• 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.

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.

Basically, who will win the future?

I'm a big fan of convergence discussions. There's generally a pretty clear end goal in mind for various bits of technologies and efforts. For example, mobile devices. I'm pretty sure we could all agree that the ultimate mobile device includes:

• Cellphone
• PDA functionality
• Media playback (music, movies, games)
• General office tools
• Email

Some would go further out and say things like foldup screens or eye pieces or brain-connections, but the above five are at least all conventional technologies. They just can't be put together for cheap enough for the masses.

Who's going to be the first to do that? Apple adding cell and office tools to iPod? 3G cellphones adding media playback and infrastructure to deliver them? Microsoft with yet another attempt at a touchscreen oversized-PSP-like device? Who knows.

The point is that it's not about delivering the product. We can do that already. It's about who will be successful at doing so, either by delivering it cheaply or convincing the masses to shell out more for it?

And that brings us to MMOs.

Right now there seems to be two distinct foundations for the future of interactive experiences in an online social settings:

1. Games that build social communities (WoW, EQ, et al). Single-experience game environments that attract a certain group of players. But because they are single-experience/motivation games, they are not as good a representative of society at large maybe.
2. Social networks that feature games (Neopets, MySpace, SL, ARGs in general maybe). Being not about a single experience they have the potential of attracting a broader array of personalities.

Going purely by reported numbers, #2 is currently the winner. However, we can't go by virtual numbers for the same reason I can't compare all MMOs to each other by using MMOGcharts. 25 million Neopets accounts doesn't tell us anything about how much revenue each account brings to the game, for example. Could be that 7mil World of Warcraft accounts generate much more cash per player simply because all of those translate into some form of guaranteed revenue per month. Besides, the costs to develop, maintain, expand and explore business relationships in Neopets are very different than WoW.

Yet they're both "MMOs" and represent two foundations for them.

There's a lot of talk about MySpace going MMO or Xbox Live already being one after a a fashion. I can't say I disagree with that in theory. They do attract a wider crosssection of people because they're not all expected to experience the environment the same way.

Yet there's something to be said for the number of people who seem to enjoy the common experience of a good game done right. Obviously there was growth potential for traditional MMORPGs beyond what the punditry assumed in 2004. The genre doubled in size in some territories in 2005/6 almost entirely due to WoW and Guild Wars. So maybe there's more growth potential, even if many analysts think otherwise?

I don't know. But it's sure going to be fun to watch.

Throughout the year, my eye has been on the Nintendo Wii. This is likely the first console I'll actually buy since the Nintendo 32bit machine from the mid-1990s.

Today this decision was nailed home for me.

In a Gamasutra article, they reference this New York Times article (requires login) which details some new information about the Wii:

• North/South American Released: 11/19.
• 25 Games for launch
• Standard AAA titles will go for $50, which bucks industry trend of $60+
• Includes the digital delivery of classic games they expect to list for between $5 and $10.
• Integrated photo support for TV display as well as News and Weather "channels".

Add to the above their already way-innovative controller, and expand the "classic games" to include every Nintendo title ever made, and we have a system that could conceivable appeal to every Nintendo fan there ever has been and talks specifically to people who don't want to learn to play even higher-resolution games on the same old controller.

While Sony and Microsoft duked it out for dominance of the high-end graphics space in the last generation, Nintendo quietly talked to an audience neither of the other two even bothered to address. And then, earlier this year when the Wii Controller was revealed, both competitors fell over themselves trying to capture Nintendo fans by saying things like "oh, yea, the Wii will be a great second system to our PS3/Xbox!"

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Meanwhile, Nintendo is effectively saying that competition between Sony and MS is irrelevant to them. The very essence of Blue Ocean thinking.

Now, this isn't to say the competitors aren't thinking innovation either. Between the Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and Live Anywhere ideal, and Sony's own Virtual Console, this new generation is less about raw graphics and speed and more about what-else-can-it-do.

And that's an important development in my mind, beyond the innovations of expanding the playerbase. Many of us have watched the rise of platform independent media consumption, watching movies on cellphones, making phonecalls through Second Life, that sorta thing. But to date, the Living Room/Den of a house has been a sanctuary away from this always-on connectivity.

This new generation of consoles stands to change that. Photos on the TV, streamed movies from the computer, banking on a console, it's all converging. Now whether people want this, or continue to relegate their consoles to the media room remains to be seen.

Personally, I expect the adopters and deniers to be separated by generation. And for both groups to find commonality with the Wii.

Overall, I felt they cast a blind eye to a number of emerging trends, but the stuff they covered about the "core" marketplace (basically as defined by diku-inspired games) was pretty good. And insightful.

The presentation was about 45 minutes of talking and 15 minutes of Q&A. The talking portion was supported by a Powerpoint show, which Jon has hosted on his Team page at Sigil Games. You can read that presentation at whim. It says stuff that's fairly straight forward. But when they were describing individual points on the slide, I found I disagreed with them about half the time (mentally, of course. I wasn't raising my hand to argue with them or anything…)

Industry Standard UI

Early on, the talk was about capturing users and giving them a fun and easy to learn experience. Common sense rule there, but they went on to say that perhaps WoW's UI should become an industry standard UI by which all MMORPGs follow.

I can appreciate why they say that. After all, this is two companies arguably working on games that will follow the same methodology that WoW followed. Hotkeys, macros, chat box, yadda yadda.

But my problem with this statement is that this assumes the entire genre going forward is going to focus on derivative EQ-style experiences. By itself that is the death of innovation, because this assumes the same game mechanic throughout at a time when the very breadth of this genre is replete with examples to the contrary. But I'll go more into that below when this comes up again.

PC is on the way out

And Consoles are on the rise. Makes sense, again, except it flies in the face with emerging platform independence trends. Designing an MMO for a console is very different from a PC. Keyboards are not the norm. Internet connectivity may be there but the publisher of that Console may have an oppressive business requirement preventing things like easy subscriptions or item sale-based revenue flows. Bringing diku to consoles is easy. Making it as relevant and affordable is something else.

Further, with computers lasting longer and being passed throughout the household as new ones are bought, we can expect PCs to be around, and relevant for gaming, for quite a few more years at least.

You need to choose a platform to start with, but even AAA single-player title developers can't afford to not consider multiple platforms. MMORPGs can afford that even less.

Oh, and they see that Brick & Mortar retailers will be critical partners for the short term (next few years at least). I tend to agree. We all talk digital distribution, but it's still young, and frought with different types of challenges that traditional retailers don't have. The big benefit also is that traditional retail comes with embedded secondary advertising. They want people walking around their store, so feature items that grab attention and make impulse purchases. The web does not easily facilitate impulse purchasing for the average consumer, outside of closed systems like iTunes.

Import Single Player Developers

Here is where I completely agreed with them. The point they made was that the industry has long been mired in conventions invented during the MUD days. The focus on resource gathering (whether plants or gear) has overshadowed the need to have fun doing it. So they recommend adding single player game developers to the core design and development team so that their insights into having a momentarily fun experience can be integrated with the thought process.

This is important, and we're seeing it already, with games like Tabula Rasa and Age of Conan escewing normal diku conventional UIs in favor of something more engaging to play. In realtime. They are both largely still about resource gathering, but wrapped in a narrative shell and with a different UI to prevent the "more of the sameness".

Trade-offs

They have been around awhile so have seen and discussed the same stuff we all see and discuss. One slide in particular talked about setting realistic goals by understanding what is truly important for launch and making trade-offs as a result:

• Breadth vs Depth
• Quality vs Scope
• Polish vs Additions

Each game will want something different, but their opinion is tha you focus on Quality, Polish and a deep experience over a broad one. It's hard to argue with this point, particularly in light of history. Notable quote from the slides:

Build a simple by deep game

Build enough content at launch that people cannot see the horizon

Get to playing the game as soon as possible, even if that means using middleware

And: get your entire company, full of cross-functional specialists, to play it. Gauge their reactions. If they're not logging in on their off time, if they're dreading the weekly build play session, if they make excuses, then there's something wrong with the fun factor of it. This is really important. People complain about not playing their own games enough, so really need to understand why. If it's not fun, it's not fun. Fix it before the public sees it because otherwise they're just going to point out the same thing publicly and loudly. Notable quote:

How do you know when it's fun? When you get your designers and artists playing it instead of wanting to go home

Do this by building "vertical slices" of the game, experiences that can be had, to test out the game play. Game systems can be built in parallel, but concepts, notably for UI and motivations, need to be tested, even if built separately from the core system. Build this vertical slice many times for every system. Test throughout development.

And of course, give yourself more time to build and test. Because that's easy…

Item Sales and Innovation

They, like many, see this as a Panacea for future revenue flows. That's fine of course, but this is where I wanted to talk about innovation again.

Item sales ingame, as defined by veteran developers, almost require a diku-inspired experience. The above assumes the future is all diku really, which is myopic in my opinion. And wierd, coming from companies that fear comparisons to WoW more than anything (because their games are/will-be similar in mechanic).

The point is to differentiate. If you sell weapons, and they sell weapons, and your game which isn't out yet is similar to theirs which launched two years ago, therefore targeting the same player, they win. Why try and make the same game then? To tweak what's been tweaked indefinitely?

That'll work for some, but others think differently. From the games mentioned above to Stargate Worlds to Star Trek Online, to web-based MMOs to mobile-based MMOs, there are a lot more people not copying EQ than those that actively are. In my opinion, WoW capped that course of action.

MMOGCharts Myopia

The blind spot I think they have though, predictable given their history, is with the emergence of web-based MMOs. By some estimates, it's not WoW that's the biggest MMO in the world, but rather Mapplestory (UK-based, coming to US). But its business is different, it's barrier to entry almost as low as possible, and the qualities of the game play just that different.

I call this "MMOGCharts Myopia" because it seems as though people only talk about the games that hit that chart. Good for SirBruce and his consulting gig, but bad for companies that want to think beyond the 9,000lb gorilla that is WoW. The basis of comparison on those charts is, to me, largely mitigated in relevance by just how many games do not use traditional subscription accounts/we-hate-RMT approach to reporting and gauging their own success. Given emerging trends, I see less games coming with that traditionalist approach too.

Conclusion

Overall a great presentation. I disagreed with about half of what they said, but it was all very intelligent and spoken through real experience so valuable all the same.

On the one hand, I'm getting worried that I'm getting to the point where I've been around long enough to be seeing new people learn old lessons.

On the other, it was interesting to hear their take on my favorite topic. I think some of the talk was a bit single-minded though, particularly the focus on hardcore gamers.

You can get a lot of time and interest from hardcore gamers. They're a great fit, the ambassadors for MMOGs in particular. However, you can't grow this genre except incrementally without appealing to casual gamers. And I mean <i>real</i> casual gamers, not someone who's casual because they only raid two nights a week instead of seven.

World of Warcraft proved this. They didn't increment into doubling the amount of Westerners playing MMORPGs. They grew by appealing to those already here and adding truckloads of new ones turned off by the time sinks. The vast majority of those people are not repeating Blackwing Lair (BWL) for new drops. They play the game as an RPG and either leave when they realize they can only grow beyond 60 by repeating BWL for new drops, or stick around to play a different portion of the game from a different perspective. And they'll be back for Burning Crusade because 60-70 is being structured the same as 1-60 was. And leave at 70 because that won't be.

But forget WoW. Big as it is, it is not the future. It is just one part of it. Segments of the punditry in this genre are fixated on Everquest (EQ), things like EQ and things that aren't like EQ but still take a whole lot of time to be successful within. Hardcore, hardcore, hardcore.

Other segments look beyond the typical CD>patch>subscription-fee model to see where the real growth is happening. It's easy to ignore this part because it doesn't show up on MMOGchart, but it's there, real, and is where a lot of companies disinterested in spending $60mil to take on the ultimate diku are looking.

You can get casual people to play MMOGs. Look at the top six titles at one of the hotter destinations for casual games. Until recently, three of them were MMOGs (Club Penguin, which has been top almost since launch, Runescape which has been there since their launch, and Puzzle Pirates which appears to have fallen off again).

That's saying something.

The future is not by reskinning diku for hopefully millions more. Rather, it's about getting more people to join a persistent online ecosystem where they can be plied for more cash by being given more experiences. The average person is not interested in an MC drop to start the tech tree to eventually take down Ony/Naxx/whatever. They want a fun game they can get into and out of that may be part of a longer-term growth strategy. And particularly in the U.S., there's a lot more average people out there playing casual online games than there are playing massively-multiplayer ones.

Make the persistent long term rewards easy to understand and a natural evolution for people you attract through casual games. Then you've got them. Just don't expect to keep them with raiding.

And finally, here's a quote I found particularly funny, given the source:

Sigil Games’ Zack Karlsson pointed out that in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (due sometime this winter), they are finding gamers well outside of the typical 18-35 year-old male demographic.

From a guy working for the makers of a game that previously made another game in which Nick Yee revealed, through qualitative study, the same info, almost four years ago.

I don't agree.

You don't need to have played these games to understand how to deliver an analogous experience to some players. Knowing what's not worked previously can potentially close a mind to what could work now. Ideas are about timing too and sometimes a good idea can come from anywhere.

MMORPGs themselves borrow conventions from many other genres that themselves haven't stood still either. WoW questing, for example is not some new and wonderful thing never seen before. The mass compulsion to partake is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy based on repeatedly-discussed success. But otherwise, it's the game anyone who's ever played an RPG has already played. Until the endgame. But even that is just about more people realizing a nascent desire to spend craploads of time doing the same thing again and again rather than there being some fundamentally new experience to be had there that's never been before.

I don't think you need to have played these games since the days of The Realm in order to design games for both current and new players. In fact, a large part of the relatively slow growth this genre was enjoying before Final Fantasy XI to World of Warcraft to Guild Wars could be attributed to veterans of the genre designing for veteran sensibilities. Not a good way to capture the new user.

The most successful titles in the genre (either by how well they scale to the business behind them, or how they capture zillions of people) were from companies coming from the outside with new rules. This is often the cornerstone of the Blue Ocean Strategy, the essence of "thinking outside the box", the tried-and-true tradition of ignoring rules other think are static.

I do not know whether Genesis is the product of a kid looking for a job or has a real prayer of seeing the light of day. But there's a long history of innovation starting just this way.

One of my favorite topics came up within this discussion. The question is: do you launch a game with a broad array of innovative features to try and capture a wide variety of players, or do you launch the game for an established audience and scale into the new variety of players by integrating innovation (or at least, broader) features later?

I've long wondered if it wouldn't just be smarter for a company to launch a game for one type of audience (in the case of this genre: diku) and then over time replace certain features with ones that would allow the integration of more virtual lifestyle-like systems. Start with a proven success and use that to bankroll into innovative thinking. That, of course, grossly understates the complexity of doing so. And as with anything in this genre, God is in the details. But I still think it's a valid question to continue asking.

But if we assume quality and experiential goals are met, there still remains some very complex questions. For example, Rithrin asked:

Why not just add in the innovation right from the start alongside the proven method? No need to start off by limiting options then opening them later…

The problem is that the more you add into your feature list for launch, the more money and team size you need to pull it off. And the more complex your final test becomes, because it's attempting to integrate a wider array of features. So, basically, if you want a broad featureset all complete and well playing, you need to convince management or VC folks that it's worth the even greater risk up front, both in money and resources and time.

Scaling into innovation meanwhile means you can focus specifically on the known desired features and therefore tap a well-defined market. With the success you gain here you can fund the innovation you want later. Some of this innovation will be appreciated by your existing players, but it can also be used to market the game to new players, getting a potential bump in PR (good PR) and therefore raising awareness of your game which may have begun to plateau in interest due to age and the launch of other titles.

In a way, SWG would have served as a great example of this had a lot of things worked out. One of the problems was that the most polished system (resources, crafting) was one with a relatively narrow appeal. Had they launched with combat being awesome, supported by a good narrative based questing system and with well-integrated PvP, they could have gained their initial success and then launched a good crafting resource system and then vehicles and then Cities and then JTL, all of which radically changed the game.

Of course, this grossly oversimplifies the task of actually doing that in practice. But that's the hypothesis anyway. It comes down to this question:

Would a game with ok housing, ok crafting, ok economy, ok questing and ok combat and everything else being the same do as well at launch as a game with great questing and great combat? If not, then maybe focus on doing what the players expect done right first, yet with an eye towards how the total system will be scaled later.

So it's not just a matter of what you launch, it's when you can afford to launch it and in what order best serves the amount of type of players you want in your game.

Occasionally, games like Space Cowboy and Habbo Hotel will become know to this core group, and some will play them. But the core, I feel, looks for similarity and differences only at the experiential level, and by comparison to EQ and UO. 

But then there's the rest of the world.

There's a lot of whacky stuff going on. General Mills has a big online game (Millsberry). General Mills, mainstay of all-things-traditional. Post cereals does too (Postopia). There's Neopets, which with 25 million accounts basically trumps any online game. Sure there's no graphical-client, not even a Club Penguin/Habbo/Bang Howdy!/Gaia Flash-based one. Just a whole bunch of web pages and activities/mini-games within. With an economy, and community, and trade (including Malls), and so on.

Some say these are "under the radar". That is true, from the specific point of view of folks who've talked about this genre from one, maybe two, perspectives. But to me, the sheer money behind them and the reach they have as a result make the core games "under the radar".

This is why I continually bang on the notion that WoW has raised the bar. They. Have. Not. Nobody is going to spend 60-80mil on a single game sold on CD with a monthly fee. As they have done in the past, they have entered a genre and delivered a pre-eminant testament to the past. And by doing so, hasten the demise of a specific way of thinking.

Does that mean everyone raiding AQ40 is going to hit Millsberry next? No. What it means is that evaluating this genre is more than just saying "it's like EQ, it's not like EQ" and involves way many more than the people already here.

Occasionally a luminary will say something like "look to Korea".

To them I'd say "look outside the subscription fee". The changes are already here.

Some of the folks within the thread are asking for stuff either they or others before them have been asking for years. In the face of so many recent events though, and being reminded of something that occured to me last June, I got to wondering:

Are they even a market anymore?

There's a lot of older conventions still perpetuated in the genre. These games still take a lot of time to play, they require a lot of dedication and, eventually, they require both of these with a group of other players. The genre grew significantly in 2005 through the introduction of two games that specifically focused on this sort of experience, polishing to a high shine iterations of the Everquest many of us played years before. Guild Wars and World of Warcraft arguably offer the best iteration of this mode of play.

Veteran players are tired of these conventions though. Understandable since they've been around awhile. But while they may want new games for them, the success of WoW and GW was largely based on both non-jaded veteran gamers and new MMOG gamers brought into the genre.

This highlights a fundamental element: in the grand scheme of things there's a whole lot of people who, while technically capable of playing an MMOG, currently are not. There's lots of reasons for this of course and the smart effort is being placed on attracting them.

I remember conversations from years ago where people derided any attempt to attract new gamers into the genre. Pundits thought they had a pretty good beed on things, "knowing" the genre was going to forever slowly grow overt time.Seems like they were righ, but it took new companies to ignore the conventions and therefore attract new players who were turned off previously by them.

Maybe that's what is needed going forward. There's still a lot of gamers out there who, while technically able to be here, are not. What will it take to get them?

Something completely different.

Maybe it'll be a license-based compendium of massive experiences. Maybe it'll be a distributed world, like a beehive hosted experience that builds from grass roots, like MySpace, or XBLA, or RealArcade, with a 3D client. Maybe it'll be a Far Eastern manga-based title since Manga are starting to take off. It'll probably not target current 18-34 year old males either, but rather, a larger group with looser purse strings and greater buying power (like today's tween girls and teens). And it'll probably not have the same sadistic time-sinky nonsense that clearly defines the niche subgroup of this already relatively niche genre (in the U.S.).

And finally, it's likely to not target anyone who's hoping to have easier access at Raid-style mob drops.

The "next big thing" to me isn't going to come from this genre. It's going to be a new title that's called "MMO" for the easy messaging, but which is a different experience targeting someone different.