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]

“The real annual growth rate of the US computer and video game software industry was 10.6 percent for the period 2005-2009 and 16.7 percent for the period 2005-2008,” the report states. “During the same periods, real growth for the U.S. economy as a whole was 1.4 percent for 2005-09 and 2.8 percent for 2005-08.” – The Entertainment Software Association, via Arstechica.com

If the industry is doing so well why do we see announcements like this one  announcing the closure of Earth Eternal, and the ever more common announcements such as Icarus’ Studios (developer/publisher of Fallen Earth) staff reductions by 70 percent? Perhaps as we discussed here and on Show 66 Senator Al Franken is right – perhaps it is a matter of mega conglomerate mergers such as Comcast/NBC that crushes independent development.

Just five days ago, we read an article by Ben Kuchera entitled Starcraft 2: Help us mourn the death of content freedom, over at Arstechnica that contained the following:

By shutting down dedicated servers and not releasing any modding tools, Infinity Ward stopped modding dead in its tracks with Modern Warfare 2. Even if someone was able to create a map or a modification, there would be no way to play it online. That’s the way publishers like it; Activision Blizzard recently announced that it has sold 20 million map packs for the various Call of Duty releases. Why allow users to create something just to give it away when there’s so much money to be made? – Arstechnica

This is, of course, something that had been rattling around the internet for some time now. The point of the article was to discuss (or perhaps bemoan, and rightfully so) the lack of local storage for Starcraft 2 mods, necessitating an upload to battle.net and thus control by Blizzard.  As it stands now there is no monthly fee, for those players who bought the full retail version of Starcraft 2, to use Battlenet (We understand players in Russia are not that lucky).

Charging for expansion packs on single player games isn’t new of course – in fact we think it is a great idea.  Does a publisher place itself in a penny wise but pound foolish position when it publishes a game without access to modding tools? Activision is obviously making some serious cash by selling maps for its games. Still, consider the path that Bethesda has taken with its games.  Not only have they published modding tools but they have included video tutorials on YouTube explaining their use. There is even a database that explains things in even greater detail.  Doing all this has extended the shelf life of their game beyond what it would have been, even with the release of “Game of the Year” editions.

Electronic Arts (EA) has followed suit to a degree with world and pattern creator tools for the latest edition of the 800 pound gorilla of single player gamers, Sims 3.  They also have expansions in the form of World Adventures which expands the game to great extents. But you will also find the single player game version of a cash shop, charging Sims points, purchased for cold hard cash, for virtual items, piece by piece – this is in addition to their “stuff packs” (collections of virtual items).

Where they also follow the trend set by Blizzard (or does Blizzard follow them?) is by incorporating the ideas already in place by the modding community.  Blizzard simply incorporates them into World of Warcraft and we are fine with that.  Where we draw the line, however, is with EA’s release of “stuff packs” that charge for work that has already been released for free by web sites such as Mod the Sims . If you want fast cars Electronic Arts will point you in the direction of their upcoming “Fast Lane Stuff” expansion. We will point you to the amazing work of Fresh Prince over at Mod the Sims that can be had for free.

But perhaps you have avoided all that by steering clear of single player games?

If that is the case then you, dear reader, are in luck. Now that Disney has spent a total of three quarters of a billion dollars on Playdom, advertisements screaming the wonders of “Minnie’s Happy Aquarium” and “Mickey’s Sheep” can’t be far behind for those who still log on to Facebook and fire up those “social games”.  But if single player games and social games aren’t your style there is still plenty of competition for your “macro dollars” in the form of micro transactions by publishers hoping to ride the ever growing wave games that redefine the word “free” by stuffing it in front of “…to play.”

There are, of course, markets where free to play is the word of the day, and what is expected by players; this is why players in South Korea get Age of Conan that is “free to play” while the game is still supported by a subscription fee in North America.  Now what started with the likes of Habbo Hotel, and Lineage II eventually saw Runescape and Wizard 101.  Soon the ripple became a wave with Dungeons and Dragon Online, Lord of the Rings Online and Everquest II.

Companies like Zynga have made their fortune by nickels and dimes, and Disney hopes to follow suit.  The Sims series is easily the single player equivalent of the Blizzard Gorilla, and there is little doubt that nickel and time transactions or no, even a stake driven through its heart wouldn’t kill it any time soon. Where the jury is still out, at least in the long run, is whether the mmo community is as willing to accept a subscription game converted to free to play as publishers believe we are.  The difference, of course, is that games like Runescape were designed as free 2 play where converting a subscription based game and turning it into Everquest II: Extended seems a bit like taking a Ford 150 and trying to make it run on batteries.

Still, if you can manage to keep your nickels and dimes in your pockets, at least for the time being, there promises to be some new roads to trod for free while you are waiting for your next greatest world changing mmo – something that has always seemed to be a bit like chasing after the gaming equivalent of the Holy Grail.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

[posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]

“No man’s Kwedit is ever as good as his money.” – Edgar Watson Howe

“It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the Kwedit.” -Robert Yates (this may close to actual kwedit results)

“Be vewy, vewy quiet – I’m hunting on Kwedit” – Elmer Fudd

It is one of life’s eternal problems, and one that every game publisher will have to face at some point in their corporate existence…

How do you take the “free” out of free to play.

As we all know (and will be discussed on show 56 out later today) free to play games work because they are:

A.) Designed to make the game unplayable without enduring enough anguish, angst and general anger that it would kill a bull moose.

B.) Designed to be so grindy that given the option, Sisyphus would rather continue pushing his boulder up a hill for eternity rather than play the game.

And most importantly…

C.) Fifteen million players all play a game that is actually supported through the spending of a 13 year old in his mother’s basement who doesn’t know her child has her credit card yet.

The solution to all these woes is found in the developer’s cash shop. For those one or two of you out there who are scratching there head when the terms “cash shop” and “free to play” are mentioned…well Google it, you probably aren’t gamers, developers or game publishers anyway.

The interesting thing about the problems with free to play game design noted under “A” and “B” is that they instantly go away if you solve “C”. Now there is a company with a product it is calling “Kwedit” that believes it has indeed found the solution for all that is ill with the free to play game business model.

The system has been written about at length by Paul Hyman over at Gamasutra in an article entitled “Free To Play Games, Meet The Virtual IOU” (You can read the article here ). Here is an excerpt from the article that explains how the system works:

At first glance it seems like a “win-win” system right? The system caters to the impulse buyer that will grab the item and pay for it later…and there aren’t any thugs waiting in dark alleys to break your knee caps if you fail to pay. The upside for the consumer is, of course, also the downside for the publisher, as the system has no way to force the player to “pay up” if they choose not to do so – other than, of course, eventually not allowing them to buy on “Kwedit” again. One look at the picture that comes with product (see blow) reminded me of the old “Joe Cool” adds for camel cigarettes of a few decades ago, purposefully aimed at younger generations.

At least as far as western cultures are concerned, from the individual all the way up through the federal government, what has caused so many problems for so long is the whole “buying it on the never-never” attitude. Kwedit’s CEO claims the product gives parents an “incredible teaching moment”. While it may indeed provide a safe environment for buying the pile of pixels without using a credit card, there seems to be more of indoctrination than convenience inherent in the system. Kwedit will very probably teach the younger members of the target that “credit”, as Charles Dickens put it, “is a system whereby a person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay.” Or as a college friend, who attended Brigham Young university put it of his alma matter: “Brigham Young but Bring ‘em any way you can”.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Free to play games in the western market seem to be developing the same trend as some of the extremely popular girls we all knew in high school – usually easy, but never cheap.

Now it seems that Keen from Keen and Graev’s gaming blog, once the great proponent of Allods has sworn off free to play games for good .  We can’t say that we blame him however, all things considered.  But sometimes it’s best not to judge the whole barrel of apples by the single rotten one at the bottom.   Even though Gpotato finally “listened” (read hastily retracted their original prices when players threatened to quit “en masse” before the end of what appears to be a “soft launch”).  

This is, in fact, one of the subjects that my co-host, Fran, Tipa, Saylah and myself discuss on the next show.  Life is circle, Elder Blackwolf used to say, and the gaming industry is the same way. A few years ago you couldn’t make the average western fan of “triple-A” games play a “free to play” game without holding a member of his family hostage.  The success of some free to play games has demanded the attention of more than a few developers, publishers, and even investors.  In many ways it’s like the increased presence of podcasting on the internet.   Those of us who are here at the start are increasingly seeing big companies with names like ABC, CBS and NBC decided they want in on the action (some of which rapidly fell by the wayside).

It’s easy to take a great idea, and in the process of trying to make it your own end up twisting it so far out of proportion that it simply doesn’t work anymore.   There is little doubt in my mind that this is the reason that some of the big communication companies that try their hand at podcasting podfade so fast it set land speed records – they were too busy trying to drive a profit margin through a great idea.  In the same way a very large fence seems to have been constructed amidst the free to play games, and the newcomers to North American shores seem to be falling on one of two sides…

On the first side we see games that have taken a careful look at some of the companies in places like Korea who have been making this way all along …the people who really know what they are doing.   My experience with cash shops in games like these, are those with stocked with items that entice the user to purchase the product.  Sometimes it’s a new outfit not available anywhere else. Don’t think that players will purchase that outfit just to hang out in front of the bank (or in port in the case of Voyage Century)? Think again.  As much as Darren Love’s now famous complaint about the $10.00 horse made its way around the blogosphere, these days it seems like a real deal.

On the other side of the fence are those companies that seem to feel cash shops are more like cash cows.  The concern I have, and that we discussed at length in our next show, is that games are being designed to force you to use the cash shop, and use it often, rather than simply entice you to do so.  It’s a delicate balancing act that not every publisher seems to have the ability to perform.   Even if the developers and publishers out there aren’t sitting down with prices and spread sheet, they should take note that gamers considering playing free to play game are doing just that.

It’s interesting to note that the cash shop that raised such a ruckus (I helped raise a bit of it myself I am not proud to say) over at Star Trek Online (STO) has only two items in it at present.  There is more to come of course, but it is easy to overlook it altogether and simply enjoy the game.

Now I will admit to throwing the last paragraph in there as a tie in…and here it is.  One of my favorite pass times in Star Trek Online (and Champions Online before I switched over to STO) is seeing what other players have done with the remarkable character creator metagame (and believe you me it is such a powerful tool it IS a metagame).  Fewer people make use of the “bio” part of the game where the player can put their character’s history in the Star Trek Online universe. It’s a shame really, because players do check for them and read them – I get regular compliments on mine.  This time I saw such a remarkable job at creating a character that I just had to share it all with you.  Those of you who have seen the new James Cameron movie “Avatar” may recognize a member of the Na’vi (the picture here doesn’t do the player’s character justice).  And yes,  it is such a fantastic idea that I fully intent to play a Na’vi myself.  Another quick note to our readers and listeners:  If you see me in game and send me a tell please tell me who you are as well (i.e. “Hey I know you from Fallen Earth” otherwise you might get mistaken for the bane of the gamers existence, a gold seller).

 See you Online

Julie Whitefeather

(Posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Web Master)