Category: Business Models (Page 7 of 10)

Raph on Measuring MMOs

June 2, 2006 / Damion Schubert

Raph has chimed in on the problems with comparing MMO populations to each other. It’s excellent, and touches (and improves upon) many things I was thinking about posting, so I’ll just thank him for saving my time.

Incidentally, this was all instigated by Sir Bruce’s latest update, and a stray comment on Slashdot that this chart shows WoW has surpassed 50% market dominance worldwide. And even though there’s a lot of reasons to doubt the accuracy of the numbers (for reasons detailed in Raph’s post, which Bruce freely admits in the Slashdot thread), it’s pretty staggering to be close enough to be able to have that conversation at all.

Tabula Rasa Interview

May 2, 2006 / Damion Schubert

Last week’s Escapist has an interesting interview with Robert and Richard Garriott, which can be used to extrapolate the direction that NCSoft is pursuing. The revelation that’ll make the kiddies talk is that Richard likes to buy online gold (this is perhaps unsurprising, as Richard is the definitive example of a game player who has more money than time).

[Richard said], “I buy virtual gold all the time,” he says, adding, “I have no problem with it. I’m a supporter. I understand that my position on this is different from our sole corporate perspective. But anyway, I participate in it.”

Mindmelding With Marketing Suit Types

April 26, 2006 / Damion Schubert

Every now and then, I try to convince a producer that “Billing model” is one of the next great design challenges. It usually takes more convincing than you would think. There’s an old line of thinking in this industry that billing is a business decision, not a design one. In fact, in no company that I’ve worked for have the designers sat at the table with the business guys to decide what to charge players for a monthly fee.

This is pretty classical thoery inside of the business world. Marketing students are taught ‘the four P’s’ – pricing, promotion, product and placement – as the primary decisions to make when marketing your item. The inference is clear – pricing what you’re selling is very different than deciding what you’re going to sell. Of course, even in the classic world, the business strategy is more unified than that. Netflix and Budget Rent-A-Car are two companies that compete on price in unique ways – and both companies built a product specifically with that in mind. Continue reading

There’s No Such Thing As “Best” Practices

April 22, 2006 / Damion Schubert

So Jamie and Jason are talking about game production issues, specifically Jason’s recent Escapist article on the matter.

I think they’re both right, although I think Jamie’s heart is closer to mine when he says that he’s tired of hearing how we’re all fuckups. Jamie’s money quote:

Game development is one of the most difficult endeavors known to man – it combines the unpredictability of software engineering with the unpredictability of film-making and the unpredictability of creating an interactive experience that’s different for every user…unpredictability cubed.

AGD Summary Part 2: Bleeding Customers Is The Future

October 30, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Raph has said that the overall theme of AGD was ‘change the world’. I think that shows his idealistic side. To me, the recurring theme seemed to be ‘how can we shake users for loose change?’ Runescape, Station Exchange, and Real Money Trades came up very frequently, to the point I was tired of hearing it by the end of the first day.

I understand there was a heated exchange between Ted Castranova of Terranova and Steve Salyer of IGE on their panel, with Ted saying “I’ll stop interrupting you once you say something truthful.” Unfortunately, I got in the room right after that exchange so I missed it, and can only relate it anecdotally. On that panel, a Sony representative said that they were spurred by the decision to do SOEbay by the fact that 40% of their service calls were related to dealing with potential RMT fraud. Smedley in his talk says that we can expect to see Sony try to make a game where RMTs are much more central to the game experience in the future. Continue reading

XBox 360 To Target Women, Sorta

October 12, 2005 / Damion Schubert

From the New York Times (registration required, bugmenot is cranky), it seems that the XBox 360 is trying to market heavily towards women. Unfortunately, their planned path is not by actually making games for women.

Microsoft hopes to win a bigger share of the market from the PlayStation 2, the top-selling console made by Sony, by promoting a more family-friendly image for the new Xbox, which will be in stores starting Nov. 22…

Brochures going out to major retailers like Best Buy prominently describe the 360’s ability to double as a DVD player, play music from an MP3 player through a television’s speakers and even display digital photos on a TV. Its game functions, while impressive, are now only part of the message…he brochure even says, “Here are some things you might want to tell your wife this thing does.”

We’ll Always Have Spore

August 16, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Scott Miller is going on again about the importance of owning your Intellectual Property. A key snippet

If you look at the top 40 console games (lifetime sales) since 1995, 31 of them, or 77 percent, are original brands (including sequels within these brands). That leaves just nine out of 40 as licensed game brands. That’s near total dominance in favor of original IP. Some of these top selling brands include: GTA, Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Halo, Crash Bandicoot, Tekken, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and Driver…

So, if original brands control nearly 80% percent of the chart every year, why aren’t we seeing a LOT more original games in development? It’s clear that the real gold mine in our industry is with original IP (and their sequels and spin-offs). Publishers would be so much better off in the long-run by creating original IP versus licensed games. Owning an arm’s length list of home grown IP should be the goal of every publisher, because it gives them ultimate control of their own destiny and revenues.

Yet we have a large publisher like THQ being out-IP’ed by a little game studio like Id Software, who’ve created three blockbuster IPs, Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.

In-Game Advertisements

August 11, 2005 / Damion Schubert

In-game advertisements, courtesy of Massive Incorporated, have begun showing up in Planetside. SOE’s small Tribes-like cult favorite isn’t the first MMO to drink the Kool-Aid, but the previous game that did so, Anarchy Online, preceded the move with an option to play certain parts of the game for free. As of yet, no such price decrease has occurred in Planetside. A quote from SOE:

Louis Figueroa, Director, Business Development, Sony Online Entertainment, commenting: “Realizing another revenue stream in PlanetSide will ultimately be good for the entire PlanetSide community. The additional income will allow us to support the game with continued development and new features that the community has been asking for. Working with Massive’s network helps make this possible.”

The End of the World As We Know It

July 21, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Psst, don’t tell anyone, but the Station Exchange launched today. Continue reading

Grey Shards

July 20, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The White Wolf thread spawned an interesting discussion, once you cut through the mindless flamewar, about Grey Shards. A Grey Shard is a server emulator for an MMO, with those for Ultima Online being the most common. The debate is, put simply, between “Grey shards are the spawn of Satan” and “Information wants to be free, yo.” As usual, the ‘yo’ crowd are the ones not trying to make money off the product.

Jaycen points out (quite correctly in my mind) that there is a clear parallel between White Wolf’s recent antics and how Ultima Online’s actions and direction nudges players who disagree with those directions to play on Grey Shards. What other choice do you have if you think Elves in UO are an abomination? Continue reading