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.

In this conversation with Dellaster though, I feel like it's high time we ask the fundamental questions:

What is the apple?

And, is there one by which all games can be measured?

Short answer: No.

Dellaster's latest comment got me thinking along these lines:

Raph's preferred metric, average weekly uniques, would be an improvement. But that wouldn't necessarily mean that those uniques have ever contributed to the bottom line ($$). If the companies could somehow be kept honest, a count of how many accounts have transfered money to the game operator in the past week/month would be more meaningful and would allow comparing subscription games with those that use some form of RMT. Also, it would be nice to see how much money was spent per account for that time period. We'd be comparing apples and apples that way.

Even a few years ago, games started entering the genre (or were finally recognized as being part of the genre) that did not have the flat monthly fee as their primary or even sole source of income. Whether it was the ability to buy pre-rolled characters from EA for UO, or it was using a premium service like changing your character's name in EQ (or the premium server itself), companies have for a while broaden their potential revenue sources.

This has only expanded. Soon games that solely exist on flat monthly fees alone will be the dinosaurs. Already we're seeing many different ways to structure and measure an MMOG company:

• Company A (CCP, Mythic, etc) might consider Average Weekly Uniques important because that helps them assess how much it costs them to continue running the online world populated only by people who pay a flat monthly fee to play it. To them, the higher the uniques, the more burden to their servers and systems, the less money to them (maybe).
• Company B (Wizet, GPotato, etc) might consider Per Player Revenue important because their business model relies on players using realworld money to buy ingame abilities as their sole source of income. Average Weekly Uniques matters to them as it would Company A, but is not something tied to direct revenue.
• Company C (SOE, Linden Labs, etc.) would take both into account plus look at the breadth of their offering of premium services for a measure of their total experience offering, something with a breadth that far exceeds Company A and B as it includes flat monthly fees, real item sales, extra community based premium services, and so on.
• Company D (Postopia, Millsburry, etc) may only be looking to advertising revenue as their main or sole source of income.
• Company E (MGA Entertainment/Miuchiz) may be funding their online world through the realworld sales of hardware at retail, potentially someday looking to activate a secondary stream of revenue.

To me, the "apple" is as different for each company as there are games. This very short list highlights the four main sources of income:

1. Flat monthly (tiered or one-size-fits-all)
2. Microtransactions
3. A hybrid of both
4. Advergaming
5. Hardware sales.

There's more. And there's more companies coming from left field bringing their own unique vision and business needs

WoW, to me, capped the Age of Flat Monthly Fees. The expectations for future games funded on this model are beyond the reach of probably 80% of those who are interested in this genre. But that certainly does not close the door on new games coming. It just means their relevance, both experientially and financially, must be different. When someone has "won", either someone else has to find their weakness and be better, or they have to change the rules and set new win conditions.

Or maybe, like so many recent entries, they just ignore the rules entirely and hit a different player altogether.

In the future, I expect to see any new game immediately categorized into a bucket populated by games of its ilk. To say "MMOG" won't nearly be enough". How the genre gets bracketed remains to be seen. But ultimately, it will need to be so that those who fund these things understand, truly, what they're paying for and what they're going to get.

It's not just about apples to apples anymore. It's about apples to apples, oranges to oranges, peaches to peaches and so on. 

—————————— 

Ref:

• The Numbers Game 

Unlike the old days, when AO, DAoC, SB, AC2 and so on were all going to dethrone the then-dominate Everquest, there's just too many games out now, splintering the playerbase into discrete sub-groups.

It's like other features of bygone days: the magic has been replaced by sheer quantity. And it's not just lots of people playing WoW.

Like there no longer being one community site to rule them all, there is no longer a single game everyone is at, nor just one game to which people look forward. We're finally out of the shell where anyone saying "MMO" meant everyone else knew exactly what they're talking about. Heck, even the relatively light list at MMOGcharts shows the sort of diversity that MMOGs have become over the last five years. And because the majority of games that could be called "massively multiplayer" don't collect a monthly fee, they don't appear on that chart. Yet, they add to the very depth and breadth of the whole.

<>This is because there's so many different types of games to like, played by lots of people. How much does the dedicated Eve Online player care about the Burning Crusade expansion in WoW? Probably no more than the fan of the latter caring about Eve's Kali expansion. 

So there's not one big "next MMO" to which everyone looks.

<>There's a whole bunch of them. <>

For me, as much as I like to keep up with the Maple Story/Virtual Laguna Beach/Kart Racer side of things, I'm still looking for the deeply immersive, where the game is the focus, not a business model wrapped around some sort of  community in which the game is a foregone conclusion (and iterative of everything I'd already been paying a monthly fee for). So I look most forward to Tabula Rasa, Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea.

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.

This research is compelling not only because it's public but because it corrolates pretty closely to a bunch of other research as well.

Is this useful for game design? Absolutely. Don't think about it as "how do I design a better game" in general. Some continue to say "just make it fun". You can't say just that though. You need to extend it to "just make it fun for them".

And who is "them"?

Your target purchaser, player and account holder. Here's what Parks Associates identifies as them:

1. Power gamers represent 11 percent of the gamer market but account for 30 cents of every dollar spent on retail and online games.
2. Social gamers enjoy gaming as a way to interact with friends.
3. Leisure gamers spend 58 hours per month playing games but mainly on casual titles. Nevertheless they prefer challenging titles and show high interest in new gaming services.
4. Dormant gamers love gaming but spend little time because of family, work, or school. They like to play with friends and family and prefer complex and challenging games.
5. Incidental gamers lack motivation and play games mainly out of boredom. However, they spend more than 20 hours a month playing online games.
6. Occasional gamers play puzzle, word, and board games almost exclusively.

Not a bad breakdown in my opinion. But I see five of the categories cited as subsets of two higher level ones:

• Diversional gamer- Lots ofcasual games, may purchase some of them, sees these as fun things to do between other life activities or after the day is done.
• Immersive gamer- MMO gamers, clan-members for FPSes, dedicated ladder-tournament RTS, that sort of thing. They don't just get into the individual game experience for a temporary thrill. They want a deeper relationship with that and other experiences like it. It's more hobbiest than gamer because they do adjust their lives to maximize their ability to partake.

The reason I say "five of the above" and not all six is because I don't agree with the concept of Social gamers being separate from everyone else. "Social" can be part of all five, even incidental gamers. To me, it feels like this category emerged separate because of how the questions were framed.

This information can be (and is) used to help focus a publisher on identifying the needs of their playerbase.

Closer to home, it can provide insight into why, for the last six months, two or three of the top six games at the ultra-casual Miniclips.com were MMORPGs (Club Penguin, Runescape and, until recently, Puzzle Pirates). The insight there is that MMORPG is not defined as "either WoW or not WoW but with the same immersive properties".

In other words, there exists MMORPGs for folks not playing WoW. Those games just don't get talked about much because they don't make it to MMOGcharts. That's the sort of huge blind spot that could shortly result in the punditry being as surprised as they were when WoW smashed all conventional definitions of success and growth almost two years ago.

The next big MMORPG is not coming from SOE nor Blizzard. It's already here just waiting for the industry to take awares. Don't think Burning Crusade. Think Neopets, or Mapplestory. The times are a changin' because the companies coming onto the scene have not been talking to the folks who came from the house that Brad or Richard or Raph built.

And that's not a slight on them at all. It's more a testament to how turnkey (relatively speaking) creating games for this genre has become over the last few years. And, it's tradition for the MMORPG genre itself to have change come from the outside. After all, there's no clear "start" for the genre, which can be traced back through such things as Ultima, Doom, MUDs and even Space Wars.

New definitions are simply tradition.

Does this sort of categorization matter though? Depends on who you are.

• If you're looking to get into the industry through a non-traditional means, then maybe it matters.
• If you're here already, chances are you've read similar research and maybe even conducted some of it.
• If you're just looking for a good time though, well heck, what does it matter how many accounts a game has?

A Tale in the Desert, Eve Online, Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft, they're out there. They're fun for the thousands, hundreds of thousand or millions of people in them. In the moment of an experience, how many people playing is academic.

And in that moment is a target audience as well.

The hysteria is reaching epidemic proportions, but I wonder if it can be stopped at all.

Every generation seems to get their scapegoat for their perceived ills. There seems to be a connection between a generation that once defined changes becoming comfortable with the new world they created and not liking when the next generation comes along to change things again.

Whether it's the evil of Books, Music, TV, Movies or Games, media has always been a favorite target. Add in the rise in sensationalist reporting from the late 90s onward, and how so many people believe Global Warming is for real when there's so little evidence to prove it's anything more than a planet that's constantly changing per natural course.

The more globalized our media outlets become, the easier it is to spread whatever message the vocal/political want to spread. Give it another year and probably as many people will believe in the corrolation between violence and video games as those who believe in Global Warming.

Maybe it's because the pro-videogames-are-bad movement makes for better soundbytes, more entertainment, more reader-/viewership. Free Speech is a business too. Or maybe it's just due to the above: those in charge are in charge because they defined the rules.

This would be all academic if not for the problem: Sensationalism that becomes conventional wisdom can become policy.

I am not sure if it because our system actually does work, or because we've just been lucky, that a lot of the attempted policies against video games have been overturned. They've all been overturned for the right reasons, but always at what feels like the last minute. So much time is spent trying to get laws on the books that the objective folks who could prevent such time wasting by pointing out obvious legal issues beforehand are ignored in the hype of politicians looking like they're trying to solve a "problem". Of course, in politics, it seems that trying to solve a "problem" is more important than actually solving it.

All of the information is out there. The objective information doesn't get the face time though.

For how long will we continue this cycle?

Personally, this pisses me off enough for me to use the word "pisses" in a sentence. Doesn't anyone read and respect an NDA for an event to which they were a hand-picked invitee?

I ask that rhetorically of course, since in this age, you only need one person to leak, and there's no way to invite thousands of people you implicitly trust. It's just a shame. 

Now, that's not to say the information coming out about Burning Crusade is bad. It all actually makes for a great read. And, there's a chance this is all just a ploy very much in line with the traditional strategy for marketing to hardcore. The anti-establishment stick-it-to-the-man sorta folks Blizzard already successfully marks to just loves to feel like they're getting info through back channels and the underground.

But I still feel it's a shame all people can't be expected to abide by even vague contracts they make. It might be fun to read what they say, but it just gets harder to hold them in any regard as people.

Temporal Ignorance

For the first time in history

I won't link to the post where I read the post where I read this, because it comes up often enough that no one post is any different from others. Any post that starts with or includes this statement is either:

• A marketing blurb
• A political blurb
• From someone who hasn't been paying attention

It's not that everything has happened before per se. There is some new thinking out there after all. However, the antics of the political and professional bodies behind these games have all existed before, in one form or another. Corporate sociology is probably a fascinating field of study, given how different companies fall into comparison with various governmental systems through history, and how others don't at all. It's that the results of their actions affect a potentially large group of people that have no insight into history at all where I am most interested.

It often falls to the veterans of the genre to educate the newbies. This is a tried-and-true approach. Instead of experienced game developers having to tell a new crowd of people the same stuff they told previous folks a decade ago, they can rely on veterans who were there to fill in. This is analogous to any progressive ranking system, whether in the military, in martial arts, a well-functioning company, wherever.

Unfortunately, in this genre, even the veterans often seem ignorant of the genre at large. And this happens to such a degree that those who have seen beyond one playstyle get fed up with their minority voice and head off to havens not travelled by the newbie who could greatly benefit from their knowledge and experience, if they have an open mind. And no, I do not consider myself among the crowd of knowledgable. I've got a few years yet.

So temporal ignorance persists because the correcting agents are hard to find and hard to keep engaged in teaching. As a result, this genre is defined by those on the outside as WoW and everything else, as it was EQ and everything else before it. To me, this is why it's so easy for people to miss that every game can be a successful business model, regardless of how many people they attract.

Elitism

This one I can link to a specific post. I read about this study over at Raph's site, and he too pointed to the derision cast upon it from the "knowledgeable" of the industry. The contention:

You can always count on scientists to confirm through painstaking study what most people can figure out using common sense.

As Raph (and others) rightly point out:

Raph Koster wrote:

More importantly, the common sense of game players has no validity in, say, a Congressional hearing

Exactly. Conventional wisdom is interesting for water cooler talk, but policy does not generally come from that. It can't because the wisdom is only shared by those who have a singular view of a specific topic. And this genre is replete with singular views. I’d rather cite this sort of study than a group of gamers who see game-wide trends because of the goings-on of their particular guild.

Jumping to a conclusion is the realm of those without accountability. That's fine for those who just parrot thoughts and ideas for a living. It is not for people who need to make sociological policy decisions.

I disagree with their assertion that the Internet has merely expanded traditional journalism.

The internet is replacing lots of things that traditionally were information presenters. TV, radio, print, carrier pigeon, mail, etc. But it's not just this mesh of interconnected computers. It's that the mesh itself has expanded to include a lot of other devices.

And it's not about us. Rather, it's about those who are following, today's tweens and younger.

You can, quite literally, get the same information from the same popular sources on just about any device nowadays, notably cellphones, PDAs, handheld game platforms, and so on (I read news on my iPaq, PSP and cellphone depending on what I have, all from the same sources). There's nothing really restricting access to information for those who consider technology a foregone conclusion. We're way beyond the relevance of the term "technically savvy". Tech, particularly to kids, just is. And they're a bigger market share than we are. By alot.

This has resulted in a radical shift in how information is presented. At one point there seemed to be a real attempt to slow down the flow of info to the LCD, the newspaper, particularly because news was being coordinated through companies that were built on that foundation. But that fell away right quick because they couldn't fight the reality: people see something, they can report on it instantly.

"Journalism" has changed. Everyone's a voyeur, and now has a voice. They are just a few grammatical lessons away from writing with the same authority. Meanwhile, people's tolerance for grammar has changed too, which is expected because language itself is a living thing, constantly changing.

There'll always be a place for print, even if it's just for collectors in a few decades. But it won't be the main way people get info very soon. This is because the information itself is the business, not just the media upon which it's presented.

I found some of the information pretty interesting.

Some basics:

• Eve hit the 130,000 subscriber milestone
• About 500,000 people registered for the Eve China beta.
• Eve Collectible Card Game ships. I'm not much into CCGs myself, but I imagine some are.

Most importantly though, they included a link to a new movie they created to show off the new graphics they've been developing. In theory, the following link will automatically launch your default movie viewer and start buffering the stream:

Link to the movie.

Complete with a soundtrack evocative of the general Eve music with a techno spin, this video shows a lot of glory shots and some battles. The ships of course look incredible, but it's some of the shaky-cam stuff that really impressed me.

I have no idea if that bit is going to make the final release, but I sure hope it does. Having fallen in love with both Battlestar Galactica and the unfortunately-now-defunct Firefly (an ode is in progress), I like me my shaky cam. It makes CGI look, well, less like CGI.