Tag: playerbase

Developer Interaction By Design

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’ll start with a disclaimer: although we’ve never met in person, I’ve known Leithart since 2012 when we were both fans of the then-upcoming MMO WildStar. Since those early days, he went into game development (coincidentally for the studio behind that same game), and I moved into game journalism. We still ping each other tweets from time to time, but that’s about it.

Getting on to the meat of the article, I wanted to respond to Leithart’s question above. As a small indie studio, with limited resources for marketing and PR, it’s only logical for the development team to want to do some of the heavy lifting themselves. It drums up interest in the game, provides direct feedback from potential players, and removes any reliance on the fickle foibles of the gaming press. Sounds like a win-win for spending a few minutes on Twitter, right?

Only, not really. While I’m a big fan of developers interacting with fans on social media, producing blog posts about their work and sharing unique insight, there’s also a risk that it gets in the way of actually developing the game. Tangentially, there’s also a risk that the game’s marketing voice – how it wants to be perceived by the gaming public – can get fragmented and/or diluted. And what happens if one of the developers goes off-brand? Can the incident be isolated without contaminating the game’s brand as a whole?

So, with both of these in mind, answering Leithart’s question is going to be tricky, particularly as I’m eager to make sure that both gamers and developers get something from being on social media. Luckily, there’s a bit of a cheat-sheet.

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Becoming The Nomad

Posted on by Gazimoff

My approach to MMOs is changing. I used to be someone who sticks to a game for several years, but now I consider changing every six months. It’s something I first felt back in August last year, and explored further when I thought there might be a limit on the number of subscription MMOs that could coexist. But is this change a natural thing that all MMO gamers go through, and is it healthy when MMOs are banking on years of subscription revenue to break even?

Back when I started playing World of Warcraft I made a promise to myself – this would be the game I would stick with until the servers were switched off. I was young, fresh and naive in the ways of MMO gaming. I honestly felt that this would be the game for me.

Since then there’s been a few distractions. Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, and Aion have all managed to tempt me away for a few weeks, but it’s never been anything permanent. Even during my time in Rift there was an understanding that Warcraft was still my primary game.

Over the last six months my perspective has been changing. I’ve been shifting my stance from someone who has a primary game with an occasional dabble in a secondary title. Instead I’m becoming the MMO nomad, charting a route through the upcoming releases without any plans to stick to a particular title.

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The Unknown Warcraft Subscriber

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a flurry of commentary recently on the recent earnings call by Activision Blizzard, where they provide some highlights on their third quarter performance. If you’re interested in reading through the entire transcript of the call you can find it at Seeking Alpha.

There are a couple of quick facts to pull out: Warcraft has dropped by nearly 2 million subscriptions to 10.3 million worldwide. Most of the loss is thought to be in China, an area which represents over 50% of the total subscriber base. The estimated rough split is approximately 5 million subscribers in the Far East, 3 million in US/Aus and 2 million in Europe/Russia.

There’s also the news on how much money Blizzard has made in the last quarter. The developer made nearly $300 million in revenue and $140 million in income – that’s a healthy profit margin of around 40% once tax gets factored in. Whichever way you slice the cake, Blizzard’s in a strong position considering that it’s not had a major release this year.

There’s only one snag with the information that’s been given to us. Although it’s easy to judge the overall performance of the company, it becomes difficult to judge the performance of Warcraft as an MMO. People will point to subscriber numbers going down and predict that this means doom for the game. That’s just simply not possible to do with the information we have available.

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The Kitten Standard Economy?

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I wrote about the possibility that Titan, Blizzard’s next MMO, would feature a real money auction house. This followed on from Diablo 3, which introduced the concept in order to provide a safer alternative to the grey market that emerged around item trading in Diablo 2.

The main argument at the time was that Blizzard would never put in a real money auction house because it would affect the core dynamic of how players gain power. There was a claim that because Diablo 3 is a dungeon loot fest with no competitive play that there’s no harm to other players in buying high quality items for real cash.

The problem occurs when you try and apply the same logic to Warcraft. Currently the most powerful items and equipment are earned through either raiding (for valour points) or PVP (for conquest points). There is no way to shortcut buying them – no amount of gold will help you, while only breaching the Terms of Use and paying someone to play your character for you will get your character geared up quicker. Not something I’d encourage.

Sure there’s a few good quality BoE items from the top tier raids that can be sold on the auction house, but they’re few and far between. As a result, would it really harm the Warcraft mechanic of playtime=power if a real money auction house existed?

My hunch is that it wouldn’t.

Of course there’s the argument that it would ruin the feel of the game, or that Diablo needs this in order to stop a grey market for items springing up. But that still doesn’t make any sense. Warcraft has its own problems, from the gold farming to account hacking. The illicit trade in gold is huge.

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If Not You, Who Else?

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m beginning to feel like there’s a crunch brewing. It’s almost like the shocks that happen before the earthquake, where you know something is going to happen but you can’t quite put your finger on what.

It started off with the comments I’d spot on Twitter from players saying they were hanging up their Warcraft boots and going to Rift. Not because Rift was the hot new game (that’s supposed to be Star Wars: The Old Republic) but because they were just fed up. Fed up of the repetition of daily quests (and let’s be fair, the Molten Front daily grind is by far a huge one) or fed up of the raiding content.

Then there was the news that Warcraft had lost 300 thousand subscribers. This, after Blizzard gave every North American veteran player a free 2nd copy and they opened up trial accounts to be infinite in duration. If I were an analyst on the Activision-Blizzard investor calls I would seriously be asking what their churn rate is.

So what gives? Where’s everyone going? At this point I could only do what any self-respecting blogger would – ask people.

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Tired of MMOs?

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a discussion kicking around Twitter for the past week or so, which seemed to end up with a single question. I think it was probably best said by Wolfshead: “is there anything left to say about today’s MMOs that hasn’t already been said?”

If we’re talking about the current crop of MMORPG games then no, there probably isn’t anything more that can be said about them. While our experiences playing those games is as varied and unique as our daily lives, the core mechanics used are almost identical. No wonder we’re all getting so jaded!

So why do we keep playing (and writing about) these games when there seems to be diminishing returns? When you’re comparing Dishwashing Online and Washing Up World, you’re still virtually washing dishes. Surely there’s only so much you can say?

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My Folly Against The Entitlesloth

Posted on by Gazimoff

I feel like a conflict has been brewing inside of me for the past few days. It’s one of those horrible conflicts of ideologies that I can’t see any easy way to resolve. And what makes it worse is that both sides of the conflict are borne of a single source.

You see, I want to help players become better.

Part of that is by writing guides, making videos and helping people in-game. I don’t see anything wrong with being a bad player if you have a willingness to improve. The players I don’t want are the greedy entitlesloths – the lazy players who play badly, know they play badly and insist on continuing to play badly. The players who then inflict their laziness onto others by abusing LFD, expecting to be carried through dungeons on a dais to scoop up loot like peeled grapes.

But in my desire to stigmatise the entitlesloth I fear that I contribute to a culture of elitism. A mindset of “You must be this skilled to enter”. I see people who play in spite of their real-life restrictions and limitations, the people who rely on Warcraft to provide them with an escape from their real world situation. And I feel ashamed that the culture I help support probably makes them feel unwelcome and unwanted.

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5 Ways to Help The Warcraft Community

Posted on by Gazimoff

Official Warcraft Forums screenshot

I was flicking through the list of recent blue posts when I came across this little gem on the EU forums. Turns out that there’s a lot of thread deletion going on, particularly when a topic gets derailed or descends into anarchy. I can’t say for certain if much useful content is being lost as I don’t tend to get involved on the official forums, but if people are putting in time and effort trying to be helpful then it’s a bad thing to see that effort get wasted.

The great thing is that the official forums aren’t the only place where someone can contribute to the Warcraft community. There are a whole stack of other places where you can help out other players, either by highlighting a new discovery you’ve made or by sharing your thoughts and experience.

If you’re interested in getting involved and helping out other players or just sharing your thoughts and opinions, don’t feel that you’re limited to what the official forums provide. Have a look at this list and see if any of these grab your interest.

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Casual Is Not A Dirty Word

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, being called a geek was a crude insult thrown around by those unwilling to accept that people didn’t share their interests and hobbies. Nowadays it’s worn as a badge of honour. I’m not saying that you’ll see me standing on the top of a mountain with my shirt torn off, shouting “I AM GEEK” into the wind, but you get the idea.

I can see the same thing happening within gaming culture. The terms “casual” and “social” are thrown around with a sneer in the voice. After all, social gamers aren’t real gamers, are they? Casual gamers just don’t play games properly? Unless you’re playing the game in the style of a seasoned professional, you must be doing it wrong, right?

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Where Videogames Go To Die

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, one of the first videogames I remember playing was Horace Goes Skiing. I was about three years old, playing this basic Frogger clone on a computer with a dead-flesh keyboard. It was great, even though it was frustrating trying to steer this character down a virtual slalom course. There were a number of other games that hallmarked my youth, from Fantasy World Dizzy through to Shenmue, stopping off at Sonic the Hedgehog, Doom, Unreal and Half-Life on the way.

It’s awe-inspiring in a way – as I’ve grown up over the last thirty years this whole new form of entertainment has grown up with me. It’s something that simply didn’t exist before my generation, yet it’s something I’ve lived with all my life.

And yet I can’t help but feel that somehow videogames are the only form of entertainment that has a built in shelf-life. I’m not talking about things like DRM or anything as draconian. It’s much more fundamental. Videogames are the only form of entertainment that is almost welded to the hardware it was created for. We expect that in time to come we will move on to better hardware, and with it newer videogames. Those older ones, the classics of forgotten generations of hardware, are abandoned and rarely see the light of day again.

Let me try and give a clumsy analogy. I have a bookshelf, on which lie a collection of books. Most of them I’ve read, some of them I’ve yet to start. But I’m in no rush – a book is a book is a book. I won’t open it one day to find the book technology has changed, or the book server has been shut down and my book service closed. It’s a kind of comfort, knowing that they will still be there and that I can get round to them, some day.

It’s the same with music – I listen to music every single day. Sometimes it’s on CD, sometimes it’s on my iPhone, sometimes it’s on computer. Sometimes I make my own music, cranking out badly plucked half-tunes on my cheap Squier Strat. But music is transient in nature, being easily movable from one medium to another. Notation on paper to bytes on a magnetic platter, it’s all the same. But I can still dig out the music I was listening to ten or twenty years ago and pull it forward, making it play on my latest gadget or gizmo. It never goes out of date.

I think it’s my fast-approaching wedding that’s thrown this into the forefront for me. One of the biggest joys in my life is being able to play videogames with other people, be they in the same living room or a different continent. I want to be able to share and pass on those experiences, and I don’t know why but I feel it all the more as I grow older. But although I can share the stories that shaped my youth and the music that inspired me as a teenager, the videogames that defined my gaming life will probably stay in the past.

Think about the games you’ve played, the characters you’ve created and the experiences you’ve had. In the case of Warcraft, you might have characters that you’ve been playing for five years or more. They have their own stories, their own paths. Even if you’ve never roleplayed, you’ve still fought battles and overcome the horrors of the world. There’s a history there full of memories.

One day the game will end. The servers will shut down and the hard drives scrubbed. Our characters will probably be long gone by then, probably only recorded in blogs like this one or merchandise like the plastic figurines or posters. And unlike a book that you can pull of a shelf and pass on to the next generation, a videogame is like a fixed point in time that we cluster around for a brief moment before moving on to the next one. Then the next one. Again, and again.

Consider that the creative endeavours of a single person might last for over four thousand years, it seems such a waste of effort that something touched by several hundred people might only live for a few years. For some reason it feels broken, as if a videogame is like a Nexus-6 replicant trying to live out beyond it’s dedicated lifespan.

In the meantime, I can only imagine that one day there’ll be a time when I’m asked about the Big Daddy figurine or the Wind-Rider plushie, and where these creatures came from. And I’ll reply:

“From worlds that once existed, but that exist no more.”

See you in-game.