The Life-cycle of online games

 Some players seem to forget that the gaming industry is a business run by game companies funded by money investors who do not give a damn about the players, so it is always about the money and therefore is run as a business.

Online games are a two part product, one being the actual game box called the "traffic generator" because it is what leads people into spending money and the second part which is the the "margin generator", in this case we are talking about the in-game shop or the monthly subscription.

In most cases the "traffic generator" is made cheaper in order to attract clients thus having a lower contribution margin, the perfect example of this are the free-to-play game which cost nothing for you to start playing thus attracting the masses that can't or don't want to spend money even though most of them eventually do, the subscription model however slightly exploits this as we are going to see in the product stages.

So what are these stages? In business management all products go through several stages called the "product life-cycle" but i won't bore you with the details, instead i will talk about the game changes in each stage from a players perceptive.

Hyped players at a midnight launch

Stages:
1. Market introduction stage
2. Growth stage
3. Maturity stage
4. Saturation and decline stage

On the first point when the game is still in development they start to increase the hype of their product for several reasons, the most basic one is to get the more players interested in the game, the second one because players do a leap of faith fueled by their own expectations multiplied by the hype and this is where most subscription based companies exploit the price a bit, since they know most players will buy the game anyway they increase the cost of the game to match the standard industry price for games in general, the difference is that most games with that cost do not have subscriptions so the game-box money is their only revenue source however subscription games get money from both models.

The Growth stage is after the game is launched, they will keep adding new fun stuff and making the game truly better by putting an effort,lots of quick patches, free extra content, cool new event, etc...

Maturity stage is achieved after the game is around for a while, most players are reaching the limits of what can be done in the game and the developers excitement starts to waver, they no longer listen to players and start to do things in a formulaic method by reusing content, making older content easier to motivate you to play with another character thus expecting players to stay around a bit longer.

The final stage of saturation and decline is when the players start to see the mind numbing content for what it really is and begin to leave, the companies see their player-base getting reduced so they announce the new expansion with the "never before seen features" thus starting the hype and setting the cycle back to stage one.

Any player with enough experience under his belt has been a part of this at one point or another.
Share your thoughts and experiences on the comment section bellow!

why most new games fail while Counter-Strike is still so popular

  The first time i played Counter-Strike i was in high-school and the game was still a unofficial Half-Life modification, at that time it was closer to a quake-like game with modern weapons then what it is now, but i will leave that for another topic.

History
  For those that don't know what Counter-Strike is, it's a First Person Shooter developed by a fellow player made from a game called Half-life that is why it was a "modification",  i use the past tense because once Valve saw the amount of people playing it, they bought the rights to the game and thus it became an official mod soon after and it became a stand-alone game later on.

The popularity
  The game popularity and success can be resumed into 1 word, "community" it's a bit vague yes but i will explain it in further detail later on , first we need to understand that this game was developed by a player meaning he knew what he wanted to play, i think its something most game developers have lost now-a-days they just build games around a franchise with 1 concept "making money", this reason is why most Indie(small companies) games are so entertaining to play, because it's not million dollar company with people who don't know a thing about gaming breathing down your neck.

ESL tournament at GamesCom

  Anyway Counter-Strike was made with an aspect in mind "for everyone", even back then you didn't need a top of the line PC to play it so most kids with a computer and a copy of Half-Life could play it, and keep in mind that back then internet was still the noisy old 54k modems and it was not that common, so most of us used to spend a lot of time playing in game store with about 20 PC linked over LAN, honestly the most fun way to play any game is to physically be with your team just like in most LAN tournaments which if you are a true gamer you have already gone to some, if not i recommend that you go if you have the chance you will love it.

  The rules of the game are very straight forward, team A vs team B fight inside a small closed map, just imagine an arena with streets and tunnels, many games have this even MMORPGs so why is the game still one of the most popular FPS games for over a decade?

  Well this is where the community comes in, as the number of players grown they started to make teams in which to compete with each other for bragging rights and so player-made competitive PvP was created and started to spread, since making a server was free players would make their own server so they could train with their team adding tactics into the game, eventually some companies started to provide high quality server for rent and now-a-days its fairly common to see game-server rentals for many types of games.

So what is missing in games today?
  This is more of a formula rather then just one thing, first games need to be able to be played by a large audience so they need to keep the game optimised for low-end computers rather then just focus on how awesome it can get with a top of the line one which seems to be what most games do, some people might upgrade the computer if they are really into it but most can't afford to do it.

MLG tournament

  Second is taking advantage of tournaments, people are competitive by nature even caveman would compete for the largest prey to show who was the best hunter, we are not that different as even the PvE players like to kick another players ass every now and then. So just like a great deal of people like to sit in front of the TV looking at whatever competitive sport they like(football, basketball, baseball...), we players also like to see competitions online as it is a sport of its own plus its probably the best publicity one can get specially at large events such as E3, GamesCom, etc...


  The third one is mainly for MMORPGs but some shooters still fail at it, is to allow players to fight guild vs guild(clan vs clan) for bragging rights, and im not talking about just Arena type gameplay like WoW has but for all types of objective based PvP.
  In the begining of this year a shooter named Global Agenda was released and it did not have a way for players to effectively do this and the results was the game losing most of its player-base within the first 2 months.

  A game that follows these simple rules will most likely last for years assuming there isn't something deeply wrong with it to start with, which is one of the reason i am looking forward to Guild Wars 2.

What are your thoughts on the subject?
Do you know any game that failed due to this?

Leave your comments or experiences bellow!

What is ArcheAge? (part 2)

Previous article: What is the Labor system and how Gathering & Crafting works

Last time we talked about how the Labor System combined with Gathering and Crafting, now we are going to take a glimpse at how Construction works in ArcheAge works as it is one of the most anticipated features in the game and the one one of the first things that was shown as the game was reviled to the community.

In ArcheAge is it possible to construct so many things, from several types of buildings to your own personal ship for naval warfare, this is the first feature i saw in this game several years ago that opened my eyes to the possibilities that it will bring to the game world, i will leave you first in a magical journey with this fantastic video that shows what amazing things can be achieved with this system and get a general idea how it works.

House Building
First of all we can't just build anywhere there are limited areas for construction to avoid blocking roads and such, so we need to attain a plot a land which is gather large, after that you go into building mode where you can rotate and place your selected house anywhere withing your land, but the house won't just pop out, you start with the house's foundation and you will have to gather the materials and have the necessary Labor Power to build it, how you will get the Labor power is up to you, use your guild members, pay some players or rent some NPCs it's your choice, eventually you can build walls to protect your town and gain money from taxes from both local merchants and players living within your domain.

Naval Construction
In ArcheAge it is also possible to build ships for your guild which can be used for several things, use them to explore the world, to conquer the sea or hunt sea monsters. To build a ship you first need to build a shipyard, for that you go to the harbor and select an area where it will be built and once its complete you can start constructing your ship, just like the house building you need materials and Labor Power.

What is ArcheAge? (part 1)

The first time i read about ArcheAge i was intrigued because i never heard of it before however, it had such amazing unique features that i never saw in any other mmo, it simply blew my mind how an unknown company could come out with such high quality game.

The reasons why its not that well known in the gaming community its because it's being developed by a Korean company(XLGames) and the lack of marketing, which might be a good thing because since the game isn't ready yet and they should use their funds for development instead.

ArcheAge is a Sand-Box MMO, a game that where the world evolves by the players hands by changing and interacting with the environment, which leads us to the Crafting and Gathering but in order to fully understand how it works we must first look at the Labor system.

Labor Power
There are 3 main stats in the game, Health Points, Mana Points and Labor Points, the last is the it is the main source for production, construction, crafting and gathering as well as certain entertainments for those who want to use them in social activities such as going to a party.

The Labor Points regenerate slowly over time, according to some beta-testers its about 1 point every 10 min and you will receive them whether you are online or offline up to limit which in the beta was 100 points, meaning it will take about 17 hours fill the bar. The Rate of use however is much higher as it depends on what exactly are you trying to do, crafting a simple item for example costs 1 LP but mining a node can cost 2 or 3 LP depending one the difficulty of what you are mining.

It is also possible to pay other players for their Labor or rent NPC's to use as labor for your constructions, so needless to say that building with a guild is far more effective.

Crafting and Gathering
Most gathering nodes have several stages each will give a different amount of material or a diferent one entirely, for example:

• an ore node has 3 stages a fresh unbroken stone, broken stone with ore showing, and broken stone with minerals showing, the stages will give you stone, metal and crystals respectively and the second and third stages may not spawn at all, also since the Labor Points are somewhat scarce there is no point in wasting it in something you have no use for unless you think it maybe profitable if you sell it.
• a tree will give a number of logs according to its size, so its better to chop down a big tree and let the smaller one grow(yes trees grow)

 The number of gathering materials is very varied, you can grow you own herb garden, forest, crops, you can pick apples... and the list goes on.
There are no Crafting professions, meaning you can craft what ever you want providing you have the recipe and the materials, just go to the correct crafting tool(anvil, mannequin, etc...).

Next on Part 2: How House and Naval contruction works

Micro-transaction games growing stronger!

  A multiplayer online games market data that tracks both PC massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and multiplayer online games (MOGs) that have a charged service this includes subscription and micro-transaction payments, has revealed that the subscription sector has suffered a heavy decline in 2010 while the micro-transaction type grew ever strongly.

  With this information  IHS Screen Digest expects the MMOG/MOG segment to grow from $2.7 billion in 2010 to $3.1 billion by 2015 due to the growth driven by microtransaction-based services in both the MMOG and MOG sub-segments.
Read the full article Here.

  This is most likely either due to the economic crisis world-wide as players try to go to free to play games or due to the fact that free to play games no longer have that "cheap" feeling and are starting to have as much quality as the the subscription games.

Guild Wars 2: skill bar

 We all know that GW2 is an action-type mmo and one of the aspect that was influenced was the skill bar, so today i am going to explain in detail how the it works as it is quite distinct from other games of the same genre.

 As we can see in the image above there a total of 10 skill slots divided in two types, basically the first 5 on the left are based on what weapon you currently have equipped and the last 5 are entirely up to the player, each of this two types is sub-divided into some specific skill types

Weapon skills

 This five slots are directly linked to your class and weapon type, meaning a ranger and a warrior with a bow will have a completely unique set weapon skills suited to their play-style.
Another thing that changes this five slots is which weapon you have in each hand, this is because you can use a large two-handed or used two one-handed weapons, simply put the first 3 slot are for main-hand and the other 2 are for the off-hand.

Profession skills 
 This set of 5 slots entirely customizable are sub-divided as follows, first one is a dedicated healing skill meaning you will always have 1 out of several abilities that will add to your survivability, the next three are utility skills which can be anything from buff to traps depending on your class and the last one is the elite skill that is powerful ability with a larger cool-down period.

 Skills can only be customized while out off combat you can however alternate between your two "weapon sets" while in-combat allowing your to be more versatile.
Some professions also have additional skill/buff/stances as their class mechanic as it can be seen in the first image above the weapon skills.

The Secret World

 

Many might not know this title but it has some strong roots, The Secret World is a new upcoming MMO from the creator of Age of Conan and The Longest Journey. It's purpose is to be distinct from your typical game as its neither futuristic nor it is the usual fantasy type, it in fact takes place in today's modern times but with a slight twist of the occult or has game Director Ragnar Tornquist describes it, "a world of contemporary dark fantasy".

In The Secret World the way players are introduced into the world is unique, you don't start in some remote location killing a few animals for some copper in fact you start the game as a regular person in one of 3 cities(New York, London or Seoul) going about doing typical day-by--day errands, but soon you start to see that some things are wrong and that those old frightening tales that you heard as a child are actually real as you dive into the occult.

 

One of the most impressive things about this game is that its lore is based in myths that we have all heard about, according to Ragnar Tornquist "it goes back 100 million years" from the Garden of Eden to Pandora's Box or even the Knights Templar.

Other interesting things about the game is that it will feature 3 opposing factions, the Illuminati, the Templars and the Dragon which i will talk about in another post and the lack of the typical experience bar in the character development.

I believe this game will be a breath of fresh air in this overcrowded gaming genre and i am looking forward to checking it in more detail!

Guild Wars 2 PvP (Part 1): Let us go to War

  Today I want to talk about a very important aspect of the game, the PvP of Guild War 2. I believe in competitiveness and the ability to provide a wide array of choices for groups or single players to be ingredients for a healthy and lasting PvP community in a game. Now I'm going to list the PvP formats we know so far:

Hot Join
  "Hot Join" are games aimed for the casual side of structured PvP. From 1v1 and up to 10v10 matches, players can join any open map at any time, as much as to experiment new builds, or wanting a few quick exciting matches to get out of the PvE environment. The Hot Join has a mechanic that on a lost match, the server auto-balances the players on each team, once the round ends the server loads up the next match or players can reselect their own teams for their matches. This kind of setup allows players to find their favorite servers and build a community by playing more then one game with the same people.

Tournaments
  Tournaments are the competitive cookie in GW2. With matches of 5v5, the tournaments will run with varying frequency, and different reward levels will allow some players to gain experience and to just experience what this format entails in smaller tournaments while more-organized teams battle it out in the larger tournaments.

Tournaments come in the following flavors:

• Pickup Tournaments: These single-elimination tournaments wait for 8 teams to join before starting. Once they start, they go through 3 rounds of eliminations, with winners receiving qualifier points.
• Monthly Tournaments: For monthly tournaments, you'll need a certain amount of qualifier points to join.
• Yearly Tournaments: These grand tournaments feature the winners from the monthly tournaments slugging it out for the right to call themselves the best PvP players of the year.
• Player-Run Tournaments: These tournaments will be customized by players, allowing for great flexibility and unique bragging rights.

Guild Wars 2: a worthy successor to 2011 mmos

Today I want to talk about combat, there are many things worth mentioning about this game and I'll probably spread this for future posts, yet the reason I chose this topic is because I feel that it is one of the most important aspects of the game.

- Cross-class combo's, imagine a Elementarist setting a wall of fire and if someone shoots through it, the projectiles become imbued with the fire attribute dealing extra damage, or a guardian setting a healing circle on the ground and shooting through it will heal the allies in the vicinity of the enemy it hits. These are only a small example of the many combinations there will be in the game, sounds like fun? It sure does to me!

- Dynamic skill system, no longer are we restricted to combat skills only when there is a target present as with most games, for example, if you don't have a target and use a skill, if there is a potential target in the vicinity it will take damage and be auto-targeted, if not, the skill is still used. Did it ever make sense that those 2H weapons almost as big as our own characters never hit more then 1-2 targets? In GW each swing will hit everything within it's reach! Realistic? Flexible? More of that please!

- Customizable skills, although the left half of the skill bar is fixed depending on what weapon we have equipped, there are a big variety of weapons, each with different situation value translating into a wide array of actual choices, the right half is completely customizable much in the same spirit as GW1, plus you can customize it further with some feats that modify skills.

- Unique underwater combat, once you dive your normal skills no longer apply, you get a new set of skills that are exclusive for water combat, this skills have unique effects that would not be possible otherwise such as forcing an enemy to sink.

Eve online: Investment gone wrong

  It comes as a surprise to me that the news aren't about gold selling anymore... eight months ago, two players named Eddie and Mordor began to establish a reputation for themselves as online brokers. In reality, however, it was just the two of them taking in people’s money(aka ISK in-game) and giving back 5% every week as rewards from their "investment".

  Week after week the business snowballed, but not as the money raked in but players who didn't know they were throwing away their money in the guise of investments for the future. In short order, they had as many as 300 new investors each week. All throwing their ISKs at the pair for absolutely nothing in return except a guarantee. A guarantee that their money would be invested into some other worthwhile fund and would earn them a consistent 5% back every week. They weren't found out until they forwarded the a message on their "online trading site" saying it was all over.

  In case someone don't know what a Ponzi scam is and hasn't watched the news in awhile, a explanation: The investment broker, or whoever is running the scheme, offer a solid “investment” that they claim will pay out great sums of money overtime. But instead of investing this money as promised, the person will pocket the money and pay you your 5% out of the money you and others gave them. After a while, people are so happy with their consistent return that they invest even more money not knowing that it’s not going anywhere except the scheme operator’s bank account. As word of mouth spreads on this great investment, the scheme runner will start taking in more and more money while only paying out a consistent 5% every week. As people reinvest their money, the business expands almost exponentially...until they are found out or they stop paying out and make a run with everyones investment money.

  Over the years I have heard many such news in RL, it came as a mild surprise that this could spread to the online world, but the most suprising thing for me is that it reached the scale it did in such a long time with no one the wiser...don't people watch tv at least? Naturally CCP being themselves allows such schemes in the EVE universe so technically what they did isn't illegal, except maybe in the eyes of all the people that lost their money but that's another story....

Free to play MMOs a new trend?

  In the past couple of years we have seen a lot of MMORPGs going from P2P(pay to play) to F2P(free to play) mainly due to subscription decline as a way to regain some players while maintaining profit from the online shops.
 
  Most of this games were not made from unknown indy companies but from well established IPs and we are going to briefly talk about each one of them.

  Dungeons and Dragons Online launched on February 28, 2006 and remained a p2p MMORPG with a $14.99 monthly fee up until September 9, 2009. Since going free to play Dungeons and Dragons Online has more players than ever. Plus, the game’s publisher("Turbin") is reporting record revenues from the game.

  RF Online or Rising Force Online, launched on November 21, 2006 with a $14.99 monthly fee. The game was both developed and published by CCR International but only went free to play in late 2008.

  The Chronicles of Spellborn launched on April 23, 2009 as a p2p MMORPG with a subscription of $14.99 / month. The game’s developers went bankrupt in June 2009, the game’s publisher in North America announced that they would redevelop the game as a free to play title. Since going free to play – TCoS  has opened up to many more players.

  Lord of the Rings Online launched on April 24, 2007 after several expansions re-launched as F2P on September 8, 2010. Since their transition to a mixture of subscription/F2P model Executive Producer Kate Paiz announced that they have doubled both revenue and player-base.

  Age of Conan launched on May 20, 2008 was made F2P recently in a new expansion named Unchained on July 1st, 2011. On the first month since they gone F2P their player-base was increased by 300,000 accounts.

  It is clear from past experiences that the Free to Play model is a success, increasing both revenue and the player-base it is becoming more and more common now-a-days.

  I dislike F2P games because allowing players to buy item/buffs at a shop ruins immersion, any sense of accomplishment and the overall fun i have in the game, as a PvP(player vs player) lover i feel that the game is ruined once the "wining condition" becomes "who wasted more money".

  What do you think?

Tera: Political system

  For those who don't know Tera is one of the next-generation games of the MMO genre, or should i say action-MMORPG. It's most known features are the targeting, combat and political system, to keep this post small i will only talk about its political system.

  In Tera players can rise to fame through PvP, epic quests and via the popular vote to become 1 of 18 Vanarchs, these players are the rulers of their designated region and have the unique power to change the rules within their domain, such as changing the taxes, forbid(or not) world-pvp, opening new shops, make player-made events, change the spawn time of the mobs and even throw players in jail.

  Above the Vanarchs there are the Exarchs which we know very little about due to lack of information, however it is known that they supposedly have the power to affect entire continents.

  This is where the information stops and players start to wonder... will this be balanced? Can these politicians be overthrown? Can a big guild maintain constant power?

Maybe some of them will be answered at GamesCom, but until then we can only wait.

World of Warcraft sustaining heavy casualties!

  We are on the second quarter of 2011 and it has been confirmed that Blizzard has lost over 300,000 World of Warcraft subscribers, adding to the losses in the first quarter it mounts up to 600,000+ subscribers that stopped playing in this year alone.

As a result of the decline the developers are forced to find out other ways to please their faithful customers by other means other "adding random content".

"As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content..." - Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime

  Yes either that or Blizzard has dumbed down the genre to badly that even the newest of players needs little to no experience to overcome what ever "obstacles" also know as 'content' to get their gear which seems to rain from the skies in WoW.

  Obviously we don't expect blizzard to blame them selves, so instead they choose to pat the back of their players and say "hey its because you're THE MAN", raising their moral and maintaining the corporate facade... a text book example of Public Relations to minimize their losses.

Aion of today - Assault on Balaurea

  I remember being amongst the hype when Aion first launched 2009, it was supposed to rock the foundations of the MMO world. I mean, what new hyped released in the genre isn’t these days?  But Aion like so many others before it fell short to it's advertised potential in the West not because it wasn’t a polished and well-made game, but because it’s pacing and mechanics were aimed towards the Eastern market, despite of voices defending as being otherwise for the Europeans.

  Over the course of the twelve-plus months since it launched NCsoft struggled, with the western and eastern studios trying to make the game what it needs to be to draw more North American and European gamers.

  I resubbed the title upon the new expansion and have been at it for awhile, and feel it’s safe to suggest that Aion is much closer now to the game NCsoft needs it to be than it was at launch.  It’s polished, pretty, and content complete with a much smoother progression that will please most Western gamers looking for an Eastern-influenced fantasy MMO that comes without the mindless mob-grind that it was in the beginning.

  It stills rely a little heavily on repeatable quests to fill in gaps, but new solo dungeons help to get out of the boredom of just grinding.  As it is now, Aion of today is a much better game than it was at launch, but it still won’t be a title to attract the masses.