Archive for September, 2009

Earlier today, Apple announced its App Store digital distribution platform reached two billion downloads. That’s 500,000 downloads in just over three months from their July milestone of 1.5 billion downloads. Venture Beat reports that out of the 85,000 apps available for consumers, just fewer than 20% or 16,000 of those are games, making games the single largest category of software available through the App Store. Apple also announced that they have 50 million units on the market split between the iPhone and the iPod Touch that can utilize the App Store.

With Apple’s increasing interest in games and utilizing them in their already dominate role in media digital distribution, it’s not surprising that major game players such as Sony are taking a cue from Apple when preparing their own app stores. It will prove challenging, even for dominate gaming publishers  to offer a viable platform to compete with the App Store. Apple already offers an enormous consumer base, integrated media devices and low overhead for developers (especially indy developers); all of which will prove hard to chip away at. As other smart phone publishers ramp up their software offerings and Sony prepares to launch their PSP GO, which will be designed around a digital distribution platform, there will at least be healthy competition to keep Apple on their feet but for now, their spot at the top looks very secure.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/09/28appstore.html

So NCSoft, ALienware and iGames LAN centers have teamed up to offer the only free trail of Aion that will be available at launch in North America. Granted, there are some restrictions but hey, you can’t beat free.

From September 26 through October 9, get your AionFull Demo Account – available exclusively at participating iGames LAN centers!

These Aion accounts allow you to try out the game for free for 3 days, 5 hours, or level 7, whichever you reach first, and you will retain your character and progress during and after the demo period! You’ll also be able to play free for an hour on the LAN center’s store systems. There is no other way to trial the game at launch in North America, but you must visit a participating iGames LAN center to get your account!

So grab your friends and get yourself to one of these participating locations to get your iGames Exclusive Aion Full Demo Account before they are all gone: http://www.alienwarearena.com/event/aion/showcase-locations/

Already purchased an Aion account? Stop by a participating LAN center to get your free Aion Instant Potion Pack including (10) Lesser Secret Remedy of Mana and (10) Lesser Life Serum!

Quantities are limited, so don’t miss out on this opportunity! Click here to find an Aion showcase location near you: http://www.alienwarearena.com/event/aion/showcase-locations/

For more information on Aion, go to www.aiononline.com.

If you’re wondering where you can find an iGames center near you, check their site out, here.

via Alienware.com

Even if you’re not under the age of 10, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about Club Penguin, which is reported to have over 12 million user accounts. After being bought by the Walt Disney Company for the hefty sum of 350 million dollars, such lucrative success has not gone unnoticed and competitors are eagerly planning ways to capture this audience.

I had an opportunity to attend a session at Austin GDC given by Min Kim, Vice President of Nexon. He eyes the generation of growing gamers born during the dot com bubble, as he believes that these players – one of Club Penguin’s core audiences – will eagerly pay for digital items. It’s no secret that MapleStory has a large community, and we’ve already seen its similarities with Club Penguin. But as kids become teenagers, the game genres they are likely to play will change with them.

It is clear that MMOGs grow and evolve with technology. As time passes, the number of 2D games is also likely to decrease. If you take a quick look at any of the new and upcoming games, they are mostly 3D games with better graphics than industry leader World of Warcraft. Will players be tempted to turn back to outdated 2D games like MapleStory when a slew of visually stunning 3D games beckon for their attention left and right? The answer is probably no.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: we all know MapleStory sucks and many teens nowadays love 3D games. If Nexon puts over 50% of their manpower on MapleStory, where will that leave them?

It’s no secret: Aion is suffering from severe server queues.  NCSoft has been quick to respond to concerned and angry players that they knew that this would happen all along, and that their players’ concerns were not falling on deaf ears.

So what happened?  If they were so savvy, why didn’t they do anything to prepare?

According to their announcement, it was to avoid “adding new servers too quickly that are then underpopulated and don’t deliver a fun experience for players.” For this, I must applaud them.

Sure, we have to deal with hour-spanning waits to get in and create a new character, which I’m sure must be murder for those of us who have already been waiting for what seems an eternity for this game to come out. But how many times have we seen a game that simply starts pumping out new servers on demand when they first open? How often have we seen those games suffer from a severe lack of population density? Do we really want to deal with server merges in this game, too?

Having worked on some of those games myself, I will admit that there is a bit of difference between Aion and them. Aion has a mountain of hype behind it, and it holds the unique position of being a Korean pay-to-play. If this just another free-to-play game, or if it didn’t have the backing Aion has, denying so many players from immediate access would be murder, since most would have no problem leaving the game never to come back. But here, players are dually-invested, and Aion is in the distinct position of being able to look to the future, and only to the future.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not particularly excited for Aion, myself. Flying aside, I haven’t seen anything in it that’s got me too fired up. But I have to admit that it’s a fine good-looking game, and I have to acknowledge it when the publishers make the right call, no matter how painful.

Here’s to you, NCSoft. Now let me in your damned game.

Harvesting in FarmVille

Having recently come into a lot of free time that was neatly distributed into small nuggets that I couldn’t put towards anything meaningful, I’ve taken to playing some of the more popular games on Facebook. In particular, I became a fan of both of Zynga’s most popular offerings, “Mafia Wars” and “FarmVille”. (Yes, for those of you keeping track, this makes me a Mafia Farmer.)

I’ll admit that I was initially leery. The concept of flash games in a social network was a little bit awkward to me. I wasn’t going to find deep, meaningful gameplay. There would be no grand stories told in the methods of Halo or Final Fantasy, and further, it was all but guaranteed micro transactions – something that I feel can be implemented very badly in games – would be in.

To say that my concerns about the gameplay and storytelling were fully valid goes without saying. To say that I enjoyed it immensely nonetheless is something I was not expecting, however. There was plenty to enjoy about these games: very appropriate, beautiful art assets, quickly picked up gameplay, and compelling leveling up rewards all kept me interested and coming back for more.

The big thing that interested me in this however was the Facebook integration. Zynga and its fellow Facebook game developers have found quite the interesting strategy. One I hope will be developed and implemented in computer games and consoles. The strategy is this: social networks such as Facebook encourage people to interact with one another. There is a definite desire to linger after you’ve posted a comment on your friend’s wall to see if they’ll reply to it. Even further, sometimes, you want to talk to someone, but have nothing to really talk about.

This is where Facebook’s games shine. During that short amount of time that you’re sitting around and anticipating a reply, you can pop right into FarmVille, check on your crops, and still be present within Facebook’s network for when your friend replies to you. Further, these games advertise your achievements to your friends and attach a bonus that people can take advantage of within the game.

There’s also some interesting cooperative aspects. In Mafia Wars, your strength is measured not only in the guns and cars you own and the body armor you wear, but also in the size of your Mafia…which is populated by your friends who also play the game. You can assign positions for their characters, and they’ll occasionally pop in to help you, whether they’re online or not. You can periodically send them gifts that cost you absolutely nothing, or ask them for help when a rival Mafia is targeting you.

All of this makes for very compelling social gameplay. It encourages you to give, encourages you to advertise the game to your friends, serves as a fun, consistently recurring icebreaker, and offers a compelling enough experience that it tempts you to come back even when you’re not waiting for that next comment. I’m very interested in following this strategy: will we see the next iteration of game development for computers and consoles taking advantage of this concept?

Browser games are an interesting beast.  When most of us pick up a browser game, it’s usually to kill some time that we had nothing better to do with – whether that’s in a college dorm between classes, or at work while the boss isn’t looking.  Simple, addictive games draw in players who would otherwise never even look at a video game.  They’re the epitome of casual gaming, something that inexplicably frightens and angers some of us.

The Browser MMOG panel at GDC Austin, consisting of David Georgeson (Gaia Online), Philip Reisberger (BigPoint), Samuel Lorétan (Ankama), and Jesse Schell (Schell Games), argued that browser games were the future.  Certainly, browser games have certain advantages: they can be played from practically anywhere, and there’s no huge client to download.  Still, I initially balked at this assertion: I have yet to experience a browser game that could provide the depth of experience a traditional client or console game gave me.

The panelists did provide some solid points.  Easier system requirements means friends are less likely to get split up, which makes guilds more likely to jump from game to game as cohesive groups.  In spite of their reputations, browser games don’t have to be a shallow experience, and they all maintained that their own games of course had plenty of depth.  And many of their players played their games while also actively enjoying console games, so they’re able to work around the competition traditional gaming might provide.  I was still not convinced when I left, and had to spend some time mulling the matter over.

Games like Fusion Fall show off the current reach of browser games, giving players a fully 3d environment without a heavy download.  Reisberger strongly believes that in a few years time, we will see browser-based games that can match the production values of consoles and clients, with tools such as the Unity 3D engine.  And with upcoming projects like Gaikai, which will let you actually stream a full client over a browser, perhaps we will live to see a game where hefty client downloads are a thing of the past.

Believe me, I’ve worked on games with downloads upward of a gigabyte, and massive client sizes is one of the biggest barriers to getting players in the game.  As browser plugins become more powerful, game companies might have no choice but to switch over to the browser platform, whether we like it or not.  And while some of us resist the mass marketing of casual gaming in recent years, can we not also benefit from streamed content and no waits to get into the games we actually want to play?

I guess this is the big one everyone’s been waiting for. Well, I hate to disappoint, but there weren’t any new announcements or sneak peaks this time around. Rather, our speakers Frank Pearce and J. Allen Brack talked about the size and scale of Blizzard and World of Warcraft. Who knew Blizzard was so big?!

But in all seriousness, as many professionals in the industry noted, it’s truly a testament to their efficiency and organization. Blizzard employs over 4,500 people worldwide, and with that many people, you’d expect webs of entanglement. But they get shit done, and they get shit done correctly. Most companies in the online games world are 50-man strong (or weak), and at times won’t see anything completed, even if it’s an everyday mundane task.

So yes, Blizzard is big, but don’t simply say you knew that. Their streamlined structure and efficiency is something other companies can model after and learn from.

I had the good fortune today to sit in on a case study of EVE Online’s player-elected council, the Council of Stellar Management (CSM for short).  I’ve long admired the various player driven societal structures of EVE, ranging from basic corporations and alliances to advanced businesses such as banks and media.  Pétur Jóhannes Óskarsson of CCP explains that the fact that EVE’s nearly 300,000 players aren’t split up on different servers allows these advanced organizations to form.

The CSM is a tribute to the way CCP conducts its business.  In short, the CSM is 9 player-elected representatives who act as liaisons between the userbase and the developers.    These representatives have no additional power, in-game or otherwise, have to campaign using their real-life names, and are flown out to meet with the developers every term (6 months) to discuss important player issues.  Since the CSM began in 2008, over 30 of the topics they have brought up have made it into the game and over 120 have been prioritized or are in the development pipeline.

How many times have I heard players complain that a company doesn’t care about them, or only cares about squeezing as much money out as possible without fixing any bugs?  In my own experience, my coworkers past and present got into the business because they had a passion for games.  In that context, the above players’ complaints seem patently ridiculous – yet they crop up again and again.  And there’s a simple reason this happens: lack of communication and transparency.

Many companies are afraid to admit to any wrongdoing.  Other companies have a mysterious urge to keep things secret as long as possible, sometimes to surprise the users, and other times for no clear reason at all.  While some secrets should be kept (surprises are fun, after all), in a vacuum of information all we have to go on is rumors, and even the most insane claims can appear almost reasonable.  In CCP, we have an example of the developers opening a direct line of communication to their players actual, giving their players a voice that they can hear clearly.  And in return, they’re giving answers and improving their game to match what their userbase really wants.

Point in fact, according to Óskarsson, the changes to the game’s sovereignty system (a central facet to EVE’s PvP) in the upcoming Dominion expansion is based largely on the feedback they received from the CSM.

Even though EVE is an unusually political game, the CSM is not directly tied to any game mechanic.  If another publisher or developer wanted to, they could implement a similar system.  Even if very few in-game changes took place as a result of a player council, at least the users would know they’re being heard, and would have a centralized method of direct communication.

And in the end, what more can we ask for?

An emerging theme at this year’s GDC in Austin in the growing importance of not only the younger audience but that of the entire family unit as well. A number of advantages are already well known about this demographic and the first is often counterintuitive; kids can drop big bucks on a game. Second, establishing brand loyalty at a young age is increasingly important in an oversaturated market.

So the big question this year is; how do you tap into this market?  Panelists Jesse Schell (Schell Games), Laralyn McWilliams (Sony Online Entertainment), Sheri Graner Ray (Schell Games), Matthew Schwartz (Cartoon Network) and Megan Geiser (Her Interactive) delve into the strategy behind reaching this new demographic and converting the younger audience into a paying audience. The key is not only to appeal to the children in a variety of ways but to target and earn the trust of the parents, so that their children will be able to spend money on the title.

While developing a game where both children and parents can enjoy is ideal, it’s no simple task. Children grow, behavioral patterns change, and it all happens in a span of a few short years. The panelists state that parents will help kids play until they reach five or six years old, but by the time they reach the age of eight, the tables begin to turn and parents need to seek help from their kids. They argue that at age twelve, kids are already worrying about perception and social acceptance, and that boys especially become hypersensitive about “kiddy” stuff. As a result, they get turned off. So what do they enjoy? According to Schell, the older boys associate high difficulty and competition with a good, adult game. However, that doesn’t necessarily appeal to the girls. So to cut the edge off of competition, he argues that there should be an emphasis on player progression, but more importantly, rewards, because it keeps player engagement.

Parents, however, do not need to get too involved with actual gameplay and mechanics. The panel argues that oftentimes, parents enjoy watching from the sidelines, and that they get their enjoyment from simply watching their kids. They also believe that in order to get parents to open their wallets, parents need to see their kids excited about the game, and they need to be constantly reminded about the game. So not only is it important to design a game where players can simply hang out, but to keep parents in the loop and engaged by providing rewards and incentives so that they know their kids are still enjoying the game they play.

Early today, Justin Cooney of Sony North America confirmed that it will be removing features it initially touted for the PSP Minis platform such as wireless multiplayer functionality, downloadable content for games and the ability to offer downloadable patches. All this is being down in order to speed up the approval time for games developed for the PSP Mini platform. The original idea of the PSP Minis was to offer an iPhone style apps platform to game developers for the PSP. With more robust features the the iPhone platform can offer, the PSP Minis have been eagerly anticipated by the PSP crowd. Now, there does not appear to be much of a difference between the platforms and only time will tell whether the incentives to develop for the PSP market are really there.via Gamasutra