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A Blue Ocean Strategy for MMOs

This year's GDC featured an interesting panel about Reneé Mauborgne's and Chan Kim's Red/Blue Ocean strategy and its impact on MMOs and the game-industry.

This year’s GDC featured an interesting panel about Reneé Mauborgne’s and Chan Kim’s Red/Blue Ocean strategy and its impact on MMOs and the game-industry. Though not without critical reception, the strategy describes the gaming market—especially the one of multiplayer games—pretty neatly. As panelist Sebastien de Halleux, founder of Playfish Games, is hitting the nail on the head: the whole industry is a very example of a red ocean market.
Subscription-based, grind-depending MMORPGs do not co-exist easily. Triple-A studios and -publishers rival each other in throwing more money into the ring to build the next WoW-killer (very red ocean, isn’t it?), featuring better graphics and more of the tried-and-true concepts and requiring more hardware.

When reading Adam Martin’s thoughts about this at T-Machine, it struck me how much Coobico’s business-concept shares with the Blue Ocean Strategy, without really planning it out in the first place:

Instead of trying to be the “next killer of X or Y”, we were pursuing a strategy to find a new audience and new opportunities to play—I have personally pointed that out in an interview with Worlds in Motion. A basic key decision was to stick with Flash, for example, which enables playing Coobico on a machine where you are not allowed to install software or just plainly on the good ole’ travel-notebook.

Offering playing modes which don’t require you to skip playing WoW or Warhammer.

Cutting costs and innovation:  compared to AAA blockbuster game studios, we are working with a ridiculously small development team and budget, which helps us to take larger risks when innovating features. As a small studio you can’t play the finanical red ocean game anyway.

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