Via Slashdot, an interesting debate over whether MMORPGs benefit sufficiently from being based on major franchise IPs (like Star Wars). Paraphrasing the arguments in favor:

• It almost guarantees a strong launch.
• Design limitations required by the IP actually enhance the design process by focusing developer innovation within a narrower subset of possibilities.
• The popularity of the Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies proves that you can create your own vision of a franchise and still make (enough) fans happy.

Arguments against:

• Players turn away from IP-based MMORPGs because they cannot live up to the fanbase’s expectations. At the same time, original content (which an MMORPG must have) is always at risk of offending sensitive fans.
• Developers have less flexibility when designing the environment, its rules, and the content that makes the game interesting (or not).
• With pre-existing protagonists (i.e. Luke Skywalker) running around, players are left to portray secondary bit-players at best. Players want to be heroes, not bit-players.

The arguments against seem more persuasive to me. That said, I think it’s premature to assume that franchise-based MMORPGs can’t work. Many have worried about sensitive fans, and there is real risk there… but on the other hand, fans clearly are willing to embrace new, well-conceived content; so willing, in fact, that they often create their own. I wish I had a dollar for every homemade Star Wars script.

Naysayers generally flaunt Star Wars Galaxies as proof that franchise-based MMORPGs can’t work, but SWG’s failure had little to do with “sensitive fans” or protagonist-envy, and more to do with the fact that SWG was boring. Quoting from the Gamespot review: “…gameplay is generally slow and uneventful, and that once the novelty of the Star Wars setting wears off–and it probably will–there isn’t much of interest to be found in the game at this point.” We’ll never know if most fans would have tolerated much “original” content because of this.

Nor will we ever know if “protagonist-envy” could have been dealt with by simply making it a little easier to become a jedi (as opposed to making it trivial, which is what Sony did with its disastrous new game enhancements). And players were given extremely limited tools via which to enrich the universe with their own content and stories, despite claims that SWG would be a paradise of user-generated content. Players wanted to contribute, but most found the process too unrewarding. And that’s a shame, because capturing that energy is one of the things a great franchise-based MMORPG could potentially do very well.

For those who don’t know, Mark Kern (the former team lead for World of Warcraft) recently left Blizzard to form his own MMO development company, Red 5 Studios. Mark took a brief respite from 24/7 entrepreneurship to answer a few of my questions:

When World of Warcraft first came to market, it succeeded in part by addressing some serious design flaws that plagued other MMORPGs. Now the competition has learned. How will Red 5 distinguish itself from companies like Blizzard, Sony, Ncsoft, Turbine, etc?

Competition is a good thing. We were certainly aware of it on our last project and I think we did well. So, it isn’t a new thing for us. I think World of Warcraft’s design and implementation caught many people off guard. Most felt it was the wrong direction to take and predicted that the game would quickly burn out. They are just starting to absorb the reasons why it worked, while we have the advantage of already internalizing those lessons.

To remain competitive, we will have to stay ahead of the curve, and build on what we’ve already learned. Being small has its advantages, in that we can take greater risks and are nimble enough to change direction quickly if we need to. We are also 100% focused on development. We didn’t want to have to split our attention between making the game and deploying, marketing and operating it like most other MMO studios. This can be a huge distraction.

Read the rest of the interview…

Via Joystiq, (almost) everything you ever wanted to know about UK video game consumer demographics. Not too many surprises in there, but two things did catch my attention: 1) There are nearly as many female gamers as there are male gamers in every single age segment. They often play different games, but in general the gender gap has nearly vanished. 2) A nearly equal number of men and women play MMOGs.

Given that RPGs have always been more popular with women than, say, FPS or sports games, I suppose it isn’t such a huge shock that many women are playing MMOGs, since most of the currently-popular MMOGs fall into the RPG genre. Furthermore, studies have shown that women tend to prefer collaborative games, and most MMOGs certainly qualify as collaborative. I often dismiss the MMORPG market as being overcrowded, but this makes me rethink that assertion. A little.

PS. Oh, and if you didn’t already read it on every other game-centric blog ever written: the ESA just announced that 35% of US parents play video games.

Thanks to Wonderland, I’ve discovered a cool little game called Fastr which is based on the Flickr image-sharing service. Fastr is a multiplayer game. Every 40 seconds or so, it appears to pick a random (simple) word and then begins downloading images from Flickr that have been tagged with that word. It displays another image every few seconds. Your goal is to guess the tag word as quickly as possible (based on the images). A quicker guess yields more points. I love it!

This game has opened my eyes to a whole new world of potential design uses for open content. The possibilities are endless. For example, how about an FPS or RPG in which the player has the power to look into other people’s minds via ESP and see their thoughts (which would be expressed as images)? When the player uses his power on important characters (especially at key plot moments), he would of course see pre-defined content. But, when using his power to gaze into the minds of normal people on the street, the images he sees could be pulled directly from Flickr. Image selection could be based on a sensible set of random keywords. Or perhaps images could be pulled from a randomly-selected Flickr user’s library (preferably sharing a tag-word, regardless of the word itself), so that a truly meaningful “thought-sequence” would be reconstructed for the player. All of a sudden, “filler” NPCs in a game acquire unique, interesting characteristics. They cease to be filler, and instead truly enrich the player’s experience. :)

More interesting news via Next Gen; this time covering speculation that Sony is actually more concerned about Blu-ray (and beating Toshiba’s HD-DVD) than it is about competition from Xbox. Take this along with my assertion that Microsoft sees Xbox as primarily a defense of its home computing monopoly, and games start to feel rather extraneous to the upcoming console war.

Anyway, Next Gen presents some good reasons for Sony to be concerned about HD-DVD. Michael Pachter speculates that, in a successful scenario, Blu-ray could be worth $2B/year in royalties to Sony. Much-needed cash for a company that derives an uncomfortably huge percentage of its profit from just its games division. Then again, given that huge percentage, one finds it hard to believe that Sony would discount the importance of the PS3. If the 360 fails, Microsoft still has Windows. If the PS3 fails, Sony has… not quite so much.

And that’s my point. I don’t believe you can meaningfully distill Sony’s battle plan into something as simple as “win Blu-ray!” The PS3 is important to Sony’s future. Blu-ray is important to Sony’s future. It’s all tied up together, and I’ll bet that creates some really interesting tensions within the company.

Nintendo’s strategy keeps looking good to me. Let Microsoft and Sony kill each other in the high end market, fighting wars that don’t all relate specifically to games. Perhaps any consumer who wishes to own two consoles will opt for a PS3 or a 360… and the Revolution. It’ll be cheap enough, and it’ll have a bunch of innovative games that you can’t play on the other consoles.

Via Next Gen, Alienware (maker of gaming PCs) has launched a digital download store for games. Similar stores and services are becoming increasingly common, though this is (to my knowledge) the first hardcore offering made by a company outside the entertainment/media industry. A very interesting attempt by Alienware to build a closer relationship with its customers (and make some extra cash in the process).

I was particularly impressed by the availability of recently-released, popular games such as FEAR, Civ 4, and King Kong. You don’t normally see titles like those offered by a digital 3rd party portal.

And speaking of digital distribution, I stumbled onto the Game xStream service, a competitor to Valve’s Steam that one-ups it by enabling gameplay within minutes of initiating a download. The service attracted press several months back, and just raked in a second round of funding.

PS. Unrelated news of interest: someone’s selling real products (PC hardware) for virtual bucks in Second Life, and E3 appears to be forbidding scantily-clad booth-babes this year.

Just want to quickly highlight a good read on the success of the Nintendo DS in Japan.

Some of you may have heard about a company called Engage Advertising that recently inserted advertisements on behalf of the Subway restaurant chain into the ever-popular Counter-Strike. Engage got quite a bit of (negative) publicity when Valve, the developer of Counter-Strike, announced that it had not approved the advertising campaign, and was treating the situation as a “legal matter“.

I’ve been wondering how something like this could ever happen without Valve’s knowledge, much less permission. Fortunately, ArsTechnica has posted an interesting article that explains who was involved, how the ads made it into the game, etc. Basically, Engage and IGA Partners worked directly with individual Counter-Strike server operators, as opposed to Valve itself.

This does raise an interesting question: will server operators for these types of games always be content to host them, no matter how much dynamic advertising is embedded within? Or will they demand a revenue share? Given that operators are mostly volunteers and fans, you might not expect a backlash, but operators have shown themselves willing to fight developers in the past.

Final thoughts: this marketing campaign was a bad idea in more ways than one. Counter-Strike appears to have been arbitrarily blanketed with Subway ads. They stick out like sore thumbs. A guaranteed mood-killer… offensively conspicuous at best. Doesn’t make me want to run out and buy a sandwich.

I’m at the GSD&M Digital America Conference today. One of the featured speakers is Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab, maker of the MMOG Second Life. Here’s the talk recap:

There are 100k users of Second Life, spending approximately two million hours per month in-game. Unlike most games, everything in Second Life was built by the game’s users. Linden Lab just provides “the virtual dirt.” Users can do anything in Second Life that they can do in the real world: learn to dance, play games that other users have made, drive cars… anything. 43% of users are female, the average age is 32, and 25% of users are international.

There are thousands of people creating goods and services within Second Life. The linden dollar (an in-game currency) can be traded for real US dollars in an exchange supported by Linden Lab, and vice versa. There are currently $50M US dollars worth of annual transacations within Second Life. Users spend, on average, almost a dollar an hour. There is even a b2b component (i.e. there are actually virtual businesses supplying other virtual business with product in-game.)

Second Life works because of two technological milestones: common access to broadband and a certain level of 3d processing capability. People you need to give people a meaningful level of creative capability before they’ll make a time investment in something like Second Life.

Kasi Nafus, one Second Life player, is probably making approximately $60k per year by selling virtual clothing in-game. Anshe Chung, “the most powerful person in Second Life”, is a virtual real estate developer. She buys and develops real estate, then turns it around to other users for a profit. Anshe’s probably making between $150K - $200K per year. She owns approximately 5-6% of all the acreage in Second Life. There’s a $1k cost associated with the purchase of a new 16 acre plot of land, since that much land requires another server to support it. Linden Lab also charges all virtual land owners a recurring land tax.

Charitable events are very popular in Second Life. With a single event, the American Cancer Society raised the same amount of money (per person) in one day in Second Life than they would have over several months in a small US city.

Philip begins a real-time, live demo of Second Life. He takes a screen shot of a fellow player, builds a giant poster in a few seconds, and pastes the picture onto the poster for all to see. Next, he begins chatting with two users who are virtually cuddling nearby. One of them is dressed in an outfit covered with kittens; the other seems to have a virtual bluetooth headset in his ear. The wearer of the headset gives Philip a notecard explaining what it does (all sorts of in-game communication functions!) He says that he paid 250 linden dollars for the device. Philip tells the audience: “The only precious resource in Second Life is your intelligence.”

Philip decides to “change clothes.” He turns into a robot, then starts flying around (anyone can fly in Second Life). He soars off into the distance, surrounded by a seemingly endless quantity of content…