BTW if you don't follow my Twitter posts, note that I am just here posting more or less the gist of the lectures, not doing too much editorializing. For instance, I couldn't agree LESS with Hickman's analysis of why WAR had problems, but it is still interesting to see the perspective that he puts forwards.

Jeff Hickman
Executive Producer, Mythic Entertainment
Out of the Box(ed Product)
Thinking for an Online Age

Mythic around for 15 years, many products in mid to late 90s, all they have ever done is online. 1999 = Dark Age of Camelot, a MMO, launched in 2001. First big shot that put Mythic on the map. 2008 launched Warhammer Online, been an “interesting” year for Warhammer. Also oversees Ultima Online, longest continuously running MMO (12 years).

In the future, online is inevitable. Not online = not going to be here. Gaming is about social applications = facebook, myspace, bringing them together in a lot of different ways. Era of boxed product is ending. Pri mary way is digital distributions, online via the internet. Instant gratification, see the ad, click the button, engage them within 10 seconds. Agile, reliable, profitable, trackable. DD is absolutely profitable, it’s not just retail boxes. Being able to track and react to customers online is essential to the future! Improve game on a daily basis, polling metrics of how many are playing and buying – can’t do that unless you’re online.

In the future, will think beyond WoW. High quality, consistent, great value, great online game. Runescape second largest online game (though numbers are arguable). It’s not very much like WoW, it’s a different type of game. In the 50s and 60s TV was all about the Ed Sullivan show, some were semi-successful but most failed. If you wanted Ed Sullivan, you watched Ed Sullivan. WoW is the same way, if that’s what they want, that is what they will play.

Lessons Learned. DAOC developed by passionate gamers, fans of EQ1. Took those games and knowledge and poured it together, can do them better, could be really cool! Great game for the time it was in and market that it hit. Game about learning from the past. So hey, we can do Warhammer Online and not make any mistakes, right? WRONG.

Mistakes on Warhammer that shouldn’t have been made:

Ease of Play. Big difference between easy, and ease of use. Thought they learned the lesson of importance of ease of use, also important to hit right balance of easy / challenging gameplay. But didn’t – PvE in the beginning is too easy, the game doesn’t make you feel thrilled to play it. You need the thrill, challenge, and danger of death. Went too easy, and the game suffered for it. But need to grab them in the first 5-10 minutes. Miss the thrill of victory.

Social tools, but little reason to socialize. Make friends, those friends keep you in the game. Recognized that, had great ideas for social tools, built them into the game. But the game doesn’t require friends. Too easy to solo, don’t need friends.

Economy and commerce not tuned properly. Really hurt progress in game.

Things that worked well. Public Quests, that’s an idea that worked well. Came about because of a need in the game, but were literally inventing them when creating the game. A highlight of the game, will be in every game they do from now on. Really refined it in Land of the Dead expansion, already starting to see this in other MMO. Open Grouping = don’t have to ask permission, etc. Been very successful, particularly for an game where there is safety in numbers.

In the future, games are not products, they are services! This is the critical piece! About your relationship with the customers, through forums, discussions, etc. Want to give you feedback, and you need to listen! A community team, in-game events, these are all needed for a service. Lip service not enough, have to embrace the fact that your game is not about the launch. Only 20% of the work happens before you go live, the real work happens afterwards. CS tools – you need to be able to service the players and meet expectations that are set by monetization. Cannot treat CS folks like second class citizens, these are the people who are keeping your players long term. Operations may be basic stuff – billing, patching, uptime. You can’t just figure this out when you get close, need to be thinking about it from the very beginning.

Don’t forget marketing! Spending money still on marketing games like UO that are 12 years old. Don’t forget about how you monetize your game! Still amazing that people aren’t thinking about this from the very beginning – subscription, microtrans, doesn’t matter as long as you have a plan. We are all in the business to sell a service, if not thinking about it from the beginning it won’t be the service that it needs to be. Service and business model inform each other.

Think globally. Online world markets. Problem in the United States, we are too focused on ourselves. “How do I break open the market in Russia”, etc. Talk about it but don’t really do it, we aren’t learning from it yet. These are the markets of the future, Russia, South America, Asia. Look to Asia for the future – they are 5 years in the future compared to us. Getting DAOC into Korea – take a good game and launch it there! Total failure, lots of reasons. Bad choice of partner, game not built for Korea. Need to learn that lesson – going to take Warhammer to Korea, but not just doing localization but cultural-ization. Partnering with solid knowledgeable partner, addressing the issues they identify for their own market. Successfully game in NA doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make any changes, just doesn’t work that way.

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.

How to make your game not sell:

http://www.holybadman.com/

1. Name it “Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?” No, seriously. That’s the name of this game. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that it basically has absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay itself.

2. Put it on the PSP, which has approximately zero marketshare outside of pirated games and DVD rips.

3. Don’t even bother to sell it in stores, make it only available through download via PSN, which requires 100 steps to activate on your PSP if you even realize it exists in the first place.

4. Make the gameplay really hard to grasp – emergent and mystifying and indirect, and also really punishingly hard.

5. Give it all a retro 8-bit look that has nothing to do with the rest of the game in any way.

I literally have a hard time imagining how you could make this game sell FEWER copies other than not making it in the first place.

Which is all kind of a shame because it’s one of the most original and inventive and addictive games I’ve played in quite a while. Basically you are carving a dungeon maze out underground, and as a result of where you dig you release certain monsters. Those monsters then form an ecology where they redistribute nutrients around and can form a food chain of higher level monsters eating lower level ones. Then heroes invade your dungeon and you have to hope your maze was confusing enough and monsters tough enough to defeat them.

I’m not sure if it has long term legs but it’s incredible compelling to me to just try and figure out the ecology and watch it all play out. One of the better “small” games I’ve played.

Between this, Plants vs Zombies, Magic: Planeswalkers, and Battlefield 1943 it’s been an amazing year for smaller downloadable games.

War on the Southern Front

My copy arrived today and I ran through the tutorial scenario in right around an hour -- 4 turns, would take me much less to replay it I think. Not to fear for the hardcore Grognards though, the Greece and North African campaign seem much larger.

There aren't any major changes in the core HPS engine, but they have made a few improvements overall -- you can see a rough estimate of attack odds before committing to a battle, for example. There are a few hotkey hints now instead of none.

But overall the biggest improvement for me is in the overall game design. It is much higher level than the Panzer Campaigns games -- 10 kilometer hexes, 2 day turns, and the system is accordingly a lot more streamlined. Stacking limits keep you from putting more than a divison in single hex and in general there are way fewer stats to keep track of (though the core AA, AT, attack, effectiveness, etc. are all there). The divison + brigades unit sizes are a bit easier to process as well though they aren't as well visually represented as I'd like.

As someone who just likes a lot of the geography aspect of these games, it's also nicer to play at a scale where you can actually see some recognizable bits.

Anyways, mark me as pleasantly surprised with this one. It's no War in the Pacific, but I'm digging it so far.

I’ve been on a Tower Defense kick after finishing my 3rd playthrough of Plants vs Zombies… so I went and picked up the latest Final Fantasy downloadable game on WiiWare, “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord”. It is literally a tower defense game, in that you are creating your Tower of Darkness™ to slay hordes of adventurers that try and climb it to destroy the Dark Crystal™.

Despite the sheer goofiness and cloying FF:CC license, there’s a decent little game there. You pick floors of the tower and summon monsters to defend it. There’s a fair bit of strategy, and it’s just fun in that Dungeon Keeper way to build your traps and tear apart adventurers. It’s also cheap, like $10. Starts out a bit slow but really picks up and gets challenging a few levels in. My two little boys LOVE watching me play as well.

The other Final Fantasy tower defense game out there, Crystal Defenders on XBLA, I cannot really recommend to anyone. It’s literally a port of a cellphone game, and it is brutally difficult with an awful interface to boot.

Also this week Little King’s Story came out, and is a Pikmin style light fantasy strategy game. It actually has some engaging characters (though remember my tolerance for cloyingly cute is abnormally high). The gameplay is a neat mix of exploration, expanding your town, and resource allocation among your workers. The European version has been out for a while and has gotten some rave reviews. I’m not super far into it but quite enjoying it so far.

I guess it’s a good week for being an overly cutesy strategic tyrant on the Wii.

Sorry for the ghost town around here, really been busy with getting things rolling and Robot and the projects we have underway here. Good times, fun to get back to the whole startup vibe (even if Robot is a lot further along from Day One than most startups).  Hopefully we'll have something to say publically more about life at Robot and what we're working on.

I will say that my current game is probably one of the most exciting games I've ever worked on, and that all the pieces are coming into place faster than I could have hoped.

Gaming wise, we're in a bit of that Spring lull though with Sacred 2 and Sims 3 around the corner I'm not sure how much longer that will last.  I've also been getting back into boardgames a bit more, getting a little Advanced Squad Leader under my belt and enjoying some lighter games like BattleLore and Small World. 

It remains a pretty awesome time to be a gamer...

Finally just about recovered from my disastrous HD crash.  Very nearly lost my entire music collection (managed to find a backup with about 95% of it).  Lost a ton of XNA prototyping work I'd done since Ensemble closed, along with various game brainstorming documents, which was probably the worst.  Most relevant kid photos had been backed up, but I lost some of those too.  Many save games lost, of course.

It's like the digital equivalent of having your house burn down or something.  Certainly has taught me a valuable lesson about backups...

Anyways, anyone following my Twitter feed ( http://twitter.com/xemu ) knows I've been much more active there than here -- something about the whole micro-blogging thing works for me.  But I'm not giving up on this blog either, I just imagine updates might be a bit more random.  I'm still really hoping to give some insight into the day-to-day of game development at Robot once we get started up there. 

Speaking of Robot -- offices open this week, and I'm very excited to get started.  It will have it's ups and downs, I'm sure, but I couldn't possibly ask for a better set of people to work with.  There are a few pre-opening meetings today and tomorrow, and I hope our network infrastructure is up enough at the new office I can shakedown a few things like our Perforce server.  We'll see, I'm sure the chaos factor will be high for at least a week or two...

Meanwhile, Halo Wars is finally out in North America this week.  Check it out and let me know what you think!

Full size here.

Dead Rising is easily one of my favorite games of this generation.  I'd just about given up hope for a sequel.  Hooray!

Came down with the virus that's been going around the family, so didn't do much today other than play games. Which, admittedly, was probably what my plan would have been even if I hadn't been sick.

I managed to "finish" three games today though, which is quite outside the usual statistical distribution for me. Fallout 3, CoD: World at War, and Interpol. All quite fun, in fact I imagine I may start up a second Fallout 3 playthrough shortly.