Standard import from our friends in the Far East. But while some may abhor the microtransaction-based business model of so many of those games, it does allow for the game itself to be both free to play and free to get. Buying stuff is contingent upon enjoying the game, so what's the harm in merely checking it out?

I won't say this is a harbringer of other microtrans games, mostly because the fact they're already coming.

Basically, a player sued an MMO company because their account was banned for long enough that their virtual goods depreciated in real world value.

Here's something for you MMORPG players out there. This month, an online gamer won a lawsuit worth thousands of dollars against Chinese game operator Shanda. The lawsuit revolved around devalued virtual game equipment and a damaged reputation.

Here's what happened: According to the report, a player of the MMORPG Legend of MIR II earlier this year logged into the game simultaneously from two accounts on the same IP address in order to transfer equipment from his account and another player's.

This prompted the owner of the second account to complain to Shanda, saying that his account had been looted by the first guy. Shanda then proceeded to suspend the account of the the guy accused of virtual theft.

It didn't end there (if it did then we wouldn't have a story at all). The player whose account had been suspended sued Shanda in Hengyang County, and according to the report the lawsuit included "requiring Shanda to unblock his account, and pay compensation of RMB 45,000 (US$ 5,625) for the depreciation of his game equipment during the suspension period, the damage to his character's reputation in the game, and his travel expenses."

The court evaluated the player's equipment through 5173.com and found his claim to have merit. He was awarded compensation of over RMB 30,000 (US$3,750). This decision was handed down on November 15. Shanda has made no comments on the case, and the company has four days left to make an appeal.

The details don't matter to me much really. Like, why would the player who had the second character complain they were looted when it was supposedly the recipient of nice new goods.

But what I do find interesting is that this 5173.com site (which I can't find an English version of) has such clout a judicial body would reference it to track the real world value of a virtual good. And then to actually require the company pay that player back for it.

There's lots of questions and potential ramifications here, but the biggie for me is this:

If an external company can ascribe real world value to a good, and the government validates that, then the control the developer has over that good is reduced. What happens to game balance then? What if an uber sword was deemed too uber and was nerfed? Suppose that sword was already sold to another player? Would that player be able to sue the company for diminishing the value of their purchase because they decided to better balance the game?

What does this do for mudflation? Can that even happen anymore? Or will a good need to stay the same relative value throughout the life of the game?

I am really hoping this is an isolated exception to the general rule, because otherwise there's big trouble ahead.

As has been said countless times, World of Warcraft proved us (myself included) wrong. Way wrong.

There's a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them, in my opinion, was because at its heart, it's a game. For gamers.

Gaming is what has been on the rise since the 70s. It's people who want a good time, fun alone or with friends.

Meanwhile, The MMOG genre was growing at a steady clip based mostly on people who wanted a cool online experience, live a virtual life. The advertising of the day speaks volumes for the audience companies were attracting. People were compelled to roleplay in these emerging graphical environments. They could build houses, host vendors, found settlements, all the stuff someone seeking a virtual existence would love.

The steady growth of the genre had this playstyle at its root. Everquest was one of the early departures from this, but even it was the sort of environment in which societies could be born. As has recently come up again here, EQ had the sort of downtime that people simply wanted to fill with conversation. But this was still mostly between people who came here to have a virtual life.

WoW did not go after this audience. That it happened to capture a great deal of them is expected, since the core experience bears more similarities to EQ and other diku-inspired games than not. However, WoW also did what few other MMOs did before it: capture lots of gamers.

Gamers want different things than virtual lifestylers. One need go no further than compare Second Life to Guild Wars to see that difference. One also doesn't need tea leaves to see which crowd is more numerous, and therefore understand why business is leaning towards delivering more online game than online roleplaying game.

Veterans lament the demise of roleplaying. But that happened concurrent to the sheer explosive growth of the genre. That growth has come from attracting gamers, who come with their own expectations, borne of experience in games of other genres. And even the veterans have benefitted, because to deliver against a gamer's expectation, certain elements must be in place:

• Can I get into it right away? None of this nonsense about having to look all over the world for my first quest NPC. No being able to kill oneself by hitting the wrong key with that NPC. No crazy-kludged interface showing me stuff I won't need to worry about for 20 or more hours of game time.
• Does it work? The days of unplayable instability are over. It works or it doesn't and the latter gets roundly villified. And then ignored.
• Am I having fun right away? 20 levels before I can start having fun? 10 levels before my first real ability? No thanks. That may work in some games, but the most obvious examples are either in decline or built for a different culture entirely.
• Am I winning? Gone are the days where twinking has been the only way to achieve good equipment in the first 15 hours of play. The game giveth or the players walketh.
• Are others in my way? Liking other people is very different from wanting them between you and the objective set for you by the game. Unless they are specifically in your way because of objectives set by the game for them (as in, a WoW Battleground), other players in public-space adventure areas can be a huge source of annoyance. Some games try to solve this through crazy contrived systems. Others just put the best content into instantiated zones created just for you or your group.

Notice has been served to the genre by the newcomers who brought games, and gamers, to the fold. That is where the growth was always sitting. Looking back, it's obvious. Lots of money in video games, lots of people buying and playing. Lots of money in MMOGs, but not nearly as many people. I think we finally understand why that was.

And it's about damned time.

• Maplestory (comments)
• Kart Rider
• Audition

I really don't know anything about Audition beyond what Wikipedia had to say, but the first and second are huge.

Snatching these up for North America while pushing ahead with their alternate-demographic virtual lifestyley games shows a rather impressive degree of diversity for a company new to the game space. Whatever audience Viacom can attract to Laguna Beach, VMTV and LogoWorld will likely be additive to whoever they can attract to the above three, which are already very popular.

Trouble is, it doesn't sound new at all.

From the press release:

WEBZEN Inc. (NASDAQ:WZEN), a leading global online entertainment company, today announced that the company will present a new payment model to its gamers in Korea for its upcoming online video game, "Soul of the Ultimate Nation." The highly anticipated game, which is currently in the open beta phase in Korea, will offer players free basic service in the market with optional in-game items and services offered for nominal fees, also known as micropayments.

How is this "new"? Is it new to Webzen? I would expect most new MMORPGs launching in Korea to be based on micropayments. To me, the question is how long it'll take before they start becoming the standard in the West.

Not that I think the few that are here now are representative of huge hits in North America. Space Cowboy, Archlord, Maplestory and apparently Everquest 2's trade-enabled servers all seem to have not yet gained serious traction in the U.S., or are reporting numbers in ways the usual gentries of aggragated ranting don't pick up upon. Can't blame the punditry of course. Most have been disliking microtransactions/RMTs since the days buying and trading Ultima Online gold was the big thing to hate.

Played this at E3 a bit. Except that you could set some fairly interesting parameters for the instances you enter, it seemed likely a prettier version of Guild Wars. I don't know what their business plan is for North America and Europe. But between the above announcement and their earlier one about partnering with Massive Entertainment to provide ingame advertising, another no-no for the veteran set, I wonder who their target player is going to be in the West.

So I took a look around and finally found some analagous numbers for Maplestory.

As reported by Jun Sok Huhh in April, based on information from the original report in Korean, the following is some highlights about the game and business.

In Korea

• The game launched in year 2003
• The number of accumulated subscribers(as of Feb. 2006) amounts to 14M.¹
• The number of concurrent users is 200K.
• The total revenue during 3 service years is 200B Won(1,000 Won = 1 USD).²
• The total revenue from licensing during 3 servicing years is 110B Won.³

Number of Subscribers

• China since Dec. 2004, 18M subscribers
• Japan since Nov. 2003, 9M subscribers
• Taiwan since Jul. 2005, 3.5M subscribers⁴
• Thailand since Oct. 2005, 550K subscribers
• Singapore/Malaysia since Oct. 2005, 550K subscribers⁵
• Global(US) since Oct. 2005, 1.5M subscribers

Some World-wide Revenue Numbers

• Monthly world-wide revenue of Feb. 2004 was 2.1B Won (US$2,232,239 today)
• Monthly world-wide revenue of Feb. 2005 was 5.0B Won (US$5,313,407 today)
• Monthly world-wide revenue of Feb. 2006 was 16B Won (US$16,997,601 today)

What is particularly impressive is that the game is free. Free to download. Free to play. Divide 16.9mil by the average monthly fee for a Western MMO of $12.95. The result? Maplestory is making as much per month as a Western MMO would collect from 1.3mil subscribers.

And how many games have broken 1.3mil subscribers? Even the newest member to that club (Second Life) only collects monthly fees from less than 3% of their playerbase (about 25,000 property owners).

Conclusion 

Considering their growth and the number of subscribers in the West, this is not a game people can really ignore just because it lacks a monthly fee and doesn't have the name "Warcraft" in it.

If you see a mob with a spear, leather jerkin and sandals, why are you not able to loot that spear, leather jerkin and sandals when you kill it?

And, if you could, in what game could you best do this?

Raph expounds on the highs and lows of WYSIWYG loot. I'm not sure I totally agree though that this can only effectively work in a wordly game, as he seems to imply.

I think bio-linked loot (a term Yivvits coined in the comments thread there) can work in Dikus, if they have a reason to break common loot down into sub-component crafting resources.

I'm thinking of AC2, later SWG, the Disenchanting skill in WoW and the new Jewelcrafting "Prospecting" skill coming to it. All allow items to be broken down into consumable resources others can use in crafting processes.

Granted, I consider neither AC2 nor SWG particularly diku in the EQ/WoW sense of the word. However, WoW Disenchanting is a very useful skill already, as the crafting skill (Enchanting) that uses the result (shards) have as their business the ability to add stats to both crafted and world-dropped items. The profession is so lucrative, most Enchanters do not even bother getting their stuff to disenchant by adventuring. They get it by buying the "junk" people sell on the Auction House.

A strong "crafting" economy is possible in a diku too. But one must assume:

• Most players are NOT there to pick flowers
• A thriving crafting economy can be based on just the few that are, and those that support them.

I often wonder if folks pushing crafter-centric games understand just how small a percentage of gamers actually want to craft. To me, it's great to build a real deep crafting engine. But in this age of obvious easy-to-see paths to revenue and headcount, crafting is a subset of a hunting game, where the percentage of time spent developing crafting should match to the percentage of players expected to bother.

The alternative is to expect fewer players and scale your business to match. There's enough room for both WoW and ATITD. It's just that when convincing folks to invest in your game, they're going to want to know why you're not chasing the big cash. If you ask anyone, they'll say they want a deeply engaging crafting system. If you see the resultant attempts to do so in diku-inspired games, you'll see the complaints that come with it, like "what, I have to actually pay attention while crafting?!" (from EQ2).

Usually in a diku you have a few dedicated crafters, more than that number dedicated to collecting resources and selling in bulk to them, and the rest consuming the end result as part of their equipment set while off killing mobs for the rest of it. 10 people can bang out enough swords to arm a server of thousands in a diku. And that's how it should be because those thousands are the primary reason that diku was inspired.

So in this system, getting a spear from a mob who was holding the spear can mean you either get the uncommon/rare/uber spear, or something you yourself could either break down to a component for crafting, or which can be sold to someone who has that skill.

Easy to say, incredibly tough to get right. I won't say WoW does it perfectly. But again, for the number of people interested in crafting, I think they do a pretty good job.

But I will close with this: the group that can achieve the vision for how UO was supposed to work initially are going to win in my opinion. Combat was deep there for reasons different from "because I killed Boss #12 the 37th time". And they were better. But to try this again is to risk quite a bit when it's so far been proven that strict linearity sells.

Quote from the newsletter:

Nielsen Media Research has unveiled plans to launch GamePlay Metrics, an all electronic video game rating service.  The service will establish new metrics for the buying and selling of advertising in video games, while also tracking the activities of gamers across other media platforms, such as TV and the web.  Slated to begin releasing video game ratings results in mid-2007, the new data will support the video game industry's development of an advertising business model to help offset the growing development costs of game titles for new next-generation consoles.  Nielsen says the data will also provide advertisers, agencies, and marketers as well as hardware manufacturers and game developers with demographic information, while also offering information about how video game play impacts the use of various other electronic media, such as what gamers are watching on TV when they aren't gaming, all of which will support advertisers ability to better negotiate ad deals and target digital gamers with both in game and around game advertising.  GamePlay Metrics will be the first offering from the newly created Nielsen Wireless and Interactive Services division.

Ingame advertising started a long time ago. With this though, I feel like it has finally arrived, at least in the mainstream Business 101 sense.

Reference:

• Ingame Advertising and Microsoft- Microsoft buying Massive Entertainment
• Ingame Advertising and the Future of MMOs- Theme and Business needs
• Ingame Advertising turns 5- Project Entropia
• Ingame Advertising turns 4- Auto Assault
• Ingame Advertising turns 3- Anarchy Online
• Ingame Advertising turns 2- Planetside
• Ingame Advertising- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Mall Tycoon

And that got me thinking about designing for the past, or at least, designing an old idea during an age of change.

These games take years to produce, refine, tweak and launch. And then they generally have years more to continue producing, refining, tweaking and expanding. There is no clear dilineation between generations, beyond what is used in advertising. There is also, as yet, no metric by which people measure when a game should close. The entire genre itself (depending on where you start) is only slightly older than the more recognizable names in it. Within the span of time that covers MMORPGs, some games have been around "forever".

So we're in an age of both new and old, where old ideas are rehashed such that they aren't even considered old anymore.

Some designers take a look at the contemporary space, identify the successes and look to refine the problems. Yet in doing so, they are automatically designing for the past. Their vision will not be realized for at least a year (if it's a small-scope game) or three (if it's not). What has happened throughout that development process though? Who has come in from left field to radically alter the measures of success or introduce new "must have" features? How have player sensibilities changed, either due to the players themselves changing or by a massive influx of new ones with new ideas?

Development is no easy task. In some cases, the process is so complex it can effectively take people out of the genre, almost altogether, the old "we don't have time to play anymore" problem. In a way, they can enter a form of temporal stasis. Their focus on their project prevents the constant exploration of an ever-changing space.

To offset this, they rely on their fans and early testers. Unfortunately, both groups are generally fairly narrow in their own perspectives, depending on the sort of game being made. These groups come from the genre as it is. They love what is there and are seeking merely a slightly tweaked version of it. Hopefully that group is big enough to get the market share one needs. Often times it is not though, something discovered only much later, after a number of binding decisions have already been made.

Trendspotting is an art and a science. It requires constant diligence, either by the designer or by the right group of people inputing. It's basic research at a time when it seems some companies still think these games are labors of love, garage-brewed on a shoe-string budget until a venture capitalist or publisher can be convinced otherwise.

We are well beyond the point where just being an MMORPG is an automatic ticket to some success though. Gamers make their choices these days well before they pay for the game. It has long been my contention that open betas are folly, for they allow everyone, from gamers to reporters, to make their assessment of a game before they've paid a dime into it. And as more games continue to come, more are preordained successes or failures earlier in the proto-stages of their lives.

The keys to success continue to change.

• It's not just IP, but how well one understands both it and what makes the fans like it.
• It's not just about launching content complete, but whether that content is any good throughout the game.
• It's not just about players being able to customized their character or spaces (or WoW and GW would have long ago tanked), but whether that personalization is part of a broader game mechanic that is compelling to many.
• And, it's not about how many players you can attract, but whether you attract a sufficient quantity of the right ones for your game.

There is no bullet-point list of answers, just an ever-changing list of questions. They need to continually be asked lest one be left behind. This is more than just knowing your audience. It's knowing who they will be at launch and beyond.

• E3 Business and Media Summit
• July 11-13
• A daily luncheon conference session with top executives and/or analysts and a Serious Games showcase
• They're considering an Independent Games Showcase, which to me sounds very much like Independent Games Festival Student Competition from GDC.
• The software showcase (the reason most people went to E3) will be located in the Barker Hangar, right across the street from the Santa Monica Airport. According to Gamasutra: "The venue will allow participating companies to showcase their games in standardized, turnkey displays areas ranging from 100 square feet to 400 square feet. "

Here's a quote about the event.

The newly restructured three-day event will, as expected, be invitation-only, and will offer the opportunity for both ESA members and non-members to stage major press events, and to have intimate meetings in hotel suites and meeting rooms with media, retailers, developer partners, and other unspecified audiences. ESA expects that event booking will be launched within the next 30 days.

Basically, the event is being split to separate business and industry functions from entertainment functions. I can't fault the logic, and I am also happy they're maintaining the software showcase. Barker Hangar is very onvenient to the airport, and changes the travel patterns of a lot of attendees. Should be interesting to see if anyone complains about the impact on the local economy.

It also is odd to put this in July. I wonder if that is when they'll always have it, or if it is just because they couldn't get anything sooner for 2007. The May E3 was perfect, between the GDC of March and AGC of August. But it was only perfect if you attended all three. Moving E3Expo to July may compel some companies and people to decide between Santa Monica and Austin next year. I'm going to both, particularly if E3 continues to charge a premium for the conference track that was free at AGC. Those sessions were more valuable to me than any number of the long list of derivative game demos.

Ultimately, this is shaping up to be the more intimate event they set out to create. Should be an interesting summer.