Project & Story

Another large, well-renowned virtual world is shuttered next week: There.com, a virtual platform co-developed by Forterra Systems and the U.S. army, and later acquired by Makena Technologies. There attracted large business-partners like Coca-Cola, CosmoGirl, Bebe, K-SWISS, and SPIN.

As CEO Mike Wilson announced, Make will continue with “some exciting educational projects in process, which [it] will continue to service. The entertainment-driven, branded space, though, will close.“ Wilson gives the bad general economical situation as reason for the closure of There.com:

“While our membership numbers and the number of people in the world have continued to grow, there has been a marked decrease in revenue, which, in these economic times, is no surprise… Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were ‘directionally correct’ and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.“

According to Alexa (taken with a large grain of salt), There’s traffic spiked during early 2008 and then gradually fell back to a meager daily reach within 2009 and early 2010.

With the closure of large virtual worlds like There and Metaplace and several MMOs changing their revenue-model to free-to-play, the field of online worlds appears to be volatile at the moment.

Via VirtualGoodsNews

Information Sercices Group has been commissioned by Popcap Games to perform a survey of the demographics of players of social games. The findings:

“55% of social gamers are female and 45% are male. Females are more avid gamers, too; 38% of females said they play multiple times a day, but just 29% males said the same. Women are more likely to play with people they know (68% vs. 56% for males), and men are more likely to play with strangers (41% vs. 33%) than women are…
There were more insights in the survey beyond gender. Facebook is the most popular destination for online games, with 83% of respondents saying they have played games there. Twenty-eight percent have purchased in-game currency with real-world money. The average gamer has played six social games, and more than 50% of gamers started playing a game because a friend recommended it or because they saw a friend playing it in a news feed or other social stream.“

Compare this to the player demographics of MMOs (as reported by the great Daedalus Project, Gamasutra and BBC, among others), where “the most hard-core players are female… Despite gaming being seen as a male activity, female players now make up about 40% of the gaming population.“

Females thusly account for a 15 percent higher proportion of players of social games in comparison to the audience of MMOs—they do seem to hit a nerve of a female audience a bit better than the standard formulas of traditional MMOs.

Engage Digital has published a virtual goods forecast for 2010, based on responses from over 30 industry executives, analysts and observers. The key-findings are:

“The amount of money spent of virtual goods will rise…
Triple-A brands will invade the virtual goods marketplace in order to tap the appeal with an increasingly broad consumer base, as a means to drive reach and engagement (though not necessarily revenues).
As the virtual goods marketplace reduces friction among buyers and draws more participants along the entire value chain (more goods creators, more infrastructure solutions, more dollars), it will inevitably draw greater scrutiny from government regulators and also be the driver of disputes that will end up in court—either seeking redress or prompting regulation… 

Among the most basic views of the sector is that it is bound to grow in terms of how much consumers are willing to spend on digital good.“

The PDF can be downloaded here.

via Virtual World News

Adam Martin has posted an interesting Article called “2010 and the Browser MMO” at his blog T-Machine, essentially raising the question, how a contemporary browser MMO should look and feel like:

“It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now…

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape…“

I would argue that this is an issue for every “serious” browser-game: probably 99% percent of all browser-games currently run on Flash, but Flash is not powerful enough to render graphics comparable to modern “professional” games—or even to 3D-environments like Unity. With the advent of new browser-plug-ins like Unity and others, the bar for good-looking browser-game-graphics is raised dramatically. The more people playing such 3D-games, or using services like Gaikai and OnLive during he next years, the higher the expectation will be how a “good-looking” browser-game should look like.

In my opinion, Adobe needs to react quickly to expand Flash’s capabilities soon. Hardware-acceleration, import of 3D-assets or some specialized Actionscript-libraries might be an idea. Otherwise, Flash-based games might soon be the equivalent of the Javascript- and applet-games of some 10 years ago.

A very happy Christmas to everybody from the Coobico-team, and a happy new year. While development of Coobico will still go on during the holidays, there will probably no blog-post before new year.

Sad news shortly before christmas for Metaplace-employees and -fans alike, Metaplace will be shut down on January 1st. Metaplace enabled users to create virtual worlds, an idea that seemingly did not gain enough traction, as VentureBeat reports:

“The company told its users today, ‘Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer user-generated content service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company’”

Raph Koster has promised to write more about the closure of Metaplace soon. He also announced a website where Metaplace friends can stay in touch. Best of success, Raph, for your next steps.

The way capitalization of web-startups works does not seem to leave enough time to gain financial success. In my opinion this is fatal for social start-ups in particular.

Free-to-play and micro-transactions are trends migrating from Asia to western MMOs in the past years—even being picked up by major players like Sony and EA. Still, it has not yet been proven if gamers’ acceptance of microtransactions matches the Asian level of market penetration and if thusly generated revenue can sustain western MMOs. 

Gamasutra recently ran an article called “What Gamers Think About Microtransactions” about the findings of Daniel Kromand who asked hardcore-gamers, who “were all experienced gamers and ranged from early twenties to mid-thirties”, about their angle on MT:

“Some games have premium items for sale, but the interviewed players were largely skeptical towards these transactions. The reason is that they threaten to tilt the perceived fairness of the game, because established players fear that newcomers can buy their way to success: ‘I don’t think they would like [expensive, powerful items] very much. Because then it means that you can be better than me, [just] because you have a bigger wallet.‘ (Peter)“

Even if taken with a grain of salt, this indicates that there are differences in acceptance of personally buying MT-items or approving fellow players using micro-transactions.

Link this to EA and SOE, who are currently changing their free-to-play-formula, probably due to a lack of revenue: EA’s DICE has raised the in-game costs of items in Battlefield Heroes while reducing real-money costs, as Eurogamer reports:

“EA’s DICE has changed the item pricing structure for its free-to-player shooter Battlefield Heroes, reducing the real-money cost of items while making their cost to rent or buy with in-game currency dramatically more expensive…
One player, quoted by Ars Technica, calculated that they would have to play 50 matches a day just to afford to keep a powerful weapon using VP. In effect, the choice for players who want to be competitive is now between spending money or submitting to serious grind. Needless to say, it’s been a very unpopular move.“

Likewise, according to an interview with Sony Online Entertainment’s Creative Director for Free Realms, Laralyn McWilliams, SOE will implement a pay-wall in their popular F2P-title “Free Realms” with the upcoming update, where all in-game jobs will become free of charge, but only up to a level 4. Higher levels will be restricted to premium members (except for players who have already achieved higher levels so far). “Freemium” comes to mind, a business model which relies on offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features (and which is not so different from your typical World of Warcraft 10 days test-drive). 

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).