , Three Melons , Acclaim, Hive7.com , and  Offbeat Creations . Now Playdom is on the verge of being acquired by The Walt Disney Company who in turn owns, Miramax Films, ABC, DiC entertainment, Fox, Saban Entertainment, Pixar Animation, New Horizon Interactive, Marvel Entertainment, ESPN, Tapulous, and Club Penguin.

My initial hope was that someone at Playdom knew a guy who knows a guy with lots of money who really, really hates Facebook games and wants to corner the market in order to rid the world of these canker sores on the butt of the universe.  In a move that epitomizes the concept of “there is always a bigger fish”, the mighty mouse is set to become The Godfather of Facebook games.  And while the ownership of Facebook is in dispute in the New York State Supreme Court, the number of users aren’t – that figure just hit 500 million users.  So if all these people are indeed “hopping on the band wagon” that is one hell of a big bandwagon. And now we know who will be driving that wagon.  None other than the mouse that roared, that mighty Disney Marvel who is set to make Playdom an offer they can’t refuse.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that anyone here at No Prisoners, No Mercy has to be happy with the prevalence of social games that are usually so sickly sweet that playing one game is enough to give a glucose overload to population of a major city.  Yes, we have played them (so we know whereof we speak) but not of our own accord. In my case my Facebook page (long since abandoned) was shanghaied by a friend who introduced me to The Sims and Farmville.  I owe her a debt for the former, and I still speak to her despite the latter.

So it seems that Facebook games are, sadly, here to stay – I guess I need to find a new hobby.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

[posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]

By now most everyone has seen the youthful face of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the co-founders of Facebook – the host of those products with names like Mafia Wars and Farmville.  Some people will tell you they love them. Others will claim that they inundate us all with mediocrity and mass marketing.  If you ask Richard Garriott, he will tell you that such productsd are the future. Here’s a quote from our earlier article “And I shall call it the wheel”:

“So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represent the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” – Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott thinks such is the wave of the future and has launched his company Portalarium to prove it.  If you ask Brad McQuaid he will no doubt agree with Mr. Garriott.  In fact Playdom has been buying up Facebook developers like they are intent on cornering the market and the Securities Exchange Commission said they have until tomorrow to do it.  Not that long ago that we wrote an article entitled The Developers are Circling…

… now it seems that they may be circling in the wrong place.

At least that seems to be the case based on an article carried by Reuters this morning.  How many people say to themselves “I wish I had paid more attention to that Jobs kid when he was working out of his garage”.  Well it seems that Mr. Paul Ceglia claims that he signed a contract with the co-founder of Facebook in 2003 to develop the website that became Facebook.  Reuters is reporting this morning that the terms of the contract entitled Ceglia to a “$1,000 fee and a 50 percent stake in the product” with “an additional 1 percent interest in the business, per day, until the website was completed” – which a law suite filed by Paul Ceglia said was February 4, 2004. Facebook says the lawsuit is “frivolous” (of course). Frivoulous or not, t Judge Thomas Brown of The Supreme Court of New York’s Allegany County has issued an order restricting the transfer of Facebook assets.

Time will tell whether the entire matter holds water or stinks like last week’s fish.  In the mean time, there is at least a remote possibility that developers could be circling in the wrong place.

One of the articles that recently caught my attention was the new one over at Gamasutra featuring none other than Richard  Garriottt .  However it is not the fact that Richard Garriott and his company Portalarium are getting into social gaming (i.e. Facebook Applications) that I thought was interesting.  Rather it was some of the comments he made about the subject:

“So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represent the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” – Richard Garriott

“most dialogue in most games are you’re told to go to location A, you might find some monsters on the way to location A, but there’s nothing relevant story-wise to your growth as an individual is going to happen on your way to location A, and when you get to location A, there’s generally one real outcome, which is go to location B.

And I don’t care how good a storyteller you are, that’s never going to be very interesting. You’re never going to feel like you’ve really participated in a truly meaningful way unless you discover things on the journey from A to B, and also when you do get to A and meet that person and have dialogue with, some form of discourse with, that it again has some outcome that for you will be unexpected, as often is not.” – Richard Garriott

Mind you I will always be a big Richard Garriott fan, even if he never returns our messages.  Still, the first thing I ask myself is whether or not Mr. Garriott is correct in his assumption that game developers and publishers who don’t involve themselves and their companies in social gaming will quickly be left behind. After all, the last time I bought off on his assumptions concerning the future of the gaming industry he was calling Blizzard’s “system of inventory management” the “harbinger of failure”. Still, there is a lot to be said for what he says about adding meaning to gaming development beyond simply “go from point a to b and kill monster c”.   In fact right now “state of the art” social games aren’t even that involving.

But what if developers where to add in a good story. What if there were more to social games than “do you want to click button a or b” and wait for a mathmatical formula to tell you if you are the new mafia don, or if your potatoe  crop will be ready for harvesting now or five minutes from now? What if a social game actually told a story? What if I could log on to facebook, create a character and become part of an epic story arch that would grab my imagination? Perhaps the decisions I made wouldn’t simply go from point a to point b but instead branch out to myriad outcomes?

Sounds great doesn’t it?

Would you spend a few bucks to play such a game? I know I would. But wait. I seem to have heard about that sort of game before. What was it called?  Oh yes, it was called…

Multi-User Dungeon

…and Dr. Richard Bartle pioneered it along with Roy Trubshaw.  Apply the same principles as M.U.D. to a facebook application? Perhaps that is a new and inovative idea. Grandma, on the other hand, would have simply said “the more things change the more they remain the same.” Whatever the outcome, and whatever the direction the gaming industry takes, while social gaming may be a new trend, I seriously doubt that any publisher who choses not to partake will consider themselves “left behind.” Time will tell. One thing is for sure, however.  The more choices gamers have, the better they have it.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

(posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster)

It’s like blood in the water.  People with initials after their name like CFO and CEO can hone in on it across vast expanses of space and time like a great white shark senses a dying fish.  What is it? Some call it things like “net profit before depreciation”. Whatever you call it, the people who invest in games call it…

The bottom line

Unlike sharks, investors don’t like dying fish. No, they like that bright shining fish that can be spotted before anyone else does. But once the fish is spotted the sharks start circling – and the particular bright shining fish that game developers and publishers alike seem to be circling these days are “social games”.   Scott Hartsman talked about them on on shows 41 and 42 but he called them “accessible games.” No one would be foolish enough to try and take on companies with names like Activision or Blizzard and expect to come out on top.  Oh a few have tried it…tried and where unsuccessful . This is not the case, however, with some of the biggest names in social game development.  Zynga may indeed be the next 800 pound gorilla of social gaming, but they are certainly not unassailable.  In fact they were sued for copyright violation just recently as well as advertising practices.  Still, they are even big enough to catch the attention of Time Magazine .  And the bigger they get, the more they grab the attention of other developers.

Social games where one of the trends discussed at this year’s Game developers Conference, and the subject of Gareth Davis’ (Facebook’s Platform manager) key note speech.  There is no denying that games with names like Farmville, Mob Wars, and Mafia Wars (all of which I have played) can turn a profit, but there are still no indications whether or not that will be a fast buck or something with staying power.   No matter how it turns out, there are always those who look at any social trend from the outside and shake their heads with dismay. Back in the 1960s people with names like “Buddy Holly” and “Elvis Presley” where people that then conservative elements of society would consider “radical”; now they are the kind of guys you would take home to mom and dad.  While those of us who owe our gaming allegiance to console games or online games may consider social games as little more than mindless button pushing, there is no doubt that  such games attract a massive audience.

Bad RPG?

As we always do, this last Easter we had some friends over for dinner, and with them came a one year old child.  As soon as our Boston Terrier took note of the youngster she started her ear shattering “get out of my territory” bark.  Our guard dog, on the other hand, could care less about the child. We had welcomed all the visitors into the house, and as far as he was concerned they all belonged there.  We pondered the situation for awhile then it dawned on us that out faithful terrier had never seen a baby before, and considered the child to be competition – another dog.  After all, she had seen the little tyke crawl around on all fours.  In our dog’s mind, apparently, even if someone had shaved all the fur off this strange dog, with the exception of a small spot on top of his head, he was still a dog – albeit a bit of a funny looking one.  Upon closer inspection our small Boston examined this new dog in her territory and noted that it had the flattest muzzle she had ever seen. Yes, she seemed to decide, this house guest made a lousy dog.  It took awhile before our terrier realized that while the one year old newcomer made a lousy dog he made a fantastic one year old little boy.

And so it is with social games – while they make lousy role playing games (that may change but more on that later) but they are great at being what they are…

Whatever that is

See you online,

The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team

Are these the online games in our future?

Tommorow’s article today – my fingers are itching to talk about this one, so here is tommorow’s article today:

EA just announced another round of lay offs, and Mythic  sadly is feeling part of the bite of the axe (we hope it isn’t really true) Sort of Ironic as “Broken Toys” (one of our “must read” sites) pointed out considering they just spent $300 million for a Facebook game developer. The particular pause that this gives me thought for is about accessible games – something we discussed with Scott Hartsman on an earlier No Prisoners, No Mercy show.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of thousands, I will use a game that I used to play as an example: Eve Online. 

Anyone who has ever played Eve Online, or attempted to, knows that it has a steep learning curve. So steep, in fact, that generally it requires a requires a team of Sherpa guides to reach the summit (read “master the game”). Now, in the last year or so the good folks at CCP have made strides in this area.  Still, this is the same game that merited hiring a full fledged economist to study it’s virtual economy.  Without any solid knowledge about subscriber numbers, it is at least easy to say the game is successful. It is either a case of a steady stream of new customers replacing the old ones, or keeping their core market happy. If we consider the learning curve with where EA seems to be putting their dollars these days a key word comes to mind…

“Accessibility”

Accessible games are an issue we discussed with Scott Hartsman on a previous No Prisoners No Mercy show. One such application is Farmville (one of those Facebook applications like Mafia Wars). Recently they hit the 60 million users mark. Obviously this doesn’t all translate into cold hard cash, but the investment needed to create such games is (at least as far as Mr. Hartsman indicated) negligible.  Now obviously we aren’t all interested in pretty ponies, virtual farms, or bunnies dancing around with toilet paper (the last being a Rod Serling quote). Still, it seems that the growth market lays more with the accessible games.

All things considered, it leaves me wondering  about games that are developed with such a steep learning curve, and the gamers that play them (considering I was one of them). Why develop or play a game with such a steep learning curve over something that takes the middle road, such as an Everquest or World of Warcraft?  Is it the thrill of playing a game where you can lose everything in a moment? Is it the virtual equivalent of an adrenalin junky? Perhaps instead it is the idea of putting up with the drudgery of staring at mining lasers for hours on end, staring into space watching the game play itself, so that  you can one day proudly announce yourself to be a “captain of  Eve Online Industry”?

A more important lesson in what seems to be a move toward more accessible games should be that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. MMO gamers seem to have a tendency to complain loud and long about those games and developers who don’t cater to their particular whim.  It may certainly be true that these are those gamers who are, as I have described them, the “un-silent minority”.   Aside from a sincere hope that the news EA “released” today isn’t true, I hope the un-silent minority takes the hint to wake up and smell the coffee, as grandma used to say. If the squeeky wheels that are used to getting the most grease keep it up there may come a day that the only online game we have to play will be “My Pretty Pony”

See you online

Julie Whitefeather