You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2006.
I swear, Greg Costikyan has to be the most well-meaning and yet ultimately self-defeating individual in the games industry. I’ve somewhat loudly disagreed with him in the past, but he’s clearly an intelligent and motivated guy. His new company, Man!festo Games just launched its website. The idea behind Manifesto is to be a games portal for indie games, near as I can tell. Problem is, unless you’re a developer or part of a very small group of fans, being indie isn’t an attraction. It’s a non-factor. It’s an attempt to make the creator more important than the product (Harley Davidson, for instance, whose motorcycles are overpriced pieces of crap compared to Japanese motorcycles, but command superior prices due to the power of the brand), but that takes a lot of money or just an extremely clever delivery, and Man!Festo has neither.
I’m 
feeling very optimistic these days about Earth Eternal’s chances and just had a moment that has left me feeling a little giddy. I needed to share it.
Chris Kohnert, Martin Best, and I (the three core non-art-team development members on EE) were standing around in the mini area we use to test things. Our technology is coming along, but we’re not to the point of worldbuilding yet, so this is literally just a flat square area surrounded by trees. We run around in it to test things with our player characters, and so on.
The 
other day I was out hiking with my girlfriend and started going over a list of dream songs that I’d like to see included in Guitar Hero 2. Two of the top songs that were brought up were GnR’s Sweet Child o’ Mine and Skynyrd’s Freebird, and I just read that they’ve been confirmed for Guitar Hero 2. Now, I’m not going to argue that these are the two greatest songs (or even guitar-driven songs) ever written, or that they even approach that status. They are, however, iconic, and that is what Guitar Hero is about. It’s not about playing pre-electric Dylan, it’s not about playing classical Spanish guitar. It’s about wielding the axe like a fucking rock star and those two songs will deliver, in spades.
In the second of a series of interviews with players (first one can be found here), I’ve interviewed a player who is one of Iron Realms’ biggest customers and famous for a rather unique playing style. The player’s character, Ottis, who lives in the world of Achaea, eschews combat for the most part, yet has an enviable selection of combat equipment. Instead, Ottis is interested largely in providing merchant services for other characters: engraving, tailoring, selling food, and so on. He’s one of the richest property owners and probably the most legendary merchant ever.
I 
was in a vet’s office yesterday, having my dog, Nixon, (pictured at right) looked at for an ear infection. While I was in the examination room and the doctor was dealing with Nixon, I started reading a bunch of posters and informational sheets on the wall. One of them really caught my eye. It was a passage from a book by writer-naturalist, Henry Beston, who wrote his famous book, “The Outermost House” in 1926. Traumatized by his experiences in the first World War, Henry had retreated to a tiny house on the very eastern end of Cape Cod to recuperate and regain his internal equilibrium. The passage from the book that caught my eye, and which seems like it was written for Earth Eternal, is this:
Just a short post to say how much I’ve come to love alternative controllers in the wake of Guitar Hero and the DS Lite Kirby game, in which you control Kirby the ghost by drawing lines on the screen. The 360’s been a bit of a letdown for me so far in terms of the games (though the hardware and Live service are both superb), and I have nothing but ill-wishes for Sony and the PS3 with its $600 price tag. On the other hand, when I think of the Wii with its lovely and accessible $250 price point and its revolutionary (for good or bad) controller, I get an almost child-like excitement. I cannot wait to see what kind of new gameplay I’m going to get to experience with the Wii’s controller. Bring on the Wii!
Edit: And Guitar Hero 2!
Having never designed a graphical game previous to Earth Eternal, I am finding the experience to be an education. Although there’s no fundamental difference between designing EE and our text MUDs, the restrictions we’re under on EE are incredible. For someone used to a level of design freedom that even the best-funded graphical projects can only envy, moving to a self-funded (read “small budget”) graphical project is quite the difference.
After feedback from a post recently on virtual world business models I’ve put together a new list of virtual world business model elements. I suppose I should really call these revenue models, but the term business model is used generically (including by me) to describe these, so there you go. Thanks to the many commenters in that thread. It’s had the most responses of any post on the Forge. After I feel reasonably confident the list is full, I’ll create a permanent page with a taxonomy on it.
I 
decided to start a series of interviews with some of our players to publish here. The first interview was prompted by an Achaea player who purchased a 750 credit (approximately US$240) custom-made virtual cherry pie that is simply eaten and sends out a couple of custom eating messages, then resets back in the owner’s inventory about a half hour to an hour later. The purchaser of this pie is a college student whose character is named Wivylma Winterwind, and whom has spent about 3000 hours in Achaea so far.
Ok, well, that headline is a bit misleading, but two companies that were recently bought out, Mythic Entertainment and World’s Apart Productions, both got their start making text MUDs. EA bought Mythic, of course, and now comes the announcement that SOE has bought World’s Apart. Scott Martins, formerly CEO/founder of World’s Apart, is someone I count as an (admittedly distant) friend and Mark Jacobs (Mythic’s former CEO) is one of my top five most admired people in the games industry (though he and I strongly disagree on the subject of virtual asset sales).
Now, of course, they weren’t bought for their text MUDs. Mythic was bought on the success of DAoC and the promise of Warhammer Online, and World’s Apart was purchased on the strength of their online CCG (Collectible Card Game) properties, including Starchamber, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek, not its text MUD, The Eternal City. Still, I knew both these companies first as text MUD developers and feel an affinity to them as such. Way to go guys!
After trying quite a few different ideas and variations on those ideas, we have settled on the final logo for Earth Eternal. I probably spent too much time on this but it was fun.
After I finally signed up for Netflix last year, I started thinking about signing up for the equivalent service from Gamefly. What finally pushed me over the edge was buying a 360 and going into my closet to get most of my Xbox games ready to take to EB Games and sell them. I had close to 50 Xbox games, at least half of which I had barely touched. That’s a lot of wasted money, even if buying video games is a tax deduction for me. I like to play a lot of different games to try them out, but shelling out $50 for a game you know you’re only going to play a couple times is galling. Thus, Gamefly seemed natural. There are other game rental services out there, but Gamefly is easily the biggest and thus, I figured, would have the infrastructure to do the same kind of short turnaround times that Netflix does.
I’ve been coming up with what I intend to be an exhaustive list of business models that virtual worlds use, successful for not. Here’s what I have so far:
- Initial purchase (box or activation) with recurring fee. (WoW, Everquest, etc)
- Initial purchase with virtual asset sales. (Puzzle Pirates, for instance, has a retail box and has servers that do virtual asset sales).
- Free download with trial period, then mandatory recurring fee. (Meridian 59, etc)
- Free download with one-time fee to achieve a particular status as ‘member.’ (Threshold, etc)
- Free download, free play forever, advertiser-supported. (Anarchy Online, etc)
- Free download, free play forever, virtual asset sales supported. (Iron Realms games, Second Life, etc)
- Free download, free play forever, subscription to unlock extra content/privileges. (Runescape, etc)
- Free download, trial period, mandatory subscription plus virtual service sales. (Gemstone, DragonRealms, etc)
- Multiple game subscriptions bundled in one package. (SOE, Skotos, etc)
- Pay-by-the-minute. (Most BBS virtual worlds pre-internet)
- Allow players to trade for real money and take a transaction fee. (Sony’s Station Exchange)
What am I missing?
This 
really has absolutely nothing to do with my blog, except, I suppose, that it’s in digital form, but it was so good, I had to share it. Music videos suck, and aside from nostalgia, I see no reason to watch commercials packaged as entertainment. I don’t see this video as a Die Hard commercial so much as a Die Hard tribute. Rarely would anything that someone would think to post on YouTube cause me to pay attention to it for a full three minutes and thirty seconds. I’ve watched this video twice. It’s just….awesome. Suck on that, MTV.
Lord of the Rings Online has gone into Alpha release 
and, according to Turbine’s CEO, Jeffrey Anderson,
“Turbine is committed to delivering the most immersive and accurate online Tolkien experience possible and today is a major milestone as we realize our vision for this mysterious and exciting world.”
Oh really? The most accurate online Tolkien experience possible? How interesting. I’m a big fan of accurate Tolkien experiences. Let’s just have a little look-see shall we?
Consider this an official unofficial announcement that our in-development graphical game is called Earth Eternal. I had to announce the name in order to get the help of some of our players in deciding which logo is most appealing to the broad audience of people who like fantasy RPGs. For the sake of reference, here are the logo ideas we’ve been working with. We’ve had three rounds of revisions so far. I appreciate any feedback people have on the logos, as while I know which ones I like, my tastes may or may not correlate with a wider audience.
I 
like to keep an eye on the Lycos 50 - a list of the top 50 search terms for a particular week on Lycos. I wish Google published the same kind of info, but I’m confident there is a very strong correlation between Lycos search frequency and Google search frequency. Here’s the list for the week ending July 29th. (You’ll have the opportunity to mock me later in the post):
- Pamela Anderson - NASCAR fans do a lot of searching apparently.
- Poker - I wonder how many simultaneous users all the various poker sites get in aggregate?
- Paris Hilton - Sigh. I would like to kick Paris Hilton down a flight of stairs.
- MySpace
- Spyware
- Runescape - I never fail to be blown away by Runescape’s incredible popularity.
- Pokemon
- Golf
- WWE - Mega sigh.
- Naruto - What the hell is this??
This is the mocking part. I have no idea what Naruto is, or rather, I didn’t until I google’d it. I’ve heard the term before, but as I am not an anime fan, I may have thought it was a smaller city in Japan. I’m not quite sure what I thought it was, actually, but I certainly did not know that it involves a loud, hyperactive, adolescent ninja who constantly searches for approval and recognition. I feel a little ashamed that such an apparently major cultural force is opaque to me, and so I invite you to mock me. (Though I’ll add that Nascar and WWE are opaque to me as well and are going to remain that way if I have anything to say about it.)
Mock away.
Habbo Hotel,
one of the top three virtual worlds in terms of users (along with Runescape and World of Warcraft), had an interesting event happen in their American site yesterday (they are very country-specific, and operate separate products in almost two dozen countries): The (admittedly, straight to DVD) new animated movie “Ultimate Avengers 2″ premiered an exclusive 10 minute segment from the opening of the movie in the Theatredome (an admin-controlled room in-world used for viewing theatre-type stuff). Afterwards, players were invited to join Marvel-themed Habbos (Captain America, the Hulk, etc) and chat with them.
Pretty neat promotion.