Minmaxing Life

I went to the panel discussion on the Future of MMOs (there’s a good writeup at Terra Nova) with pretty low expectations based on previous year’s experience. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be – mostly thanks to Min Kim from Nexon and because Ray Muzika is not only smart, he’s also a really nice person – but it was still really boring, full of obviousness and corporate non speech.

What I found most striking were the comments Cryptic Studio’s designer Jack Emmert made. Because he – as a developer – likes subscriptions, he went ballistic against microtransactions and made really strong comments against them – insisting that the model did not work outside of Asia (who’s supposedly “resisting subscriptions”).
But then he pretty much lost all credibility when he declared to Kim he was not familiar with Maple Story. I guess he’s also never heard of Habbo and its 8 million sessions per month and 60 MUSD annual revenue on virtual good. Talk about having a severe case of tunnel vision! Also, Jack did not seem to comprehend the crux of the problem is not wether to do microtransactions or subscriptions (heck, do both!) – the real question is about being free to play, giving free access to the game, or not. That is the inescapable trend he is going to have to fight against and it was quite shocking to see how blind he was to it. Interestingly, Min Kim mentioned that all of Nexon’s team are small: Kart Rider was developed by only 5 people and even now is no bigger than 20 people…

To me, the real future of MMOs is about in-browser, free to access and play experiences with a very strong identity (both in gameplay and visuals), developped by a low burn rate team.

At GDC, nothing illustrated this better than the session with Gene Endrody from Maid Marian. This incredible guy builds and runs in-browser, 3D MMOs with the help of his wife. And that’s it. He does everything, from programming and administrating the servers and the forums to modeling and animating. The result is nothing short of amazing: he has 1.8 million unique users every month (with big overlap between the games), the games uses Shockwave which is installed on 59% of PCs and he does monetization via advertising. His biggest constituency is Polish(!) at 19% followed by Americans at 13%.

He has two main products. His recently released Club Marian (a pure social hangout experience) and his better known Sherwood Dungeon (a casual fantasy MMO) and has about 6000 simultaneous players on the site at any time.
He makes heavy use of procedural construction approach (think nethack, rogue): all the environment is procedurally generated. He found out there was a similar power structure between the online and console industry: in the online world the gatekeepers are the web portals. He wanted to circumvent them so his strategy has been to build a network of affiliates with lots of smaller websites. There’s a minimum size for affiliates but he’s kept his linking rules very simple. Affiliates can in turn monetize by doing their own advertizing around sherwood dungeon’s.

All his 3D assets are created in maya or generated in lingo. Distribution model has been very important and procedural generation has been key (kept the download size low). Fraud detection is a huge issue for small companies.

What about customer support? The game is free so the expected level of support is low.

If you have registration, email confirmation and all that crap upfront, you immediately loose 90% of your players.

The other uber cool “future of MMOs” prototype I’ve seen at GDC was on a friend’s laptop right before this Maid Marian session. But shhh, this one is still in stealth mode…