Here’s a question about increasing the profitability and decreasing the development cost of any MMO, although probably no-one except the web-people will recognise it as such (and even some of them won’t get it):
How do you improve the customer support for an existing MMO?
[where do you start, and what do you target?]
The simple guide I found here doesn’t actually work, although it “mostly” works. Several bits are out of date. Even then it only *partly* works, because it leaves all PEAR commands as requiring root to run. That may be what you want, but I doubt it. Not what I wanted.
phpMyFAQ is a nice idea, and mostly it’s well done, but with a few basic mistakes in how it’s been implemented that were so annoying I couldn’t live with them. There’s no Debian package for this app, sadly, so things like “using a better version of TinyMCE” require you to manually fix them all (no package-management based solution here, unless you want to maintain it yourself?).
In my joyous travels developing a fun little iPhone game recently, I kept track of all the many tips and tricks and gotchas I came across. There are a fair few bugs in Apple’s IDE (including at least one critical one that bit me), some stunningly bad flaws in the Objective-C language (it’s *horrible*), and some slightly surprising lack of docs from Apple in key areas (like: how/when do I get paid?)
There was too much to blog it all, so instead I installed a free FAQ software and I’m gradually transferring my notes over to this FAQ (only got a few questions in there at the moment, just fresh installed):
http://iphonefaq.t-machine.org/index.php?action=show
(the one you probably want to start with is: How to make applications for the iPhone?)
There’s an awesome feature to this FAQ too (not that I’ve tested it): anyone can go to the site and click “Ask a Question” and it gets added to a list for admins to answer and post. You can even answer your own question at the same time as asking it.
If you’ve been developing iPhone apps yourself and have some burning questions or neat tips of your own, feel free to go to the FAQ and add them in. Any problems, email me (email address is on the About link at the top of this page)
Dan’s put up the slides from his talk at the Let’s Change the Game Conference – but more importantly he’s done a long writeup with the slides embedded in the text, so you can get the flavour of the talk he gave even though you missed it.
He set out to be mean and nasty and ranty, but I think Dan is far too nice and friendly a person with too little viciousness in him to be like that in person. IMHO, on the day he was much more genteel, and so in some ways I think the written version of the talk is even better than the talk itself.
Anyway, well worth reading if you have any interest in making better ARGs. Don’t expect to get any concrete advice, this is a talk aimed at prodding you to re-think objectively just how often you give in to temptation and use weak devices and shortcuts that if you saw someone else doing you’d berate them for. Although it may not seem like it, I think Dan’s talk is an excellent intro for beginners to ARGs, since it will likely warn you off the big temptations that experienced ARG makers avoid or use with care, but newbies these days may find it easy to go overboard on. Don’t take it too literally, if you know all about ARGs already.
Gamasutra’s just posted an Opinion piece (so it’s not GS’s position, they’re just giving air-time to the author) about the interview process for getting a job in the video game industry.
Right up-front the author states that one of the three aims of the employer is:
“To pay as little as possible”
What?
No.
Don’t work for companies who have that on their agenda, unless there really aren’t any better opportunities available (hey, it’s a recession – maybe you just have to accept a second-rate job right now).
A company that wants to pay as little as possible cares less about you than they do about sucking value out of you for their profit and spitting you out once you’ve been used up. Note: this is not “making best use of their assets”, this is “carpet-bagging value-extraction”. It’s an attitude that leads to miserable work environments and unstable teams.
So, to anyone getting a job in the industry: Please stop propping-up the bad business models of the companies that do this, and work for the most decent company you can find instead.
EDIT: clarification, after several people responded to say that the statement really meant the company was just aiming to “pay no more than is necessary to secure your services”:
(NB: I like the overall idea of the article, but I object to quite a few other details, especially from the employer perspective; for instance, telling candidates to pretend to be something they’re not just in order to get the job is not appreciated, dude. Both company and candidate need to be honest in the interview, because otherwise one or both of you will get rather unhappy starting about 2 hours into your first day on the job, and it’s not a relationship that’s going to last)
Bienvenue au blog, M. Bidaux!
“There were many reasons, but mainly, we decided against it because we knew that we would be very busy and the blog was always going to be left as a “when we have time” thing, and that always translate into in a “if we have time” thing.
…
The main issue was the commitment a good blog requires. There is nothing as sad as a blog you really like that gets updated irregularly. We will solve this right now, in this first post, just by managing the readers expectation: we won’t commit to have regular updates and features on this blog.
It’s OK, Thomas – we won’t stop loving you if the blog updates are irregular. I think it adds to the charm.
Fortunately for us, Thomas and Diane forged ahead anyway, and the ICO Partners blog is now open for business, featuring “in an approximate English and at irregular intervals”:
* news from the online game sector
* views on common and uncommon problems we encountered working on online games
* news on ICO Partners activities
…could be that the “beat your staff with a stick, and if that doesn’t work … beat them harder” style of management was de rigeur for the Norwegian games industry:
AoC, in the words of an (alleged? ex?) employee:
the problem with Age of conan is that the game was in “crunch” for almost 3 years.
…who had *great fun* working for a company called Funcom:
then i was sick for a week, after having worked so intensely. i’ve never been that sick before, says “theodor”.
after having researched if the workers rights are after the work environment laws, and talked to his colleagues about this, he was asked in by the management. there he got a lucrative quitter-package if he stopped working the same day, which he agreed to.
…and Anarchy Online:
Keskin tells that he chose to leave Funcom because he was treated very badly by person in management. as he was being laid off, he claims that lies were spread about him from the management to his earlier co-workers.
i worked on anarchy online, and played that game for several years. it was a joy to work on the game, but if you ask questions, either about what they say to the public, or about something ethical– there’s a lot of strange things going on there– they turn around very quickly.
even if the whole thing is about if you want to do improve projects you’re working on, keskin says.
Of course, it could all be a big misunderstanding (mistranslation), since I don’t speak Norwegian, and I have no idea where any of my Norwegian friends are these days to ask for a second opinion on the translation (PS: Bjorn, if you ever read this blog, get in touch :)).
The App Store is just another casual games distribution platform + social network. You can pretend it isn’t (sometimes I think Apple is still pretending that it’s just an extension of iTunes, and ignoring the social side completely – Doh!), but that doesn’t make it true :).
Apple’s had the iPhone version of the App Store running for more than half a year now, and made tens of millions of dollars from it, so what’s it like? Where’s the social stuff good and bad? Where’s the game distribution stuff good and bad?
(a.k.a. “How to invest in MMO development … profitably”)
The world is full of games companies that blow stupid amounts of money on making online games (typically “massively multiplayer online games” (MMO)). It’s time to put a stop to this madness; honestly, I thought everyone learnt their lesson about 5 years ago when we had the last wave of “everyone’s making an MMO … oh god, these things are TEN TIMES as expensive and ONE HUNDRED TIMES as difficult as we thought … Run away!”. Apparently not.
I think there’s two ways you can learn for yourself how to make a profit from developing online games:
As part of our super top secret new startup we’ve been making some educational games, and for fun (in my spare time) I tried porting one to my iPhone. It’s a simple maths game which I thought would work well with a touch-interface. If you have an iPhone, you can get it here:
(this is a bit of an experiment – if enough people like the game, I’ll take the time to plug it in to some serverside stuff we’re doing which will add a bunch of feedback/stats/scores features for anyone who’s got the game)
Alice Taylor, Channel 4
From the ARGs in Charity and Education conference last week. Alice was forthcoming on real data – and, more importantly, C4’s outlook/perspective – on a bunch of issues. Very useful stuff.
As ever, errors and ommissions my own, and my commentary [in square brackets].
Main post on the conference is here.
As ever, errors and omissions my own, and any personal commentary is in [square brackets]
EDIT: updated with some corrections, courtesy of Juliette
This week, I was at the tiny one-day conference on Alternate Reality Games, and their use in charity and/or education, at Channel 4’s offices in London. All proceeds from the conference went to Cancer Research UK (I think it was mainly organized by the team that this year won the competition to get funding for their idea for a charity ARG, sponsored by CRUK, with help from the guys at Six to Start).
As with all other conferences I go to, here’s are writeups of all the sessions I attended. Unfortunately, Channel 4’s offices are a bit … um … 20th Century: their auditorium has no power points. It has sockets that have been covered over with screwed-on metal covers to prevent you using them. Pretty amazingly dumb, considering how funktastic the rest of the building is. So, I ran out of power halfway through, and couldn’t cover all the sessions. Sorry!
Oh, wait, actually they’re not. But people love to misinterpret statements with the word Google and the number 20 in them.
As I put in the comments:
Frankly, I’ve generally not bothered to correct anyone who didn’t bother to research it themselves – except in the cases where they were in my own organization, and attempting to make decisions about related matters based on misconceptions of the supposed Google rule.
Of course, my dear lovely friends may have been lieing to me. I very much doubt it (and even if I didn’t, what they’ve said over the years has made a lot more sense than most of the hearsay you hear on the web) – but the point here is that I’ve bothered to ask.
Google has so many employees that if you preach on subjects like 20% time – which, by the way, I think is one of the most fundamentally important (and least well-understood) issues in corporations, job choice, and why you get up in the morning, but that’s another post – then you have no excuse at all for not going and asking an employee how it works. Last time I looked, they had bajillions of offices around Europe, not to mention the sprawl all over the US.
Your possible answers include:
1. Because … Apple engineers have never heard of the concept of a “patch”, and require you to re-download the *entire IDE*, with all libraries, all documentation, all binary code – everything – when they release an update? So the current “SDK” for iPhone (hint for Apple: when most people say “SDK” they don’t mean “plus a copy of a bloody operating system”, they just mean “the few custom bits that are specific to that app”) is a whopping 1.6Gb?
[NB: actually in general I think that’s a good thing – avoids a lot of mis-configuration / version mismatch problems – but as an MMO developer the idea of *not* patching gigabyte-sized packages horrifies me, and avoiding those problems actually isn’t THAT hard (it’s been solved many times by now!) these days. Writing (or buying) a good patcher is one of the first steps you do in MMO dev projects…]
2. Because … Apple didn’t think to split The Behemoth into multiple files, perhaps make them something reasonable, like a few hundred meg each?
3. Because … Apple decided to put this monster behind an authentication check on their website, presumably for legal reasons, and there is no other “official” mirror (all the ones you find on google are technically-illegal torrents or else, ultimately, redirect you back to the apple.com link), and their authenticated sessions TIMEOUT after 1 hour of “not fetching any new pages from the site” (completely ignoring whether you have any transfers in progress!), and refuse to send you data once your authenticated session runs out?
4. All the above?
NB: I wasn’t brave enough to try resuming the downoad without first re-authenticating and loading at least one web page from the apple developer site to prove I was logged in. I suspect (*suspect*) that the web browser would receive an HTTP 300 redirect to the login page, at which point most browsers are going to delete the partial download. Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAARRRRRRGHHH!.
Expect to see some comments/tutorials/advice on iPhone game development here at some point in the near future. If I can ever get the download to complete…
Because WordPress is so poor at handling file uploads (AND because the new WP versions introduced incompatibilities somewhere that make some of the original blog pages 404 even though they are in the WordPress folder), I’ve created a SourceForge project for this (http://javanioserver.sourceforge.net/), and uploaded all the files there.
For those of you who wanted the source recently, there’s links to the downoad page from the SF page – the three files marked “version 1.0.0” are *precisely* the same ones I originally uploaded to the blog post.
If I get time, I’ll check the source in to the SF SVN too, so you can check it out directly (and upload any modifications you make).
(“embarrassing, empty, yet still really dirty”)
Courtesy of The Register.
(and some real information here)
Now that I no longer work for a large MMO publisher, I no longer have access to all the juicy numerical goodness, research, and stats that they had on their games and everyone else’s. A chance email recently suggesting I take a look at Xfire’s gamestats led to some quick experiments that came out surprisingly well. It’s given me a new predictor for player numbers for any MMO that’s available in English which is sufficiently accurate that I’m going to use it going forwards. Take it or leave it :).
(this is rather the opposite end of interpretation to “Over 1 billion people play online games” – and make sure you read Raph Koster’s thoughts before trying to interpret these figures)
Even though there is NO audited, trustable source for these figures, we already know that the public “guesstimates” like MMOGchart.com are routinely used:
These numbers are *seriously important* to the industry (like it or not!).
There are three types of official figures for player numbers for online games:
Public companies whose primary business is online games are often expected (required, perhaps?) to publish precise figures (a side-effect of the rules on what they have to stick in their annual reports). Not all do (?), but noteworthy examples include:
You … may well note a trend there. These figures are useful, and aid businesses operating in Asia, but by comparison life is somewhat harder for anyone wanting to sell into America or Europe. In all fairness, there are American and European companies that chose to (usually irregularly) make official statements via Press Releases, but this is an order of magnitude less detailed and usually less accurate than what would go in an annual report for a public company.
(NB: IMHO, the American and European economies and industries suffer for this lack of transparency – business models are more fragile, staff are less well-informed, decision-making is weaker, etc).
Bruce started out by taking as many of the official figures as he could find, modelling graph-based trends, and then re-applying those trends to missing data to try and extrapolate or interpolate the missing items. Where a game has never had ANY official figures, he took estimates based on a wide variety of inputs, everything from unsubstantiated rumours through to unofficial figures “leaked” by employees of the companies that were running the games.
Good points: (mostly) documented estimation process, started with accurate data, includes data for many games, includes detailed writeups explaining which figures are “accuate” and which are “guesses”, and ascribes an estimate of the amount of error in each individual estimate
Criticisms: assumes all games behave similarly in growth/shrinkage, updated very infrequently (every 4-12 months)
Phil‘s VOIG was started apparently in frustration with the slowness of updates to Bruce’s figures (originally he updated frequently, but over time updates got less and less frequent). Phil doesn’t divulge his methodology, and you cannot download their figures (although you could read the website visually and type down each individual number. Umm. No, thanks).
Good points: *still* more frequently updated than Bruce even though Bruce has tried to speed up again
Criticisms: unknown methodology, unknown error-margins, poor data format, no download of figures available
Lots of games industry staff believe in sharing their figures more openly than their managers are willing to. On top of that, it’s often difficult or very difficult to answer a journalist’s question in an interview – or to explain a decision made during a post-mortem or conference talk – whent the audience have no idea what the underlying figures are. So, we often see individuals from games companies making public statements as to player figures for various of their games.
Good points: effectively these are “official” figures
Criticisms: not just vague as to numbers (usually they are only quoted to 2 sig.figs) but also vague as to *meaning* (registered players? active? paying?), very irregular publication times, often non-specific about what *date* they apply to (and people often quote figures that are a year or more out of date!)
A few organizations try to independently measure figures. It has long (ten years) been a complaint in the industry that no organization of high reputation in the traditional Media sphere (e.g. ABC for printed publication circulations) has started auditing online games. Recently, there have been huge efforts by a handful of companies to measure website traffic specifically – e.g. Quantcast, Compete, comScore – and for some online games those figures are often extremely good (games where people have to use a website each time they play the game, for instance).
Good points: stringent accounting standards (they hope to become ABC equivalents), strong expertise with web properties generally (so accustomed to the many tricks that black-hat website owners use to try and inflate their figures), very frequently updated (in some cases as frequently as per-day, taking them almost into real-time status)
Criticisms: mostly useless for non-web games
…but this final type – independently-measured figures – is the one we need more of. Because we need something that:
Xfire is one of several companies trying to make “a social network for video game players” by creating a custom chat client that you keep open while playing the game. This allows them to track who is playing what games, when, for how long. For some time now they’ve been publishing (openly, for free), stats on how many hours each game is being played for per day in total. That figure gives some idea of the total “attention” that particular games are receiving, both individually and comparitively, but it’s useless for anything else.
I’d looked at the Xfire stats before, but only used them for very high-level comparitive judgements, since in most cases I work with games that have wildly varying “average number of hours of play per player per month”, and so the Xfire stats could not be used to judge games.
I had an email from one of the Xfire guys, suggesting I look at the stats again, and I noticed that they currently have a “number of Xfire users playing each game” stat too. Interesting…
Xfire has far too few users for those users-playing-today figures to be even close to the actual Concurrent Users figures, let alone number of players.
But I have a lot of high quality data on a wide variety of games (through official and unofficial channels), and I have most of the “official” figures, so I wondered what would happen if I tried using some well-known and accurate figures to look for a correlation with the daily users figures on Xfire. Pretty obvious. NCsoft sells directly into US and Europe and has established subs games in both western-developed MMORPG (City of Heroes/Villains (CoH/CoV) – known as “CoX”) and eastern-developed MMORPG imported into USA/Europe (Lineage 2 – known as L2).
I chose these two games because:
The ratio of “Xfire activity” : “actual subs” is very different for those two games – but I wondered how well they predict the ratios for other games I had the figures for? I tried classifying each game simple as “eastern import” or “western”.
In each case, I looked for the following success / fail / anomaly criteria:
The “anomaly” result allowed me to run this against all the games where we only have “generally-accepted estimates”, and then decide in each case whether it was a breakdown in the methodology, or if it pointed to the “generally-accepted estimate” being wrong.
I had 4 types of number to compare against, FYI:
Because Bruce gives you a downloadable spreadsheet of his data – and because you can read his own commentary on how (in)accurate each individual figure is – I used his data as the “public estimate” figures.
| Name | Official/trusted | MMOGchart | Best-Guess | Xfire | Xf-v-NC-CoX | % NC-CoX | Xf-v-NC-L2 | % NC-L2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2Moons | n/a | 448 | 74,567 | n/a | 314,633 | n/a | ||
| 9Dragons | n/a | 211 | 35,120 |
n/a |
148,187 | n/a | ||
| Age of Conan | 415000 | 415000 | 1032 | 171,771 | 41.39% | 724,780 |
174.65% |
|
| Anarchy Online | 12000 | 12000 | 164 | 27,297 | 227.47% |
115,178 |
959.82% | |
| Archlord | n/a | 1330 | 221,372 | n/a |
934,067 |
n/a | ||
| Audition | n/a | 473 | 78,728 | n/a |
332,191 |
n/a | ||
| City of Heroes / Villains | 125000 | 136250 | 125000 | 751 |
125,000 |
100.00% | 527,432 | 421.95% |
| Dance Online | n/a | 107 |
17,810 |
n/a | 75,147 | n/a | ||
| Dark Age of Camelot | 45000 | 45000 |
144 |
23,968 | 53.26% | 101,132 | 224.74% | |
| Dofus | 10000000 |
452000 |
10000000 | 1433 | 238,515 | 2.39% | 1,006,405 | 10.06% |
|
Dungeon Runners |
n/a | 95 | 15,812 | n/a | 66,719 | n/a | ||
|
Dungeons & Dragons Online |
45000 | 45000 | 159 | 26,465 | 58.81% | 111,667 | 248.15% | |
| EVE Online | 250000 | 236510 | 250000 | 3429 | 570,739 | 228.30% |
2,408,208 |
963.28% |
| EverQuest | 175000 | 175000 | 109 | 18,142 |
10.37% |
76,551 | 43.74% | |
| EverQuest II | 200000 | 200000 | 440 |
73,236 |
36.62% | 309,015 | 154.51% | |
| Exteel | n/a | 202 |
33,622 |
n/a | 141,866 | n/a | ||
| Final Fantasy XI | 500000 | 500000 |
509 |
84,720 | 16.94% | 357,474 | 71.49% | |
| Granado Espada | n/a |
222 |
36,951 | n/a | 155,912 | n/a | ||
| Hellgate: London | n/a |
542 |
90,213 | n/a | 380,650 | n/a | ||
| Hero Online | n/a |
269 |
44,774 | n/a | 188,920 | n/a | ||
| Horizons | 5000 |
5000 |
58 | 9,654 | 193.08% | 40,734 | 814.68% | |
| Kal Online |
n/a |
207 | 34,454 | n/a | 145,377 | n/a | ||
| Kart Rider |
n/a |
10 | 1,664 | n/a | 7,023 | n/a | ||
| Legends of Mir |
n/a |
0 | 0 | n/a | 0 | n/a | ||
| Legends of Mir 2 |
n/a |
0 | 0 | n/a | 0 | n/a | ||
| Legends of Mir 3 |
n/a |
0 | 0 | n/a | 0 | n/a | ||
| Lineage |
1100000 |
1100000 | 2 | 333 | 0.03% | 1,405 | 0.13% | |
|
Lineage II |
1005000 | 1006556 | 1005000 | 1431 | 238,182 | 23.70% | 1,005,000 | 100.00% |
| MapleStory | 15000000 | 15000000 | 4042 | 672,770 | 4.49% | 2,838,721 |
18.92% |
|
| Mu Online | n/a | 56 | 9,321 | n/a | 39,329 |
n/a |
||
| Neopets | n/a | 0 | n/a | 0 | n/a | |||
| Perfect World | n/a | 1472 | 245,007 | n/a | 1,033,795 | n/a | ||
| Pirates of the Burning Sea | 65000 | 65000 | 64 | 10,652 | 16.39% | 44,948 |
69.15% |
|
| Pirates of the Caribbean Online | 10000 | 10000 | 443 | 73,735 | 737.35% |
311,122 |
3111.22% | |
| Ragnarok Online | n/a | 173 | 28,795 | n/a |
121,499 |
n/a | ||
| Regnum Online | n/a | 236 | 39,281 | n/a |
165,744 |
n/a | ||
| RF Online | n/a | 347 | 57,756 | n/a |
243,700 |
n/a | ||
| ROSE Online | n/a | 83 | 13,815 | n/a |
58,291 |
n/a | ||
| RuneScape | 6000000 | 1200000 | 6000000 | 2535 |
421,937 |
7.03% | 1,780,346 | 29.67% |
| Seafight | n/a | 151 |
25,133 |
n/a | 106,048 | n/a | ||
| Second Life | 91531 | 91531 |
4398 |
732,024 | 799.76% | 3,088,742 | 3374.53% | |
| Secret Online | 10000000 |
10000000 |
0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||
| Silkroad Online | n/a |
4980 |
828,895 | n/a | 3,497,484 | n/a | ||
| Special Force | n/a |
0 |
n/a | 0 | n/a | |||
| Star Wars Galaxies | 100000 | 100000 |
644 |
107,190 | 107.19% | 452,285 | 452.29% | |
| Tabula Rasa | 75000 |
75000 |
184 | 30,626 | 40.83% | 129,224 | 172.30% | |
| The Lord of the Rings Online |
150000 |
150000 | 2282 | 379,827 | 253.22% | 1,602,662 | 1068.44% | |
|
Toontown Online |
100000 | 100000 | 172 | 28,628 | 28.63% | 120,797 | 120.80% | |
| Twelve Sky | n/a | 797 | 132,656 | n/a | 559,738 | n/a | ||
| Ultima Online | 75000 | 75000 | 192 | 31,957 | 42.61% | 134,843 | 179.79% | |
| Vanguard: Saga of Heroes | 40000 | 40000 | 583 | 97,037 | 242.59% | 409,444 |
1023.61% |
|
| Warhammer Online | 800000 | 800000 | 5621 | 935,586 | 116.95% |
3,947,662 |
493.46% | |
| Wonderland Online | n/a | 202 | 33,622 | n/a |
141,866 |
n/a | ||
| World of Warcraft | 12000000 | 10000000 | 12000000 | 112784 |
18,772,304 |
156.44% | 79,208,889 | 660.07% |
| World War II Online | 12000 | 12000 |
50 |
8,322 | 69.35% | 35,115 | 292.63% | |
| Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates | 200000 |
34000 |
200000 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% |