Designing for a casual MMO.

• Differences in designing a casual MMO
• Play sessions are shorter - as short as 5 mins
• Competition - lots of distractions... new games for this group every single day
• Skill set and skill level - way different from traditional players... don't spend hours playing games like we do

Change the way you think

• Keep the focus on the players
• Think outside the box
• Don't base everything on what you like or prefer
• Don't rely on your own judgment over UX testing
• Question the "way things have to be"
• Understand your audience well enough that you can speak your audience's voice. I am speaking as the player here, not what I think - what I think doesn't matter.

Theory, Practice, Results

• Design team would have been better off if we had this process from the beginning.
• Drivers and passengers - analogy of a tour bus experience. You have a captive audience that you want to entertain.
• Designers are drivers. We are planning where people go. Plan the route, equip bus, pick stops and sights, determnine cost, provide entertainment along the way.
• Passenger is in control. It's his trip, money and time. He can get out of the car anytime he wants. He can blog about how your trip sucks. He can never ride with you again. Enough unhappy players will shut you donw.

Focus on passengers:

• Identify who the passengers are
• Set guideposts - how do I know I'm on track
• Look at competing tours
• Clear the path - get rid of your assumptions
• Design the passenger's experience - control exp start to finish
• Head out on open road

Identify the passengers

• Who are we trying to attract and entertain
• How do they spend money: Pre-planned vs impulse (boxed vs online), small increments vs large purchases - determines pricing bundles, retail vs download - assumption is retail is higher value... people may buy online because they saw it in store, convenience vs function vs vanity (maple story has nailed this distinction)
• What are they interested in?
• What are they watching on TV?
• Understand your passengers
• Don't base decisions on yourself or your own family
• No matter how normal or typical you feel, you probably aren't - we like BSG, general populace likes Desperate Housewives

How to get info

• Zandl Group Hotlists
• Iconoculture
• Others

Identify the passengers

• Free Realms player is boys and girls equally
• 10-15 years old
• Secondary is casual players and parents and family
• Example of Zandl Hotlist - provides demographic insight into what they are doing, wearing, etc.
• Pets in Free Realms can wear outfits. For every bionic dog there is a princess cat. Enough options and people feel welcome in your game.

Set Guideposts

• Short set of goals - guideposts or landmarks. Team goals.
• Check them with every decision you make
• Include development goals, when it's good for players - ex need really robust tools for designers to build content - good for players... equals lots of new content for players. Making content for impulsive players could be key for you.

Free Realms Guideposts

• Virtual world for teens, tweens, and casual players
• Support four play styles: Adventure, mini-games, simulation gameplay (housing, pets), Socialization
• Quick to start - get into game very quickly as first time and returning user
• Easy to understand
• Rewarding to play - a lot of online games have you working toward longer term goal
• Never assumes based on age or gender - won't assume your girl character will start as a cook... can alienate ppl and close off market

Free Realms Key Design Decision

• Create a game with a wide variety of activities that are all optional but all equally rewarding
• Players do what they want to do and feel like they are playing a game made just for them

Free Realms Interaction Reward Cycle

1. Player Need (Wealth, relationship, personal skill, etc)
2. Interaction (NPC, object, Mini-game, etc)
3. Reward (money, friendship, leaderboard, pet level up, etc)

Assess competing tours

• Tours that explore similar landscapes in terms of demographics
• Free Realms competing tours are: Runescape, Maple Story, Habbo, etc
• Other games: EQ, WoW, Animal Crossing, Nintendogs, WCIII, DotA, Viva Pinata, The Sims, Gears of War, Cooking Mama, Puzzle Quest, Gears of War (reload mechanic will show up as a part of housing)
• Inspiration comes from anywhere

Clear the Path

• Discard assumptions you may have about how to make game your making
• Look at assumptions from passengers POV
• Analyze each feature
• Challenge every assumption
• "In writing you must kill your darlings" - William Faulkner

Flow Chart

• Is it fun?
• No? Is it essential? - No, Get Rid of it; Yes, Improve it!

Shot of Disneyland theme park map - they are the best at controlling experience. Lot to learn from that.

Design the Passenger's Experience

• We use SCRUM on Free Realms
• Traditonal view of user story: written desc used for planning, conversations about the story, etc
• Should be written from player perspective ("don't want to run out of inventory space")
• User stories as the foundation
• Orient design docs toward user stories... inventory design doc could start with user story
• USer stories + solutions + implementation details + game design
• Design the passengers experience

Servers

• Assumption: a character is locked to a server
• Sucks for my friends on different server - sucks when server is down
• USer story: want to play with friends on diff servers
• User story: want to play when server is down
• Other games, Runescape, Wizard101
• Solution: Play on any server, any time
• Hindsight: should have included server transfer while in-game before launch
• All languages + all servers = new problems (great from player perspective... but lots of delay in translation)
• Need server recommendation logic - take server select out of experience... to do that you need a system that recommends a server based on where their friends already are
• Jumping to a friend may mean a long download - if you stream your content... if you haven't been to your friend's part of the world, you will spend time waiting for it

Classes

• Assumption: a character is locked into a class at character create
• Problem: I can't understand the choice before  play
• User stories: As a player, I don't want to make a long term choice before I play
• User story: As a player, I want to try different classes
• Solution: jobs
• Hindsight: too many choices, all at once
• Making a job cool = lots of investment in that job = expectation that subsequent jobs will be that robust
• Putting job choice up front in new player experience
• Create a stronger link between fave jobs and identity
• Gleam and Gloam are really important to give a sense of purpose

Inventory

• Assumption: have to limit inventory space... buy additional space.. inventory tetris is good
• Problem: I have to decide what to throw away, I have to spend money to carry things I earned
• User story: don't want to have to choose to destroy something to pick up something else
• Other games: none
• Solution: unlimited inventory
• Going to buy items in Free Realms is like going to target - shields, swords, but also housewares and automotive
• Hindsight: unlimited inventory + no delete? ooops; single char is 2mb and growing, before housing... a lot to xfer to and from client;
• Implementing a super high inventory limit... as well as a way for players to sort inventory and give players a closet in their house where they can store inventory items

The Fun

• Assumptions: MMOs are about systems and rewards and not gameplay
• Problem: audience expects moment to moment fun, so I expect more polish
• User story: want to have fun ACTUALLY playing your game; all play styles need to be available to me
• Other games: puzzle pirates, puzzle quest, etc
• Solution: emphasize interaction and reward equally; For each min--game target a specific gender and age with the mechanics... mining (boys), harvesting (girls)
• Solution: have a sense of humour... anything is more fun if it's funny
• Hindsight: Game developers are not normal... what we thought was fun was not; inveting more in 2D games, improving 3d games so they are easier to play, improving camera, exploration should have been optional - will change it to be a playstyle not mandatory, activities need to be clearly marked;
• All play styles and mini-games need reward and progression... our tower defense game had no rewards and wasn't being played... once we added rewards it went through the roof
• Players want to make their own fun. Parties are very popular in Free Realms.  Always a party going on. Need to give players tools to make their own fun and just hang out.

Stats

• Assumption: MMOs have to have stats.
• Problem: how do I choose between items with lots of confusing stats?
• Problem: I don't want to have to use a calcuator
• User story: I want to understand my choices without having to learn these stats
• Solutions: Only derived result stats - all explicit about what they do for you, very few stats, shard system
• Hindsight: Stick to only derived stats, but add more depth; find ways to better separate appearance from stats, enhance "walking leaderboard" variables (need to look at someone and know what they've done)
• Players who walk around in banana or hotdog suit get challenged to more duels.

Look & Feel

• Assumption: high fantasy is cool
• Problem: fantasy is not cool, it is for nerds; embarassed to talk about; I want a player that looks like me
• Free Realms has to appeal to the guy who beats up the kid who plays WoW
• Smedley's kid decided he wasn't going to talk about WoW anymore at school because he wanted to get dates
• User story: As a player, I want the choice to look cool and wear real clothing that looks cool to my friends -
• Solution: FR is a mix of real world and fantasy and player can look the way they want to look
• Matrix: Costume, Freestyle vs Combat, Non-combat
• Critical shift to go from fantasy to real
• Hindsight: Need more clothing choices in character create for girls; need more bad ass appearances for boys; need more elaborate outfits for high character progression

Progression

• Assumption: characters level up only by playing combat
• Problem: game looks cool, but I don't want to fight; things I like (crafting) aren't important enough to level up on
• User story: As a player, I want to level up for what I do - don't tell me what I like isn't important)
• Solution: level up for multiple things
• Hindsight: Need more meaningful items; need more robust and accurate leaderboards, achievements will be really significant in progression when they come online in a week; need more consistency across jobs
• Figuring out how a postman and a ninja level up in a consistent way was designer hell. If you are considering a game that has multiple play styles that are equally rewarded, think of it a lot up front otherwise your game will feel like a carnival.

Sessions

• Assumption: Should take many hours to get the best rewards in the game
• Problem: I like this game, but I don't get anywhere playing it 2 hours a week; Why won't you let me spend more money on your game?
• User stories: Don't want to commit all my time to one game; want to decide whether or not I want to buy game changing items
• Solution: Gameplay is in 15 min chunks, interactions give frequent rewards; game-changing items avail in store - add exp, etc
• Hindsight: we shipped the game too easy... will make combat harder; will change game to make sure best gear is dropped not bought, putting more limited time items on marketplace, adding a wheel of prizes... helps short sessions

The Open Road

• How do you know if any of your ideas will work? You don't. Get to the point where you can try it on people outside of your live audience... really key.

Solutions lead to new problems

• How do leaderboards work if you char is not linked to a server?
• How do you set difficulty when your char progression is so shallow? There will be more diff between level 10 and 20 character in the future.
• How do you deal with hackers when everyone can create a free account? Player char dressed as referee. All our C/S agents wear this outfit when are in game - only our GMs can wear these. Players know they can trust this person. Guy in police outfit is the enforcer... you know you are going to get hit with a ban stick - players will stop doing something when they see him. Only 1 enforcer per server - they are a real person the GM needs to "check out"
• How do you help players understand unlimited inventory.
• How do you keep stats light and meaningful? Majority of our audience is level 5.
• How do you satisfy casual and dedicated players?
• How do you balance earning coins as postman vs pet trainer, etc? Best you can do is to try to do things in a way that doesn't alienate people. Boots for postman were way overpowered. Designers nerfed it, we patched it, players freaked out. We unnerfed it - let the 100 players who had the boots keep them, but made new boots fixed.

Design Cycle

• Identify passengers: who is actually playing? Are the ppl we wanted to play, playing? Do we need to retarget?
• Set guideposts: What now is important to players? What are they asking for?
• Competing tours: Never stop looking. After we released, several competitors changed web flows. No we are changing.
• Clear Path: What of our assumptions were wrong.
• Design passengers experience: 3 levels of data: Stats (how many ppl play Postman), Trend (are more people playing postman now), Correlation data (most important: how many ppl who play postman now but didn't before are now buying items?)

Parting thoughts

• Stay focused on goals
• Find creative solutions
• Understand that each solution creates new probs
• Play game in your head and look for edge cases (what happens if bought a job but my membership lapsed and I tried to interact with something)
• Evaluate each decision against your guideposts
• Design every system to be as flexible as you can - easy to make changes without people noticing
• Be willing to take risks - but be willing to cull it early if it looks like it will fail
• Be willing to kill your darlings
• Stay in touch with your passengers
• Keep focus testing! Ends guesswork and arguments.

As a developer, what is your bias/approach when you're pitching your own products vs opportunity to do a publisher's IP?

Feargus: Pubs are more willing to take risks when there is money. When we are looking at what we will pitch, we consider the climate - i.e. if publishers are willing to take risks. Normally we put together 2-3 pitches, hand them over, then we get the word on what they would really like us to work on (i.e. a license). We will often look at a publisher's catalog to see what they have - sometimes what they offer doesn't make sense for the platform or genre - we try to figure out what would a license that works for us look like as a game. That's where we focus our efforts. If we pitch a license they already have and it blends with what we do, then you've gotten past step 1.

Jean Marcel: Different pubs have different priorities. Some are heavily driven by their slate. For me it's all a question of quality. It's all about what a developer can deliver. Sometime the brand you are working with will define the boundaries and you'll ask the dev to stay within those boundaries. But sometimes you want the dev to bring their own ideas and see how they fit within your brand. Can be dangerous for a creative org to take directly what the publisher wants and not bring their own creativity.

Question for Leo: You've worked on titles like Matrix Online and Star Wars Old Republic. What are challenges of producing online vs standalone?

Leo: Couple challenges... from a user's perspective, you have a bunch of passionate people. When you are making a single player game that is more scripted you can have a better understanding of how they will interact with your IP. In an MMO, users may find a bunch of different areas fun - combat, harvesting, etc. Working on an online game, you have to make sure that all parts of the IP are well thought out so that any way a person comes at the experience is unique and well done.

Feargus: The licenses we've worked with a lot (D&D, Star Trek, LOTR), when you are making a big game with a license you are usually expanding the license. So we need to ask lots of questions... when we wanted to use some iconic characters from within D&D, we had to ask what the IP holder cared about - can we change colours, etc. We didn't wait for them to tell us. Can we blow this city up or can't we? Need to bring the question of boundaries up ASAP. We did a little design work, but not much, just to find out these boundaries up front with tons of questions.

Jean Marcel: Great point. Most of the company may be risk-averse, but the role of the developer is to push the boundaries, otherwise you will end up with a copycat product and no one will be happy in the end.

Feargus - do you feel more or less secure as a developer because it is based on an IP or not?
Feargus: I would feel much more secure about working on a licensed property in times like this or not. From time to time, we're living in the minutiae of making a game and the publisher is looking at ROI. It is easier for non-gamers to understand a game if it is a license than if it is not. Licenses are something we pursue more in these economic times because the org would understand the product more due to license.

Jean Marcel: I understand this point of view. Right now movie license games have bad perception among consumers. Sometimes they don't make sense to greenlight. That's why I go back to quality. When you have an IP holder who has a big vault of IP, it is good for the developer to come back to the publisher with what they would like to do - regardless of whether there is an upcoming movie tied to it. More secure for developer because the amount of promotion that needs to get done for this type of product is less than original IP.

Arkham Asylum doing incredibly well without being released with a movie. Dev times getting longer and longer. What's your POV on this approach on not tying a game to a movie launch?

Feargus: That's interesting. Talking to my neighbour... he knew WoW and the name of the company I worked for. And he didn't dress like a gamer. Acceptance of games as a whole by everyone. Led to an understanding that games are a part of a brand as a whole. Now when we are approached for a movie game it's no longer a 6 or 9 month dev schedule, now they are calling 24 and 36 months out. Great to see that there is an acknowledgement of how making a great game can push the whole brand. Also seen a lot lately that people are open to not following the plot of the movie. We can now add in more creativity. Great business decision too.

Leo: Lot of things come into play when considering this issue. What does a coordinated entertainment launch due in terms of a multiplier effect. Does that drive concurrent movie/game releases. How does this corrolate to kids games? Do you have to make a 95% game? Or is it more important to hit at the same time as the big movie? My experience is that it's a balancing act between associating a game with a movie release or delivering a well reviewed adult-oriented product.

Jean Marcel: I agree. Let's take the big movies - $50-100M marketing investment. If you position yourself very differently from the movie, your game may be lost in translation. But it's important to understand the world, but not re-tell the same movie they just saw. Need to have a deep dive on how we build the product from a dev perspective and how we can create more synergies with movie and its director, right from the beginning. If there is a better synergy from scratch - the game guys have good dialog with movie director - then movie director can get cool weapons in film, etc. But in the past, we were struggling with the lead time. Movie script takes lots of time. For developer, takes a long time to create tech and pipeline. But if we can match the 2 schedules together, then the result all around is better.

Do you think the market is more fickle? As dev times have become longer, how do you forecast status of an IP that far out?

Jean Marcel: No risk, no business. We are trying to protect the companies with a different level of risk. What is the trend of this property - invest early enough to capitalize on that. But there is a level of uncertainty still. Market has changed dramatically lately. Dev community is trying to change processes but there are some timeframes which cannot be compressed. It will always be an issue we have to fight with. But if we have a great product, I still believe the product will find its consumer at the end. Biggest mismatch can be platform - if there is a big change there, that can be the biggest error.

I was surprised by Lego Stars' success. Two disparate brands, now they've defined their own genre. Do you guys have an example of surprising brands in games?

Feargus: We're going through all the failures in our head... Superman, Ironman, etc. Telling... there are so few of these licenses that have done well.

Jean Marcel: That's interesting, because Lego was not in great shape when developer went in with that license. They had to rejuvenate the brand. The quality of the product with drop in drop out play, etc elevated it. Kingdom Hearts is another example - taking a lot of characters and putting them in a world no one expect. Wound up a good matchup.

Eugene: Many industry types were surprised Kingdom Hearts succeeded... throwing all those IPs together usually regarded as crazy.

With a Star Wars Lego title, is that an example of a game contributing to the brand?

Jean Marcel: Definitely. Where Lego was before and the tremendous job they did extending that brand to a different medium. Now around the world you see Lego stores, attractions, etc.

Leo: The game reinforced both. I can see through my kids how they react to these things. They hadn't watch Star Wars but only wanted to after playing these games. By bringing those two things together, it helped expand and solidify the love of Star Wars in another generation.

Jean Marcel: Interesting to devs and pubs is that it is a broad offering - dads playing with their kids - and I know a lot of people at my age who are playing those games. Key challenges for dev community to emulate that success. How do we touch the massive audience rather than just the core. How do we create these titles that create a fissure in the business to expand it.

Eugene: Developer was incredibly passionate about both IPs. Rock Band Beatles was driven by Harmonix - it is now part of big worldwide event - the re-release of these albums - and now this dev is part of a huge event. Says a lot about games' relevancy. The reverse of that for developers is that devs can get so passionate about the IP, but they may not want to work with IP holder.

Feargus: We all have the things we love. You get a chance to make a game about it and the opportunity is weird. When I got to be in charge of D&D games, it was bizarre. My part in it was great opportunity. It can jade your vision in terms of what is important from a business perspective. Now with the big budgets if you are too enamored you are at risk of making the wrong decision. On the flip side, it can be a positive if you are that into it. Can be a good decision, but it's a risky decision. As a developer we've tried to focus on the business so we can stay in business. By bringing yourself back and making the judgment call about ROI versus passion... you are better off. I.e. our $9500 per man month vs the $11K we're getting paid - we can't put any extra man months into it.

Leo: You can't let your passion drive insanity and feature creep. Have to be cognizant of your passion driving you away from business necessities. From a marketing perspective, I can be passionate about something but I too have to be conscious that my approach may not be the right one for introducing the product to the consumer. Take it back to business perspective so you don't go crazy.

Q&A

With iPhone and webplatforms and quick turnaround, how does that affect relationships with IP holders, etc?

Feargus: It will probably go back to overall goal of using the license. iPhone games can get done quickly, but the goal may not be met. It may not be synergistic with release of a movie - an iPhone game can have SOME impact, but probably not big enough to build on what's happening with the movie. No magazine covers unless it's a AAA game.

Jean Marcel: All those approaches are always good for the business. Especially as you can plant more seeds and see what you get out of it. But the massive hype is only going to come from something big. There is probably a mix of products to do, but ultimately you have to hit the date with a big product. A small product won't help you. Perhaps a smaller product can serve as a focus test for a larger one.

Eugene: Very difficult to market mobile and web games - they are more viral. Games usually try to ride on coattails of big movie releases. Breakout iPhone and web games may be helped by being tied into movie releases.

How has dealing with license holders changed over time? What is it like for a developer to go out there approaching them now?

Feargus: I can speak to my experience. Very dependent on the people you are working with at the licensor. We've worked with D&D... from 95 until just recently. When you're dealing with a licensing group that is incentivized to work with you, it's more likely to be successful. At one point the licensing $ went to Wizard of the Coast, but then at one point it did not. When that happened the relationship changed. Might be a question to ask at the outset. We always look at it as "it's their license, not yours" and when you treat it that way, you get on their side. When we ran into trouble with Wizards of the Coast, we'd fly up there to help us stay in touch and keep it together. As to how I think it is now, I think there's more of an understanding about games. But it really depends on who you're working with at the licensor.

Jean Marcel: Licensor really understands the value of their IP or brand. So they are much more careful about doing poor products... need to product their franchises and be careful in selecting their partner. We are still fighting with the perception in our business - especially related to movie games - that it is enough to slap the image on the front of the box and the game can be poor.

Often the publishers and licensors are people who don't know games. Why not hire someone who has dev experience? Are you seeing a change in that?

Eugene: 15 years ago you were working with licensing, not interactive groups.

Leo: Just quick, 10 years ago, what would happen is companies would recognize they don't know games so they'd find one person in the department who was a game player. That was detrimental to process. Now most IP holders have departments of people with real experience.

Feargus: You are still going to run into licensor reps that do not understand games. I also was that guy once - who didn't know anything. I was telling people how to make games (when I shouldn't have). All you can do is help them understand how games are made and don't talk down to them. Ultimately they are going to believe or not believe you.

Jean Marcel: Question of skills and talent among guys on licensing front. They should recognize who they need to bring in and what they don't know. If they don't, then it's probably the beginning of a bad relationship. As soon as you touch the creative side, everyone wants to be involved. This can be a very slippery road. This is the role of the developer that they need to make sure the creative stays with the people who know what they're doing. The role of the licensor is to translate the brand. People need to stick with their responsibilities.

As media companies come into business (again), how are these companies newly approaching their re-entry into gaming business?

Jean Marcel: Culture, Talent, Processes. Culture because game space has a different culture than toy space or movie space. So you need to deal with that and make sure the two can work together. Talent because you need right skills and people to do the job. Processes because you need the right tools to get things done. Companies that are born and raised in games - i.e. 25 years in the business - have this as their DNA.

What advantages do media companies have over EA, Activision, etc?

Feargus: Deep pockets and diversified businesses.

• Gaia been around for 5 years
• 10M uniques/month
• #1 time spent in social media - avg 51 mins/visit
• Gaia feels like a mix of a socnet and an MMO like WoW
• Dig into user experience or talk to ppl using it and they describe it differently - feels like 21st century version of the mall or downtown or summer camp
• Place you go to hang out with friends and do a dozen different activities

At this point, Craig is talking and flipping through slides SO fast that I'm not sure he wants anyone to really take this stuff in (later confirmed as he says slides won't be avail online - it's a management slide deck). So I stopped taking notes for this segment.

ZOMG producer comes up

Be Both Accessible and Engaging

• Need to be accessible and engaging
• Gaia started out engaging, but lost accessibility for a while - fixed it with better UI and user analysis
• But we do "engaged" with authority - largely due to our 20 ring circus, retention is very high
• Another positive example: Facebook - You lose hours without realizing, there's always one more thing to do, lots of flavours for lots of different user types

Three Key Lesssons

• Make it fun
• Get users to buy
• Make it easy to buy

MAKING IT FUN

Identify your Audience, then own it

• You can't satisfy everyone, so design features to satisfy a niche
• Understand your niche - identify key features by talking to fans; get the core right before taking on more tasks
• Good things happen when you nail the niche - great reputation, word of mouth increases, once you have more users you can get diverse
• Gaia example: started as anime lovers forum catering to artists, forums to talk about it all, bragged to others and it grew
• Gaia focus has expanded over 5 years, adding features slowly - went to housing (ppl who do housing aren't necessarily the ppl who do the dress up doll stuff - diversifying), rally cars
• Also provide custom mini-games, attract the most casual of gamers, they have social aspects within them allowing chat, etc
• Eventually expanded to a full-fledged MMO, ZOMG (video doesn't play - Craig working on bringing it up)

Keep your Audience Involved

• Internal marketing for both present and future features
• Players want to be excited, so make it happen
• Schedule of events to keep players looking forward, so they never want to quit
• If players ever get bored, there are a million other net destinations to go look at - never let them get bored

Talk to your Users

• Your ideas may not be what players want
• Find out
• Implement after you figure out how it makes business sense - either soft or hard returns
• Don't come up with a money making scheme then foist it on your players

Bite Sized Content

• Frequent rewards
• Smaller time commitments
• Early accomplishments
• WoW reward schedule is way too long for web world
• Random events system in ZOMG has world constantly changing around you so it's never the same - lots of different experiences so every time you go in there is something new and different

Keep New Features Coming

• Keep evolving, refining, adding
• Stay flexible
• Never stop
• ZOMG rolls out stuff every two weeks or less
• Always make sure players are fully aware of what's coming up

Build a 20 Ring Circus

• No single idea appeals to everyone
• Satisfy more of your core audience by creating new ways to interface with your site - dress up vs marketplace vs games vs hangouts etc
• MMOs multiple kinds of gameplay within the game

Create a variety of experiences
Cater to many different player types with features such as:

• Forums, guilds
• Collectibles
• Gathering, crafting
• Social community
• Social gaming
• Combat, PVE, PVP
• Mini-games

Gaia invited fans to meet employees after a company softball game in San Jose. Fans travelled from Florida, Washington state, etc to meet them. Very passionate.

ZOMG is Engaging Users

• Extremely high retention over 10 months since open beta launch
• Avg play time 2.5 hours
• ZOMG players 4x more likely to purchase than main site players
• Incredibly easy to try, free, no download, four click entry
• Achieves its goal as fly paper for the main site

Get them to stick, then you win

• The more entertained, the longer they stay
• Longer they stay, more likely they are to buy something
• More likely they are to make a friend
• Once they've made a friend and bought something, very unlikely they will go away
• Cultivate, nurture and entertain your users

Get Users to Want to Buy

• Accept it! Most users won't buy from you - but those that won't buy are still critical to your business, they will keep the community alive and exciting for those that will buy
• Build things that entertain everyone - then enable ways for buyers to participate or get ahead via purchases

What do they buy?

• Anything that promotes self expression
• Anything that promotes sense of belonging to the community or friends
• Anything that lets users get to an end goal faster or easier
• Anything that looks like it can be turned for profit

How Does Community Affect Revenue?

• Community provides the venue where users can brag by displaying their earned/purchased items and abilities - forums, profiles, guilds, marketplace, games, UGC, town area, post artwork, get ratings - hot or not, etc
• If they can't brag, they don't want it and the items and features are worthless

Are items entertaining? You bet they are?

• Gaia makes all their money off sponsorship or microtrans items
• Item types are a form of entertainment - decorative, functional, and/or collectible - but they don't satisfy 100% of your audience
• Have to keep coming up with new stuff
• Items that evolve - i.e. the egg that hatches into a Phoenix are very cool... people speculate on how it will evolve, gains value over time

Non-Item Revenue Examples

• Shout outs (Maple Story)
• Time shortcuts (powerup in ZOMG, points in Zynga games)
• Name changes/server changes (Everquest, WoW and traditional MMOs)
• Premium features (features or areas avail only to members - Club Penguin, Runescape, etc)

Make Buying Easy

• Utilize every payment option
• Mobile payments
• Game cards
• Credit cards
• Cash
• If you can use ALL the available payment systems, use them all. They don't cannibalize each other
• Habbo Hotel has over 170 payment methods

Recap

• Make it fun for everyone, but focus on your niche first
• Get users to want to buy, make it exciting, let them know what's coming up, features oriented toward core
• Make buying easy - if you can make it 1-click, make it 1-click
• Customers win, you win, everyone wins

Q&A

Any mobile plans?
Craig: great evidence you can be successful in this area. GREE and DNA (Mobile Game Town) in Asia are both doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue

Average age of Gaian?
Craig: Median age is 18 years old, 60/40 girls; doesn't work for a 10 year old - sweet spot is 19-20 girls.

Sponsorships - can you talk about it?
Craig: Sponsorships work well for us. We had no ads 3 years ago, now we've done a ton of deals with big brands. Skittles is on our site - they funded the creation of a variety of virtual spaces that had some game mechanics in them or custom mini-games or cooperative experiences in site where if you did these experiences you would earn Skittles and the community's goal was to collect as many skittles as possile and build a rainbow. When it was done, there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that rained gold (Currency) down on all users. We partner with a brand to build something that adds value to the user experience. They fund it, but we build it. As a result, turns out you get better response rates for advertisers.

Have you found a sweet spot for price?
We are still experimenting with that. We don't have a lot of items over $7.5. Many other companies say there is no price insensitivity between pennies and $7.5. The real issue is the penny gap - charging anything more than $0. Anytime we raise a price, revenue goes up. The sales of the item do not go down.

How do you value sponsorships?
We have to tie it to CPMs as there is no other way an agency can value a deal. Otherwise they can't show metrics the way they are used to. We get over 2B page views a month, so it's easy to offer impressions.

How do you QA new content without breaking old stuff?
It gets harder and harder. Make thorough checklists and resist tendency to just get it out because "you know it's good" - gets to be a certain size of an MMO where you try to compartmentalize your code so things are less likely to break, but ultimately good QA processes will make or break you.

Along the QA lines, how much do you use automated QA or is it all manual?
It's all manual in our case. We have some process checks (scripts compile, etc) but in general most of our stuff is manual and we rely on checklists. All our QA is in-house. We only did a hardware compatibility test externally.

How big is the development side of the organization?
105 people in whole company. 40+ of whom are developers. Include QA and backend operations, then maybe 50 dev. ZOMG team is impressive... 15 people (5 artists, 10 devs) on ZOMG MMO (draws laughter from crowd).

Is Membership Suitable for Gaia?
Craig: I think you have to choose Runescape or Maple Story model. Pogo has pulled off both though... you can buy sub that gives you a collection of virtual goods. I think you have to decide up front what you want to be. One gives you more users, but less revenue per user. Sub models give you more predictable revenue stream, but microtrans have potential to blow that out of the water due to uncapped ceiling on ARPU.

Do you have a mix of time-based vs consumables vs permanent items?
Most of our stuff is permanent. Then there is time-based stuff (fish only live for 90 days in an acquarium) and then we have consumables. Just did deal with Vivix - you can modify your voice, but it only lasts for a few weeks.

Is 60/40 split for Gaia the same within ZOMG?
Yes it is. 90% of our users have never played an MMO before. Game has a lot of combat - worried that we would only attract guys. But that hasn't been the case at all. 60/40 girls, just like main site.

Demographic among national boundaries?
North America is 85% of the player base.

What were your advertising efforts to get your name out when you launched?
No money was spent. Even still, we spend almost no money on marketing. Almost all word of mouth. Tools within Facebook and their invite loop systems are probably the easiest and cheapest way to acquire users. That said, we haven't used that yet - most of our growth is word of mouth at school. We have started to test online ads and we've got it so we pay less for the ad than we get from that user lifetime.

How to build your own interactive marketing campaign. Self-publishing. Empower you so that when you are working with a big pub, you are in a strong position to work with them.

Games first passion, second passion is community building. Founded Bardo in 2007, focused on combining both passions.

What is Interactive Marketing?

• Not Facebook profile, not Twitter
• People connect with 18 friends 1-to-1 and ping 110+ people each week
• <5% visit social networks for purchase decision guidance
• <9% of tweets have value
• Marketing has moved from transaction=based effort to a conversation
• Interactive Marketing is not ONLINE marketing - although the internet facilitates interactive marketing. Easier to collect info and communicate.

Developing a Marketing Plan

• Cover the 3 pillars: Advertising, promotion, PR (+business development).
• Map out key selling points, roadmap for asset release, tentpole events, specific programs, budget
• Initial programs should be designed to test waters and fine tune campaign
• Start early enough to build momentum
• Promote, Engage, Measure, OPTIMIZE
• Establish your tentpole events - what's the hook?
• Design to drive interest in 1 big POP
• Use interactive marketing to go deeper - build the buzz through conversation
• Blogs, forums, podcasts, events
• Answer questions

Finding Your Key Influencers

• The key is not to market to everyone, but the key influencers. These are not necessarily people who will buy your game. How do you find these people?
• When John was marketing Hudson (Konami's parent co), he found some people who really had fond memories of the company. He then first created a campaign that targeted these people. Created an exclusive club for them, gave them tours and inside info, etc. These are ppl who told them they'd give cover stories if they brought back the company... or retailers who said they'd give direct distrib deals if the company was brought back. Within 3 years, Hudson became the most profitable unit within Konami. Those key influencers were hugely important.
• Don't treat your key influencers like Rock Stars. You are the rock star. These guys are your entourage. They get into this exclusive club because they hang with you. Go out of your way to take care of your entourage.
• Gave out Elder Scrolls backstory to key influencers.
• Focus on High Impact Programs
• Want to work on high impact programs that drive conversation
• Blogs have a major impact on purchasing decision
• Content will always generate a greater response than an ad
• Position content in middle column - heat tracking shows ads are not noticed
• Reach out to 1 new site a week - connect with them, get to know people on a personal level, get to know blog's culture and demographics
• Make it easy for them, create a FAQ or choice sound bites... most bloggers write on the side (ME), limited time money attention
• Follow and engage readers in the comments section and forums
• Don't do 1 big story, do lots of smaller stories - blogs generate 1.5 page views per session (about half of all blog readers never go past home page), buy viewers come back frequently - so break up your stories to constantly engage, rather than 1 big story
• Don't just focus on big blogs... small fan sites can become powerful... even a $200 ad placement for a small site can make them an ally

You Gotta Wow Them

• Make your interaction shine
• (shows picture of a crappy demo room - actual room at a huge publisher... room looks like a closet
• Shine and affect all 5 senses - create an environment that feels warm, including the environment you present in
• Interaction Shine also applies to online
• Keep a positive attitude - don't get caught up in flame wars
• Give your fans a chance to defend you rather than replying right away
• Don't "sell" your product, but don't get too casual - the focus is not your life story and issues
• Develop a list of instant answers so that you don't share incorrect info or reveal anything that is still under wraps. Share this list with everyone who is communicating online. But don't just cut and paste those anwers.

More Tips Working with Online Media

• Meet them in person
• Live demos - make the demo fun - the enthusiasm of the person demoing the game and the entourage is what sells the game
• Big sites only cover you a few times and want the exclusive
• Use smaller sites to share info constantly
• Create a Press Asset section online, easy access to screenshots, FAQs, videos, logo
• Get a Media Kit from the magazines or large website - they are free. Tons of good industry data. Many times they will have free research reports.

Go Beyond Virtual World

• Engage people in real life... plan events
• Have gear ready to go - podcast and video equipment, digital camera, laptop
• After 6pm meeting - beers, etc
• Take advantage of smaller events - i.e. Destructoid's NARP
  Event planning for just a few K
• Always looking for great games to showcase
• Sponsorship opportunity - mrdestructoid@gmail.com - can sponsor for as low as a couple hundred dollars
• Don't just give away swag - make people work for it by interacting with you
• Booth babes are ho hum, bring on board "escorts" who know how to woo your customers - the escorts served as concierges or guides for high profile guests... made the high profile guests into rock stars... helped them avoiding lunch lines, etc... but also knew how to play Hudson's games - invested 2 full days training them in how to play their games and then used them repeatedly as they already knew Hudson's history
• Work with other developers to share costs

Common Developer Dilemma

• Limited time, budget and knowledge for marketing
• Not enough products in pipeline to keep conversation going
• Current outreach effort not reaching enough people
• Built something called "The Kartel" - a social media marketing platform akin to the one American Idol uses
• TheKartel.com is a new gaming community portal designed to connect devs, pubs, impact players
• No need to reach out to 100s of social media sites
• Content is not consumed in isolation
• Experience is part of a connected conversation - 75% of web surfers read more than 1 blog per session
• Gamers have one convenient spot to find all the info they want about different game devs
• Quickly start a fan club
• Instantly connect with lots of people
• The Kartel manages all the admin stuff
• Fosters a lively place where gamers contribute in a positive way
• Built in rewards and loyalty program
• Earn Karma points for contributing to community and keeping things lively
• Sega Nerds example: site been around for 8 years... 3,000 blog posts to date. Home grown effort. Generates more consumer activity than what Sega does internally. To grow it, they went to TheKartel.com - seganerds,thekartel.com. Results - 50% traffic growth in 3 months, potential for 200% more. 50% more time to focus on content and community building.

Final Notes

• Reach Key Influencers
• Focus on High Impact programs
• Engage in Conversation
• Don't go it alone - form your own Kartel or join one
• Costly? No - does require heart and soul.
• Let the rich guys woo a girl with diamond rings and fancy yachts - your strategy: write her a hit song, paint her a $1M portrait, cook her a gourmet meal - bring something to the table that no one else can

What's important about tools?
John: Tools make difference between being "nice" to people who ask questions, apologizing etc... versus being able to say "we can see what happened here, we can fix this, you can keep playing like you were before this happened". Difference between being polite and fixing problem in game, forever.

Phil: Cryptic's focus has been on internal tools for C/S and tech... no external apps... our in game ticketing system took 18 months to develop. Main focus is helping players solve their issues themselves first, versus having them send in an issue.

Jason: C/S is a people business, but what those people are has shifted over time. Anyone can run into battle but the better your weapons the greater your success. You can hire great C/S people, but if you don't have good tools you're damaged. Before people always wanted to speak to someone, now people expect that there won't be someone there and they should be able to solve their issues themselves. Tools are the class higher sword you are looking for.

What's the #1 vendor you'd recommend for C/S?
John: We use vendors for all our ticketing systems and we'd recommend them - we are happy with their product. It is relatively abstracted from our game data - which is why it works for us.

Phil: Used Primus - they build an internal knowledge base for our C/S agents to use. By using this internal knowledge base, it helps the C/S team provide the right answer every single time. It is a living breathing doc updated by the C/S agents themselves, every time they have an interaction with a customer.

Jason: I am from the old AOL world. I am hard-pressed to recommend a specific vendor. AOL's tools grew beyond their expectation and they weren't able to scale fast enough. At AOL, the average agent took 15 minutes to log in to all the different tools they needed to use that day. So I believe it's good to find the right tools.

What's the biggest productivity gain you've gotten out of a tool in the last 5 years?
Jason: When we gave people the option to chat immediately with our AOL service, we deflected a lot of C/S calls.

Phil: Two examples. From gaming side, we had a huge gain in deflection of C/S issues by building in self supportability. You're a player, you have a quest, you complete it but item doesn't drop. Is it because I am new? I don't know. By using in game ticketing system, you can view all tix and see if anyone has the same issue as you. Very frustrating not to know if it is just you or other people are having the same issue. In game support people can then put note in there if it is a known issue. Outside of game industry, re: phishing with PayPal, we built a robust internal tool that would allow us to get a phishing site down within 8 hours as opposed to a week. App we built was very automated and would alert us and track offending sites. Decreases productivity costs for C/S agents and increases customer satisfaction.

John: We syndicated our self serve content so it was available in Google, etc. The first place you usually go for help is Google, not necessarily our NCsoft site. So we make sure all our knowledge base issues are searchable via Google. The goal is for our content to be there when someone looks for it. In the last year, we're using Twitter to push messages out to our playerbase about game updates and outages, we're monitoring Twitter and Facebook updates re: NCsoft and then we can proactively contact those customers if we choose to, then hopefully make amends for the issue. We find that is a very efficient way for us to handle those issues... we're contacting people early and resolving these issues before they become larger.

How many people do we devote to social network monitoring?
John: We don't devote any more resources than we already have. Our existing C/S and community team handles it. On the GM side, we're utilizing some tools that monitor Twitter feeds, etc for key words. It's all part of our team's day.

Which tools are you using to monitor Twitter?
John: The names escape me, but there are a lot of tools that do the trick.

Phil: Re Twitter, it's a good thing to let players get the word out and tweet (he said "twitter", but I changed it) from within the game. Free PR.

What's the tool you are trying to build now or wish you had?

Phil: The ability to automate the reports coming in from people re: griefing, etc. One thing we are looking to do now is that if a player gets reported for griefing too many times, then a bouncer comes out and beats up the offender. But that could be exploited. Realistically, if you had a tool that would do more analysis on the reports coming in to weight them according to where they are coming from, their frequency, etc.

John: I have been fortunate to be at NCsoft for many years, so there is not one frontier we haven't yet tackled. But I now have a dedicated tools prog who reports to me in terms of schedule time - allowing me to manage what he works on. We can tackle some of these little things piece by piece. Surprising how big a difference these little things can make.

Jason: A universal interface for your C/S tools system is pretty critical. #1 reason people stayed with AOL was ease of use - they made it very simple. #2 reason ppl stayed was for the service they received. Also, fraud is a critical issue - the more robust our anti-fraud tools, the easier C/S's life is.

What are the most difficult things to handle from a C/S perspective?
Phil: Currently our biggest issue outside of griefing is key issues - people bought the copy somewhere and have trouble activating. One positive thing that was put in place that takes up a lot of C/S time is the number of key commands they have to remember. All our C/S agents work through the backend, not in-game, so we can get people items, move them, etc from our CRM system without having to log into the game.

Jason: From my past life with AOL, I was driven crazy by their reactive approach to retention. Re: data mining, the more you get the more you can strategize. If you can be more proactive, more people will stay in your game as opposed to "You're ready to leave now? Let me try to keep you" - need to get to the customer before they are thinking of leaving.

John: There are a lot of pain points that can't be worked around with tools, but the biggest category for pain points for us are third party transactions - people selling items outside of the game. Ultimately problems with those transactions come to roost with NCsoft.

With CoH's mission architect system, what lessons have we learned from that system?
John: Paragon Studios would be better to answer in-game issues. In terms of C/S issues, it puts a bright light on the fact that any system that is player driven and player moderated becomes part of the game as well. Players will game that system as they would any other system. If there is any benefit that could come from gaming the system, they will exploit it to do so. Lineage: right before a castle siege, the players will gang up and report a guild to get them in a penalty box for a while.

Would problems with player-to-player transactions, would they be mitigated by using a Playspan-like service?
John: No. Where there is a dollar to be made - i.e. by undercutting a sanctioned player to player service or by offering goods not sanctioned for sale - people will move in to exploit that niche.

Bugs versus C/S Issues Question
Phil: Workflow... for each shift we have a roving C/S person who looks at newest tickets coming in to see patterns coming in. The rest of the team is looking at oldest tickets first. So the person looking at new tickets can tell right away if something has just broken. On Champions, as it is very new, we have a lot of items being reported as bugs because people don't know how the game works - i.e. many of those bugs are as designed. Whereas #1 issue on in-game support side for City of Heroes is IP violations - people creating Incredible Hulk.

How do you get around tools dev being put aside when game dev takes precedence?
Jason: You start early. And you try to think ahead and allocate the resources necessary to dedicate to those tools full time. The rest of the org needs to know how important it is that those tools exist when you go live.

Phil: Closed Beta and Open Beta are very important on the C/S side because it helps us rehearse and get our tools and workflow down. Put a cost associated with the top 10 issues coming in... if you can put a cost against what it takes to resolve these issues, you can argue for them to be resolved by the dev team. Also, really engage the dev team to get involved with C/S... we have a Telesupport Listing Session.. designers come in to sit with C/S team to see what issues we are having on a day to day basis.

John: Important component to having tools at launch for new game is to carefully design the tools you are asking for. Prioritize those tools in a way that makes good sense to everybody on the team. I have seen very frequently someone come back with 30 pages of tools they'd like. If you turn that over to dev team, they will ignore everything. If you can come back to dev team and tell them you need these 3 things before Beta, then these 4 during Beta, then these 3 after launch, etc that will get done. We have to be more astute with what we ask for from the dev team.

Gordon: From the perspective of the people funding these games, tools are harder to justify as the best C/S in the world won't drag a bad game up from being a good one. So the financiers are often mostly concerned with what the prime mover of what will make a great game. Rigor around prioritization and communication of cost benefit analysis is crucial. It's up to you to show you those CBAs before launch - when it's much easier for them to see the issue as by then they're paying for the mistake of not making the tool.

In a free-to-play world, are there some issues that are too expensive to resolve? Could you charge a premium to resolve these?
John: In general there are some things that get too messy for us to figure out. They are usually related to person to person issues - she took my account, etc. Actually more common than you would believe that two people can provide all the identifying info for 1 account. There are no tools we can develop to fix those. Account hacks, etc we can fix pretty easily though. In terms of the premium support, there may be a market for that sort of thing, but only if you are offering support that is truly premium. Fixing something that is very broken in a game won't win you any fans if you charge to do it. But a concierge service or something premium might.

John: We look for people that are way off the curve in terms of they call way too much, we call them and ask them what's going on. Often when you break that anonymity barrier, they stop calling as much.

Has there been any studies on what bad C/S costs you in terms of actual metrics?
Gordon: Problem is translating soft into hard - can't say "if this agent talks to this person, then the person will play 1 week longer"

Jason: We worked hard at AOL to do that sort of thing. Europe did it very well. My old title was Director of Customer Experience... experience is proactive, support is reactive. We were able to say that if we did X, player will stay for Y. We had those numbers and those were very powerful.

Phil: Satisfaction scores play a key part in player base retention. We want to do transaction surveys. Players get a survey occasionally... focused on the actual issue a person had. We don't ignore them. If players gave us a 3 or below on a 1-10 survey, we reach out to that person personally... call or email to figure out why. When we reach out to these people, 9 times out of 10 we find out that people who are leaving the game are not leaving due to a C/S issue. Often you do surveys and never hear back - if you reach out personally, perhaps you will continue playing the game because you believe they care about you.

Gordon: Often if people leave over a C/S issue, it's a last straw issue - so it was an accumulation of issues up to that point - not that particular issue. C/S gets a lot of misdirected blame. If you look at cancellation surveys, people give a reason for leaving that is usually not the real reason. Takes talking to the person to figure it out.

One Last Point:

Phil: Re lifetime subscriptions. Many people who hold these accounts believe they are entitled to a much higher degree of service. If you're thinking of offering lifetime subscriptions, perhaps think twice about what it will take to support them.

Kongregate hosts 16,000 Flash games, 1,000 are added monthly. It's oriented towards core gamers and includes achievements, friends list, chat, comments and ratings.

• 85% of Kongregate gamers are male, majority are teenagers & college kids.
• 8 million unique users per month

Game plays are not as long-tail as expected:

• 1st game - 12m plays a month
• 2nd game - 10m
• 20th game - 2m
• 60th game - 1m

• Top 10% of games - 90% of playtime
• Top 1% - 50% of playtime

Regular players vs addicts

• Epic War 3 - deep single player game - 33% converts to regular players (5x plays), 10% converts to addicts (20x plays). Conversion is low because players already finished the game by that time.
• Dolphic Olympics 2 - Tony Hawk style game - 24% to reg players, 13% converts to addicts - Did well for a single player game. It's not IMMEDIATELY obvious how great/fun the game it is, players need to get good at it first. When put badges into this game, ratings skyrocketed since people were pushed by achievements to try out other areas of the game.
• Platform  Racing 2 - 38% to regular players, 27% to addicts. Simple platformer mario-style that won user's choice award. Has UGC and long legs.
• Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy - 32%, 22%
• Free Rider 2 - 17%, 18% - Once you get over hump of creating levels, it is more likely to convert you.
• Desktop Tower Defense - 7%, 15% - Have to build lots of towers before getting the value.

When putting in achivements, more often ratings go down. When people really care about your game because they like the achievements, problems (such as with controls) become more obvious. Or people play games they don't like just to get the achievements.

Newgrounds vs Kongregate ratings
In many cases similar, in some cases not. Suggested rationale for difference included.

• Desktop TD Pro - 3.9 vs 4.4 (NG vs KO) - KO: gameplay is awesome, so it's ok we already saw the game before
• Protector 3 - 4 vs 4.3 - NG: we've already seen this
• Post it Draw it - 3.7 vs 4.3 - NG: wtf
• Epic Battle Fantasy - Parodies of Final Fantasy fights - KO: ripping off FF, and is not so fun
• Nuclear Eagle - 4.1 vs 3.7 - KO got frustrated by not being able to finish (too hard)
• Xenotactic - 4.4 vs 3.9 - NG, someone reskinned DTD
• Thing Thing 4 - 4.4 vs 3.7 - KO about 5,000 people who uploaded stuff to the site (8 m)
• NG has higher % of people who consider themselves developers. So when they see something technically impressive, they react well.

Flaws in Flash Games

• Need a mute button
• Have save files, and pause buttons (users really want all of that)

Build fun first
Lots of new devs think it's like doing a homework; that putting in enough 'good enough' work in each area gets your game to be  fun.

Button Hunt 2 - 3.83 rating, 760k gameplays
Shopping Cart Hero - 4.07 rating, 2.2m plays
Don't Shit Your Pants - 4.01 rating, 835k plays

New devs - The product counts. You are NOT paid by the hour!

Players don't read instructions

• It is developers responsibility to teach, not the players
• This is something that friends/family won't critique you on
• Have a dialogue that pops up when you learn a new mechanic, don't assume that people are going to remember instructions from the title screen
• Allow flexibility with controls - say use WASD but also use the arrows

Super Energy Apocalypse Recycled - 4.11, 650k gameplays

• Two thirds of the game is a tutorial. A great way of doing it as opposed to 'We hope you read the instructions on the title screen'

Challenge does not equal frustration

• It's a virtue to have a good difficulty curve
• Bad: POD, hidden timer
• Good: N+, high skill component, reward players on regular basis, then game can be brutally hard

Art games work without much gameplay - Sprout, Anika's Odyssey - Beautiful, bizarre, text-free, remain intuitive and enjoyable

Good strategies need to be the fun ones
Players will play the game to complete the objectives, not to have the most fun

Ether Cannon 3.27, 184k
Ether War: 4.11, 838k

Closing

• Style, aesthetics, relatability are more important than impressive tech
• 3D graphics do not impress, since players already play console games
• The final 10% is the most important - Tweaking, and getting reliable feedback from non-friends

Panelists:

• Daniel James, Three Rings CEO
• Min Kim, Nexon VP of Mktg Nexon America
• Lisa Rutherford, Two Fish
• Andrew Sheppard, Hi 5
• Craig Sherman, Gaia Online

Nexon

• $29.3M in 2007 in virtual items sold in NA
• Driven by new content but also by new payment platforms

Gaia

• 8M uniques/month
• PCU 100K every afternoon
• 2 diff currencies
• soft currency is attention-based currency - secondary market for this has over 100K completed auctions per day for virtual currencies and goods

Two Fish

• Virtual economy data platform provider
• collects data from within game worlds, then feeds it into analytics db
• Allows you to optimize user experience
• Has about 20 customers
• Helps to set up economies, balances sources and syncs, tweak

3 Rings

• $4M/year in rev for PP
• Whirled has similar economy with 3rd economy allowing for UGC creators to cash out

Hi5

• 63M users
• Open social supporter
• 40 currencies, 70 langs, 60 payment methods
• 10x size of myspace games is their game site

Two Fish

• When starting, understand what your goals are and what you're monetizing
• approach design from bottom up - asking where company wants users to spend and earn

Gaia

• did not manage economy when they started
• want ppl to earn quickly for initial wow experience
• down the line, someone who has been playing for months and months get really rich - what is left for them to buy?
• need to manage these disparities correctly from the beginning
• company has one full time economist balancing it

Nexon

• 1999 or 2000, company stumbled on microtrans
• tons of ppl in beta for quiz game
• turned on charge switch and everyone left
• switched to f2p
• heuristic process
• recommends learning from playing and purchasing items and deconstructing what they've figured out
• a lot of it is a function - time = vanity, etc

3 Rings

• don't screw up
• mudflation - overinflation of currency is easy to introduce if you are not being rigorous about sources of attention currency
• need to have some level of instrumentation... need to pay attention and be set to react when something goes awry
• it is a discipline that is tough to master

Early (Moderator)

• Most games are a command economy - decisions about game economy made by a govt or central body, not market forces. Do you give the market any control ?

Nexon

• Nexon controls all re game economy
• ppl think of biz models first
• most important is to think of what game ppl wnat to play... high levels of engagement
• ppl playing your game casually... playing it 5 times, etc... unlikely to play
• need to get higher enggement times

Gaia

• in these conferences, you'll see two answers for how to run these games
• socnet are driven by viral loop or manufactured virality
• core brand or long term user base coming to a destination site
• we are in the latter category see a close tie to making an awesome product and getting a higher level of monetization
• others are more focused on pushing people into a monetization model early on

Hi5

• 3 different levers:
• engagement
• monetization
• virality
• with a hard currency, has to be a command economy

Early (Moderator)

• what are the leading indicators you measure and what do you do with them

Two Fish

• looking at macro flows. in and out of economy, both real and virtual money
• measure how quickly they are coming in and out of game
• are women having money coming through their accounts quicker or slower than men?
• look at what they pend on on... retail optimzation methods... correlated against demographics and pricing and how pricing changes over time
• a lot of data and charts but you have a repsonsibly to be benevolent

Nexon

• how people are flowing in
• how they are churning out
• unique users per month
• ARPU for that month
• pay rate based on subs they have
• economy balances itself... quickly they are going to determine if they want to pay for your game... in some ways the players dictate how you charge for your game

2 Fish

• difference between people paying and what happens within game
• within game world itself, thinking about what you are giving your users... you want them to have an economy they feel is balanced

Nexon

• we do not tie attention and real money currencies together

2 Fish

• some ppl do tie those two currencies together

Gaia

• best measure of what you're doing right is
• retention analysis
• length of time spent
• ultimate measure is customer retention

3 Rings

• any metrics are useful for testing hypotheses, but if you're wrong you need a new one
• how much cash are people holding?
• going to be a tension between hoarding and what you need them to do, which is spend so they need more money
• really interesting metric
• puzzle pirates is a command economy - cash prices fixed by us
• in world, player creators price certain items
• I would like to take back that control... users don't do a good job
• players tend to price too cheaply
• we will likely have to seize control of pricing from the users as they are acquiring things to easily

Early (Moderator)

• wealth management has come up as a topic - are there things you can do that aren't massively disruptive?

3 Rings

• incredible opp to take fantastic amounts of wealth and turn it into a one-time exclusive item
• when we shut down alpha server we challenged people to throw Pieces of 8 into a hole... winning group got their name on top of a list

Gaia

• we wanted to redo our amazon-like stores within the site, so we created a fiction inside Gaia that stores were getting shut down because of recession... asked users to help donate to help build higher quality stores... we created a concept of leaderboards... where largest donating teams got their names in lights... they felt as though they were getting status within the site

Nexon

• you want your players to spend all the money they have so they need to get another payment card, etc
• you should offer your players lots of diff ways to spend their money
• players are not buying 1 item at a time... they are batching... buying $10 of virtual currency at a time... so you need lots of options for purchase so people don't have money just sitting there

Early (Moderator)

• do you measure inflation? have an index?

Hi5

• no, we don't... we have 40 currencies... every country has its own purchasing power for a user
• a lot of people when they are thinking in metrics talk in ratios... very dangerous to measure app performance in ratios... tells you nothing about success... one could be making $1, one could be making $1M
• need to look at overall

Early (Moderator)

• why have multiple currency types, why not just 1?

Nexon

• if you want one currency, you probably lose control
• if you can't control it, the players might not need you anymore

3 Rings

• very risky to have just 1 currency
• Linden has just 1 currency... from the outside it is terrifing
• they say they are a country - maanged like a central bank
• second life is not a game, so they don't have the same compulsion loop
• stripping out that game aspect means they can probaby get away with 1 currency
• whenever you have a faucet that is your real money currency - espcially if it is uncapped - you can wake up and find it hacked or duped and you have to press reset
• dupe bug for soft currency or farming method is bad, but you don't need to find it in 30 mins... where you would with hard currency dupe bug

Nexon

• take a couple items and make them purchasable by soft and hard currencies... most players will work hard to purchase with soft currency

3 Rings

• the ppl who do take credit card out are buying the time and attention of the people who don't

2 Fish

• in general, dual currency is what we recommend

Early (Moderator)

• you hinted at exchange between soft and hard currency... where is the legal liability... regulations

Gaia

• we need to be clear... if you can get your money out, then it is a big issue
• SL has a currency where you can invest your time and get it out in real dollars
• as soon as you do that, you can run into regulation issues, but more primarily, people will try to game the sytem... bots, farming, etc
• if you are going to go down that path, plan on having half your dev team working on managing exploits for the next few years
• you have then become the best target for money laundering
• we chose not to do that... greatly simplifies life... branding decision as well - is your site a place where you can spend time and earn money? a career? or is it a fun experience where you put in your money but don't expect to get it out

2 Fish

• working with two companies that are in the skill based gaming sector... getting money out
• we use a double entry ledger system... duping is harder
• huge fraud risks
• comes down to modeling behaviour... looking for abnormalities

Gaia

• if you want to let money out of your system, you need to do games of skill not chance

Early (Moderator)

• how do you price things?

2 Fish

• i love pricing... counterintuitive in some places
• barrier pricing... i.e. everybody wants one of the cooler cars
• initial thought is that cars should be expensive
• but really they should be cheaper as they are a barrier item
• once they have a new car they can spend more on customizing it
• think about what kind of behaviours you want and price to encourage that

Nexon

• we actually do sell cars for $10
• we sold 120,000 cars for $10 apiece
• agrees re: barrier
• but barrier for ppl in game is not 10c, but $10 for initial payment... so you need enough items to justify that
• if you have 100 ppl playing game, what % are going to pay and how much
• what items can you create to get to a $15 ARPU

Gaia

• we do exactly that re: modeling an ARPU
• interplay between getting ARPU up vs getting percent of people who pay up
• clearly they should be complementary
• but fascinating thing is that we are not really clear on which one matters more, we go with what is easy
• getting dollars per player up is always easier
• people who want to pay are willing to pay a lot of money
• relatively easy to find small % of ppl who pay and pay
• more interesting thing is how to get a higher percent of ppl to pay
• that has more ramifications on long term business health
• barrier is getting the money into the game via cc or payment card

Hi5

• we work with developers on pricing
• if you don't test a variety of price points initially... you are liking to optimize around a suboptimal price point
• also important to take into account how much money is being spent per minute of engagement
• if you do allow exchange of soft and hard currencies, need to ensure the price is not punitive - with one dev, we halved it from $5 per half hour to $2.50 and doubled their ARPU

Gaia

• ways to avoid hitting the 1% chargeback
• not allowing you to purchase on day 1
• maxing the amount ppl can spend in a month
• making sure ppl can't pull money out

3 Rings

• we hit chargeback problems ... we hadn't switched on address verification... turned it on and problem went away
• WoW has big chargeback isseus as people farm on stolen CCs

Gaia

• median user age is 18
• under age 18 I would be looking at sub models
• bad if you have to ask mom each time you want to spend another dollar

3 Rings

• habbo hack for under 18 microtrans - $4.95 club habbo sub that gives you virtual currency... allowance from folks... can also buy more currency
• hoping users get comfortable with that and give more money

Nexon

• betting on teen market
• kids are fickle... in and out quickly
• once club penguin kids grow up, they will spend money on virtual economies.. right now their parents are saying no to premium subs

Drop me a line if you'd like to meet up to discuss working together.

I've been invited to speak at a roundtable called "Contractor, Freelance or Employee" during the Casual Connect Leadership Development Forum on July 20th. I'm obviously 100% in the corner of being a freelancer/consultant as it's been 2 years since I made the jump from 13 years spent in the core games industry and things have gone great.

(Check my blog for a wrap-up of my 2008 consulting business... a great year, thanks to phenomenal clients!)

The Leadership Development Forum is put on by Women In Games International - the organization I have to thank for making me the only male on my roundtable. How rare!

See below for links to bios for me and my fellow roundtablers:

Adrian Crook
Noelle Hunt Bennett, Big Fish Games
Naomi Kawase
Belinda Van Sickle, GameDocs

The idea is simple but radical: turn everyday web browsing into a game - a group experience together with other surfers.

While searching Google or browsing your friends photos on Facebook you could be playing games, undertaking quests or chatting with other avatars also at the same sites.

The concept of collaborative browsing isn't new, witness social browser Flock or social recommendation services such as StumbleUpon.  In the past months the gameplay element of collaborative browsing has sped forward with venture backed players launching services and a handful starting to gain good traction.  The fledgling genre, sometimes called Passively Multiplayer Online Games (PMOG) or parallel browsing worlds are an innovative take on free to play virtual worlds.

Instead of web communities such as Gaia or Stardoll where you log in and remain on the destination sites, PMOGs are plugged into everyday web behaviour. Giving new life to existing pages, rather than trying to construct a full virtual world of its own, these "meta" services ride on top of web surfing and layer gameplay, content and community around them.

Together with user generated content and communities, the experience can feel more personalized than in traditional online games and adds a new dimension to the pages you see every day. Privacy and other deployment issues aside (all need plugin/client downloads for the full experience), they are an interesting development and have the potential to redefine the web browsing experience for a new generation of consumers.

The Players

It's early days for PMOGs and there are different approaches being taken, from pure avatar chat through to scripted gameplay and questing whilst surfing the web. Let's take a look at 5 of the players in the space:

Rocketon

Rocketon avatars on any website

A parallel virtual world for 2D chat & flash games, Rocketon works as a 'top layer' to any website you are browsing. This enables each page in turn to become a virtual chat area. The avatar is customizable into any dimension and either human or animal/monster form. Since this works on top of the page, it is not heavily reliant on outside codes, and does not need to utilize a large amount of processing. The ability to switch between avatar walking or chatting and browsing the web is done by a button on the bottom left, which also serves as the chat bar and game starter.

The interactions that are enabled with Rocketon include surf following chat, where you can move from page to page while chatting and passing links, where-upon your avatars can meet up again. The ability to share your web experience with avatar chat and games definitely spices up many popular destinations. The only downside is you must visit Rocketon.com first, before going to any other websites.

ExitReality

Exit reality 3D Web world

Turn every web page into a 3D space. The workings of ExitReality are based on the VRML markup language, which as been around for a while, but neglected in recent years. Exit Reality is based on this language and is able to model any website into a standard room with both 3D and 2D content. Once web sites are optimized for ExitReality, a virtual room is made available.

There are many large web sites currently involved in this 3d World, including MySpace and Facebook, who allow each user page to have their own “virtual hangout room”. The ability to interact with others as well as with the environment makes this web browser feel more of a MMORPG, than a POMG. Each site that is optimized using ExitReality can choose from a variety of landscapes, from a treehouse to a beach house. And for savvy users you can edit your own space.

PMOG/The Nethernet

The Nethernet

The Nethernet (or PMOG.com) is a passively multiplayer online game with a structure similar to the likes of StumbleUpon mixed with World of Warcraft. In this arena, players are free to roam any website, utilizing a toolbar in-browser to interact with other players. The web discovery aspect gives users the options to share any website they are on via setting 'portals'. Players are able to create missions to give badges and rewards to other players, thus sharing their selected sites.

Since any game has two sides to choose from, you are allowed to align with the seemingly good or bad. The good aim to share the web and it's randomness with the community and the bad are there to 'mine' the sites and cause chaos (also the name of the bad side). You are allowed to choose an avatar to represent yourself, but the gameplay does not include on-site avatars, and once the tool-bar is installed, there is no need to use any website portals to log in, or to browse through.

Yoowalk

Yoowalk - Time Magazine Room

Taking the interactive city form is Yoowalk, an online portal for web browsing. With the interface at Yoowalk, the design is centered around a city where you are able to walk around each block and jump into websites that have been added to the directory. Each site that is indexed is given a virtual room where their content is delivered on the walls, and then after a click you are taken to the information requested.

Yoowalk is a flash player that gives virtual streets filled with different sites organized by country and topic, if you want USA news, you can navigate to a number of popular news sites. The user interactions let you chat with users via the flash portal and you can use your avatar for mobility, or you can speed the walking by clicking 'fly'. The gaming aspect is limited, but the user-interface is designed for web browsing rather than games. Different rooms can be made by each site; Google has a video room, main search, News, Maps and Mail.

Weblin

Weblin is a passive multiplayer chat in the realest sense. Your avatars are static on the bottom of the page, which helps when trying to actively surf your websites. Where others promote games and virtual rooms, Weblin is best for chatting with people who are currently where you are. You can add friends that will allow you to chat wherever you may be, but the main interactions are between yourself and others on similar top level pages.

Weblin on Facebook.com

Actions that users can do to websites include re-painting the site, flooding the page, making the site clouded, as well as raining roses or exploding the page. Weblin is the most popular with over 2 million users, and it shows. The interface is the least intrusive, with the avatars staying at the page bottom, and effects showing up rarely. Despite the client download and plug-ins users can enjoy a easy to use chat system that doesn't require surfing through a gateway site first, or running intensive graphics.

Summary

It is clear to see that the big players in the early stages of PMOG growth have taken very different approaches to how web browsing can be made interactive. From the casual web quests, to the on-page chat and antics with your avatars – and even changing the web itself to a 3D world, the ingenuity and innovation in these players is significant.

By their very nature, to be successful the services must build a critical mass of users to avoid the "ghost town" syndrome - and some are making great progress already.  Looking at the numbers, and simple traffic statistics show that PMOG communities are growing, with over 2.3 million users within these five networks alone.

The strong indicator of how these sites are to be in the future rests in the hands of continuing to make each site add value to the web experience, and give the burned out web surfer a new wave to ride.

Because sharing communities have seen explosive growth for helping 'spread the word' (digg, reddit, delicious), and helping to explore the depths of the internet (StumbleUpon), the PMOG takes the human need for information and adds fun and interaction with others in real-time.

Billing itself as one of a new breed of pure play web publisher, True Games Interactive opened shop at the beginning of 2008 is expanding its team and title list. We invited CEO & Co-Founder Bob Drobish to reflect on their first year and where free-to-play social games are heading.

How did you start True Games and how has the first year been?

We began True Games by stepping back and doing our home work.  We looked at player interests, trends in the industry, and the gaps between the two. From that we built a business model and a plan that was compelling enough to attract the best professionals and business partners in the industry.

We were fortunate enough to attract people like Peter Jarvis formerly of NC Soft and Peter Cesario formerly of Namco Bandai.  We were also fortunate enough to attract business partners like Petroglyph, GOA, and Possibility Space.  Of course, one of the highlights of the year was connecting with global media giant UTV as both an investor and strategic partner.  It has been a great year.

Your first game announcement was Warrior Epic.  Are you focusing on any particular type or genre of games?

We have exclusively focused on micro-transaction based online games.  Our immediate titles are exclusively designed for PC.  The two titles that we have announced so far, Warrior Epic (Developed by Possibility Space) and Mytheon (developed by Petroglyph) will be downloadable clients, but with a twist...

From a gamer point of view, are there any synergies between games on your platforms?

Yes, there will be synergies in terms of billing and currency, but we feel that this isn't the most compelling aspect to gamers.  We believe that it is the overall quality of the player experience throughout the full lifecycle of a game that gamers want and need.  That being said, our platform will offer user-friendly, mechanical conveniences that will add to the quality of the overall player experience.

How do you view the economic climate and how that will affect the F2P market either good or bad?

The economic climate is of course challenging for us as it is for all business.    As an industry however, I think that online, micro-transaction based games offer a uniquely compelling entertainment value proposition.  In these economic times, we'd expect that the most cost-effective entertainment options would have an advantage and we think our business model fits into that category.  Gamers do not have to spend $60 up front on our games.  They can download it at no cost, play as much as wanted with no subscription charges; while having options for micro-transaction purchases.

Is True Games targeting a global audience or focusing on US and English speaking markets?

All the IP's that we establish are designed with a global audience in mind. Some western markets we will serve directly. Others we will serve through syndication partners with local expertise; but always designed for and distributed to a global audience. Player interest in games is global.  The internet is global.  So yes, we have developed games from the ground up to cater to players all over the world.

Many believe that old subscription models will give way to pure micro-transaction models, what's your take?

There is an undeniable trend toward micro-transaction based models.  Our research shows that this will continue in the years to come.  However, I think the market will continue (at least for the foreseeable future) to offer subscription and micro-transaction based models; in some cases both for the same title.  We believe there will be a rise in various hybrids of the two forms.  Ultimately, the most successful model will be the one to serve the player best.  This will require extensive testing and research.

What is the most exciting development you anticipate in 2009 for the industry?

The most exciting development we anticipate in 2009 (and what our business is built upon) is the launch of AAA games with a free-to-play model.  Clearly, there are a lot of free-to-play games and AAA games.  However, there is no successful AAA game with a micro-transaction based model in the western market.  To develop this will be our most exciting endeavor in 2009-not just for our company but for the industry as well.