Famous last words

Everyone’s familiar with the famous last words list – you know, the RPG one. Here’s one:

I’ll take off my armor so I’m silent and slip past the dragon.

In a recent discussion about whether Warhammer Online is a failure or not, someone brought up a Marc Jacobs interview. One of his quotes has become synonimous with WAR’s failure to keep the 1M subscribers it got after launch:

“The corollary to that is if you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble — that’s not a healthy sign for an MMO,” he said, citing Sony’s January-released “Pirates of the Burning Sea” as a recent example. “It will be the same for ‘Warhammer.’ Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”

By his very own definition, WAR failed spectacularly but was there any other way? For all practical purposes, Blizzard has come up with the FORD MODEL T of MMOs. They will milk it for decade (at least) and hope that their next model (TITAN) will capture WoW’s market share.

However, there are other factors making it even harder to beat a blockbuster MMO. For one, it’s the networking effects – chances are your friends play WoW rather than ANY other MMO. Even more important however is the fact that most of WoW’s players are first-time MMO players. They are happy with Blizzard and have little incentive to change the supplier of their MMO.

Even though there’s many WoW clones that hope to capitalize on these first-time MMO players, the only ones that are doing OK are free-to-play ones that solve the issue of the subscription fee. To use another analogy, the only way to beat Windows is through a free (or dirt cheap) *nix OS, like Mac OS or the many Linux distros.

2012
04/24
CATEGORY
Business
Game Advertising
Game Marketing
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Creativity

Creativity circa 1991, little has changed since then as John Cleese aptly observes in this lecture. No new research has been done, obviously because it’s a dead end research.

So what distinguished creative people from not (so) creative people? The ability to PLAY. Worth watching if you feel you are good at it (playing).

Checklist for entering open (creative mode):

1) Set up space – an oasis of quiet
2) Set start time and end time – play is impossible without time limits (90 minutes)
3) Don’t take the FIRST solution, the most creative solution usually comes after cliches.
4) Confidence – forget about the fear of mistakes, the essence of playfulness
5) Humor – catalyst for entering open mode quickly; the more serious the subject, the more needed humor is.

2012
03/10
CATEGORY
Game Art
Game Design
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Exploiting cognitive biases

Zynga has been long know for being run by spreadsheet people and not game people (see video “Monetizing like Zynga“).

It seems now that in addition to spreadsheets, they are masters of cognitive biases. A new paper by Juho Hamari details who social games have taken Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow and implemented game mechanics that take advantage of people’s cognitive biases (their System 1, as Daniel puts it).

Loss Aversion in Facebook Games

A few highlights:

Exploiting endowment effect: game mechanics that emphasize LOSING something you already own, as opposed to gaining something you don’t own yet.

Sunk-cost fallacy: game mechanics that focus on the amount of effort you have already invested in the game, forcing you to consider sunk-costs when a “rational” person would discard the sunk costs and focus on the present (and future) costs.

Status quo effect: Select a default option that is significantly higher than the average value – when it comes to purchase of virtual currency. Most people would think that spending $20 on Farmville cash is OK for a game, only to find out it doesn’t even buy them a tractor.

Quota anchoring: creating a number of DAILY quests. Failing to do all daily quests results in a strong desire by the player to return to the game and complete all daily quests.

2012
02/26
CATEGORY
Business
Game Design
Game Marketing
Monetization
Systems Design
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Congress, SOPA, and LOL

As a fan of League of Legends, I feel a bit guilty for not playing for at least a month. I haven’t even read about the last two heroes.

However, what’s important is that other people are playing and some of these other people happen to be a Congressman taking a stand against SOPA right on LoL’s forum!

Although I am sure that a LOT more congress “persons” play ZYNGA games, I doubt they’d use come out openly and FarmVille as a forum. That is if FarmVille had a forum.

So I feel pretty good about the future of online games, especially, the multiplayer arenas.

2012
01/21
CATEGORY
Business
Game PR
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Zynga Poker

Zynga has finally hit the big time, if you define big time as a perfectly timed IPO. For a company that was founded only in 2007 on by copying a poker site, they have come a long way.

Or have they?

When Mark Pincus started the company in 2007, he took a big gamble by betting on Facebook, as the future of online gaming. Facebook at that time was far from being the dominant player that it is today.

He started with Zinga Poker, a poorly-coded clone of popular poker sites. He didn’t find his hit until he launched Farmville, a clone of Farmtown.

You will not the word clone being used a lot. It is an internal Zynga doctrine, not a derogatory term. See video where it is clearly stated that no game is produced by Zynga unless it is a “clone” of a successful game by another company.

Cloning a successful game and throwing Zynga’s marketing muscle behind the “new” title is a valid technique. The suspect part comes when hundreds of thousands players complain of being misled into purchasing virtual goods in the new game, a.k.a. Scamville (Source: Techcrunch).

That’s not all. According to Grumpy Old Accounts, Zynga have been massaging their accounting practices more than once in the months they prepared for an IPO. When selling virtiual goods, Zynga have split their sales in two arbitrary categories: durable virtual goods and instantly consumed. Instantly consumed items (like an energy boost) are accounted for immediately as revenue. Durable items (such as a tractor in Farmville) are spread over a long period (e.g. 12 months).

By re-factoring this “long” period and the definition of “durable”, Zynga can easily adjust their revenues to present investors with a rosy picture of incredible future growth. They can also hide their profit margin from Facebook, who take a 30% cut currently.

So back to the poker table. Zynga’s poker strategy has been successful so far. Through bluffs and some really strong card dealt by fate (if you consider Russian oligarchs to be fate), they have managed to win their first tournament and a huge jackpot.

The question remains whether their $6 billion valuation is sustainable. After all, their first IPO filing stated a price in the $15-20 billion range, which is the combined valuations of Electronic Arts and Activision-Blizzard, the two biggest companies in gaming.

Zynga Poker IPO: Infographic (click to enlarge)

2012
01/11
CATEGORY
Business
Game Design
Game Marketing
Monetization
Systems Design
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Exclusive access: Riftforge playtest

Riftforge is finally open for a limited public playtest.

You can start playing immediately by entering this secret passcode – SOFIA.

eu.riftforge.com

Playtest objectives

Riftforge playtest objectives are two and we expect your feedback on both:

  • Collect balancing data on the RPG classes
  • Improve the interface and overall interaction with the game

Playtest feature list

Your ultimate objective is to rise in rank. Winning against high-ranking players results in significant rank improvement and tons of gold.

Character Creation - creating your character gets you:

  • One commander slot – you choose your first archetype
  • Immediate access to three core and two special troopers
  • Full complement of weapons and armor for each trooper

PVP Battleground - once ready for battle, you can:

  • Play a ranked battle: wins and losses influence your rank
  • Join an existing custom game (training)
  • Create a custom game (training)

Equipment and troops - the gold from your wins allows you to:

  • Upgrade your gear with better weapons, armor, trinkets
  • Recruit veteran and elite troops
  • Improve your skills via training

Technical Details

  • Any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 9 via Flash plugin)
  • Any modern computer, including iPad (iPods & iPhones are too small)

2012
01/06
CATEGORY
Business
Character Design
Game Design
Game Marketing
Game PR
Misc
Systems Design
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Temple of Gameplay Evil

As a big fan of tactical RPGs, I often browse GOG for old games that have stood the test of time.

I have re-played Icewind Dale a few times through the years but I wanted something a bit different, yet D&D. So I reviewed the comments and found that at with the Christmas promotion, you can get The Temple of Elemental Evil for just $2.99.

I quickly realized that I have completely forgotten how unforgiving the D&D system is. My observations (rant) in bullet-format:

  • Missing – I am level 4 and I still miss a lot. I have missed continuously for four rounds of combat where all my 5 characters attacking a single enemy
  • Damage – your enemies miss a lot as well but when you get hit, you can be killed instantly (at low levels) with damage exceeding HP of the wizard well into levels 4+.
  • Prior knowledge – the game is designed around a lot of saving and loading. When I exited the first dungeon, I was half dead. I was greeted by 13 fresh new opponents!
  • No retreat – there is no way to retreat from a battle, so you have to know in advance what enemy you’ll be facing. There’s also no room for a lot of missing or high damage (see 1&2)

The game is extremely hardcore and I like that. At the same time, I feel that the D&D combat system creates a whole host of issues (above). The way to address the unpredictability of the results is to tweak the hit chance, the weapon damage and the hit points. It’s so basic, yet D&D continues to rely on arcane D20 concepts that produce extremely erratic results when samples are small.

These quirks force you to save and reload often (thank God for quicksave and load), which diminishes any sense of accomplishment. It also justifies you to abuse the AI any way you can find, from sleep to entanglement, to shooting through a door that’s too small to fit the ogre in the other room.

Apart from combat itself, the other major issue is the flexibility of the class system. As someone who haven’t played a D&D game in 10 years, I had to follow a step-by-step guide in order to generate a working “party”. It is extremely easy to gimp your characters with your stats in a way that is irreversible. The other reason to follow a guide is the added element of “surprise” when you realize you have leveled up pickpocket and there’s no one in this game worth pickpocketing!

In short, it front-loads 90% of class decisions. I know WotC have tried to address this by adding flexibility with all the multiclassing options. However, multi-classing quickly veers into gimping territory as there are only a few viable archetypes.

2012
01/04
CATEGORY
Business
Character Design
Game Design
Game Writing
Level Design
Systems Design
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