BBC news - Online games market

[Hayduke]

I feel so old and out of touch now.  Seems like a great racket though.

[Bzalthek]

It's time to sit out on the front lawn, tell "back in my day" stories, drink some iced tea (spiked) and yell at people "my lawn, get out of!"

[Xanthippe]

Seriously?

[link to Club Penguin]

My daughter, age 10, has played this since shortly after launch (I think early 2005?).  It's very well-done, for what it is.  Constant upgrades, new content, very polished. And it's cheap - $5/month for the subscription, which isn't even necessary unless you want better stuff.

I just got her a Nintendo DS Club Penguin game that interfaces with her Club Penguin account via WiFi so she can play minigames on the DS and then upload the coins she gets from them to her account.  Brilliant.

It's not for grownups, but it's an amazingly fun and successful game for kids.

[Xanthippe]

I doubt they make a huge amount off it, but don't forget CoX has booster packs now.

Imagine how much more they'd make if their booster packs boosted xp gain.

 

[Sky]

True dat! I don't think +combat xp potions make much sense in EQ2, but they'd be  in CoX!

[UnSub]

True dat! I don't think +combat xp potions make much sense in EQ2, but they'd be  in CoX!

 - XP has been smoothed out in CoH/V.

 - There is now a rested XP bonus for leaving characters offline in patrol areas.

 - Not that hard to lvl in CoH/V blah blah blah.

[Trippy]

And yet even with all those changes whenever they have a 2x exp weekend there's still a massive influx of people playing.

[Venkman]

I feel so old and out of touch now.  Seems like a great racket though.

Sheesh, yea, bigtime. I might occasionally run into a YoVille or whatnot, but I'm pretty set in my preferences. I'd much rather play a ChampO or SW:TOR or if it doesn't suck Fallen Earth or Dragon Age than any of these thrifty browser worlds. I'm just in that "other" market now though, the one that gets the relatively few big plays from the very same people who were playing MUDs and designed the earlier traditional MMOs. All the more recent MBAs are chasing the younger markets with their "synergistic excite and delight with multiple points of consumer and IP engagements".

[Sky]

- XP has been smoothed out in CoH/V.

 - There is now a rested XP bonus for leaving characters offline in patrol areas.

 - Not that hard to lvl in CoH/V blah blah blah.

Ok. That's cool.

+XP potions would still be nice for that game. Easier than reducing the amount of repetition.

[waylander]

And yet even with all those changes whenever they have a 2x exp weekend there's still a massive influx of people playing.

Quoted for truth. I had 2 level 50's, and several lower level toons in CoH/CoV.  The missions were just so repetitive that I just couldn't stand to level up new characters, so double xp weekends were a good way to PL through all of that.

[Raph]

BTW, YoVille on Facebook has somewhere between 6-8m monthly actives. It's F2P, though.

[Xanthippe]

BTW, YoVille on Facebook has somewhere between 6-8m monthly actives. It's F2P, though.

Does it have pvp?

[schild]

BTW, YoVille on Facebook has somewhere between 6-8m monthly actives. It's F2P, though.

So how does it make money?

[Lum]

You buy YoCash! for your YoStuff! Also, ad banners.

[Xanthippe]

You buy YoCash! for your YoStuff! Also, ad banners.

What do you do with YoStuff?  Can you steal other people's YoStuff? 

In other words, how do you grief Yoville?

[Lantyssa]

When you quit, can I have YoStuff?

[schild]

There's a Yo Dawg joke in here somewhere.

[Sky]

There's a Yo Dawg joke in here somewhere.

Curses, foiled by that meddling jew!

[Azazel]

When you quit, can I have YoStuff?

I thought of the exact same line as I was scrolling down, but it turned out I was beaten by the Red Panda!

[Xanthippe]

BTW, YoVille on Facebook has somewhere between 6-8m monthly actives. It's F2P, though.

So how does it make money?

I sacrificed myself to sign up to get you this information.  Hope you appreciate it.

There's two methods of currency, coins and yocash.  Coins are "earned" in game by visiting the Widget Factory (one visit per 6 hours) and clicking the work button.  The more people one recruits to work on their crew (via pestering Facebook or Myspace friends), the more one earns per visit to the Widget Factory.

Yocash is bought with real money.  Also, one can earn yocash by clicking on offers to sign up for this or take that survey.  These surveys and offers appear designed to be harvesters of information.

Yoville residents can use coins or yocash to buy crap to decorate their apartment or wear, or gift things to other people.

What else is there to do?  There's a cheesy slots app at the casino, with typically shitty odds, which pays in coins.  There's a cheesy race app at the speedway that I couldn't beat in 3 tries and gave up.  One can play tic-tac-toe or roshambo with another person. 

It really is a wonder to me why anyone would pay real money for any of the crap in this game.

Comparing this to Club Penguin, which my daughter plays -- I much prefer the Club Penguin model, which is subscription based, but it actually has decent mini-games and no limit to how much currency one can "earn" (via playing minigames) to spend in game (can't buy Club Penguin coins with real cash).  Watching her interact with others on this -- it's well worth the 5 bucks/month.  Kids get together and play school, for example (someone plays the teacher, the rest students).  Kids play on CP the way they do in real life, often.

[Zzulo]

Club Penguin? Really?

[Xanthippe]

Club Penguin? Really?

It's very well done, for what it is.  I stress the "for what it is."

If you're a kid who likes to play with other kids, it's terrific. 

(For kids, I also like Toontown a great deal but it's awfully grindy - it's safer, though, in terms of chat).

[UnSub]

Club Penguin? Really?

The MMOs that are taking the chances and growing the market AREN'T the ones we talk about here. So while we can look down our monocles while drinking snifters of brandy at titles such as Club Penguin and Runescape, they are doing better than the vast majority of MMOs and doing a lot more in terms of evolving game mechanics / expectations for MMOs.

[sidereal]

The MMOs that are taking the chances and growing the market AREN'T the ones we talk about here. So while we can look down our monocles while drinking snifters of brandy at titles such as Club Penguin and Runescape, they are doing better than the vast majority of MMOs and doing a lot more in terms of evolving game mechanics / expectations for MMOs.

Your lips were moving, but all I heard was "grind grind grind grind grind grind Club Penguin grind Runescape grind grind"

Putting aside the games for kids for obvious reasons, it's not like games with non-Diku mechanics don't get a fair shake on f13.  There are fat threads supporting The West, Nile Online, and MyBrute now.  It's just that there's a general aversion to the absurd grind of most of these 'casual' games.  Probably because it's a self-selected group of people who at one point thought UO was new and fresh, and so are on average old, and who therefore don't have the time to drool in front of a keyboard watching their Maple Story avatar do whatever for the jillionth time.  Grindariffic games make money because the content costs are kept low by gating the content on absurd realtime requirements.  And there is apparently a healthy population of people willing to do the drooling.  There's nothing there that I'd consider 'evolving' game mechanics.

[UnSub]

I'm not just talking diku vs. non-diku.

Runescape is a browser-based MMO with sub fees and has been doing it for a good while now. Made by a couple of guys as an idea. The rest of the MMO market is just now catching up.

Club Penguin is aimed squarely at kids and has a game based newspaper that has a circulation of 6.7 million and gets 30 000 player submissions a day. It's players don't even have credit cards and have to pester someone else to pay for the good stuff, yet still has enough low level stuff to attract and retain entrants.

Grind doesn't even come into it. Perhaps some on f13 are jaded from being involved in MMOs for too long, but if that happens en masse then we'll enter the realms of obsolescence. Besides that, the boards get way too excited for the first 30 days of any new major IP MMO launch to truly accept that these boards are yet past it.

[Xanthippe]

The MMOs that are taking the chances and growing the market AREN'T the ones we talk about here. So while we can look down our monocles while drinking snifters of brandy at titles such as Club Penguin and Runescape, they are doing better than the vast majority of MMOs and doing a lot more in terms of evolving game mechanics / expectations for MMOs.

Your lips were moving, but all I heard was "grind grind grind grind grind grind Club Penguin grind Runescape grind grind"

Putting aside the games for kids for obvious reasons, it's not like games with non-Diku mechanics don't get a fair shake on f13.  There are fat threads supporting The West, Nile Online, and MyBrute now.  It's just that there's a general aversion to the absurd grind of most of these 'casual' games.  Probably because it's a self-selected group of people who at one point thought UO was new and fresh, and so are on average old, and who therefore don't have the time to drool in front of a keyboard watching their Maple Story avatar do whatever for the jillionth time.  Grindariffic games make money because the content costs are kept low by gating the content on absurd realtime requirements.  And there is apparently a healthy population of people willing to do the drooling.  There's nothing there that I'd consider 'evolving' game mechanics.

Club Penguin excels at providing new content often.  I don't see my daughter doing much grinding at all.  She has a pretty short attention span, and mostly plays with other kids (playing school, playing pet store, whatever). 

I'm not sure I understand your point about non-diku mmos.  Could you please elaborate?

[sidereal]

I excluded Club Penguin and Runescape from grind by not replacing them with the word 'grind', but I did say I was excluding kids' games, because none of the posters here are kids.  I've played a number of the games that are very popular but get little coverage on f13, and a large proportion of them (mostly asian imports) are absurdly grindy, and that is, I suspect, why they get little coverage on f13.

In short:
At one time it was reasonable to have a news site or forum that convered 'The MMO Industry' in toto, becuase 'The MMO Industry' was a group of games small enough to count on two hands, and because the demographics of the people playing those games was pretty narrow and self-selected.  Somewhere along the way, and at an accelerating pace, that stopped being the case.  So when people are SHOCKED SHOCKED that the range of games that the f13 community covers is now actually a pretty small and somewhat random subset of the MMO universe, it's because that hasn't set in yet.  The solutions are to either get used to it or, if one were to actually want to avoid the obsolescence UnSub is referring to, to make a SRS effort to continue covering the MMO industry in total, meaning we'd need like a kids forum where my son could chat with Xanthippe's kid about how rad and awesome Dragon Fable is (but under no circumstances would I allow him to read the rest of the forum)  Or we send adults in to sample kids games, which is somewhere between silly and a felony.  Or we bring in contributors who are already active in those communities.  Or we eat cheesecake.

[Count Nerfedalot]

cheesecake is good