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Ripple Works

Hardcore MMO players are a niche audience. There, I said it. You, as someone who is taking the time to read an obscure MMO gaming blog, are in the far tail of the statistical distribution. And I’m writing it, so I’m even further out there.

Attempting to appeal to players like us is intentionally gutting your potential audience. At IMGDC, Gordon Walton of Bioware compared you to a connoisseur of fine wine. You have discriminating tastes and an attention to detail, and you will go through great effort to wrest a nugget of fun from your entertainment. For most others, he explained, “ripple works.” Fine details are lost on them, and simple is easy.

Sure, you say, children like sweet, bland, and greasy food, but they eventually move beyond McDonald’s. We can lure them in with casual semi-MMOs and then let them graduate to the big leagues. These WoW players are going to want something meatier soon. Great, show me anywhere it has happened. Has your favorite book outsold The Davinci Code? Which of your favorite band’s albums has outsold Britney Spears? Is the main character of your favorite movie better known than Jar-Jar Binks? There are lots of great things that appeal to refined tastes, and few of them are market leaders. Popularity does not determine quality, but it does determine who gets rich and where resources get invested.

Don’t worry. It’s a big market. Your niche can survive a long time. The same market that mass-produces pap (some of it really enjoyable, if we can see past our elitism) makes it worthwhile to cater to lots of smaller markets along the way. The center of mass may be even less hardcore-MMOy than WoW’s pre-70 game, but that will subsidize your less lucrative refined tastes. That should be a liberating thought for the ~5% of WoW players who beat the Black Temple before 2.4: millions of people paid for the creation of content that you completed and they never saw.

: Zubon

Getting Whirled

I must confess that I’ve been feeling underwhelmed by new sites like Metaplace and Whirled.

I get it intellectually — these sorts of services can do for gaming and virtual worlds what YouTube has done for video. But I just haven’t found myself feeling excited. I don’t even have enough time to run all the WoW dailies I want to run, much less putz around through a dozen new MMO’s every month. Give me my WoW expansions and give me Warhammer Online, but Metaplace? Yawn.

And I was trying to like them, I really was. I’m a big admirer of Raph (who’s responsible for Metaplace), and I spent an hour or two poking around the Whirled beta last week. The concept seemed neat, but I found the experience underwhelming. Boring.

‘Till this afternoon.

Continue reading Getting Whirled

1000 Bloom, 900 Wither

The phrase appearing most in my IMGDC notes, although no one actually said it, is “let a thousand flowers bloom.” Whatever fun or crazy idea you have, make that game. Independent studios have the freedom to try things that are too risky or quirky for big producers. Barriers to entry have never been lower, with improved middleware and distribution channels. Everyone on the forums who thinks he can do better has a chance to prove it.

Of course, Sturgeon’s law applies. Most of them are going to be crap. Have you been to a flash games portal? There are a dozen decent games of each type, followed by a couple hundred horrors. That is fine though, because players will tend towards the few quality games, followed by a long tail of niche games with implementations that appeal to a small number of people. Many attempts at low cost will produce a few gems, which can then receive greater attention.

By greater attention, I mean being bought by a larger company, unless your indie has the business framework to work with a million customers. That is a good problem to have, but it probably means you should cash out and use that money to fund your dream project. If you are not part of the crap 90%, you might have a sustainable niche game, and a select few will be bought out by EA, Sony, etc.

Or maybe they will just take your idea and run with it. I have not noticed Blizzard making payments to Games Workshop or the estates of Gary Gygax and JRR Tolkien, nor did Richard Bartle drive away in a gold-plated limousine.

: Zubon

What we say // What we mean

“Hi everyone” // “Why do I even bother? Half the guild never replies”
“After thinking it long and hard…” // “I really-really thought about it for five minutes while I was having lunch, but it had been festering for a while”
“…I’ve decided this isn’t really the guild for me.” // “I’ve decided that 40% of the guild are retards, the other 40% are useless and the remaining 20% are people that I have no beef with. For now.”
“I guess the guild changed from what it used to be, and while change is good…” // “I’m not getting my way anymore”
“… for some of us it can take some effort to adapt” // “I can’t be bothered”

Continue reading What we say // What we mean

Great Concepts

I will be posting about things from IMGDC for a while, but first I must take a page from Nerfbat. If you want your game to succeed, you must have a more awesome concept than Attack of the Mutant Camels, in which you battle giant, fireball-spewing camels. This is a concept so awesome that it not only spawned a sequel involving bipedal goats with guns, but someone else used the same name for a later game. It looks like someone made an updated version, but you can still play the original.

I proposed a panel on “fire-breathing camels and your indie game.” They turned me down.

: Zubon