Monthly Archives: November

Two studies about the american and european gaming-market were published lately: NPD’s “Entertainment Trends in America” and Today’s Gamers International Gamers Survey. According to NPD, 14 percent of all U.S. households subscribe to online gaming subscription services (August 2009), while the Today’s Gamers survey claims that “MMOs constitute 14 percent of all time spent playing video games in the U.S.“, where of “ the U.S. online population surveyed, 21 percent said they play MMOs. 45 percent of those count themselves as paying MMO players, while 30 percent have spent money on casual game portals.“

Now, I can’t say if 14 percent of all households match 21 percent of the surveyed U.S. online population, but as Tobold points out, the subscription numbers seem to pretty high. It seems to be in ballpark of 15-20 million according to world internet usage statistics. According to the reported age (8-12 years old), my guessing would be that a large number of these so-called MMO-subscribers come from online-worlds like Club Penguin (which is, of course, comparing apples to oranges).

Apart from that, incidentally, Today’s Gamers International Gamers Survey claims that the MMO market share in the EU is around 13-14 percent, meaning that the MMO market in the U.S. is around 60% larger than in Europe. In case these figures can be trusted, I wonder where the gap comes from; is it a difference in credit card- or broadband-penetration? Or the more difficult european heterogeneous market?

Via Gamasutra.

Another aspect under construction is Coobico’s roleplaying part. As of version 0.4 we are orienting this more heavily towards tactical roleplaying—which here means to be able to control more than one character on a quest to solve problems (as opposed to the standard MMORPG-formula of one player, one character). We already abandoned the unnecessary division of having one player-character (which can be controlled directly) and keeping a population of settlers (not directly controlled).
Players will be able to choose any of their settlers to manually control them and go exploring. Each settler has a set of skills at her disposal; players can choose which settlers they want to take along on a quest, to control which skills will be available in a dungeon.

We are currently doing some low-level work for Coobico’s alpha-release 0.4, e.g. completing the quest-system. Besides that, one item on our long laundry list is overhauling the mechanism of upgrading and populating buildings. As of version 0.3 “upgrade-slots” for a building got available automatically after some amount of time (a slot could then be turned into something productive). We finally decided to let players upgrade their buildings entirely manually, according to their own pace and preference; the old system probably would have puzzled Coobico’s novice players (“why is nothing happening here?“), while it would have unnerved the more hardcore players (“why the heck do I need to wait?“).
As of version 0.4, buildings can be upgraded at any time according to the players’ own pace. Also, we are raising the prices for constructing a new building, but any new building will come “pre-equipped” with a settler (eliminating the need of manually recruiting a settler at each newly constructed, empty building).