The final day of GDC Austin started off early this morning with an insightful look at what it takes to run an MMO these days. The panel featured Rich Vogel from BioWare, Nathan Richardsson from CCP, EA/Mythic's Jeff Hickman, Lorin Jameson from SOE, Min Kim from Nexon, and Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel. With approximately 47 years of combined MMO experience, the panel was a fount of information on this unique gaming genre. The talk focused on maintaining games 5 years after launch.
The discussion started with a focus on what player base developers are working for once the launch influx has subsided. The panel brought a diverse set of experiences to the table but all agreed on the idea that developers need to focus on the dedicated core audience while still leaving options open for new players.
You kind of transition from looking for the audience you want, to understanding the players that you have.
As a games user base fragments, developers find themselves wanting to satisfy all play-styles at once which can lead them to lose focus on what makes up the core of their game.
There is a certain effort to broaden the audience but at the same time it's also keeping in mind that there is a certain type of player that wants to play EVE.
You need to recognize when your game needs a different kind of focus and focus on retaining those core users and then using them to pull in other like-minded people.
Fighting against this urge to rampantly diversify remained a theme throughout this section as developers need to augment their games slowly and precisely to keep from alienating their dedicated user base.
The biggest lesson I think that people should take away from here is you have your core game, and you can change it to help broaden the appeal to it but changing the fundamental core of your game would be a very risky thing to do.
The panel then moved on to how companies can gain new players without losing their dedicated core. Jeff Hickman quickly brought up the idea that changing the front end of a game can be a good path for developers while not altering the experience of the older players.
We put out a new front end client. Did it blow the socks off our subscriber base? No. Did it bring in and widen our reach? Absolutely. We got a whole bunch of new players be re-presenting the offering.
Jeffrey Steefel ran with this idea by talking about changing the Turbine titles Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online from pure subscription payment to a blended subscription and free to play model.
We went to a blended model. So rather than saying we are going to throw out the subscriptions and go free to play for everybody, we said look, let's assume that different people want to engage with us in different ways with their time, their money. Let's give them a choice.
By opening up their pay structure, they received a large influx of new players and ended up making a great deal more money on their titles without adding large amounts of content. He reiterated how this payment flexibility was proving to be extremely effective to a Western audience. Min Kim from Nexon then joined the panel and quickly started speaking to how their games never existed in a box copy form and never started a subscription, yet they are continuing to find success in the MMO market.
We've never had a box. We've never gotten our $15 a month. Everybody that comes to the office is earning their paycheck every day. If you can get somebody to play the game in a passionate way for a very long period of time, you'll figure out a way to get money out of those users.
Rich Vogel then pulled the conversation towards running into roadblocks developers encounter in level based games. He referenced World of Warcraft and how metrics showed that many players would stop playing around level 35 just to come back months later and start over.
Believe it or not in a lot of games, including WoW, you are looking at level 35 and a lot of people stop and then they come back and so what you need to do, and what Blizzards has done, is there is this curve they start accelerating up.
This caused Blizzard to reorganize their games leveling path to accelerate players past this stumbling point in an attempt to keep players passionate about playing their game to experience content.
Nathan Richardsson from CCP offered a different approach to drawing former players in by mentioning how EVE expansions are added to the game for free.
For eve, expansions really isn't an acquisitions tool. All expansions are free and they are basically making sure that people come back and stay with us. You might think that we are throwing money away by not selling them but around the expansions our churn goes up to becoming non-existent.
By adding dramatic amounts of new content without adding an extra charge CCP found large numbers of players would re-subscribe to experience the new content and stay long enough for them to make more money on just subscriptions than what they would make off selling expansions to a smaller number of players. The discussion continued on this path by noting a delineation between console players who are only interested in the newest games and MMO gamers who remain dedicated to older titles that take the time to add new, accessible content.
The console player always cares about what's new, what's hot looking, etc. On the MMO side it's really more about the relationship as well as how new that game feels with the content you give them.
Lorin Jameson spoke towards the update cadence for adding new content to older games. He remarked that Everquest originally followed a six month cycle for adding new content, but over the last five years they discovered they needed to add content almost monthly to keep players satisfied and interested in their title.
We realized it became more and more important for our customers to see value in their monthly subscription and the best way to do that is new content every month.
Nathan Richardsson and Jeffery Steefel parroted this comment by talking about accelerating content generation in their respective titles to show the community that you care about their experience in their game.
Sometimes up to 7% of people that buy the box never play the game. It's true.
As they wrapped up to conversation, Rich Vogel spoke to the crowd about how important it is for developers to keep and grow their staff after launch. He gave the impression that successful, well designed, fun games can fail completely if studios cut their staff after launch because they are unable to continue growing the experience for their players.
When you first launch your game, you communicate with the community but you have a tendency as the developer to kind of hold the secrets. When you are a 5+ year old game, you better be having actual conversations with your community and asking them questions and learning what they want.
Question: Can you share some best practices with building a community management team?
Nathan Richardsson: Bring them in early that's the first thing. Don't start hiring them when you are about to launch. Secondly, getting at least experienced leads in the community is important, because this is a specialty that you don't get in so many other different fields. Managing a player base is totally different from for example managing ten million mobile subscription users in a different industry. So get experienced people and get them on-board really fast. It should be the third person you hire.
Rich Vogel: Yeah, community management is very important. You need to have someone who has a thick skin and someone that doesn't use a specific handle that is theirs. They need to represent the company. I am very serious, when you see those kind of things like they have their own handle they want to use, these are are lots of questions I ask "Ok you have an ego, out." That's not a person I am going to hire.
Jeffrey Steefel: Think of them as a part of your game. The people that you are hiring for the community team are part of the people that are building your product. That is the most important thing. The second thing is it certainly is a channel of marketing communication but the biggest mistake is to think that community is specifically and mostly a marketing channel. The third thing is you are always going to get people who are themselves gamers, fans of your game, your company, but fundamentally make sure that it is someone who either already or that you can train to get them to understand that their job is actually to work with the company and the product to drive that communication with the player not to be a player who happens to be on the inside. That's one of the biggest challenges and you have to really make that clear from the beginning.
Question: If you are going to release a game in 3 years, would you make it subscription, free to play, or hybrid?
Nathan Richardsson: It depends on the game. I'll put it this way, there's this secret about EVE that it actually is free to play, it has been for over a year and a half or two years I guess. There's this unit called PLEX which is basically thirty days of game time. This is an in-game item that you can buy and sell to someone else for in-game currency. So you can just pay for the game by playing. As a result EVE is going into a kind of hybrid direction and that's because we as a company believe that this pure-play model is not going to work long term. Sure there are going to be certain types of games it is going to work for. For instance, if you look at the virtual goods market based games they are still also in hybrid territory. There's nobody that's like 100% pure-play as such. There are certain examples of course but you will see this is hovering somewhere between these extremes.
Rich Vogel: I think you are going to see a lot of hybrid models.
Jeff Hickman I think they are all going to be hybrid models.
Rich Vogel: In MMOs you have a huge amount of whales playing, if anyone understands that terminology from social gaming. You have a tremendous amount. You have a huge amount of whales in the game and you are leaving a lot of money on the table in certain respects. The good thing is you gotta make sure there's value to the player. That's the key to doing anything, any business model you have is that a player perceives it as real value in what you are offering them and as long as that's there, you'll be fine.
Question: What role and what value do you see mobile devices contributing to your games?
Rich Vogel: Access point I think is a great word for it because it would be cool to twit with your friends who are in the game. It would be cool to have different access points for controlling your inventory and your crafting.
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Posted 10/16/2010 5:17:58 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/26/2010 9:08:29 AMAs somebody who is generally against MT, let me assure you that I am only against it when it tips the balance of a game. I would rather just pay upfront and it be balanced or have the choice to not waste my time and save my money, then to go into a game and realise 10 hours in that I can't have a decent play through without emptying my wallet for a game that was supposed to be free.
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Posted 10/11/2010 2:48:23 AMI tip my hat to the SWG staff for providing the community just enough to keep the game going. The link to the complete interview is below. It provides a yard stick of how fortunate we are are in the time and care Bioware is providing prior to the launch of TOR.
http://www.massively.com/2010/10/05/squaring-off-with-swgs-producer-teesquared/
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Posted 10/10/2010 3:23:18 AMSteefel owes me a new keyboard and a glass of whiskey. The nerve to say this as they just let LotRO go without any notable content update from Dec 1, 2009 to Sept 15, 2010 is incredible. Oh, and the most notable thing about the Sept 15 "update" was FTP, after that it was the revamps of the zones that existing players never frequent, and after that they revamped outdated content by effectively just making it level capped content again. They showed outright apathy towards their existing customers, not "care"....
Please BioWare.... Look to Turbine as exactly how NOT to keep a game going for the long run.
Rookie - Shards of Alderaan (Republic Justice)
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Posted 10/10/2010 5:15:09 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/11/2010 4:13:49 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/19/2010 9:10:06 AMIn fact, if you have an active sub ( including lifetime ), you also get 500 free turbine points every month ( including the months between the F2P announcement and actual switch...providing you logged in at least once. )...which can be put towards a free permanent stat boost.
If you're going to complain about something, please choose an issue that is actually there. For example, the value of the points if you DO try to go free to play. ( Take for example the Mines of Moria expansion, which costs nearly 40 bucks worth of points...but is only $10 on amazon, or if you can still find a copy in best buy, etc. ) Also, Turbine is horrible about fixing issues. The rune-keepers 4 trait set bonus, on all 3 trait lines...which is kind of a big deal...has never worked in the almost 2 years since the mines of moria introduced the RK. Also, theres the blatant attempts ( and mostly success ) of Turbine to destroy PvMP...or any of the other numerous issues in LoTRO.
Sorry for the large side-track, on to the more on-topic comment:
Most of the people on the panel kinda bug me. I don't know the people, so had to go on the links provided, but the companies specifically...no thanks.
I think Rich Vogel ( and by lack of contest Nathan Richardsson ) are fine....but really?
SOE ( The Destroyer of MMOs )
Turbine ( The Lackluster )
Mythic ( The Failed )
CCP as I mentioned lack of contest, because, well...EVE is just so different. No other MMO can be compared to EVE ( well, Perpetuum, which is in beta, could be...but thats a different story.. ) and EVE can not be compared to any other MMO. They're great at what they do...in fact, I love a lot of CCP ( I mean, come on, how can you not love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5xvkAPXB9c ***NSFW*** )...but EVE just isn't like other MMOs, so really...can their experience help other MMOs much? Sure, they won't hurt it...but they can't really help either.
Rich Vogel from Bioware, oddly enough, is the only person from that panel that I would listen to because of his work on the 2 games that started MMO: Meridian 59 and Ultima Online.
***Disclaimer***
I have been playing MMOs for almost a dozen years, and am both disgruntled and biased as hell....take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Cheers, Zemerick.
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Posted 10/9/2010 12:20:59 PMI hope Bioware's take away is to make content greater than leveling, like Blizzard has done since 2004-05. Making player excited to play rather than level.
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Posted 10/10/2010 7:27:24 AM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/10/2010 5:16:50 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/12/2010 2:16:17 AM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/9/2010 3:06:27 AM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/9/2010 1:29:36 AMNow that's a panel I want to see.
"Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Making A Game And Love Fleecing The Playerbase."
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Posted 10/10/2010 7:50:45 PMMicro-Transactions may be an even bigger monstrous plot then fluoridation.
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Posted 10/9/2010 1:59:34 AMmein furher I CAN WALK!