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Brian Green has a post up asking “How Low Can You Go?” talking about the minimum amount it takes to make an MMORPG. He’s commenting on a post on a very new blog that claims a new MMORPG (that isn’t trying to compete with the giants) could be made for $2 million and take 2 years doing it. Brian raises the stakes and claims it would take $3-$3.5 million, though he allows that some savings could be made by trading equity for salary.
Note: Brian has since clarified that he’s not asserting it would take 3-3.5 million to make a moderately successful MMORPG. He was asserting that it would take 3-3.5 million to make an MMORPG with the salary figures that the author of MOGBlog was giving. I’m going to leave the post up anyway though as I have little doubt many out there do think it takes millions to turn out an MMORPG.
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I hadn’t heard of the OGDC, which was announced at the end of August, until today. I wonder whether CMP acquiring Austin Games Conference strengthens or weakens the appeal of OGDC. I tell you one thing I like about what I’m seeing from OGDC so far though: Reasonable pricing. Early bird pass is only $195. You can submit an application to speak here. I’m not sure if I will or not. I’m a speaker at GDC again this year (meaning free admission), but that’s local for me and doesn’t come with the cost of a plane ticket and hotel rooms attached to speaking. On the other hand, I’ve actually never been to Seattle and this might be a good excuse (not that one gets to actually see much of a city when one is there for a conference) to go.
As reported by Gamasutra, 
CMP, owners/operators of conferences like the Game Developer’s Conference and owners of Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, has acquired The Game Initiative, operator of the Austin Games Conference. It’s too early to say what the impact is going to be, but I am sure I speak for a ton of developers when I plead that the AGC attendance fees NOT be made competitive (ie very high priced) with the GDC fees, which are prohibitive for many indies (thank god speakers get free passes, as I don’t know if I’d shell out $900 to go otherwise, and I’m local!).
X06,
Microsoft’s gaming conference, is serving as the platform for a ton of announcements. Here are some items that caught my eye:
- Cryptic, developer of City of Heroes/Villains, and Marvel announced that they’re teaming up to do Marvel Online. This is amusing given that Marvel was, until recently, suing Cryptic for facilitating copyright infringement.
- Peter Jackson has teamed up with Microsoft to work on two games. One is going to be set in the Halo universe (though not as part of the Halo trilogy) and one will be an original creation by Jackson’s in-development new interactive studio, Wingnut Interactive.
- Guitar Hero II is confirmed for the 360. Everybody knew this already anyway, of course, but woot! Of course, this means I’ll have to buy the game twice, as the 360 version looks to be launching after the PS2 version. It’s also apparently not a port. It’s been re-written for the 360. Downloadable content ahoy! If they put a good selection of songs up for download, I know that I, among many others, will end up spending more money downloading songs than the game itself originally cost. God, I cannot wait. Earth Eternal is going to have to do without me on Guitar Hero II release day.
- The original Doom is on Xbox Live Arcade, with 2-4 player co-op mode and everything! I will be buying this.
Warning: This is a rant.
Mastercard and Visa drive me crazy. For many, many years, phone and internet-based merchants have been asking, loudly, for Visa/Mastercard (which, for all practical purposes, represent a duopoly in the US) to accelerate the pace at which they roll out customer security features. It is in the consumer’s interest and in the merchant’s interest to reduce fraud, but what is in Visa/Mastercard’s interest is maximizing the number of transactions, since they take a percentage of each transaction. The more transactions, the bigger the profit Visa/Mastercard make (they are not the same company, and their regulations differ, but only in detail, never in substance).
Gamasutra is reporting on the creation of a new games studio called Green Monster Games, founded by, of all people, Curt Schilling, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Assisting him are Todd McFarlane (creator of Spawn) and fantasy/sci-fi author R.A. Salvatore. Apparently, Schilling already owns a small paper-gaming company. That’s it. I just thought it was an interesting group of founders.
F
rom a post on a blog called Shoemoney I came across today comes a failed business idea of the blogger. I’ll just quote what he says, as it’s hilarious.
I want to purchase a Gas Station and Give away Free Gas
The catch is like the gas would come out really slow and also you would be limited as to how much you could get per week. (Like max 50 gallons a week).
How do I make money ? EASY - I would setup paintball guns around the gas station with webcams that would let people from the internet take shots at the people filling up there cars with gas. You could charge per shot or a xxxx amounts of shots per month for a set fee. PROBLEM - I talked to a city council member about this and he told me there was a “no flying ordinance” or something rule within city limits however I could maybe do it in the country…
Too funny. One wonders what goes on in the mind that considers this idea seriously enough to talk to his city council member about it.
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.
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!
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?
Note: Runescape announced they broke 1 million subscribers in early May, 2007.
Runescape is now reportedly at 800,000 subscribers (with, they claim, 5 million unique users/month), and recently broke 200,000 simultaneous players. Will it be the second Western game to break a million subscribers? Here’s the Google Trend data for search volume. As you can see, the growth rate is declining, though growth continues.
The NPD group released its June best-selling PC games today. They are:
- World of Warcraft
- Half-Life 2 Episode 1
- The Sims 2 Family Fun Stuff
- Cars Radiator Springs Adventures
- The Sims 2 Open For Business
- The Sims 2
- Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
- Guild Wars Factions
- Heroes Of Might Magic V
- Age Of Empires III
20 months after release, it still sits on top. That’s just incredible, particularly for an MMORPG.
As reported by Red Herring (via PaidContent), Sulake, Finnish developer and publisher of the ridiculously popular Habbo Hotel has raised an additional $7.65 million from Japanese investors in order to expand into Japan and then the rest of Asia, and to help launch Habbo Mobile. This follows on the footsteps of a huge ($23 million) investment in 2004-2005. Habbo is one of the most popular virtual worlds on the planet, and gets about 7 million unique monthly users, mainly in the teen demographic.
My favorite thing about Habbo are the weekly live radio programs done by Sulake’s Canadian manager (and friend), Allan Best. He’s big on doing impressions and has a couple regular ‘characters’ that appear on the radio show. It apparently enjoys a relatively high percentage of listenership by Canadian Habbo players.
Neat stuff. Go Sulake!
From Engadget.
When Microsoft releases its iPod competitor at the end of this year, they are going to give users of their service all the songs that they’ve purchased via iTunes, costing Microsoft bucketloads, as it will still have to pay the rights holders to the songs. Those are some deep pockets! I suspect this is going to be a brilliant marketing move for MS who has shown themselves willing to take big losses on version 1 of a product to establish market share.
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 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.
Good for Mark Jacobs! Good for the customer though, given EA’s terrible record with MMOs? I don’t know.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!)
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.