by John Hoskin on Jun 12, 2008
Welcome to the 848th Edition of Loading...
If you aren't reading this in your e-mail, you could be. Sign up. Are you looking for gaming news? Look no further for all of the headlines. General industry news, right down to game specific and forum thread feeds are all yours as part of Ten Ton Hammer's news syndication program. Enjoy!
Daily Column
Loading... walking on water, climbing on fog.
First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.
If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)
Age of Conan - 200 BPM World of Warcraft - 106 BPM Lord of the Rings Online - 39 BPM EverQuest 2 - 35 BPM Warhammer Online - 26 BPM EVE Online - 23 BPM Guild Wars - 20 BPM Vanguard - 19 BPM Lineage 2 - 19 BPM Tabula Rasa - 13 BPMThe top 10 games in the Pulse remain the same with only Lord of the Rings Online and EverQuest II swapping spots.
We have big news from the Turbine team! Adam Mersky chatted with Garrett Fuller yesterday and you may be surprised at what he announced.
"A lot has happened at the company over the past year. We launched a great triple AAA game, it won game of the year. It won multiple awards; it's done very well both here and in Europe. I just got back from Korea where we're going to go into open beta in the next couple weeks. You know China is being localized now and should be launched sometime by the end of this year, beginning of next. Russia is busy localizing now and we're starting to ramp up for them. This just means more markets for LOTRO and that is great. That is not just money in our pocket but credibility and interest from a lot of people.
We brought in a new CEO in the fall and Jim Crowley has helped us lay down a long term vision. Our license for LOTRO has extended for a long time because the folks at Tolkien Enterprises are really happy with the ways things have gone. They want to ensure that this has got a lot of run way to make sure more good things are to come.
DDO is starting to come into its own now after 2 years of really hard work. The game is to a place where players are really happy with it.
This has all culminated into funding now from two important partners. GGV that has a huge imprint in Asia which is important to our industry, it extends our expertise in Asia which we had a little of, but we certainly needed a lot more of. And as we mentioned earlier Time Warner coming on board and having one of the world's biggest media companies enter our space. Not only is this a validation for our vision of MMOs but certainly is a validation of the game space. That this is not going away and that people are going to get more and more involved in it.
Combine all this with the console market which is growing at an exponential rate, I'm not sure what it is exactly, but you can look it up. Consoles are a very big chunk of the gaming ecosystem and they are now connected. Now we see an opportunity to take the great things that we can do with persistent online worlds and working really hard to be successful and work on a console platform and that is not an easy thing to do.
We have lots of job listings out there. We have added 60 people since the beginning of the year and our job website has about 40 listings on it right now. So clearly we are building a console title. Unfortunately, I can't go any further into what that console title is, or if it involves any of our existing products or is one that has yet to be named." -- Adam Mersky - Turbine
There you have it! Turbine is working on a console title. If was a person who speculates, and I am, then I'd put the Time Warner connection together with consoles, mix in Turbines affection for high profile intellectual properties and suggest that Harry Potter might be the IP that will be Turbines first console MMOG. Thanks Adam for taking some time with us.
We're hiring again, but not for a Harry Potter MMOG just yet. This time our site aimed at tweens and younger is the site with a help wanted shingle out.
"Do you enjoy playing games online with your kids? Do you enjoy discussing games aimed toward kids, tweens, and teens with family and friends? Ten Ton Hamster is looking for a paid staff writer to help cover our growing list of youth-targeted MMORPGs. Writing and HTML formatting experience preferred but not required. Please submit inquiries or letters of interest and resumes to Jeff Woleslagle before noon EST on Tuesday, June 17th."
Gamasutra has taken an excellent look inside the Activision - Blizzard, or as I refer to it, ActiLizzard merger. One important aspect of this merger is that Activision and not Vivendi Games (Blizzard) is the dominant partner. Activision seems to be the one that will call the shots. If I was a Call of Duty or Guitar Hero fan I would be thrilled. As a World of Warcraft fanatic I'm not so sure that this is going to benefit me.
I mentioned Kotick, the CEO of Activision in a previous Loading... He is a guy that the media love to talk to, coming up with such gems as,
"The business has grown so much... that [Blizzard], like us, have tried to prioritize opportunity, and that probably has been at the expense of expanding [average revenue per user] to the few million hardcore, rabid hobbyist enthusiast World of Warcraft fans who would pay substantially more than probably what they're paying today for enhanced services like character transfers." Bobby Kotick, CEO- Activision
Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan, an investment firm, had this to say,
"For example, I think Activision will ultimately figure out a way to extract some value from farmers who create things on WoW and sell to other subscribers, bypassing the middleman. Activision is sufficiently resourceful to figure out how to insert itself into the process as an exchange (a la eBay) and collect a transaction fee for sales of user generated content."
Wouldn't that be awesome? If Blizzard sold gold and other in-game items for real cash? Players would... wait a minute, players have loved SOE exchange so much that no new exchange servers have been opened. You can't take a game that was built to curb real money transactions (RMT) and magically turn it into a RMT game. Even games built from the ground up as RMT titles die quick and painful deaths. I'm not suggesting that it can't be done, but 10 million people like it just the way that it is, thank you very much.
He has also hinted at the possibility of a Call of Duty MMOG. With the exception of EVE Online and likely Stargate Worlds, non-fantasy MMOGs have been real barnburners. I bet one about World War II would really pique some interest. I would rather see a real MMOG built from the ground up and not a game with a successful title slapped on the lid to sell it. What's next? World of GuitarCraft?
The EA versus Activision battle lines are drawn, but does anyone think that Activision can become the new emperor? EA is already moving down the right track, purchasing MMOG community building companies. Name some great Activision communities. I'll bet you write all them between these brackets [].
EA, has spent $30 million on community, plus purchased Mythic Entertainment. They get it. Community and not the game title are what keep people playing a MMOG. I like Age of Conan, but you know what? I'm playing WoW because my friends and family play it. If you are the only one who likes baseball on your street then you are unlikely to go out and play it by yourself. It's a community game, much like MMOGs.
Ironically, Blizzard doesn't do all that great a job with their community. Granted their community is so enormous as to be difficult to deal with in any attempt, but I'm not sure that they really understand how community works or who owns who in the community space. For instance, they recently added a very high-profile site to their official fansites listing. That site is part of a network that until recently was publicly known to be owned by a gold farming outfit. They were getting no love and so, decided to say that they were no longer part of that company. Better journalists than I have deduced that it was just a shifting of paper to give the perception of playing on the right side of the fence. Gold farming sites don't sell their database components. That is how they track where gold is made the fastest.
CCP, the team behind EVE Online gets it. They have smart staff in the community building department. NetDevil gets it, although they have yet to really knock one out of the park. NCSoft really gets it and has for quite some time. Community is the #1 most important aspect of your game. If you build a fantastic game and make it hard for players to interact then your fantastic game just became a mediocre game.
If Ubisoft wants to compete in this market they had better wake up and spend some of their $1.2 billion announced warchest on community building. Cheyenne mountain should do well in the community department if they fund it well enough. They have superb staff in place.
I recently posted Hoskin's First Law of Game Communities: Don't host official forums for anything other than support. Since nobody jumped up and down to disagree, which you are wont to do, I'll leave it alone and give you,
Hoskin's Second Law of Game Communities: Give Players Multiple, Easy Methods to Interact. MMOGs are about interaction with other living, breathing human beings. Don't create a combat mechanic that makes grouping difficult (Auto Assault). Don't create a chat interface that is clumsy and difficult to use (Age of Conan). Take as much, if not more time on the social interaction aspects of your game as you do on the combat mechanics and the art design. Give your players a means to interact outside of the game, via mobile phone or via the Web. Keep your customers connected to one another. Build friendships. Provide guild tools that create solid bridges between groups of players. Provide investments in your game that can be shared (XBox Gamertags). Provide as many channels of advancement as you can and then allow your players to advance together. The more you allow your players to interact and share their experience within and outside of your game, the less likely they are to dash off when the next big thing arrives and even if they do, they are more likely to come back. Make your game their home, their hub and you will be richly rewarded.
Let's leave this with a little community building compliments of Josh Drescher at EA-Mythic.
That's it for today! The Loading Forums await you. Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.
--
[A big thanks to Phil Comeau for putting together the links, headlines and taglines today. ]
14 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 1030 in June! 1426 in 2008!
New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today
Images/Video
Dungeons & Dragons Online: Devil Invasion Aftermath VideoInterviews
EVE Online: Exclusive Q&A with Empyrean Age author Tony Gonzales Champions Online: Dev Profile - Danny Southard PlaySpan: CEO and Founder Karl MehtaFree-to-Play
Top 10 Free-to-Play GamesComics
Ten Ton Comics: 'Wisdom'Community
Warhammer Online: FAQ Update Vanguard: Create a Caption RumbleGuides
Lord of the Rings Online: AH Pricing Update - Medium Armor Age of Conan: Guide Portal Redesign Age of Conan: Armorsmith Tier 1 Recipes Age of Conan: Necromancer Feat Calculator Update Tabula Rasa: Commandos World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Rogue Skills UpdateHot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to
EVE Online: Exclusive Q&A with Empyrean Age author Tony Gonzales Ten Ton Comics: 'Wisdom' PlaySpan: CEO and Founder Karl Mehta Top 10 Free-to-Play Games Age of Conan: Post-Launch with Jason Stone Age of Conan: Lost in Hyboria - Ode to the ESRB Ten Ton Forum Developer TrackerReal World News
Lesbos islanders dispute gay name [Courtesy of Michael G.]Thanks as always for visiting TenTonHammer.com. Thanks to Phil Comeau for doing the heavy lifting with the links.
- John "Boomjack" Hoskin and the Ten Ton Hammer Team