You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2006.
David Kaye, one of my business partners, has a fun post on his blog, the Razor, about the difference between media interest and consumer interest, using Second Life and Runescape as his examples. Media interest essentially represents hype and consumer interest represents substance (at least from a business point of view). Media interest/hype is useful if it gets you consumer interest/substance, but otherwise, it’s mainly useless hot air.
I’ve been reading about the practice of split-testing lately, which is essentially Darwinism for content such as advertisements or web pages. For instance, say we want to increase the conversion rate we get on visitors to our websites actually creating characters and getting involved in the games themselves. We could a) use our best guess at what will be appealing, b) solicit feedback from potential users via a focus group or some other method, or c) use split-testing to actually find out what users prefer. (I’m sure there are other options, but I am not really a marketer.)
I was listening to a bit on NPR yesterday about gold farming in China, 
and was struck by the casual certainty with which the owner of one Chinese operation asserted that multiple publishers are engaging in RMT on the side. In other words, the fellow was claiming that publishers are secretly selling gold to, presumably, middle-men like IGE. Why would a publisher do this? Revenue, and importantly, revenue that has very little incremental cost to it.
About half of my most cherished video game memories involve playing console games in a living room with good friends,
and I feel like these memories have almost ceased to be freshly created.
It all started with the Dreamcast, and our ability to dispense with the inconvenient reality of having to travel to one another’s houses, though unrelatedly, the DC is also easily my favorite console for the physically-proximate shared video game experience. I still remember 9/9/99, the release day of that beloved console and how excited we were to break that thing out and play Soul Calibur.
1UP is reporting that MLG (Major League Gaming) has signed top Halo 2 team ‘Final Boss’ for $1 million to ensure they will only play in MLG tournaments. A million bucks to play Halo. I can almost hear the sound of 25 million hopeful teenagers simultaneously resolving to play more video games.
Good for Mark Jacobs! Good for the customer though, given EA’s terrible record with MMOs? I don’t know.
Via Broken Toys comes a report that MySpace is being sued for $30 million by a mother who claims her
underage daughter was sexually assaulted by a man she met on MySpace. Leaving aside the obvious parental unfitness the mother has demonstrated in her hypocritical attempt to pass the responsibility for bad parenting to MySpace (See? We can all engage in histronics.), what annoys me about this is the obvious attempt to fling a stone at the nearest big company in the hopes of knocking a settlement to the ground. This woman’s daughter was allegedly assaulted in Travis County, in the state of Texas, in the United States. Why not sue Texas on this logic, since that’s where the assault actually occured? Surely where the assault takes place is more relevant than where the assailant met the victim. Why not sue the US government, since it failed to prevent the assault from actually taking place? How about an automaker, since no doubt cars were involved in transporting the victim to the place of victimization?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I often get asked why our games have players purchasing a currency called ‘credits’ rather than simply directly purchasing what it is a player may buy with credits; instead of buying 100 credits, why not just have players buy the widget they’re
going to buy with those 100 credits? When we first opened Achaea in 1997, this was a reasonable question, as credits were non-transferable. A player purchased credits, and then purchased other things with them. The only advantage was saving in transaction costs by letting players purchase in bulk.
Not too long after, I started wondering why we didn’t allow players to transfer credits to each other. Goodness knows they were asking for it often enough. I honestly don’t remember my rationale for not allowing it, but I quickly realized the enormous advantages to be gained by allowing credits to become a ‘real currency.’ They can be summed up as, “Everybody wins.”
I got an email recently from an Achaea player whom I was helping with a large credit purchase of 8000 credits (or a bit 
over $2000) after my reply containing an apology for the delay in response time got to him about 18 hours after his previous email had arrived in my box. 18 hours might not normally seem like a lot, but I always feel bad when we can’t have near instant response to customers regarding real money matters, and, of course, as some customers will tell you, we fail at that too often. In any case, he wrote:
“Delay, are you kidding? I have to say you’re far more accessible than I think most people in your position would be… you always seem to have time to help. You’ve certainly created a fun game, but if it wasn’t for the personal touch that you and those working for you add by your prompt responses, I wouldn’t be as willing to spend money on it.”
Shot-Online is coming to the West as expected, releasing in August of this year by SyNet Entertainment, its publisher. It’s not much of a virtual world, but it is online, multiplayer and it uses the virtual asset sales model to give players the option to upgrade with different kinds of items, including limited use items such as the ability to get a better deal when selling to NPCs the next five times. There’s also Pangya, which is wildly popular in Asia.
I just beat Texas Flood on expert in Guitar Hero! Woot! That leaves only four songs to beat on expert:
- Godzilla. Very tough because of two extended solos. Edit: Scratch that! Just beat it too! More cowbell!
- Frankenstein. Just weird. And hard. Edit: The monster songs are my thing lately I guess. This one went down as well, leaving only the last two.
- Cowboys from Hell. I don’t know this song at all to start with, and it’s ridiculously fast.
- Bark at the Moon. Ozzie’s guitarist kicks my ass. I’m unsure if this or Cowboys is the hardest song in the game, but they’re both exceptionally tough.
I love this game. Can’t wait for the sequel. Maybe I’ll have beaten all the songs on expert by then, but I doubt it.
The UPI is reporting that a new Conan movie begins shooting in 2007. Rumors are that it’s potentially the first in a series. Suddenly Funcom’s deal to extend their license to 2023 makes a lot more sense.
This is hilarious: http://ascii-wm.net/
It is a server streaming World Cup action to you over telnet, in ascii. Feeds start 10 minutes before a game. It makes the text MUD lover in me swoon, though I’m not giving up my HDTV for it!
When someone hears that we sell digital items in our games for, at the high end, more than $500, I’m often responded to with questions along the lines of, “Why would anyone buy something that doesn’t exist?” After I quietly sigh to myself, the resulting exchange might go as follows:
Hope you like it!
I’m sure you’ve all seen the news that F13.net reported on: Blizzard spent 50 million Euros on WoW. Zats a lotta pasta! Even more, I’m fairly sure that does not include costs incurred by their partners like The9 in China for marketing and promotion, and may not include marketing costs even in the West. The real total, all things considered, is likely approaching $80 million.
It is humbling to note that one of our two in-development games has the largest budget, by far, any of our games has ever had and is still less than 1% of that figure. Happily, we’re not stupid enough to try to compete directly with Blizzard. Many of our players play WoW and our text MUDs both, and our graphical game is not targeting the same audience. It nevertheless feels a bit like standing at the foot of a God and staring upwards. Any grandiose thoughts you might have had about pulling a David and Goliath flee before the sheer immensity and power of the titan before you.
A thought floats by…
“Well, what if I stabbed him in the foot and then, when he went to punch me, leapt on his hand, ran up his arm, and slit his throat, Jaffe-style?”
A closer look, however, shows the sane dreamer that such a feat is better left to the heroes of myth and legend, and that the wise will be happy to live in the shadow of the mighty God, gathering nuggets of audience goodness that are not significant enough for him being to reach down and pluck for himself.
I don’t know the man except by reputation, but I’m going to have to vote for ‘jackass.’ He’s got an interview with Gamasutra this week entitled “Video games are dead: A chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford.” Here are some selected gems:
“What I meant by that was that the creative life has gone out of the industry. And an industry that has no creative spark to it is just marking time to die.”
“I haven’t even seen any new ideas pop up. The industry is so completely inbred that the people working in it aren’t even capable of coming up with new ideas anymore.”
“But I think that it is reasonable to expect that an industry that hasn’t produced any innovation in at least a decade is unlikely to change its spots.”
EVE Online has gone into an open-beta in China (operated independently of the version running in the West) and on its first day experienced 200,000 registrations and hit 30,000 users online simultaneously! The full story can be found on Gamespot. I have to say, China just continues to surprise me and, I suspect, everyone else in the West. World of Warcraft is, to date, really the only Western game to make a splash in China, and I wouldn’t have guessed that EVE would be the next to do it. EVE is pretty hardcore and is basically the opposite of WoW in every way possible except for the fact that it too has a 3d graphical interface.
Go CCP! (and Optic Communications, their Chinese licensor!)
My formal education is a degree in government from Cornell. After university, I discovered, to my profound disappointment, that my dream of someday opening a political philosophy store wasn’t going to happen. (”May Day sale! Communism, 70% off!”) Apparently there’s not much retail market for that sort of thing. As a result, I had to settle for the second (ok, maybe the third or fourth) best thing: Implementing some sort of political system into a game.
GameDaily Biz had an article last week entitled, “Where Have All The Game Gods Gone?” The piece’s main thrust can be summed up by this quote:
The big developer names that most often appear in the enthusiast press are still the big names we knew in the nineties: Molyneux, Carmack, Meier, Miyamoto, Wright, Kojima, and Spector are all still more recognizable than almost all of the developers that got their start in the last ten years. Furthermore, there is a very good chance the situation will be the same five years from now.
I was at the conference today, or at least, half of today due to other committments. It was, at least compared to the size of the room, not too well-attended (half-full), which is disappointing, as I like the idea of the Focus On conference series. The first developer’s conference I ever attended was one of the now discontinued GDC Roadtrip conferences, sometime back in the late 90s, in San Rafael, CA. They suffered, I think, from being mainly smaller, regional versions of GDC (much smaller). The idea of a series of conferences that lasers in on specific topics is more interesting.
Apparently, the ancient game of Rock, Paper, Scissors is flourishing these days, at least to the extent that there are championships.(?!!) I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise insofar as many combat systems essentially use an RPS system but with more elements and more ways in which those elements are structured. Still, I couldn’t help but chuckle at first, and immediately IM’d the link to a friend. Then, I started reading more about the strategy of the game and it got me thinking.
I’m in the middle of Guy Deutscher’s “The Unfolding of Language: An evolutionary tour of mankind’s greatest invention” and I’m loving it. It’s about how language evolved incredibly complex grammatical structures (such as Latin’s). One of the core theories of the book is built on is the idea that language, and abstract thought itself, is nothing more nor less than the result of metaphor and its incorporation into everyday language.
For awhile now, I’ve gone back and forth on whether to start a blog or not. On the one hand, I find it a bit presumptuous to essentially claim, by setting one up, that I have something so important to say that I just had to put it out there for all to read. On the other, I believe I’ve accumulated a certain set of experiences that isn’t duplicated very often in the games industry. I’ve had nine years of consecutive growth as an indie developer, and pioneered a business model along the way.