John Smedley, SOE

EQ 10 years ago, going strong today. How many people playing games from 1999?

Current MMO audience - Avg age 33, gender 85% male, 15% female. Goal = expand that demographic.

Launched in Apr 28. 5 million registered last month. Shift for company into a new area of gaming, for kids. Making it since 2005. Needed to assemble the right team.

Lots of usability testing, built a usability lab. Over 100 usability tests. Kids don’t think the same way adults do. How are they different? Short attention spans, like 5 mins. Avg session = 20 minutes.

Registration screen failure – birthdate failure, because they didn’t want to do the math of what year they were born in. Gender also a problem because ingrained not to give out personal info. Today = where do you live, how old are you. From 45% to 95% of getting kids through that screen.

8 min download on avg cable connection. Focus on making it simple to get into the game.

Under 13 = 51%, 13-17 29%, 18-12 12%, 25-34 5%, 35-44 2%. Big section triggering COPA. Limited numbers as you go up in age. Material impact in selling, sell to the kid and sell to the parent. Gender = 67% male, 33% female. Great success, wanted 50/50 and taking steps to do that.

Lots of effort into a kid-friendly UI, some great examples out there like Club Penguin, Wizard 101. Learned a lot, but take a look at what kids are use to using, like Mac OS in schools = dock at the bottom. Allow kids to do something different every 5 minutes.
#1 job = brawler. #2 and #3 not as expected. Demo derby at 2, racecar driver at 3, chef at 5. Pet trainer very popular – why? Made pets cute. Need activities for girls besides combat. Thus, pets. Closer to Nintendogs than pets from WoW. Pets have their own personalities. Can reward for good or bad behaviors. Pets are microtrans items, built a class around it. Gestures / minigames to level your pet up.

Other minigames in Free Realms. Mining = match 3 minigame. Can go from killing to puzzle very quickly. Also chess, checkers, multiplayer games kids are familiar with. Chef popular, trying to bring all kind of other games into the game. High end 3d racing. Leveling curve was harder than they thought, found some stopping points with metrics and made them easier = more level 20 racecar drivers.

Newest game = card duelist. Launched with it but just did an expansion pack. More level 20 duelists than any other class. Similar to Pokemon or Yugioh. #1 seller in the store = card packs. Coming up is soccer in a few weeks. Wider international appeal, familiar to kids.
Built an in-game store to monetize. Click to buy, one-click. Fund wallet with station cash cards or online. Get cards into all major retail outlets, very successful experience. Back end revenue sharing with major retail outlets. Free month + microtrans currency. Retailers sell for 99 cents, successful conversion = revenue share. Distribution most important thing to get right after the game itself. On any given day 50% of players would use the store ( though that doesn’t mean that they buy things! ).

Interface for store was too confusing for kids. Not intuitive to go in and buy items without context. Leveling up through racing, put manikins out with cool racing gear on them. Really helped sales a lot, immediate spike. Starter screen = focus kids attention on what is new. Good example = Combat Arms. Sell a lot more stuff to girls = 68% of purchasers. Tradng card game, followed by health potions and ornamental things, then pets. New store experience with a recommendation engine. Need to treat this store like a real store, merchandising is important – ease of use isn’t actually the #1 thing, need to get kids to understand the value of what they are buying.
Doing another game in this space, not announced yet. Learning a lot about marketing to kids. Biggest thing is that TV works! Much more so in the kids market. Peak pop around 5:30 PM. Huge spikes when TV commercials run. Commercial = 5 mins later in game. These are not just new customers but returning ones, need to remind them to come back! See a FreeRealms ad followed by Wizard 101, that’s because it works.

40% of audience in EQ2 using microtransactions! Need to get people to understand value of it. Average of 8 days to convince player to actually pay it. 24 log ins (avg player 3 times a day). Have to convince mom and dad too.

Too much free stuff at launch?

Big surprise, Spain as 5th biggest country, behind Brazil in #4.