Adobe has a piece up about Sherwood RPG, a 3d MMO that runs in Shockwave (a web browser extension if you’re not familiar with it). Sherwood garners 1.4 million unique visitors a month, is completely free, and is ad-supported. It also takes about 30 seconds from clicking ‘Play Now’ to getting into the play experience, if you have Shockwave installed (I have heard Shockwave has about 55% penetration in the US market).

I love Sherwood. I don’t really play it beyond checking out what Gene Endrody, its creator and sole developer, is up to but I was impressed enough by the way it operates that I had planned to talk about it during my talk at GDC this year. (I had to cut the segment about Sherwood due to time constraints unfortunately.)

Two things stand out from Sherwood for me. First is the sheer economy of design and technology. Granted, if you don’t have Shockwave installed, the start-up process is a little more annoying but Shockwave is a very easy install all things considered. Once you start up, you’re in the world incredibly quickly. Geometry is cheap and the models in Sherwood are decent in those terms. The textures are not as good, but that’s a trade-off that has likely proven well worth it for Gene in terms of keeping download time to an absolute minimum. No 100 meg installs here. The gameplay is pretty basic and the world is not particularly rich with content but it’s completely free and never, in any way, asks for money from its users.

In fact, that’s the most impressive thing about it to me, and the second thing that stands out. It’s completely ad-supported. The reason I had included Sherwood in my GDC talk was because Sherwood’s revenue generation model is so simply efficient. Virtually all of the ads that run on maidmarian.com, the umbrella site that Gene has Sherwood and a few other of his games under, are for games that directly compete with Sherwood for its audience’s attention.

Heck, the front page of his site runs ads for two main games, and only one of them is his own. Gene has chosen to look at his game and decide, effectively, that he’s better off sending people who are pre-qualified as interested in MMOs to competing MMOs than he is at trying to directly monetize his players. He’s approached Sherwood entirely this way, and encourages other sites, I believe, to run Sherwood as their own, as long as they include his Google ads in the frame Sherwood is running in.

It’s an interesting strategy that’s clearly working for Gene, though I think at some point he’s going to polish his games to the extent that it’s worth more to get players to pay him directly than it is to direct players to other people whom the players will pay instead. Clearly, running ads isn’t some sort of innovative strategy, but yet there’s something about the specific way that Sherwood runs ads (as a funnel to games normally considered competing) that I don’t see done very often, if at all. If Gene looks for funding, investors take note. Of course, if I were Gene, I think I’d try to avoid that and grow organically as he’s done thus far.

Thanks to Mike Rozak for the tip.