Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Great ideas don’t always translate into a successful business model and the gaming world has seen its fair share of seemingly sure fire concepts crash and burn, but every once in a while something comes along that has so many pieces of the puzzle put together that success is virtually guaranteed.  Susan Wu and her team of MMOG veterans at Ohai games believe they have found that magical formula and after sitting down with her at GDC to talk about the company’s first title, City of Eternals, and the future of gaming, it’s hard to argue with her.  

City of Eternals is a browser based, free-to-play MMOG currently in beta testing that features a highly social core and uses a player’s facebook profile to auto populate both your avatar and your friends list. City of Eternals isn’t a facebook game however, it is flash based clientless game that exists on its own web site and can be hosted through HTML embedding by anyone who wishes to add it to their own pages.  The game is set in a vampire themed world that blends many core values of the popular vampire mythos, including the uber-popular romance of Twilight.


Of the many innovations in the game, perhaps the most interesting is the live feed. Based on RSS technology the game creates a hyperlinkable feed that populates the games front page with a stream of information that players will be able to directly interact with. By clicking on one of those links, you will be able to load directly into that area and help your friends or experience a similar adventure. This feed will also be able to be streamed to the players social networking page if they so desired. The game will give players the ability to explore, craft, co-operatively defeat monsters, or do any other number of activities that would be expected in a traditional MMOG. Fans of leaderboards will also enjoy City of Eternals as there is a live feed at the bottom of the games website that features leaders in multiple aspects of the game.


Susan was confident that the timing was right to “bridge the gap between MMO and social gaming” and that “most social games today are not that social”. By removing the barriers that keep the vast majority of players away from MMOGs, Ohai believes they can tap a much larger market than has previously been accessed, and be financially successful doing it. “Farmville has 100 million players that spend, on average, 1 to 2 dollars each per year on one end of the spectrum and then you have a game like World of Warcraft that is enormously successful in their own way with only approximately 12 million players but yet they still manage to make over a billion dollars a year. We think there is a huge opportunity in the market, there is a new efficient frontier so to speak, of MMOGs that target 20 to 30 million players and monetize at 20 dollars each per year.” Making an MMOG for “Your aunt who loves fashion wars, or your wife who doesn’t like MMOs” sounds like a great way to get the most out of that new frontier.

Their formula for tapping that market is to become to MMO gaming what the iPhone was to smart phones and what the Wii became to consoles, a blend of accessibility and ease of use that can finally topple the misconceptions surrounding MMOGs. By making between 6 and 8 games per year with a process that she described as “MMOs developed and iterated almost as easily as publishing a blog on Wordpress”, Ohai hopes to create games that everyone wants to play and will provide “fun within 30 seconds”.


While the first title seems to have a pretty specific core audience, the second planned title, known only as Project Unicorn Parade so far, looks to draw in anyone who likes animals – a market that Susan described as being “basically everyone in the world”. Considering the strong team and amazing leadership at Ohai, coupled with a vision that has a firm grasp on what the public wants, it is this writer’s opinion that Ohai and City of Eternals are in for a lot of success in the coming months.