From the Game Design track

... How can MMOs develop mass appeal in the US?

So I was expecting - not having read properly the outline - this talk to tackle things like cultural expectations, marketing, content type, consumer types, but it turned out to be a nice chap from SOE (with UO under his belt) who works on SWG talking about the design elements that count, and pitfalls that kill. My scribbles:

How can we get to over a million PAYING subscribers to a US MMO? How do we get a million freeplayers to convert to subscribers? EQ and UO have over 2 million who have ever played these games. The market size in the US is about 2.5 million players. The market place in October 2004, ranking OVER 100k (I’m only dealing with non-boutique games here, only those with over paying 100,000 subscribers):

1. EQ (Alice: Everquest. He was very  entertaining and refers to all games as their spoken acronym, so  "wow" and "eequeue" and "yuoh" for instance)
2. SWG (Star Wars Galaxies)
3. FF Online (Final Fantasy Online)
4. DAOC (Dark Age Of Camelot)
5. UO (Ultima Online)

Once WoW launched, WoW shot by everything. They have 600-800,000 paying subscribers in the US. EQ and co start at around 300K paying subs. What’s happened in the market shift from previous MMOs to today, is all existing MMOs went down in population when WoW came out. ALL of them. What does this mean?

• Our market is smaller than we thought (but still growing, so that's good)
• People go to the next shiny thing
• Communities are portable!!
• Lots of existing or former players went to WoW

The Sims sold 42m units. Half Life sold maybe 4m. WoW – comparitively speaking, a mere 800K. But WoW will generate more revenue in its lifetime than the others. 

MMOs generally last 5+ years. They have ancillary revenue. One of the things we’ll analyse is what makes (in terms of game design) MMOs up today. CoH (City of Heroes) taught us that games that aren’t deep and don’t have huge structure can be fun! CoH was a huge wakeup call for us all.

Key ingredients in MMOs:

• Character customisation
• Some form of combat
• Advancement systems – XP
• Environments – gorgeous
• Crafting (economics)
• Socialisation
• Content – quests

 This makes up the core MMOs of 100K plus games. Why have we not hit the million paid sub mark? 

• Complexity
• Not knowing what to do (purpose)
• Little socialisation mechanics
• Friction – advancement, travel, etc.
• Penalties – hard to understand for a broader audience.
• Content (too hardcore, too repetitive, treadmill)
• Time intensive. Play hard to keep up with friends who are also playing.
• Too focused on killing as advancement

 Every game, including WoW, has a treadmill. CoH introduced the concept of ‘sidekick’ – a lower level player can join a higher-level friend in quests. 

Key components to hitting a million. How do you get there?

 Brand/IP. Have a great brand, a huge loyal following! Familiarity. Living out a fantasy.
Ease of use – huge. Simple and deep: mantra that we need to follow. Simpler systems are harder to design than deep systems are.
Achievement (pacing is the key):

• Goal driven – solo and group. You need goal driven fast paced rewarding cycles all the time. You have to have both solo and group. You can’t force this – forced grouping is bad.
• Fame, achievement of. How do you recognise achievement in-game? EQ uses clothing and equipment. Fame is important, people like it. Especially Achievers.
• Character Differentiation is key. How can I make myself unique in a world?
• Foster relationships:
  • Social spaces. There are  chat areas out there that have 15 million people chatting in them. Social spaces are KEY to growing MMOs. Social architecture and engineering in our games is hard and hasn’t been done very well. The only social spaces we have in our games are guilds and guild halls. Cantinas. Bars. Taverns. Theatres.. they need elements added to make users come back. Famous places to go.       Think about this: people don’t like to fight all the time, they like to       chill out and talk.
  • Roles: the healer, the tank. Everyone knows about these roles. But it’s important to create interdependence so people rely on each other. Think of ways in social spaces as well as in environmental spaces to cause grouping to occur. Make sure some are non-combat related!
  • Sometimes you can make a MMO that is economic or political based, it doesn’t have to be combat based!
  • Grouping that rewards. You have solo advancement that’s cool, but grouping offers lots better rewards and encourages people to come together.
  • Rites of passage. These games don’t have really good rites of passage. Wedding rings. Wedding dresses. Things for guilds. Have a character be able to kill himself and be buried in a graveyard with a MONUMENT. Leave a mark. Develop a rite of passage for leaving! Rites of passage is a very powerful tool that we don’t use much in current games. Ceremonies, or give things away, or .. lots of cool concepts.
  • Adventuring that’s not limited. I’m playing WoW now, and I have friends who have played for a few months and I can’t really play with them. That sucks. I want to play with them. CoH with the sidekick system showed us that we can develop ways to let people join up together irrespective of level. You incentivise hi-level people to work with lo-levs – give them bonus points for mentoring. Thinking about ways for people to get fame and feel good about joining up with other people no matter what level you are.

 Immersion. Wow is AMAZING. It’s seamless and beautiful. Everything looks like it blends together.

o Directed experience. What’s the purpose? Make sure users know what they’re supposed to do. People like to be directed, people don’t like to not know what they’re doing.

o Exploration is huge. Everyone loves to explore and find new things in a world. This is key to making something stick.

o Renewable content. Minigames! User-generated content? We have too many static oriented quests that are very similar and don’t change much. I call these chores. We can’t develop enough content to keep people entertained: we need to think about ways of making renewable content.. we’re introducing Space Mining for episode 3 SWG. You go out and mine asteroids. Things are different every time you go out and do stuff out there.. that’s renewable content.

o Ability to make a difference. Key in my opinion. If a player can change the world somehow, they feel important. We don’t do enough of that today. That’s a glue factor in my opinion. How can we have players make a difference? Think small.. gather momentum.

 Penalties and friction needs to be painless. This is a secret sauce. How do you do that? I have not quite figured out how to do this yet. Friction is important because you don’t want someone to advance to level 60 and be done with the game before they convert to subscription.. you need some friction and penalties or the game isn’t fun or challenging. However you have to make it in a way that isn’t painful to people. Losing XP? No! Users do not like that. We’ll talk more about this a little later in an open discussion about how to make this happen well.

 Can you keep players? It’s hard! Once you got them, how long will they stay? I’ve checked playpatterns and they’ve changed. Today’s audience is more casual. 12 hours a week compared to 20 3 years ago. People have less time.. shorter play cycles. New users play at different times of the day too, instead of the original 6-11pm. We used to keep people for 10-12 months in the old days, and now it’s shorter than 6. When you develop an MMO it’s all about keeping the subs. The broader you go IMO the shorter the lifespan will be, btw.

 The Glue:
CoH had 250K and now it’s down to 125K. People on average played for 6 months and had done all the content. It didn’t have what I call the glue. You gotta think about the glue. It’s the long term health of the game: 

o Achievement is really important. Level based systems have limitations, so what kind of ladders can we build to change this?

o Relationships. This is why people play our games. People form relationships in games that they like to stick to. These relationships will develop OUTSIDE of your game and they will MOVE! So how do you keep them in game? Social engineering mechanisms – ingame Like that Japanese mobile phone Lovegety functionality, it works! Alerts when someone walks by who shares your interests. Friends lists. Easy ways to communicate in the game. Ingame IM. Communications are EVERYTHING.

o Immersion is critical. Great environments that people want to explore.

o Ownership. Whether it’s items, real estate in the game. Key to stickiness!

o Dynamic. If people realise there’s a changing game and a live team uploading stuff and you can change things, you’ll keep people in your game. If nothing is added in a while, people will leave. If you see an advancement curve that’s too fast, griefing increases – because it’s entertaining to be able to pick on other players! You have been warned.

o Unique persona is key. Character customisation .. in SWG 50% of the players had never played an MMO before and the customisation part was the bit these people loved the most. Unique persona can go with fame btw. If you walk into a cantina if you’re famous, how about if NPCs treat you differently? Look at you, stop talking? Badges. Teeshirts. Mechanisms like this is really important. User Generated Content: if you had 20,000 items built in a day, and only 10% is good, you have 2000 good items you didn’t have before!

 What happens when you’re too successful?

• Flash crowds
• Lag
• Melt-down
• Huge lines.

 You ever been to Disney? Look how they hide the lines? They’re geniuses! They understand crowd control and flow. They have you flowing through the park THEIR way. It’s part of their design You need to think about this. If you’re too successful, can you deal with flow? This could ruin a player experience. Instancing saved EQ2 and CoH. Scalability: lighter objects for storage! Simpler systems that join together. If you have a lot of people using your system at once, your client can only receive so much data through the pipe before it chokes and dies. 

Three years ago it would take 5 months to get 100K users. Today – 100K in FOUR HOURS or less. WoW got 250,000 in a day and a half. How do you handle that upfront flash? 

/end for questions.

He noted Nick Yee and the Daedalus Project as source of data.

 

Comments

[Rich]

nice summary, thanks alice - but who was he? was it Rich Vogel?

[Alice]

Yup.
Sorry. It's been a long day. :)

[Groovymarlin]

Interesting comments. Funny that he talks so much about encouraging socialization and getting people into social spaces like cantinas. Also encouraging mini-games and non-combat gameplay options. And by "funny" I mean "bitterly ironic," based on how SWG has treated their entertainer professions!

[araczynski]

good read, but makes too many assumptions, and/or stereotypes too much. i'm 30, professional, married, kid on the way, i prefer single player games because it doesn't feel like i'm competeting against everything around me, its easy to come home and unwind, and the last thing i want when i come home from work, is to compete with anybody or put up with annoying people. it doesn't take long for a couple 'incidents' to completely ruin the whole experience and sooner then later i'm selling my account and going back to single player, where i can again relax and enjoy the world at my own pace.

i'm personally looking forward to guild wars because it has the best of everything for me, episodic content, compltely instanced adventuring, no 'fees', and yet, i still have access to pvp if i so choose (never), as well as some trading in the cities with other real people if i so choose, but 95% of the time i can completely forget that anyone else out there exists.

wow is nice, but people are leaving in droves just as fast as they're entering, they can keep all their promises for all i care, i'm done.

[araczynski]

aside from making much more solo content in mmorpg's, which all developers seem to be too lazy to do, i still would love to be able to play single player versions of all these mmorpgs, i'd pay $100 just to have EQ1 run on my own personal computer with my own world, or DAOC, or WoW, or EQ2, not as a server for anyone else, but just a single player version. that would make my year.

why not tap into that market?

[JBJ]

The speaker should take a look at EVE (www.eve-online.com) .

With a subscriber base of over 50k it's not huge, but it's incredibly different from all other MMOG, and does have the huge political and industrial aspects that most others lack.

It also has a unique skill system, time based, so your character is advancing in Skill Points while you sleep... it works better than you would think

[ddd]

This is a great example of how a smart person can go wrong if they don't have a good sense -- let's call it a theory -- of what they are talking about. Rich thinks he's talking about online games. He's really talking about play. And the assumptions he makes about play are assumptions he gathers from his knowledge of games. The future contains the past, it does not extrapolate from the past. And this includes the future of games.

For instance, much of the thrust here concerns creating "socialization mechanics" without recognizing that the problems these features try to fix (i.e, the "problem" of free and individual play) are much more significant and telling than the solutions these features offer. Why can't players belong to more than one guild at a time? Why can't they masquerade and hide their identity within guilds? Why can't social play be as free and fun -- and, yes, as destructive at times -- as play and replay with character costume design/alts (which Rich praises)?

Online games will remain the niche market they are, dominated by guild mafias that slide from one game to the next until the appeal of online games is one of playing individually rather than in a group. Doesn't mean you can't play individually WITHIN a group -- that's fun too -- but as long as designers continue to try to capture and restrict play inside the mechanics of guild/clan/supergroup and/or label "anti-social" play as griefing, then you got what you got right now.