The wizard of oz had it right...

Not much of my advice will be sagely or even wise. In fact, without comScore numbers at my disposal, I'm really pretty powerless. But, I do know a couple things.

Never, ever let anyone see behind the curtain.

Pretty simple right? Well, you'd be suprised how many MMO's have lost their mojo by violating this simple rule. I remember a long time ago the first GM position I took. It was for an exceptional text based MMO that I really loved. I was sort of a trouble maker, but I was creative so they gave me a shot.

The process involved me creating a new account and that account had GM powers. I would log in and appear in the GM lounge and that was that. But it wasn't. Right away, I was no longer bound to the constraints of players. I could have any item. See any creature and with a simple word or gesture, dispatch it. I was in heaven, or so I thought.

Everything was great until... I tried to play the game as a player again. I couldn't do it. The goals of reaching great heights no longer held any appeal to me, and, why should they? Just moments before I was creating creatures, now defeating them just didn't have any appeal.

I never played that game the same again, and eventually quit. I loved that game.

I used to play Ultima Online and wow, I was doing great. I was a woodcutter by trade and was just having fun sort of building stuff and you know, life was good.

Then I got an emulator. Yeah, I could run my very own UO shards, create objects, maps, buildings, you name it. Very cool, until of course, I tried to actually play UO again. That was more than 7 years ago. Haven't ever gone back.

I played an MMO in beta recently. Decent game, it really was. It was a new metaphor for the genre, one I wont reveal because frankly anyone halfway savvy reading this would immediately identify it. Anyway, played the beta, even preordered. Thats how cool it was.

I logged in on the last day. I was excited for the server wipe because like many beta players, I had first hand knowledge of how to get a leg up before the unwashed masses started playing.

I went to a local NPC shop and...to my horror there were experience books there. They were cheap and allowed me to instantly level my beta character to the highest level possible. Of course I did it. Of course I ran off and obtained what I tried so hard to obtain in the beta, what I knew I would try equally hard to obtain in the live game.

So there I was with all the goodies. It was great.

I never played the game again once it went live. I tried, once, but...I had already seen behind the curtain. Once I had experienced end game content, the mystery was gone and so was the appeal.

Don't promote paying players to GM's unless you have a damn good system in place.

Don't design your games so they can be emulated. Always keep something so key to the games operation that it keeps the smart ones guessing. And when they figure it out, change it. Change it again, and again. At random. Make it clear to your paying subscribers that any client detected having played on an emulator will permanantly ban them from the live game.

Finally, dont ever expose your end game content during beta to players who haven't gotten there by their own means. It might seem like a great reward, but I'm here to tell you, its a game killer. Period.

I'm out. Ciao.

Whats up with MMO's today?

I got a lot of uh, feedback at ION for some of my views on the state of MMO's. Largely, the mixture of games out there seems to consist of either under-funded or under-thought games that are destined for failure.

I think the industry overall has lost perspective on why MMO's became popular to begin with, focusing too heavily on attracting a slice of Blizzard's 18-24 Male pie, and this demographic isn't completely accurate anyway. And accuracy about understanding the MMO audiences is probably 90% of the reasons why MMO's fail. Well, that and releasing end-game content to beta players right before releasing your game. Whoops, did I say that? Regardless, do please understand your audience, don't release end game content until...well...end game.

In April of this year, 10.8 million unique players played World of Warcraft. For those of you interested, this is 1.3% of the global internet audience. On average, nearly 4.5 million people on planet Earth take on the daily role of Horde or Alliance.

Of these, The audience is almost overwhelmingly male, and this reinforces the tongue and cheek understanding that yes, that really hawt Blood Elf is probably a male between the ages of 15 and 24. Ew.

Unless of course they are between 35 and 44. In this particular demographic, it is very nearly a 50/50 split with Female players edging out males by about 59k players. In fact, any guy below the age of 35 who has any notion of finding a girlfriend in this game should seriously reconsider. Actually, any guy of any age looking for a girlfriend in a fantasy MMO, well, you get the point.

The news isn't all bad. Even though the audience 'tilt' is overwhelmingly a younger audience, leaning male, comparing the 'over the hill' crowd versus the 'under the hill' crowd reveals a fairly promising market to be had for developers willing to 'risk it all' on older audiences.

Underneath all this is the fact that there are 3.4 million WoW players out there (1.5 female/1.9 male) who might be looking for a richer, more immersive MMO experience that they are not currently getting anywhere but in WoW.

Name one thing that nearly 3.5 million men & women 35 or over like to do alongside of 7.4 million youngsters, 4.9 million of which are below the age of 25.

So why is WoW so tough to beat? Is it because they create content so fantastically attractive across all demographics? Is it because the rich storyline and quality of roleplay create impossible barriers to entry?

Maybe, maybe not. It might just be that publishers aren't interested in niche markets. It might be that developers have stopped creating visions, and are now focusing on 'effective and proven strategies to win share from WoW', instead of innovating and creating IP that may (or may not) attract an audience.

Quite possibly its the formula by which MMO's are created that caused a failure to attract the right age demographics and the proper male/female ratios. Again, it goes back to targeting. You cannot say, "I'm going to go after MMO players who like fantasy!" I've said it before, its like selling cars to 'humans'.

Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Blogspot!

I'm in a time warp. I had to move my posts from Wordpress because I really wanted to Adsense my blog you know, 'cause I'm a capitalist. Anyway, time references in my posts, (e.g. I was at Burger King last week, may not actually reflect last week or even last month.)

So no complaining if you spot a reference to something like this. Meanwhile, enjoy my blog.

Will Sony really reinvent the MMO?

I caught SOE CEO John Smedley's keynote at this years ION conference in Seattle last week and got to sit through over an hour long keynotercial about the two upcoming MMO's they plan to release, Free Realms, and The Agency.

Targeting two completely different audiences, the aim of these new games is, as Smedley claims to 'Reinvent the MMO'.

First of all, to reinvent anything, you'd need to start out by actually inventing it. Sony didn't do this. The first MMO's came out before the Internet even emerged with great games like Air Warrior on GEnie, GemStone (which still exists today) and Neverwinter Nights, the first MMO to include graphics.

Are there problems in the MMO space today? Sure, but in this humble writers opinion, a lot of them have been caused and/or perpetuated by SOE. For one thing, I happen to know a little about the history of the development of Everquest and it's not without its shady side.

But lets get onto the point of this entry, which is SOE's shot at making good on this claim. After all, many have tried, and right now only one is truly successful.

So exactly what are the recipes for reinvention Sony is bringing us? Young girls, apparently and Rated M shooters with edgy content.

SOE says Free Realms will be going after the under 14 market, and trying to bring young girls back in the market. Also, the MMO shooter market which Smedley claims is 'basically untouched'. If by untouched you mean that the last few of them released were 'untouched by subscribers', you might be talking about titles like Planetside, wait...isn't that by Sony? At it's peak that gem had 40k subscribers, and that was in 2004.

That's fine. Perhaps Sony feels that this time, somehow, they can get it right.

So to accomplish this goal Sony would need to count on a few things things;

1. Online players from the shooter demographic which is 75% Male 18-24, and,

2. Online gamers from the Female 6-14 demo.

Only a couple ways to get them, either find new players (really tough), or, wait for attrition from other games that have the same demographics. The latter is not as tough but still difficult because even if you do pick up drop off players from other games still you have to deal with the fact that you start out with low loyalty players.

But I can get behind all this, maybe. But lets see if there are any scientific indicators to back this up. For this next trick, I'll need a volunteer from the MMO audience. "You sir, there in the back, with the shirt that says 'Demographic audience attrition for WoW over a YtY 2007, 08?" Yes could you please step forward.

Lets take a look at something I like to call gaming audience 'spill' which is a measurement of demographic loss for a game over a year by age and gender.

For instance, between April 2007 and April 2008 World of Warcraft player base declined world wide the most in two primary groups. I know, your on the edge of your seat aren't you? Am I going to say males 18-24 and Females 6-14?

Well, I am going to say 18-24 but they are females and WoW lost 23% of them versus the total WoW audience last year. But there are males too! Buuut, they are 12-17 just a skosh outside the primary target demos for a game like this.

I'll have more to say about all of this very soon.

Watch out Warcraft, Funcom might have something with Age of Conan (maybe).

Speculate, speculate, speculate. Its what everyone wants to do about Funcom's newest MMO Age of Conan. I've reviewed it, I've looked at screencaps, read forums, etc.

I'm just not much for speculation. But, looking at the numbers, I think we might be seeing something happening - something vis a vis AoC taking at least some marketshare in the older demographics (AoC is rated M after all).

Still, take a look at this.

What are we looking at? We're taking a look at search behaviors on Google for 2008 between WoW (Red) and AoC (Blue). Look closely at 2008. What you are seeing is a decrease in searches for WoW with a simulataneous upswing in searches on AoC.

But what does all this mean? Alone, nothing much. What we need to look at is the demographics AoC is going after; simple - 18+ (again Rated M), and we need to determine the market size of MMO players in that demographic.

Once we have that, we need to see how WoW is doing with that demo or parts of that demo. Are they losing share? If so, how much?

This is what the next few posts I'll be putting out will discuss. We'll be reviewing the progress of search, sure, but more importantly we'll be looking at demographic climb and decline for both WoW and AoC. Interesting stuff. Stay tuned.