For the past years, our very own Thomas has been going around the world, preaching about Games as a Service, the whole idea that focusing on all aspects of a game that are not core gameplay not only can drastically increase all key performance indicator in an online game, but also prove very profitable. Now,  Ubisoft Toronto’s head Jade Raymond recently showed a pretty good understanding of this concept by using a interesting analogy. She said, while talking about a new project : “Games aren’t just what you talk about around the water cooler, they’re becoming the water cooler itself …“

MMOs as “Colorful IRC channels”

The point of this short blog post isn’t to explain the importance of communities in online games, but it is now widely known that one of the most important element of user retention in MMOs is the social network that players are building with each other. “People might come for the game, but they will stay for the community” is a common saying in our industry, and nothing is more true. The main reason why people keep coming back, month after month, year after year, to their favorite MMO, is because they have made friends there, and to many players, a MMO isn’t much more than a chatroom with shiny graphics, allowing them to connect with their community and chat with them about many topics, many of them not having anything related to the game.

Looking back 10 years ago, I remember that among the late players of “The Fourth Coming”, a large proportion of them referred to the game as a “colorful IRC chan”, and it isn’t rare in older games to see long-time players simply standing around the newbie areas, buffing and healing newcomers without doing much else, because they simply logged in for the sake if chatting away with their guild. There have also been many examples of teams of employees in various industries using online games to gather during lunch breaks and discuss current issues and projects while blowing off steam and shooting ennemies. These are just exemples of the importance of good social and community features in games, and illustrations of Ms Raymond’s claim : games have become a place of important social interaction, an area where people gather to chat about everything. “We need games as a way or excuse to talk to each other. Obviously the massively multiplayer games have gotten this for a while, she continues. It might seem new, but it’s been around for a while.” A while indeed, and Ms Raymond, who has been producer for virtual worlds The Sims Online and There.com prior to joining Ubisoft, knows a bit about it despite her current company not being big on MMOs these days.

The first MUDs were not-so-colorful, but still social

Social features at the core of online games

Games are now the water cooler, and have been for a while. More than character creation, graphics, leveling mechanics, and even more than combat mechanics, social features are the core of MMOs. Of course, these mechanics are mostly unknown, they are developed to be so easy that users don’t even notice when they are using them, but my humble opinion is that the easy, cross-server grouping interface in World of Warcraft is much more important for the success of the game than the new classes or races that Blizzard might have added in the latest expansions. And even on new games, and without being as big a company as Blizzard is, my advice would still be the same : groups, guilds, friends list, chat systems and other more exotic social features such as City of Heroes sidekicks or LOTRO’s much underused family system, should receive as much care as raid instances, because users who integrate a community, socialize and make friends with other players within a game might stay a little longer while waiting for new content to arrive, whereas players with plenty of content to go through but nobody to explore with will inevitably leave, and go to more welcoming and community-friendly lands.

Online games are the water cooler, they are the neighborhood bar, millions of WoW players are relying on the advice of their guildmates to know if they should go see the remake of Tron or not, where to go on vacation next month, or whether they should eat pizza or Chinese takeaway during their raid tonight. Although they were never as open, games have been social networks way before Facebook arrived, and I can’t wait to see a remake of “The Social Network” starring Martin Freeman playing the role of Mike Morhaime, and Ricky Gervais as Bill Roper, because you certainly don’t get 12 million subscribers without making a few enemies…

I have often said that the business models are now part of the game design process – and we are currently seeing new games using this to the best. But to see historical actors of the industry making their own experiments with their costly projects is actually equally interesting – or even more considering they have to manage their existing games and adapt them accordingly. There have been three announcements lately of that nature that I think are worth closely looking at.

Blizzard

Blizzard has released some exclusive virtual perks for sale (three pets and a new mount) on their website. The success seem to be there so much that you actually have to wait in a queue in their virtual store upon their releases . These actually fall down in the category of the “small” experiments in my opinion, and while they probably make a significant amount of profit on these, more than what other  games make in their lifetimes, Blizzard doesn’t seem to want to increase the rhythm of the releases for those virtual perks. They actually might just do it in the future but it would diminish the respective value of all of them and the profits wouldn’t scale up proportionally – especially as they seem reluctant to sale any item that would confer some in-game advantage (rightfully in their case). However, their latest foray in evolving their business model looks a lot more interesting to me and that’s the Remote Auction house.

By paying an additional subscription (3$ per month), a player can get access to the Auction House features as if he was in game. The RAH is accessible from the Armoury website as well as from the Warcraft iPhone App (and soon on Android). This may seem like a small thing, but I think that actually it proves Blizzard got it right, once again. As much as I think the subscription model is very limited and often inappropriate for games, WOW is one of the few games that has the design 100% supporting the model. Adding another subscription will go with the way the players are used to pay for the service. The ubiquity of the RAH is also supporting very nicely that model.

It is good to see the market leader being the one pushing for new things like this – arguably, other games have had Auction House through their websites (or on mobile apps), but none of them was big enough to prove the solidity of the concept and nobody had charged for this to my knowledge.

Turbine

After adding to a subscription-only Dungeon & Dragons Online a  free to play micro transaction model (technically, it now is an hybrid of the two and they ditch the Pay to Play on the way), Turbine has now announced they were going to do a similar thing with LOTRO (and go read that summary from their lecture at LOGIN on the DDO experience). And that’s a huge step. As much as I think DDO game design never properly supported a subscription model, and had a design that lent itself to be a Free 2 Play game, the same can’t be said about LOTRO. That game has been pretty successful as a subscription MMO from all indicators and taking it to a Free 2 Play model will be a much bigger challenge. I think it will be the first MMO of that scale going for this kind of transition and they will face interesting design challenges. From reading their FAQ though, they have taken a lot of good decisions.

To start, they are keeping a form of the subscription model, mitigating some of the risks of going too far into the full virtual item model. They also have tiered the accounts rights based on whether the player has a free account, an account who has bought Turbine points at some point or a subscription account.
Then, there is also the realisation that, to sustain a good acquisition loop, getting rid of the “Pay to Play” layer is required anyway. As much as a “free trial” can help, in the end, it becomes for most games a hidden Free 2 Play version of the game, one that forces you to pay at a given stage, regardless if you have had the time to enjoy the game or not.

Considering that Turbine has had the opportunity to develop their Free to Play expertise with DDO, I am reasonably confident they will be able to manage this transition relatively well.

Real Time Worlds

Well, considering how I introduced the article, we can’t actually say that RTW is a historical actor. However, they come from a part of the game industry that is very traditional. Crackdown, their previous game, was a box-only console game after all. And I was expecting them to go for a classical uninspired monthly subscription for the game. But they haven’t.

The current model for APB is actually intriguing. The game is still very much Pay to Play as you have to buy a box to get access to the game. It gives you full access to the hub component of the world, where you socialise with other players but where none of the core gameplay (shooting people) actually happen. To access that part of the game, the box gives you a time credit of 50h to spend there. Once you have consumed those 50h, you can buy more time credit by chunk of 20h, or get unlimited play time for a month (as in a normal subscription) – you will apparently be able to trade items for some currency allowing you to buy game time as you can actually do in EvE.

Where I think they are clever is in having from the beginning that component of the game that is for free forever. I expect them to run some Trial program for the game, and they will hopefully give that access to the space free for ever for people who tried the game.

Now, I have doubts on their plans overall. I haven’t played the game so i can’t really form a very informed opinion, but from what I have seen, this is a fast pace game, not necessarily with a vast amount of content. And even though it is a more open model than subscription, I think any time-based monetisation can only be properly supported by a content-heavy game. With the game only a few weeks from its release, we should find out soon if the audience embrace that model or not. Hopefully, I am wrong and if not, I hope they will have the time to adapt to a model that works with their design.

[Find here details on the APB model]

Three interesting cases to study closely as they develop.

If  the use of the WOW IP in an unlicensed manner is admittedly technically illegal, the policy seems very strange in an age where a big number of successful companies are looking to foster such initiatives by releasing open APIs and  hoping to incentivize developers to grow around their service in a platform strategy. It’s not a new idea, empires have been built that way. Blizzard’s measures are likely to discourage add-on developers from putting effort in making Wow interface better, or more targeted to specific needs , in short from increasing the value for users. The people who were using the iPhone apps are likely to be disappointed and have a worse experience with Wow in general as a result.

In a way, Blizzard seems to have a bit of schizophrenia here : Making the UI customizable and releasing game data on the web are steps that they have been taking relatively early, but on the other hand, they refuse to acknowledge that they are opportunities for third parties to build extra value for their players around them, of which they would benefit as well (in free marketing, better player retention, by taking a cut on sales, etc…). One can literally imagine the legal /licensing head arguing with the community/marketing head there. In clear, they have done the first moves towards a platform strategy and are now backing off.

The problem for Blizzard is, there are only a few possible choices in terms of platforms around a service :

• Don’t be a platform. Build everything internally. Send C&D notices to people building around your service and replace it by something you designed. This way, you can control everything and are sure that you users only have top-quality handcrafted experience, the way you want it to be. Problems : to achieve this, you have to hire a tremendous number of people, which can very well make you an unmanageable bureaucratic behemoth, making innovation expensive and above all, slow. You are also deprived of all the ideas you couldn’t have had internally, and will have to figure out everything your users want yourself, in which you will certainly miss a lot (in the same way that it was hard for centralized economies to plan everything people wanted and needed). Then, it doesn’t scale that well, and you are likely , even with a huge workforce, to not being able of offering enough compared to what the rest of the world who isn’t on your payroll can do. It only can work if you are in a position of dominance and able to absorb these huge costs, and then, can make you very vulnerable to more nimble challengers and even hamper your ability of competing with yourself and evolve. Nobody makes money out of your IP or service, but then you also make much less overall, while having bigger costs. Obviously, you might also be in a situation where you started by being closed and then can’t afford the investment to change your game’s structure for any of the other options.

• Be a closed platform (the way a console manufacturer is, or the Apple App Store). This can be very different depending on how closed it is : either whitelist people allowed to work on your platform (the way Blizzard already does for product licensing, for T-Shirts, novels, miniatures, etc) , or have an approval process ensuring a minimum consistency of quality level (à la Apple). In doing so you can control quality and make sure your users aren’t exposed to anything bad. Problem : approvals are a lot of ongoing bureaucracy, taking your company time and resources. Although it works well for physical goods who don’t change often, for live services it creates its own specific challenges, similar to the problem for console manufacturer’s online games policies : do you have to review at every change (more bureaucracy and sluggishness) or is the license granted forever? Plus, by granting those licences, you are effectively giving the chosen ones a competitive advantage over other companies of their fields, who maybe could have had better ideas of products and services and have made more money for you, more value for your users and for your brand.

• Be an open platform, à la Facebook or Amazon. You get much more content, services, marketing and revenue that you would ever be able to generate alone. You grow a huge pie, of which you get only a cut. Problems : your users indeed can be exposed to a lot of bad content, not find what they want, there are a lot of opportunities for exploits, etc. The quality of the content and services depends largely on the incentives for developers : it’s hard to get professional quality if developers can’t monetize their efforts at all.  One has to understand that developers of mashups and services using APIs are already in a challenging position to build any sustainable position, as a lot of times they would use data that they don’t own, and most apps, even if the code isn’t obfuscated, are not necessarily difficult to reproduce, as the rapid succession of cloned apps have shown. Ultimately, the level of quality on open platforms is pushed upwards by competition alone. And there’s always the risk that the platform itself develops their own, better marketed version of any application, undercutting the developer’s market. While a very nice approach, it has to be kept in mind that there are costs attached at being an open platform, and while they are likely to scale with the success of the platform.

To come back to the Blizzard case, it would be interesting to estimate the cost of opportunity of preventing addon developers from monetizing and anyone else but them to release WOW iPhone apps. There are already some going-around on this policy, as the Curse premium offer, whose announced benefit is amongst others supporting the addon developer community. Whole platforms such as Curse itself grew from Blizzard’s willingness to let people develop tools, but unwillingness to promote and offering convenient access to them, and impossibility to develop internally all the tools that created value for the user. Either way, some choices will have to be made – like Pandora’s box, you can’t open “just a little”.

You can go see the demo video at Kotaku as the Youtube versions are getting removed as they pop up.

But the basic principle is an app acting like a 3D client for WOW that would run on your iPhone. And the question that actually gets asked is who on earth would like anything like that?

Not that the idea to actually play an online game from anywhere at anytime is not very enticing, but the execution of said idea seems very awkward and actually, a bit naive.

Each device and hardware has strengths and weaknesses, they all have certain feature sets that encourage your design to go in a certain direction. And a 3D WOW on the iPhone seems really overkill.

WOW is not actually that much about the 3D experience. As a rich universe, the part of the game that actually properly use the 3D rendering is the one thing that you don’t want to do via an unreliable device (from a network point of view):
- Exploring becomes bland, you can’t actually appreciate the environment. You are more likely to get lost with a small screen not displaying enough of the landmarks. It also becomes a lot more dangerous, your combat capacities being limited by the interface.
- Killing mobs, being done via the gimped combat interface, is very likely to become tedious due to the limitation of the interface, or very dangerous if you don’t stick to lower level mobs (to grind your pre-raid craft ingredients for instance).
- Raiding isn’t even a remote possibility.

True there are key to the fun you have playing the game, but they aren’t the whole thing, by far…

So, what would one do on a WOW app for iPhone:
- Use the auction house. Something that in the game already is done via a full-screen window with all its elements in 2D.

- Craft. 3D isn’t necessarily useful for that part of gameplay either.

- Manage inventory. Or more interestingly, manage your inventory between your bags, your bank and your guild vault. All of this space is rendered in 2D in the game.

- Social interaction. While grouping is probably not an option, you can still manage your guild, your calendar, send mail or just chat with friends. There are plenty of IMs applications on iPhone and community being central to the online game experience, it is actually surprising that the Vollee demo (fake or not) doesn’t even touch that topic. Adding a live feed of your friends in-game actions (a la Hearthstone) would be very beneficial to keep in touch with the game while away.

- Travel. That’s probably a bit more controversial, but travelling in the game translates mostly in time-to-travel. A 2D app could actually extrapolate the travelling time based on where you are. It would add a safety dimension the game doesn’t have, but the way it is currently designed, there aren’t many areas in the game that are actually really dangerous. Even as a low level character, you can actually reach a lot of locations – locations that matter at least. Accessing the characters unlocked flight paths and some extrapolation on travelling time based on which zone you are in and which mount you use shouldn’t be a problem. You can even use the background use of application to actually move your character when looking at your emails and get an alert when she finally arrived at a capital. That would open for some limited exploit possibly, but, let’s face it, the time your character is spending on a flying mount is that much time your are not really playing the game anyway.

- Check out and manage your character. By adding some Armory-like functionality, you could have a feature set that is richer than the one you currently have in game. You could easily respec and play around with your different talent trees on the go.

- Check and compare your achievements, as you can already do via the website.

- Check and update your in game calendar. And synchronise it with whatever calendar applications you are using.

There could also be a suite of functionalities to leverage the actual features of the device: sync up your contact list with your buddy list or vice-versa (controlled by a confidentiality setting system), receive auction house alerts (or any in-game message) while off-line, or set an alarm with the phone based on some event in the game calendar.

The point is, Blizzard could develop a really nice application on iPhone (and they might already be doing that), without a 3D render of the game. It would actually very likely be easier to use, quicker to connect and over-all better designed. They could have to develop it in-house though but with their level of resources, the extra engagement and retention they would get from their users  would probably make it worth it alone.

There is a real opportunity at the moment to develop very nice features for AAA MMOs on phones (iPhone leading the charge, Nokia and its Ovi platform is also probably worth considering too), but like so many things, you have to pick your fights.
Would a real 3D environment really add to what you offer, or will it hinder what you try to achieve?

3D virtual worlds on mobile are more likely to actually be specifically designed for those devices.

As a reminder, we will be speaking at GDC, during the Worlds in Motion Summit. The session is on the 23rd of March, at 4.15pm, in the North Hall (room 132).

We actually wanted to share here a teaser of the many topics that the session is going delve into. A lot of the focus is on explaining Europe and the market of online games in Europe and how it is different from the North American market.

There is obvious, to start with, with the fact that everybody doesn’t speak English in Europe, as the many languages is the most obvious challenge coming to mind. Here is a map representing the level of English across Europe, with, for each country, the percentage of people who said yes to the question “Is your English good enough to have a conversation?”:

And we would argue as well that if you can have a conversation in English, it doesn’t mean you want to or have a knowledge good enough to actually be comfortable doing it. But those differences go beyond different languages being spoken. Cultures are different. Player behaviours and expectation are different.

Here is an example that illustrates this, the World of Warcraft servers per type in Europe and in the US:

There is more demand for PvP in Europe it appears, even if only by 10%.  The fact alone that a difference exists is actually quite key as far as the European market is concerned. It means you cannot translate 100% of what is being done in the US for instance to the European audience. This doesn’t even show the differences inside Europe itself, which we’ll be developing during the talk. There might some topics that will work in a similar way, but there will probably as many that won’t.  Catering for Europe properly is a good strategy as you will improve your long term user retention and lower the acquisition barrier.

If this glimpse hasn’t sparked any interest, know that we will also talk about much more: payment systems, Latin as an official language, game ratings, the many definitions of Europe even Europeans don’t understand, the subtle differences between American English and British English, the main local operators, the main local developers, why Germans don’t get French humour, why the French despise German humour, the local Free 2 play market, the relative political correctness of beheading characters, French keyboards and Superman (and perhaps more importantly, Green Lantern). If none of those topics is sexy enough to convince you to attend, the presentation has a slide talking about booth babes. German booth babes.

If you will miss the session, feel free to use the form and contact us so we can meet later that week.