The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Quick lunchtime read for you: Rock Band and Guitar Hero sales are slumping. Was this all a fad? Or are they running out of ‘must have’ songs?
I still play, but my frequency is way down — to usually once every couple of weeks, rather than every other night, and my wife and I are less fanatical about following the latest DMC. The drum kit is pretty close to being relegated to being shoved in the closet, and only pulled out for game nights.
What’s the most important high-level goal of a Product company? “Shift more boxes”
What’s the most important high-level goal of a Service company? “Purchase more customers”
Worth the extended read.
While at GDC, I heard a lot of people who were pitching free games that, well, aren’t. Most of them are free trials of games that hope to monetize quickly. You are only a free game if your evangelists say you are.
Free play games depend on evangelism of the players (usually kids without access to credit cards), in order to build larger and larger audiences. Free play games work by shovelling in as many customers as is humanly possible, and often get any cash at all from a very small percentage of them (I’ve heard percentages in the 1-3% range for some games). But they work because a kid says to his friend, “Yeah you can play for free!” — even if, at a certain point, the player hits a roadblock he has to pay to surpass. Continue reading
What if World of Warcraft had been a free-to-play ad-based game?
Interestingly, Pardo commented on this subject: “When were first going to make World of Warcraft, we wanted to make it free and advertising supported.”
However, the Blizzard exec noted: “We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.”
The Next Sims 2 expansion pack is IKEA themed.
As in overtly IKEA-themed, instead of merely a clever homage.
Magic: the Gathering has had, over the years, a debate over the use of what they call proxy cards, or the use of stand-in cards to represent more expensive, harder to find cards. Often times, these proxy cards are little more than writing the words ‘Black Lotus’ over a worthless land card, but in today’s day of low-cost color printers, many players attempt to make more ‘perfect’ ones, by downloading the art and pasting it to the back of a cheap common. Continue reading
My new boss thinks that games today are too expensive.
Riccitiello says the $31 billion gaming industry will suffer if it doesn’t start to reevaluate its business model. Game executives at Sony (SNE), Microsoft (MSFT) and Activision (ATVI) must answer some tough questions in the coming years, like how long they can expect consumers to pay $59 for a video game. Riccitiello predicts the model will be obsolete in the next decade.
“In the next five years, we’re all going to have to deal with this. In China, they’re giving games away for free,” he says. “People who benefit from the current model will need to embrace a new revenue model, or wait for others to disrupt.” As more publishers transition to making games for online distribution, Riccitiello says he expects EA will experiment with different pricing models.
Once upon a time, massively multiplayers were pretty much entirely a culture steeped in open source. This is back in the MUD days, when great worldbuilding meant concise yet interesting blocks of text, and the term ‘massively multiplayer’ was still waiting to be invented by some overzealous marketing droid.
Success was defined by reaching 100 simultaneous users. Wild success was reaching 200. The developers actually feared wild success – we were usually running on the back end of university email mainframes and whatnot, often without the IT department’s permission, and wild success meant they might notice, and pull the plug on your world. There were many, many stories of MUDs who encountered a service interruption of that sort, and who lost their entire player base in the 2 week period it took to find a new internet-connected mainframe to call home.
The chairman of ITV says that games are evolving in a moral vacuum. Wait, the TELEVISION INDUSTRY is accusing anyone else of being morally bankrupt?
A Chinese gamer died from playing games 3 days straight. Tasteless comment overheard elsewhere: “”Shit, I hope that’s not the guy I hired to powerlevel my new character.” In all seriousness, there’s been about half a dozen of these in Asia over the years. Has there ever been one in the US? What, culturally, is the difference? Continue reading
This guy claims to be an ex-Arena.net employee, and he’s decided to burn some bridges to the ground. Among his unusual assertions:
1) Some enterprising lower level employees of Arena.net has forged an ‘unofficial’ partnership with gold farming organizations (’GFCs’), who they feel are providing a valuable service to the goldbuying public. This partnership is, shall we say, not a corporate mandate. Continue reading
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