This week, for some reason I don’t understand, my brain was fired up at night, I couldn’t sleep and that idea came back to haunt me. So, I spent a couple of hours with LinkedIn and here is the result, a year after Realtime Worlds shut down (maybe that’s my subconscious at work here).

Methodology (sort of)

The method I used is very simple and a bit flawed, but by the time I realized that, I had done most of the data mining and was too lazy to start over. I went in LinkedIn, used the advanced search and looked for anyone who worked at Realtime Worlds in the past. I will obviously miss anyone who hasn’t a linked account, and will include anyone who had left before the studio shut down. The search has to be done per country, and I didn’t search *all* of them but I covered the most important countries in Europe, North America, Canada, South Korea and Japan.

I grouped employees by “job category”: biz/publishing/QA (one of my early mistakes — I should have made QA its own category considering how many people fall under it), producers, game designers, artists (including audio artists), coders. In a few instances, I made calls that are questionable (I put all the IT/admin staff in publishing for instance), but I was consistent doing so and I don’t believe that drastically changes the results.

The results

There are 352 people on LinkedIn who state they used to work for Realtime Worlds. RTW used to have an office in the USA, so it is impossible (without a lot of painful research) to know how many of those currently living there moved from the UK. I will assume that they were all already in the US when working for RTW. The same is true for the employees currently based in South Korea. Everyone else, I think we can assume has relocated to a new country within the year after they left RTW. Here is the repartition per country:

So basically, 90% of RTW employees remained in their own country. Unsurpisingly, the countries that attracted the RTW talent are either very strong in online (Germany, Iceland) or offer very strong tax incentives (Canada). I didn’t have any expectations when starting this research, but this seems like decent retention.

However, despite being based in the UK, I tend to have a more global approach and global concerns, and I am more worried about talent leaving the industry altogether than I am of foreign brain-drain.

Even if it is unfortunate when a country loses talent, at least the industry as a whole is doing OK. With that in mind, I did some segmentation per industry, with the following groups: Games industry, Finance (totally biased choice, I was expecting it to be a strong competitor, especially for coders), Other IT (I included middleware providers in the game industry – so anyone employed by Unity wouldn’t be here for instance), Other industry (none of the above) and ‘status unknown’, which covers basically 2 cases: anyone still working at RTW according to their profile (they could be unemployed or happily working somewhere else, we just don’t know) and anyone who is freelancing. ‘Freelancing’ is really vague – freelancers could be very successfully working in the games industry, or barely making a living, or freelancing in the games industry and the cinema industry or anything else. Because it’s so open-ended, I decided to set freelancers apart. There are also a few cases of people saying they are looking for a job, but it could be that they haven’t updated recently or they are still looking now, so I put them there.

All that said, here is the result worldwide:

So, the game industry has lost 37% of the RTW pool – and that’s a scarier picture to me. Arguably, it is not THAT bad. It could have been a lot worse. Next chart is the same, but only for the UK employees and I added two categories, eeGeo and APB released, to check the number of people who found work through the spin-offs of RTW.

First, the UK numbers are quite similar to the WW numbers – it makes sense as this is the biggest group of the survey. There is a bit less Other IT (RTW US employees were more prone to switch to this segment) and more Unknown status (not a good thing in my book), but the ratio of retention of the game industry is roughly the same.

What is a lot more interesting is to note that the RTW spin-offs only cover 12% against 50% for other game companies. It is by no means a small number. Not having gathered that data, I can’t say which company really helped there, but top of my head, going through the profiles, it is mostly Jagex, CCP and Codemasters. Kudos to them, I am sure they were quite happy to be able to get staff with online experience, a profile hard to get in the very-console oriented UK industry.

The last charts I want to share are the ones highlighting where each job category ended up in in terms of industry.

So, that’s about it. I have put all the data in a google spreadsheet if anyone wants to play with them – as it is imported from Excel, charts won’t look pretty. I should also add the disclaimer that I did this on the spur of the moment for fun, and doing this analysis seriously would require a bit more thinking through beforehand and more rigorous process (for instance, several formulas are likely to break).

GOOGLE SPREADSHEET

Expect a very different topic next time I have insomnia.

The biggest F2P MMO in Europe, Metin2, was originally launched in 2006 as a subscrition game, and quickly repositioned as Free-to-play when it failed to gain traction. Since then, switching a struggling game to free-to-play has been a popular tactic, but for some games it did little to renew interest and bring a new audience, most of the time when it was too late already to adapt the whole game design and the way to run operations to the new model. That’s what happened to games like The Chronicles of Spellborn, which unsuccessfully switched to a not-quite-F2P model after an unsuccessful launch. The game just announced its definitive closure.

For some other games, like Turbine’s Dungeon and Dragons Online, it did bring a second youth and new players. Encouraged by the success of the tactic (or discouraged by its subscribers numbers), Turbine has since announced that its flagship MMO, Lord of the Rings Online, will switch to a Free to Play model at the end of the year. SOE has also announced recently that EverQuest2 was going free to play too. EverQuest 2 has been around since 2004 and isn’t getting any younger, so it’s probably an attempt from SOE to keep its existing base and attract ex-players.

Because, if everybody agrees that subscription is a barrier to entry, it’s also often overlooked as a barrier to re-entry, which is the main problem that declining games are facing.

We are curious to see how many more announcements there will be in the coming months, as the less pay-to-play MMOs remain, the more difficult it is for each one to keep the model. Games like Lineage 2 and City of Heroes at NCsoft could certainly be considering it, but even more recent games who did not meet the expected level of success like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan could be tempted.

The difficulty resides in finding the investment and expertise to develop the game around a new business model, while forgoing the existing revenue streams, which can be a huge gamble. This is also a difficult community management exercise, as first most people express discontent at having paid for something that is now free (a problem every company has when lowering the price of a product), and then if it is successful in growing the game’s audience, the reaction from the initial community can be very negative at the afflux of freeriders coming in. Not only are they n00bs, but non-paying ones at that!

It’s interesting to note that some recent or not even in Beta yet indie subscription  games have also announced their switch to free to play. The thing is, given the state of the AAA (understand “subscription-based”) MMO market in the West (which is flattening according to a brand new report by Strategy Analytics), it’s going to be very difficult for new games to be in a position to demand a subscription from players. The only games in position to keep the pay-to-play model will probably be the very niche games, where subscription is not the biggest barrier to entry and whose players are price inelastic (I doubt EVE Online would get much more players if it was free), and uber blockbusters which can command this premium  (Star Wars Old Republic will probably still launch pay-to-play). Even the biggest blockbusters might have trouble staying P2P, and those of the future might not be . The free to play offering is now so diverse and qualitative that it’s difficult to see what other type of game can now successfully launch pay to play. Attention is precious and the online model is games paying to acquire users, not the other way round.

We’re still noticing a lot of contempt in the generalist video games media for free-to-play games, when they are just not realizing that they are becoming the norm, and that the trend is accelerating. These media will go the same way of the pay-to-play games if they don’t get educated about free to play soon.

On Tuesday 13th of July, I presented my lecture “Games as a service, do you really know what it means?” at the Develop in Brighton conference. While I have changed the slides a bit for the event, the content was essentially the same as when I presented it in Seattle for the LOGIN conference, and you can find the presentation on slideshare.

The really good news is that Dan Hon did a great write up of my presentation (something I meant to do for a while but never took the proper time to do) and you can find it on his blog:

My next speaking event already takes place in Munich this week. I will present a keynote at the Social Media Summit of the Making Games Conference with the topic ”Social Games: Busting the Myths”. You can find details on the event here.

And you probably know already, we will be at gamescom this year, we even have a booth: Hall 4.1, Aisle H, no. 055. Contact us if you want to meet.

The opening speech made it very clear. Asking the audience ‘What is Community Management?’ brought it straight to the point why a Community Manager Conference does make sense. It’s by far not the very first time I saw this question being raised and everyone giving a different answer. The first time was years ago and still not much seems to have changed. No wonder then that the audience got excited hoping to know the answer by the end of the day. This, on the other hand, would have been a wonder. Nonetheless, the CMC proved to be a stepping stone for many who are now hoping to be able to visit similar events in the future – and maybe one day be able to answer this question without second thoughts and hesitation.

The other thing that became clear is that while Community Managers tend to know each others (board)names and faces, they usually don’t have time for long discussions at conventions where their companies are exhibiting. This is usually the time where Community Managers bond with the community itself as those shows are more consumer oriented – and consumer relationships are a vital part of each Community Manager’s job. The CMC did a great job in bringing people together and get to know each other better.

Most likely everyone will have left the convention with different thoughts but I am sure most of them were positive. If you haven’t attended CMC or aren’t sure if you should visit future conferences then here’s a short list of things you could take away from being there.

Think outside the box

A lot of Community Manager job descriptions list ‘thinking outside the box’ as a desired ability. While it’s easy when you start the job – maybe coming from the outside or even the fanbase – it gets tougher once the routine kicks in. You know how your company rolls, what your managers want to see and it becomes tempting to take less risks and focus on safe results.  Speaking with or listening to other Community Managers enables you to not forget how to think outside the box. While many share the same challenges, the approaches to tackle them differ. Beyond that, everyone has other special abilities and ideas. Ideas you might have never thought about before – maybe because of lack of time or treading water. Get inspired!

Personal development

Inspiration is one thing, the actual implementation is the tough part. Talking to other Community Managers can help you improve your knowledge and gain more skills. A rule I’ve told myself but unfortunately not follow all the time is to also visit speeches or panels I don’t have a clue about at all. Sure, the title of a speech might sound interesting if it’s a topic I am enthusiastic about but then I often find myself leaving the room an hour later not having learnt anything new. It might even have been a great speech but only 5-10 minutes of it have been things I haven’t heard before. It does not have to be a speech about quantum physics but anything outside my expertise might give me 50-60 minutes of new knowledge. This knowledge might not be necessary for my day to day routines but can come in handy when encountering an unusual problem or trying something new.

Finding the answer – what do you do?

As mentioned before, even Community Managers still have problems describing what their job actually is. If they don’t know, how are others supposed to know? You might end up in a situation where you have to sell your services and by then it’s best to know how valuable you are. Maybe your company hired you just because they heard that they need Community Managers without even knowing exactly why and how to track their value. (Same phenomenon can sometimes be seen with Social Media Managers these days). This shouldn’t stop you from learning from other people’s experiences to find out how things are being managed elsewhere.

Maybe it’s the other way round and you already have a clear image of not only doing what you’ve been told but shining as an expert in some areas. Share that knowledge and get knowledge back in return.

Community Management takes place in an ever changing environment. Your community might be totally different than other communities. A global and everlasting definition of Community Management and its tasks might never be found but there is one question you should be able to answer when being asked:

‘What is in there for me if I let you manage our community?’

• Digital distribution sites, like Steam
• Platform managers
• Aggregators, like Miniclip
• Community and media websites
• Ad networks
• SEO-savvy “gateway” portals (MMO lists, etc)

Channels like these have grown greatly in influence, and the conditions of working with the most prominent ones are becoming increasingly expensive (some of the biggest aggregators now ask for either lots of cash, or equity).

Since bringing a user in can end up taking quite a large part of that user’s LTV in your service, it’s not really surprising to see game developers/operators trying to cut these costs by becoming or investing in media themselves, as Dofus’ developer Ankama is currently doing — they just announced that they’ve bought a minority stake in French website Gameblog (link in French) after investing in print media company HP/MP, web TV outlet Nolife and their own games magazine, IG Magazine.

Meanwhile, many websites that command a lot of traffic are moving further down the value chain. Some are getting into affiliation, which is the raison d’etre of portals such as MMOLife‘s. Others are entering into channeling deals: sevengames (an arm of media group ProSieben in Germany) has gone this route, as has Bigpoint, offering client-based games by GOA and Gamigo, and more recently, Free Realms. Portals Buffed and MMOABC are getting into game publishing, while German site Gamona and Romanian portal Computergames.ro are becoming distribution channels for payment codes and mobile payments.

As time passes, it will be interesting to see the barriers between the different steps in the chain begin to blur. Some links will move up while others move down. How long before properties commanding huge amounts of traffic start buying developers, or the other way round? How far will the integration go? Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments.

Vivendi Games Europe is currently in the process of reorganising its activities following the merger with Activision and a number of people were made redundant. A part of the team went to the direction and asked to actually create a dedicated website listing the persons currently looking for a job. And they said yes and Talented People was born:

Welcome to Talented People’s website!

Here are gathered former Vivendi Games Europe employees’ profiles and resumés in order to create a pool of experienced professionnals for the recruiters and to promote their skills and knowledge or the new businesses some of them are founding.

You can find all the profiles of the talented people who took part in Vivendi Games Europe’s human success: financiers, managers, team leaders, developers, artists, game designers, QA tester, business developers, jurists (…), they are all here!

As hiring managers, you can search profiles matching your needs using the dedicated fields on the left or use the fast search below. You will then be able to contact each individual using the personal data given in his/her profile.

If you know people who might be interested in the information on this website, feel free to use the “send to a friend” link.

Thank you for your support! We hope you will find here the perfect candidate or business to match your needs.

Talented People
“We have talent and the entire world is going to know it!”

It is refreshing to see an initiative that goes away from the “Fire and Forget”  that tend to come with big lay-offs.