The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Newsweek asks the asinine question of the week: will Guitar Hero make fewer people play guitar?
Clearly, Guitar Hero is fun. But by bestowing the rewards of virtuosity to those who haven’t spent years to earn it, is it dumbing down musicianship? If a teenager can easily become a make-believe guitar hero, does that mean he won’t ever bother to master the real thing?
Raph links to a great article about Second Life, which comes to the conclusion that Second Life is a Ponzi scheme, or something similar.
No, SecondLife is a classic pyramid scheme. Or, more of an Amway-like pyramid: partially legitimate, partially ponzi. Sure, there are plenty of legitimate SecondLife customers who just like to go there to get their kicks, spend a couple dollars, and be on their way.
Crap, now I have to rebuy it and two controllers.
Yo, Jason, if you’re listening- can you guys figure out why the new controllers trigger Star Power off of a light breeze? For those of us forced to cheese our way through the hardest solos, it makes beating the game pretty much impossible.
In the midst of a Second Life article that picks on the Linden boys for glibly announcing they’ve reached 2 million accounts (including the mysterious fact that they’ve gotten 1 million new accounts in the last 2 months, but still seem to average 14K players a night), Van Hemlock makes the following observation:
Residents Logged in in the Last 60 Days: 809,960
(From http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php)Accounts signed up in the last 58 Days: 1,000,000
Add two days’s worth (34,482, from above): 1,034,482 signups in 60 days
Soooo:
1,034,482 – 809,960 = 224,522
I might be getting confused with definitions here, but doesn’t that mean 224,522 people have made a Second Life account, but have never used it to log in even once, not even to have a look for an hour and get bored? How does that work? It gets worse if you take into account that many of the 809,960 logins are existing residents who had signed up prior to the one million mark, and are still logging in. That can’t be right – more than 12.5% of all SL Residents have NEVER logged in EVER?
Yeah, that’s about right. ALL MMOs get this – it’s one of the more mysterious things about the industry. I’ve seen one standard MMO quote that roughly 10% of the people who buy boxes for their game never log in, and another 5% create an account but never log into a game – the percentages vary from game to game, but are never insubstantial. In a pay-for subscription model, the latter group would be considered by cynics to be ‘the perfect customers’.
Linden Labs’ 12% makes sense when you consider that its a free trial. There’s no financial incentive to play. Probably a bunch of people got distracted between the time they created their account, and the time they downloaded the game. Perhaps they even got distracted by a story about how their credit card information isn’t safe.
Matt Mihaly wants to know what’s wrong with twinking.
One argument the anti-RMT crowd puts forth, however, has always puzzled me insofar as it strikes me as fairly hypocritical: The idea that Player A giving something to Player B in exchange for real-world money somehow harms Player C and thus should be banned, but that Player A giving an item to Player B in exchange for real-world friendship (or familial connections, etc) does not harm Player C in the same way.
One hidden aspect to Nintendo’s strategy for world domination is the rather unique idea of actually having enough product on the shelves. EA estimates that there will be 900K to 1.4 million Wii sold in North America by the end of the year, which contrasts sharply with the PS3 numbers, which look to be half that.
Sony has been trying to spin this as a way of creating a sense of demand, and that this will be the ‘hot product’. How well that will work when mom can turn around and buy a Wii or a 360 instead remains to be seen. And don’t be fooled – consoles are Christmas gifts in North America – having more boxes under trees dramatically increases Nintendo’s odds of hitting critical mass. Shipping substandard numbers in North America for Christmas is going to mean a lot of kids who currently only live off allowances will have to wait a year to get their hands on the box (especially considering PS3’s substantial price tag). Continue reading
See, here the message is how microtransactions provide better and more gameplay to the customer.
Guitar Hero II is going to be rocking a new stage! RedOctane announced today that the Guitar Hero crew will bring their award-winning tour to the Xbox 360 “The tour will continue the rockin’ gameplay Guitar Hero fans have come to enjoy, and will now include expanded Xbox 360 capabilities,” said Kai Huang, president of RedOctane. “With Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 rock rhythm, lead, or bass guitar tracks with downloadable content and the new X-Plorer controller, designed specifically for the Xbox 360.”
Scott at BrokenToys is reporting that Archlord, which originally was going to allow you to pay more money for more powerful characters, has been forced by player outcry to abandon these plans for a traditional subscription-based model.
Many developers have long hypothesized that the one-size-fits-all monthly fee may end up fading in the US in favor of more micropayments and premium content, as has already happened in Korea. Archlord’s changing of plans suggests a handful of possibilities: Continue reading
My power point presentation is now online in the sidebar.
During my talk, I said, “You don’t need combat. You just need something visceral, tactical, repeatable, with potential for co-op play and which is easy to learn, but hard to master.” Some people thought I was speaking tongue-in-cheek, and that I thought that only combat could actually ever fit that bill.
Meanwhile, Kart Rider just announced they hit 700K concurrent users.
Call it a minor revolution: while Sony is desperately fighting a battle to keep players from building homebrew environments on their PSP, XBox is flying into the teeth of the dragon. They’ve announced today that they plan to ship a consumer version of the tools needed to make XBox 360 games.
“It’s our first step of creating a YouTube for video games,” Moore said, referring to the wildly popular free online video sharing Web site. “It will give you everything you need to bring your game to life on Xbox 360.”
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