That isn’t such a great choice for me – my PvP skills are slightly worse than my ability to paint the Mona Lisa using tarmac, with my feet, and blindfolded. Daily quests have a tendency to get very old very quickly, leaving me looking at raiders like a kid with his face pressed up against the toy shop window, peering in at all the goodness without being able to take part.

So we had a think about what else we could do, and we think we have a solution that everyone will enjoy.

Hats. Not literally, but more a figurative sense, using the Team Fortress 2 style of fast-paced fun with distinct cosmetic rewards. As I’ve mentioned before, there hasn’t been a decent space combat dogfighting game since X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter game out all those years ago. It’s a completely untapped market at the moment, ripe and ready to exploit. Plus a ton of the art assets, game engine and design work has already been done.

Gameplay would be fast-paced, newcomer-friendly and with an emphasis on fun instead of showing off skill or trying to build an e-sport. Getting blown up would result in a quick respawn, with no huge wait times or penalties.  Players would be spending most of their time flying around and shooting things, not waiting for a countdown timer.

You could even have different gameplay modes such as defend/capture the space station, mine the asteroid belt, king of the quadrant and so on. Enough to keep things varied and allow for tactics to evolve, possibly including derelict ships and minefields to keep things interesting.

And the rewards? There’s cosmetic stuff such as customisations for your ship to make it stand out, or new internal features like a trophy cabinet or a mute switch for your ship droid. You could even have variations on weapons and armour, giving them a boost in one direction but a drawback in others. It takes a page from the Team Fortress 2 playbook of allowing players to earn fun items like hats, without getting into the PVP arms race that happens in so many MMOs.

So there you have it – turn a side-game diversion into a compelling endgame activity and grab an unpopulated segment of the market at the same time. It’s a win-win.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• My Struggle with Sandboxes
• SWTOR Space Combat: Missed Opportunity
• The Necessity of End Game

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Post tags: endgame, hats, space combat

I have an opinion on Non-Player Characters. It emerged in the days of the first escort quest I attempted, when the computer-controlled NPC I’d be chaperoning would sprint ahead to certain death at the hands of hungry skeletons. If they weren’t sprinting ahead they’d probably stopped to admire a particularly intricate pebble and forgotten all about me. Either way you’re probably looking at death or failure, or more usually both.

At that point my opinion of NPCs was cemented: dumb as a bag of bricks.

Since that day we’ve had Warlocks and Hunters in World of Warcraft trying to order around pets and minions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Spin the artificial intelligence roulette wheel and find out if your trusty sidekick is going to help or just stand there like a lemon. And although things have improved over the years, the lemon is still on that scoring board.

Star Wars: The Old Republic aims to improve on the largely superficial AI by coating it in a Choose Your Own Adventure, allowing you to shape the relationship you have with your companions. Unfortunately it doesn’t always go according to plan, as Sypster recently found out.

That’s largely the shape of NPCs for the past ten years. They might talk a lot more than they used to but they still spend their time standing under the same canvas tent waiting for players to turn up and help thin the overflowing rat population. Other than providing animated scenery and a tiny bit of world colour, they have a handful of lines to deliver and a reward to hand out. That’s it.

While this is an issue in standard theme-park MMOs it becomes more of a frustration in sandbox games where the game has to teach you the intricacies of the interface and how to interact with the game world before you can be unleashed on an unsuspecting universe/continent/village. Wouldn’t it be better if the NPCs could help with passing you advice, or if your sidekick could do more than just tell you how upset he was about your conversation choices.

Due to their own limited programming and scripted responses, most NPCs remain nothing more than superficial intelligences. Their responses are limited. Building a proper artificial intelligence is hard work, especially when you look at the relationships between NPCs as groups and individuals. It’s something that StoryBricks eventually hopes to crack. But are there other options?

Why not cheat? Instead of using superficial intelligences with limited responses, why not use directed player characters controlled by real people?
As far-fetched as it sounds, this exact process is already done in the kids-focused MMO Club Penguin. During an interview with creator Lane Merrifield, Eurogamer revealed that the developer now uses a 250-strong moderating team to “play with and encourage the children of Club Penguin to try new things” alongside their other duties. This is a bit of a revelation, as almost every other MMO relies on NPCs,  in-game tutorials and the kindness of other players to help newcomers get started.

The concept has also been described in For The Win, Cory Doctorow’s book exploring the near-future of MMO gaming (and available to download from his website for free). In the book Doctorow describes games publishers extending their support teams through systems similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, with armies of remote workers performing directed player character duties where the scripted dialogue eventually fails.

Beyond the utility of having an extra creature fighting on your side, companions, pets and sidekicks are there to help root the player’s character to the game world. In SWTOR they help to make the experience personal to the player. But they are still superficial intelligences, running off and pulling extra mobs or staring at the ceiling when they should be healing you.

But while the combat AI is always likely to be a sticking point, evolving the story of an MMO beyond the Choose Your Own Adventure limitations is going to become crucial if developers maintain this mantra of delivering tailored experiences. Part of that tailored experience has to be supporting and interacting with players from inside the game, if only to encourage them to keep playing.

After all, that’s what it’s about. Keeping people playing. Everything else is secondary.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• Questions To You: On Criticism
• Playing Cards at the Carnival
• Cheering the Armchair Designer

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© Gazimoff for Mana Obscura, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: companions, design, development, npc

In the time since I started blogging about MMOs, I’ve learned a huge amount about writing, sharing and being part of a staggeringly huge community. In many respects though I’m still a noob, bumbling around and making mistakes. Things like the blog going offline due to setup or configuration errors because I’m too stubborn to use a free service, or losing my entire blogroll moving from one host to another.

I also look at the other bloggers and still feel amazed. How on earth does Tobold manage to come up with a new topic to write about every day? Where do Psynister and Cynwise find the time to put together their detailed, well researched guides? How does Spinks manage to read all the things and pull it all together into a well researched reflection of both the community and her own opinion? What inspired I Like Bubbles to convert the rant into an entertaining art form? How is The Daily Blink regularly and consistently funny?

When MMO Melting Pot mentioned that people felt intimidated by long-standing bloggers I was surprised to see my name listed there. I guess I still see myself as a newcomer to blogging compared to a lot of other people. It also reminds me how lucky I am to have created something that seems to work, even though I have no clue how I managed it. Part of me puts it down to trial and error, while another part reasons that it’s just fluke.

Even so, when I started out with MMO blogging I was given a bucketload of advice from a range of different people. There were many good lessons that I learned, but the four most important ones were these. I don’t know if they’re common sense (something I don’t have) or based on old proverbs, but they’ve worked for me. If you’re starting out as an MMO blogger or you’ve been doing it for a while but you’re struggling with it, I hope these are helpful.

Think About the Future

Starting out as a blogger is a daunting thing. You’ve got ideas for a handful of posts that you’re desperate to share and you can’t wait to get started. With blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger you can be registered and writing in minutes. And that’s a great thing!

But before you start publishing take a moment to plan things out. If your head’s full of ideas then draft the articles up in Word or Google Docs or similar to free up your mind. Put on some relaxing music, grab a notepad and think about your blogging future. Contemplate everything: will you still be playing the same games, digging into the same classes or grouping with the same people?

Likewise, where do you hope your blogging will take you? Are you happy for it to be a hobby or are you hoping to use it to move into a career as a paid blogger or video game journalist? Are you thinking about making an income from advertising, selling ebooks or something similar? Do you want to move into the games industry as a programmer, community manager, artist or sound designer? I’ll be honest – one of my goals is to eventually work in MMO game design, and although I don’t think it’ll ever happen it at least gives me a target to aim for.

Never Bin An Idea

Blogging is great when the ideas are flowing and posts come together almost like magic. It’s when the well of ideas runs dry and the muse is out of town that things come grinding to a halt. No inspiration means nothing to write about, which means that the blog you put all that effort in ends up being neglected.

Ideas are fickle things – sometimes there’s a huge flood of them desperate to leak out everywhere, other times your creativity is left like a barren and dry desert. The best safeguard is to write down ideas when inspiration hits you so that you don’t forget them later. If a blogpost spawns further ideas as you’re writing it then consider saving them for a follow-up post in the future. Keep a notepad next your PC so that when you’re gaming you can make a note of something. Take screenshots!

Get Involved

Putting up your writing for everyone to see is one thing but helping people to know it’s there is something different. This is a difficult topic because it’s like walking a tightrope between crocodiles and alligators. On the one hand you’ve got the conundrum that if you don’t share your new blog with people then they’ll never find it, but on the other hand if you start spamming places with “Visit my blog!” then you’ll quickly earn yourself a bad reputation. The trick is not to get eaten by either creature, which usually relies on something that I have none of – common sense.

The best thing I’ve found is to become involved in communities gradually in order to understand what accepted behaviour is. Twitter works differently to Reddit, which works differently to forums, which are different to Google+ It’s important to get to know each community before posting a single link to your own stuff. Some forums are happy for you to link your blog in your signature while others are completely against any form of self-promotion.

That said, be free with getting involved. Talk to other people. Post comments on other blogs with your own thoughts. If they inspire you to write your own blogpost, link back to their article. The same with forum threads and Twitter interactions – if you can share where the idea came from then do it.

DO NOT just spam everywhere advertising your new blog. Be sensible and respectful of the places you’re participating in.

There Are No Rules

My final bit of advice is another truism. There are no rules to successful writing, no guaranteed formula that will work for you. It takes work, experimentation and persistence to find a setup and style that works for you.

To give you a bit of background, I’d originally started out writing a tech blog. I’d research my articles and carefully give reasons for my opinions. I got some great feedback from family and friends, but it just wasn’t going anywhere. I tried making it more interesting by including subjects that I was more passionate about (games), but then it became disorganised and unfocused. After trying to reboot the idea a couple of times I decided to shut it down.

Since then I’ve read a lot, learned a lot and tweaked things a lot to gradually improve how I write, how I lay pages out and how I organise the blog. And I’m still learning – how to make better Youtube videos, how to design my own games and so on. I’m finding new bloggers with interesting ideas and I’m loving what they’re writing about.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• Fear of the Fansites
• Getting the Most out of Game Time
• Tired of MMOs?

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Post tags: blogging

The great thing about this Adventure mode is that it’s entirely optional. You can either spend time building the huge mine cart roller coaster you’ve always wanted, or you can build the portal, traverse the Nether and defeat the Ender Dragon. Or you can do both at the same time.

It’s also convinced me to check out the limited selection of sandbox MMOs currently available. After digging into EVE, Wurm Online (a previous Notch creation) and the Glitch beta, it becomes pretty obvious who these games are aimed at: builders. Go to this location, harvest these resources. Go to that location and build something with what you’ve gathered. Sometimes there’s a “kill ten rats”, but before you can do that you have to find a tree, cut it down, mine some iron, learn how to blacksmith, until finally… the rats have gone home for the weekend.

I think that this is the biggest problem I have with sandbox MMOs: in a world where almost anything is possible why would you choose to play Sim Peon Online instead of Hero With Fireballs Deluxe? While I like the idea of having my own lair built to my own specifications, I’m not sure I want to spend all my game time building one brick by brick.

I’ll be honest – I’m a fan of the theme park. I like the finely crafted stories and the carefully designed worlds. I don’t mind if my options are limited because I’m too busy running round shooting lightning from my fingertips and cackling like a madman. Sith don’t create statues themselves, they get their apprentice to hire off-world slaves to build it for them!

The part where all my theme park praise comes unstuck is at endgame. Once you’ve hit level cap in almost any MMO you’re on the repeating circuit of daily quests, daily instances, raiding and PVP. Your choices then are to start at the theme park entrance again or going round that endgame loop until the next content update. It gets old no matter which game you’re sitting in.

There have been some experiments with bringing in sandbox elements, such as player or guild housing, player cities and so on. But permanent structures in a game inhabited by a transient playerbase always seems like an odd thing. As a game moves into later life, derelict monuments to hundreds of patient hours stand there slowly gathering digital detritus till the servers are finally deactivated.

But could it go the other way? Start out with a malleable landscape and a set of rules and layer the adventure over the top? Allow players to choose the path of the hero or the craftsman, with both just as wide in scope and value? Would a world in which the learned magus and skilled mason can coexist be an idea that resonates?

I’m constantly surprised by the pace of endgame and the thirst players have for new content. New MMOs are now launching with enough new content to last through a year of continual updates. As production values and player expectations increase, the cost of providing this content buffer is only likely to grow. Whether this kind of growth is sustainable is a good question.

While I don’t think that a game like this will emerge any time soon, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are handfuls of coders and designers in sealed off rooms experimenting on something like this. While the theme park is great for providing direction and structure to MMO gameplay, I’m beginning to feel that a sandbox foundation may be the answer to the frequent delivery of new content we now demand.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• SWTOR Endgame: Fixed!
• Replacing the Superficial Intelligence
• LFD: No Simple Answers

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Post tags: design, endgame, sandbox

The argument is that Star Wars: The Old Republic needs a Looking for Flashpoint tool in order to help groups form for both levelling instances and endgame content. There are currently a large number of players unable to experience this content, either because their guild doesn’t have enough players at the same level or because they’re too busy enjoying the stupidly good questing content.

The choice seems to be between a Warcraft-style Looking for Dungeon tool, or not having one at all and just making do with shouting in the chat channels like some market trader. Neither is a great solution – one end leaves you frustrated with anonymous people you’ll never encounter again, while the other leaves you frustrated at the lack of response from other players as you sit doing nothing for hours on end. Either way you’re left frustrated.

The exception is if you have a guild that’s both large enough to support flashpoints (and populated with people who want to do that content) and which has people in broadly the same level bracket. If either is not the case then even with the best of intentions the guild is less of a guild and more of a social chat channel. But I digress.

Looking back on the early days of Warcraft some six or so years ago, zone layout consisted of a collection of quests followed occasionally by an instance at the end. The quest chains were laid out to drive players to the instance, making sure that they were aware of them and that they should take part. As a result, zone channels were full of people putting groups together while they were questing – you didn’t have to pause the fun activity of completing quests in order to form an instance group.

By contrast, SWTOR positions flashpoints as seperate content. While you can pick up the flashpoint breadcrumb from a ‘Flashpoint Courier’ in most level-suitable zones, it’s made to feel like optional side-content instead of central to the levelling experience. The chatter in the zone General chat tends to ignore them as well, meaning groups simply aren’t being formed while people are out questing. In fact, players seem more interested in the 4-man Heroic Quest group content than they are in flashpoints.

It means that unlike Warcraft, most of the flashpoint recruitment is done at the Imperial or Republic Fleet hubs rather than the questing zones. This means you have a tiny window of opportunity to grab people as they cash in their commendations and catch up on crafting before they’re off to have more fun on the next planet.
See the problem?

This is why large guilds have so much more success forming groups. By having a persistent chat channel that spans all planets, they have a natural advantage to forming groups while players are out questing. If you don’t have those kinds things at your disposal, you’re out of luck. Which is why so many people are clamouring for an LFD-style tool. Given the choice between struggling for hours to assemble a group and going to do something more fun like questing, world PVP or space combat, most players would pick the option to do something else.

That said, the implementation of the tool in Warcraft is pretty dire. It takes no account of player preferences and serves to make them more anonymous instead of less. It’s designed to be incredibly efficient at putting groups together and by consequence tends not to be focused on helping players get to know others from the same server. Rather than doing a simple “lift and shift”, BioWare should be encouraged to create their own design with better goals in mind.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• The Gates of Compelling Rewards
• In Defence of the Trifecta
• Karma As A Mechanic

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Post tags: design, levelling, lfd

When looking at console games the main driver is to make back the cost of the game in boxed sales. An XBox 360 game that shifts 2 million copies globally equates to roughly $120m in sales, of which the publisher is likely to see roughly $30m. If your game comes in at less than this budget or you sell more copies than the forecast then you’re into profit territory.

MMOs break this mold by placing some of the budget for the game against forecasted subscription, micro-transaction or “in-life” revenues. The Old Republic pushed this further than most, assigning a huge chunk of the project budget against these in-life revenues. It’s a bit of a gamble, which is why building up preorders is so important. But in this case, it should also pay off.

Looking at the first month sales we know that over 2 million copies of SWTOR have been sold. What we don’t know is the proportion of people who bought the boxed copy, Collectors Edition or Digital Deluxe from Origin. This is important as a publisher only tends to receive about 25% of the retail RRP for boxed copies but can earn much more from an online store offering digital downloads. Assuming that EA earned a minimum of $15 per sale, earnings for the first month would be around $30 million at a minimum. That leaves EA with around $170m to bring in from subscriptions.

Last week I took a closer look at how many subscribers are likely to stick with SWTOR after the first month, coming up with an answer of roughly one million. Assuming these subscribers stick around for the whole year that’s a further $180m earned from monthly subscriptions at $15 a time. There are currency variations and multi-month discount deals to factor in, as well as people who prefer to use game time cards, so overall it should even out.

Offsetting against this income are operating costs. SWTOR uses three datacentres located in East Coast USA, West Coast USA and Ireland in order to provide players with servers near to them to play on. That said, it’s unlikely that these facilities would be dedicated to supporting the MMO, instead providing support for Origin as well as console-based multiplayer sessions. The entire EU server cluster is likely to squeeze into 10 to 15 racks, with each rack measuring 80”x40”x24”. A typical large datacentre costs $10m a year to run, but colocating in existing EA facilities should bring operating costs down significantly.

There’s also customer support requirements. Again these are likely to be an expansion of existing EA facilities rather than dedicated BioWare installations, although SWTOR support might be made up of a dedicated team. Even with a team of 100 staff on an average salary of $30k per year the overall support cost would be $3 million per year. All in, the annual run and operate cost for SWTOR should be significantly less than $10 million and probably be in the $4m to $6m mark.

To recap, a $200 million game that made $30 million in first month sales has $170m still to recoup from subscriptions. SWTOR is likely to retain 1 million subscribers, earning $180 million in the first year. Operating costs are likely less than $10 million.

From my crude napkin-maths, Star Wars: The Old Republic should break even by the end of the first year, with anything beyond that being healthy profit margin. It’s possible that the forecast was for the game to pay back within three years, in which case it’s easy to see that the game should make a substantial sum even if subscriber numbers drop.

As with any rough calculation there are assumptions. The first big one is not taking payment processing, debt refinancing, currency exchanges and other fiscal operations into account. The second one is the cost of ongoing development and maintenance. it’s not clear how much future content was ‘baked in’ to the $200m cost, or if BioWare will be looking to dip into some of their subscription earnings to fund further development.

It’s likely that we’ll never know the real numbers from BioWare, as these costs tend to be competition and marketplace sensitive. Either way, it’s clear to see that BioWare have produced a game that stands up to financial scrutiny as well as critical acclaim.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• The Impending Release
• Under the Hood
• Mage Cataclysm Preview

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© Gazimoff for Mana Obscura, 2012. | Permalink | 18 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: development, finance, theorycraft

First there was Justin Olivetti over at Bio break who awarded Mana Obscura “Best New Blog” in his MMO Community Awards. This was completely out of the blue – something I wasn’t expecting to see at all. For me to be listed next to so many great blogs was surprising and incredible and so many other things.

Yesterday was the second clanger – the MMO Melting Pot community awards were announced. These folks had continued the annual “Piggies” after Larísa from Pink Pigtail Inn retired from MMO blogging last year. I was doing some research for something I was originally planning on posting today when the news came up on Twitter.

I’d won the award for Most Solid Content Provider 2011. I still don’t believe it, so I’m going to quote Hugh from the Pot here:

I’m going to let you into a secret here – Gazimoff is one of the few people whose work I will not wait until the evening to read. If I see there’s a new post on Mana Obscura, I’m off reading that bad boy right away. His writing is consistently insightful, intelligent, thought-provoking and entertaining. So, if you’re waiting for me to fix an egregious guide typo or approve your comment, and Gazimoff’s updated that day (which, let’s face it, is more likely than not), I’m probably off reading his post when I should be working. He gets not only the blame for my procrastination but also our award for Most Solid Content Provider 2011

There are so many great bloggers whose content I really enjoy reading that were also nominated, and I was both amazed and surprised (again) to be listed among them. But to win? Inconceivable. After all, I’m just doing this blog for fun – it was never supposed to become something serious!

If I’m honest, these awards aren’t just for me. They’re also to the close friends that persuaded me to give MMO blogging a shot and who helped me out when I was getting started. They’re to the community over at Blog Azeroth that helped me get started, providing me with both technical and moral support. They’re to everyone who’s left me a comment saying thanks for a great article or responding with their own thoughts and opinions.

There’s also the people who I’ve bounced ideas off, who’ve given up lunches or afternoons just to talk about some game concept or other. There’s the people on Twitter and tons of other places whose random comments have given me an idea. There’s the video game journalists and bloggers who report the industry news and provide a steady stream of food for thought.

All I do is join the dots and write what I see. It’s all of you that put the dots there in the first place. For that, for the awards, for the recognition, for being there, for everything, thank you.

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Post tags: awards, flushies, mmo melting pot, piggies

Trying to forecast renewal rates is pretty challenging at the best of times, mainly because there’s very few benchmarks on these figures for MMOs. The most common figure that’s announced is the total subscriber base, although sometimes we’ll hear about how those subscribers are distributed by market. We’re also not given churn rates, so we have no clue about the number of new subscribers coming in versus the ones that are leaving.

So what exactly is there to go on? Well, assuming that the best renewal rate BioWare can hope for is 100%, let’s have a look at what will help them keep that number high and what’s dragging it down like a lead weight.

The Pros

Kicking off with the most obvious, BioWare organised two very large beta weekends just before the game launched, inviting everyone who’d shown interest in the game to download it and try it out. This had two major benefits – it helped persuade people waiting for a 10 day “free trial” to preorder the game, but it also convinced people who didn’t like the game to not pick up the box at launch.

Content starvation is also a critical thing. One month is enough time for someone to hit level cap on one character if they’re playing regularly. For those being more relaxed about it or who have their attention split between games you’re looking at twice that. Plus there’s the reroll factor – people hitting 50 on one character only to roll and start working on the next.

There’s also more subtle methods that BioWare have used to retain subscribers, like requiring a payment method or gamecard before activating the game. The reason behind this is simple – players are more likely to cancel the subscription if they’re prompted to enter their details at the end of the bundled month.

And what about competition? The heavyweight rival World of Warcraft still doesn’t have any new content, and in fact Blizzard decided to make the latest Dragon Soul raid even easier for players to complete. While this might help raiddgroups get over a difficulty hurdle, I can’t see it being a great lure to pull people back. “Hey guys! You know that frustrating boss we were stuck on? He got nerfed! You can come back now!”. For anyone who wanted to see the content, LFR has given them exactly that.

And what about the single player market? Skyrim took an arrow to the knee, Mass Effect 3 is out in March (although the demo is going to destroy Valentines Day) and Diablo 3’s eruption from hell has been delayed. MMO and RPG gamers could be left in limbo until either Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World comes along to pick them up.

There’s also the news that anyone who bought the game and buys a one month subscription or game time card will qualify for the in game title ‘Founder’. While it’s not on the same level as a companion pet or weapon crystal, it’s an added incentive for people to stay in the game till patch 1.2 arrives.

The Cons

The Old Republic’s Achilles Heel right now is end-game content. It exists and it’s built to a high standard (the new Kaon Under Siege flashpoint is incredibly good fun) but it’s very difficult to get in to at the moment. With a population spread widely between the early levels and the cap and many guilds straddling between SWTOR and Warcraft, finding groups is an exercise in frustration. A standard population server might only see one or two groups formed through general chat channels in a 2 hour window. Unless you’re in a large guild populated with level 50 characters you’re going to get very bored very quickly.

There’s also been a couple of observations that have done BioWare no favours on the last day of subscribing. First was stock analyst Todd Mitchell coming out and cutting his price on EA stock, citing concerns with SWTOR’s sales performance and first month play observarions. Mitchell’s no newcomer to the videogames industry, having looked at their performance since at least 2006. Then there was the issue players started having with the unsubscribe page, again drawing attention to the date and fuelling conspiracy theories.

Also, just because Warcraft is asleep at the wheel doesn’t mean there’s no competition for SWTOR at all. As Sypster and Tesh reminded me on Twitter, Star Trek Online has just gone free to play. If you’re prepared to trade Lightsabers for Phasers then this might be a smooth (and cheap!) move. Alas, force powers are not included.

The Prediction

We know things are good but not great in SWTOR at present. We have an analyst cutting predictions and problems with the accessibility of end game content. But by the same token, we have a market with very little competition, either from newcomers or existing stalwarts. So what’s the figure?

Looking at other industries, churn rates for other industries tend to be fairly low. Verizon’s wireless subscriptions tend to have a churn rate of around 1.5%. Netflix use a rolling monthly contract and their churn rate recently rose to 4% following various blunders this year.

Meanwhile, analysts have historically pegged Warcarft’s churn rate at around the same as Netflix with 4-5%. That article’s from nearly 5 years back though, so it’s unclear if this figure is still accurate. There’s also some research from Nick Yee (a research scientist at PARC). His own research (PDF link, ‘Building an MMO With Mass Appeal’, pg 292)  indicates that “only 40% of new subscribers remain in a game for more than two months”.

So what’s the number? With the work that BioWare have put in before the game’s release coupled with this being month 1 and not month 2, I’d put the retention rate at somewhere around 60% to 70%, but probably on the lower end of things. After month 2 I’d expect another drop to about 40-50%, in-line with previous MMOs. This means that from the 2 million in sales at launch, SWTOR will end up with a stable base of about a million players from which to grow. This is broadly in-line with other predictions from a year ago, although we might not agree on the final number of subscribers.

Just like Chris mentioned over at The Daily Blink, subscribing to an MMO once the bundled month is up isn’t an automatic thing any more. With the current economic climate many of us are feeling the pinch and tightening our belts. Although I’ve made the decision to maintain a subscription to both SWTOR and WoW for now, there are a lot of gamers who can’t make that choice. Which one will work harder to earn our cash?

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• A Limit on Subscription MMOs?
• The Unknown Warcraft Subscriber
• The Infinite Trial

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© Gazimoff for Mana Obscura, 2012. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: churn, retention, subscription

Get used to the message above – you might be seeing a lot more of it in future. The U.S. Government is currently considering the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) – a move which could seriously damage the Internet as we know it should it become law.

• It makes website owners liable for content posted by their users. Expect to see blogs close their comments and forums close their doors, just in case a user posts something that gets the site shut down.
• It gives the U.S. Attorney General the power to seize websites that hold or link to infringing content. There’s no request for content removal and no court process or oversight. Places like YouTube, Reddit and Twitter could be pulled offline overnight.
• It forces advertisers, payment processors and internet providers to block blacklisted sites, again without prior notification, court process or oversight. Sites could see themselves cut off from any revenue.

Gamers should be especially concerned by this proposed legislation – it’s got the potential to stop gaming blogs using screenshots, gameplay and howto videos being uploaded to Youtube and streaming tournaments through places like Twitch.tv. Many of the writers, voices and faces that are a part of the online gaming communities would be unable to operate in a post-SOPA world.

You might be wondering why Mana Obscura (a British MMO blog) is against SOPA and PIPA. The answer is simple – the internet is a worldwide entity. Over half the visitors here are American. Advertising is supplied and paid for by an American firm. Many of the games discussed here are designed and developed in America. While it’s easy to dismiss SOPA and PIPA as an American problem, the realities do not stack up.

Mana Obscura is against video game piracy. The people who work to bring us the games we play should be rewarded, no matter what title or platform they work on. But we’re also against bad lawmaking with wide reaching ramifications. Instead we’d like to see the technological and creative industries work in partnership to bring new ways to harness the power of their entertainment without penalising loyal customers and harming fans.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

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NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

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© Gazimoff for Mana Obscura, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackout, protest, sopa

Last weekend I finally managed to hit the level cap on my Sith Smuggler (edit: Sorcerer) in SWTOR and complete the class quest chain. Darth Gazimoff is now pottering around Illum and doing the occasional bit of space combat, but I’m realising it’s not enough to keep me interested for more than a few weeks. Once the quests run dry I’m left with the usual choices – alts or end game.

As Tobold puts it, there’s not really enough story in one class chain to last through more than a month of moderate play. I’ve decided to roll some alts, although rather than it being a new story it’ll just be the same one but told from a different perspective. The stories themselves are very good, but just like finishing a new book I’m left with a feeling of “now what?”.

The levelling experience has also highlighted a few things to me. I’ve only done a single dungeon – the Black Talon. I’ve not taken part in PvP and I’ve not done any operations. The guild that I’m in only has a small number of people at 50, so I’m currently kicking my heels a little. Space combat is still fun apart from the top-end missions that need every single ship upgrade.

For an MMO, it feels like I’m not getting into the multiplayer aspects of the game at all. The server – Trask Ulgo – has a pretty good population. So what gives?

Ultimately I think that tools like LFD and LFR have made me lazy – I actually have to work at finding a group for flashpoints instead of just clicking a button and waiting. It also means that I’m probably going to have to spec as a healer if I want to ever escape the confines of the Imperial Fleet.

I’ve been reminded a lot about my vanilla Warcraft experience. Back then it took about an hour to form a group for level capped dungeons unless you were in a substantial guild. It also took me about six months to find a raidgroup and even then it was by accident. Today the MMO landscape changes at a much faster pace – in six months I could be playing Guild Wars 2, The Secret World or the Mists of Pandaria beta.

It’s a painful admission, but I’m beginning to feel that for all the community pain and disconnects that tools like LFD caused they have become almost essential in modern MMOs. Perhaps keeping things server specific would help, perhaps implementing better matching algorithms might be a smoother move.

Either way, the fact that I’m hunting around in SWTOR for more things to do is a great sign of just how much the game has grabbed me. Unlike other MMOs that have been dropped before I even reached the level cap, SWTOR has me playing solidly for a month and still hungry for more. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a pretty good mark for any successful MMO.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• The Gates of Compelling Rewards
• Burnout By The Numbers
• The Back Seat Guild Leader

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Post tags: levelling, raiding