Re:Only paying once...
on
Pay to Play
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are models for games that will simply never work as pay-for-play. No-one is going to pay by the month for a Quake-style FPS game, when Quake 3 can be played for free. Basicly, if the game lacks persistance (of either character, or some collection of accumulated resources through accomplishments), there's nothing there worth paying for. And even so, if the world itself does not offer persistence and a social space, it probably won't work.
You're at no risk of having to pay-to-play for Quake 3 deathmatches or Empire Earth battles (much as some of the suits would like to delude themselves into thinking so).
This is not a "One size fits all" business model. You cannot plug just any genre or type of game into it and have money magically pour out the other end, and a lot of capital is going to get poured down the drain proving that.
Pay to play works for these because there is genuine value-added that simply cannot be provided any other way.
Because it's the worlds worst Customer Service nightmare when some putz pays $1500 for a character and gets scammed.
--Dave Rickey
Re:The pay-for-play concept works
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 1
You are paying for the server costs, which I would imagine is pretty expensive per month.
Servers, bandwidth, and Customer Support costs roughly $5-6 dollars a month per customer. DAoC burns more bandwidth than most European countries.
--Dave Rickey
Re:Free games!
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's been tried, it doesn't seem to work. You need to have a full-price unit on the shelves for people to actually buy. Hell, our piece of the retail sale barely pays for the "free" month, we'd *gladly* just let you download it. People just don't do it in enough numbers to make a viable business model.
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
Re:they are gonna try this again.
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's what you are missing: EverQuest, Ultima Online, and Lineage: The Bloodpledge (state religion in South Korea) are the highest grossing PC games *ever*. Bigger than Starcraft, bigger than Quake 3, bigger than Myst. That $10/month adds up when the typical player sticks around for more than a year. And you don't have to share the subscription revnue with the retailers and distributors (who typically take 3/4 of the purchase price).
That's why the industry is suddenly waking up. This is a genuinely stronger business model that *works*. Online games are almost certainly going to be a $1,000,000,000 (that's one *billion*) dollar industry in 2003, after the release of Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online. It's already worth hundreds of millions in actual revnues companies are collecting *now*.
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
My Porsche Needs Performance Upgrades
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Just FYI, the title of this post is an inside joke, I'm not sure how many of you will understand the source. Just rest assured I mean it in fun.
Anyway, I'm one of the designers who worked on Dark Age of Camelot, a recently released subscription-based OLRPG (which now has revenues exceeding $1.4 million/month and climbing fast). Before that, I had a very minor role on the team that created EverQuest. These games are my obsession, my career, pretty much my Mission in Life (yeah, it's pathetic).
Anyway, there's a lot more going on here than just evil corporations finding a way to extract more money from consumers. Some of the companies involved do think that way, you can tell which ones by the red ink and failed games they produce.
If MMOG's offer no more gameplay than you can currently get from a boxed retail title, they will fail. This was the core problem with Motor City Online, it was not really an MMOG, just a "captive audience" matchmaking service for an internet-playable racing game, the actual game could have been released as a standard boxed title with a GameSpy Lite client, and have been accepted quite happily by the car-crazy crowd that liked the "Need For Speed" and "Test Drive" franchises.
MMOG is only one of the names we apply to these games, there's another that much more accurately reflects what they do: Persistent Simulated Worlds. The monthly fee isn't paying for the game, it's paying the company to safeguard the integrity of the *persistent* world.
The average MMOG player spends 20 hours a *week* playing his game of choice, at a cost around 12 cents an hour. How many forms of entertainment are that cheap? The game is only a focus, what's really happening is an artifical community (there's nothing virtual about it). People have friends, enemies, even romantic relationships (don't ask).
In all truth, it's not the game you're paying for, but the community that forms within it.
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
Re:The other "Emergence" was much more than a 6
on
Emergence
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· Score: 1
I think because his next book, Threshold, was so bad. Some writers only have one good book in them, For Palmer it was Emergence.
On the subject of reverse-linking through combing through your logs, it doesn't seem like this would be a particularly difficult problem, except that it would need a different parser for each web-server implementation. To reach critical mass, you'd need to find a subcommunity where for whatever reason most of the sites for it used the same architecture. However, for focused community sites, it would seem a natural thing to do, it surprises me no-one ever tried it.
As for the reviewer's angst about the failure to explain God's role, I'm surprised the same thing didn't jump out at him that did at me: Emergent systems are controlled from the edges. Direct intervention rarely produces the results you are looking for, you have to monkey with the fundamental rules.
God's all-powerful and all-knowing, but he worked himself out of a job in the first planck unit after the Big Bang. Since then, there's been nothing for him to do but sit back and watch it run.
--Dave Rickey
More useful than the reviewer gives credit for
on
Emergence
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· Score: 1
For a variety of reasons, I am very interested in emergent behaviour. However, most of the literature about it has been too focused, applying only to a very specific field and without any effort to extract general principles.
Bioligists discuss it in terms of evolution, physicists talk about it in terms of particle physics and cosmology, sociologists talk about it in terms of city formation and anthropologists in terms of cultural dynamics. But none of them try to explain emergence in and of itself, except for the mathemeticians (and good luck figuring out what the hell they are talking about if you don't have a higher degree in pure math).
As a prior commenter stated, many people *talk* about emergence, and derive emergent principle from their disciplines, but very little effort is made to define what emergence is, how it works, and how to tell the difference between emergence and random noise. In answer to another commenter's question, emergence frequently *is* a matter of scale, random behaviour at one level displays emergent properties at the next level, then reverts to apparent randomness at higher scales, and then can display randomness *again* at the next jump in scale. Emergence is what happens when all the "random" fluctuation happen to cancel each other out in just the right ways to make something definitely non-random happen.
That's why this book is useful, because it examines emergence as a whole concept in plain english, rather than just focusing on a particular example or type of emergence.
Slashdot Mirror
You're at no risk of having to pay-to-play for Quake 3 deathmatches or Empire Earth battles (much as some of the suits would like to delude themselves into thinking so).
This is not a "One size fits all" business model. You cannot plug just any genre or type of game into it and have money magically pour out the other end, and a lot of capital is going to get poured down the drain proving that.
Pay to play works for these because there is genuine value-added that simply cannot be provided any other way.
--Dave Rickey
--Dave Rickey
Servers, bandwidth, and Customer Support costs roughly $5-6 dollars a month per customer. DAoC burns more bandwidth than most European countries.
--Dave Rickey
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
That's why the industry is suddenly waking up. This is a genuinely stronger business model that *works*. Online games are almost certainly going to be a $1,000,000,000 (that's one *billion*) dollar industry in 2003, after the release of Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online. It's already worth hundreds of millions in actual revnues companies are collecting *now*.
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
Anyway, I'm one of the designers who worked on Dark Age of Camelot, a recently released subscription-based OLRPG (which now has revenues exceeding $1.4 million/month and climbing fast). Before that, I had a very minor role on the team that created EverQuest. These games are my obsession, my career, pretty much my Mission in Life (yeah, it's pathetic).
Anyway, there's a lot more going on here than just evil corporations finding a way to extract more money from consumers. Some of the companies involved do think that way, you can tell which ones by the red ink and failed games they produce.
If MMOG's offer no more gameplay than you can currently get from a boxed retail title, they will fail. This was the core problem with Motor City Online, it was not really an MMOG, just a "captive audience" matchmaking service for an internet-playable racing game, the actual game could have been released as a standard boxed title with a GameSpy Lite client, and have been accepted quite happily by the car-crazy crowd that liked the "Need For Speed" and "Test Drive" franchises.
MMOG is only one of the names we apply to these games, there's another that much more accurately reflects what they do: Persistent Simulated Worlds. The monthly fee isn't paying for the game, it's paying the company to safeguard the integrity of the *persistent* world.
The average MMOG player spends 20 hours a *week* playing his game of choice, at a cost around 12 cents an hour. How many forms of entertainment are that cheap? The game is only a focus, what's really happening is an artifical community (there's nothing virtual about it). People have friends, enemies, even romantic relationships (don't ask).
In all truth, it's not the game you're paying for, but the community that forms within it.
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
--Dave Rickey
As for the reviewer's angst about the failure to explain God's role, I'm surprised the same thing didn't jump out at him that did at me: Emergent systems are controlled from the edges . Direct intervention rarely produces the results you are looking for, you have to monkey with the fundamental rules.
God's all-powerful and all-knowing, but he worked himself out of a job in the first planck unit after the Big Bang. Since then, there's been nothing for him to do but sit back and watch it run.
--Dave Rickey
Bioligists discuss it in terms of evolution, physicists talk about it in terms of particle physics and cosmology, sociologists talk about it in terms of city formation and anthropologists in terms of cultural dynamics. But none of them try to explain emergence in and of itself, except for the mathemeticians (and good luck figuring out what the hell they are talking about if you don't have a higher degree in pure math).
As a prior commenter stated, many people *talk* about emergence, and derive emergent principle from their disciplines, but very little effort is made to define what emergence is, how it works, and how to tell the difference between emergence and random noise. In answer to another commenter's question, emergence frequently *is* a matter of scale, random behaviour at one level displays emergent properties at the next level, then reverts to apparent randomness at higher scales, and then can display randomness *again* at the next jump in scale. Emergence is what happens when all the "random" fluctuation happen to cancel each other out in just the right ways to make something definitely non-random happen.
That's why this book is useful, because it examines emergence as a whole concept in plain english, rather than just focusing on a particular example or type of emergence.
--Dave Rickey