Multiplayer Interactive-Fiction Game-Design Blog

Some out-of-theory effects do exist though: Some socialisers like organizing their own social events, effectively providing free content. Virtual worlds always have newbies coming in, and if they can be introduced to the other socialisers they will provide new topics of discussion. Most importantly, socialisers develop relationships that keep them in the virtual world even though they're bored.

Even if targeting a virtual world at a specific category of player works (such as for achievers), targeting a virtual world at a mix of player-types works better for a few reasons:

1. 
   The explorer, socialiser, achiever, killer matrix is actually a two dimensional continuum. Many people fall in-between explorer and socialiser, or explorer and achiever, etc. Virtual worlds targeted exclusively at one player type will lose those players that fall between.
   
2. 
   Players' types (explorer, socialiser, etc.) change depending upon their moods. (For example: While I usually like playing adventure games, I still go for the occasional CRPG.) One reviewer commented that it's worse than this, since player types also change depending upon the virtual world - which is an interesting social engineering subject that influences all virtual worlds, not just those targeted at explorers.
   
3. 
   Players have friends who may not all fall into the same player type. If a virtual world is exclusively targeted at one player type (such as explorers) then players will find it harder to get friends to play. If their friends get involved in another (more generalised) virtual world, they are more likely to follow their friends.

   This follow-ones-friends issue has other ramifications for virtual worlds, namely that of critical mass. A commonly accepted "rule" of MMORPG marketing is that if it doesn't achieve 100K users in a year its subscription rate will gradually decrease and the MMORPG will fail. Fixed costs are one reason for failure, but people following their real-life friends is a positive feedback loop that causes large MMORPGs to get larger, and small MMORPGs to get smaller. While a virtual world that only targets a sub-set of player types can exist, it's an uphill battle that ultimately reduces the number of players attracted to the virtual world.

   
   

After having a stress dream that the achievers and socialisers of the world got together and kicked out all the explorers because they were useless (similar to how the Golgofrinchians kicked out the telephone sanitisers in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), I decided that I wasn't entirely happy with these bleak conclusions.

A few months ago I wrote up a short article about an "Evolutionary explanation for entertainment". See http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/NaturalEntertain.htm. In the article I produced a list of stimuli and drives that hold a primate's (aka: human's) attention.

Below (in the first column) is a list of those stimuli and drives. The other columns show how well these stimuli and drives are satisfied by a number of different entertainments, including TV/movies, adventure games, CRPG, and virtual worlds. The more stars, the better the entertainment fulfils the stimulus/drive. Red stars indicates that the entertainment is the best at this type of stimuli/drive. (You may disagree with some of the stimuli/drives or scores. If so, trying making up your own graph to see if the results change.)

• 
  Escapism - Virtual worlds aren't as good at escapism as CRPGs because they break the user's immersion more. This happens when a) a player enters a medieval town that is overwhelmingly populated by people (other players) sporting weapons and armour, (in a more realistic world most citizens would be unarmed) and b) all the other people (other players) talk and act out of character. CRPGs have neither of these problems because there aren't any other players.

  By the way, if you think of explorers as being synonymous with real-life adventure tourists then you'll realise that worlds wishing to attract explorers either need a huge number of NPCs wandering around to dilute the number of players (tourists), or the worlds need to enforce role playing.

  
  
• 
  Stories - A CRPG can maintain a weak storyline that the player can experience, such as "save the world from the evil overlord". Virtual worlds cannot because in a VW one player's actions cannot affect the world's storyline, except in very rare circumstances. Players in a virtual world can create their own "stories" through their own activities though; while such stories are compelling because the player is part of the action, they are not the same finely crafted story that occurs in a professionally authored novel.
  

Basically, if putting an adventure game online can make it cheaper (or better for the same cost) then players will go online. If going online does not reduce cost then online adventure games have little to offer, and explorers would prefer to play off-line adventure games.

The perils of online distribution

The Internet promises to be a frictionless (ie: cheap) distribution system. While a game may be sold for $50.00 at a store, the game company only gets (approximately) $15.00 of that due to COGs, distribution, and the supply chain. Theoretically, a game company could just distribute its game on the Internet, bypass all the expenses, and pocket the $50.00.

As seen in the stimuli/drives list, potentially cheaper distribution is the main way an on-line adventure game can improve upon an off-line adventure game.

Distributing on-line comes with a heap of problems though:

• 
  Renting vs. buying - To a customer, on-line distribution feels more like renting than buying because a) they don't actually get anything to hold, and b) as you'll see later, on-line distribution practically forces you to create a pay-as-you-play model.

  How much are people willing to pay for a rental? A lot less than a purchased product. People will pay $20 for a DVD, but are only willing to pay $5 (or less) to rent it. Does that mean that people willing to pay $50.00 for an off-the-shelf game will only be willing to pay $15.00 for the downloadable version? I hope not, but I'll assume this is the case.

  
  
• 
  Narrow-band - Most of the world is serviced by traditional 56K modems. Even people with broadband will find a 5GB DVD-sized download overwhelming. For on-line distribution to work, an online adventure game must be (relatively) small. Uru (which included Uru Live) fit onto one CD, much smaller than previous versions of Myst, because Uru replaced the movies and 360 degree bitmaps with real-time 3D animation.

  Reducing an adventure game's download size is a large task. The texture maps, 3D models, sounds effects, recorded speech, and cut scenes increasingly require more and more CD-ROMs in the package. (Although Uru Live is only one CD, if there were an Uru Live II that had the graphics quality of upcoming games like Everquest II, it would certainly require more data.) To produce an adventure game small enough to download, developers may need to replace many hand-painted texture maps with procedural ones, use more procedural models, reduce the number of sound effects, use text-to-speech with transplanted prosody, and animate cut-scenes on the fly.

  Ultimately these changes will reduce the visual and acoustic quality of the game. Players won't be willing to spend as much money without the eye candy. The $15.00 price-point might drop to $10.00 or even $7.00. (The only bright side is that the lower-quality graphics will reduce development costs.)
  

• 
  Bad purchases - Before I purchase a game I read reviews of the game to see if it will interest me. Even with that, I still "toss out" half the games I buy. Within an hour of opening the box I know that I don't like the game. The only reason I persist is because I just paid $50 for the game and I'm going to get as much enjoyment out of the game as I can, even if it bores me to death; I usually give up after about 10 hours of play. On-line players will give up before their trial-period ends.

  Therefore, if I had a chance to try a demo of every game first, I'd buy half as many games. If other players are like me then games distributed on-line would sell half as many copies as they would through retail.

  The only up-side to the equation is that free demos can catch players that wouldn't be willing risk $50 to try the game, but who end up liking it and are willing to pay for it. I suspect this is a false hope: Of all the games I've played from demo CDs or downloads, I have only bought one or two.
  

• 
  No commitment - When someone pays $50 to play a game but doesn't like it, they're going to stick with it for at least a few hours before giving up in disgust. (In my case it's about 10 hours.) However, when someone downloads a demo game, they don't have $50 of expenses that they feel compelled to "enjoy". Consequently, if the player's attention is not grabbed within an hour (sometimes 10 minutes), they're lost.

  What does this mean? A retail virtual world has approximately 10 hours to get the player hooked, so that they'll sign up for a further 20 months. A downloaded virtual world has only 1 hour.

  
  

• 
  Just browsing - Once software can be downloaded for free, you'll also get "browsers" who download the game even though they don't expect to pay for it. Shareware software has a browse-to-buy ratio of 20:1 to 100:1. If an adventure game is a 1GB download, 20GB - 100GB will be downloaded for every copy sold. If bandwidth rates are $1-$3 per gigabyte there isn't much hope of making a profit.

  Browsers cost money because downloads cost money, and their calls/E-mails to customer support cost money. To minimise these costs an online adventure game must be a small core that downloads on demand, and downloads the bulk of its data when the user pays.

  
  
• 
  Piracy - Piracy affects every game.

  Retail games experience three forms of piracy: 1) Organized crime that makes and sells 10's to 100's of thousands of copies; while not common in the US or Europe, such piracy is very common in Asia. 2) Friends making copies for friends. 3) People selling or giving away the game once they're finish. (Item 3 is technically not piracy, but it has the same effect.) I haven't heard recent piracy statistics for the software industry, but the music industry estimates a 40% loss of revenue due to piracy. Rod Humble, in an article for Game Developer Magazine (May 2004), mentions that one retail game with a free online component had seven pirated copies for every copy sold.

  When a game is small enough that it can be downloaded, pirates have a feast. I have never heard piracy rates for shareware (aka: downloadable games), but rates are intuitively much higher than software that's too big for a download. Just look at the popularity of (illegal) music downloads to get an idea.

  Luckily, there is a solution to this: An interactive experience cannot be pirated if important parts of the content are safely stored (and guarded) on a remote server. Anyone can pirate Everquest's client. They can't get hold of the server software or content though, so to play Everquest, a person must pay SOE money. (This is a bit of lie. It is possible to reverse engineer the Everquest server, but the user-experience won't be the same.)

  Conclusion: If an adventure game is distributed online, it should include a client/server model so that piracy is eliminated. The reduction in piracy might improve sales enough to offset the lower price-point.
  

• 
  Extra costs - Producing a client/server game is expensive. Not only are development costs higher, but network bandwidth and continuing product support are issues. See "Developing Online Games" (New Riders) for a detailed enumeration of the costs.

  Lower prices might have one advantage here: If customers are paying less money for a product, they generally expect less customer support. (This is not always the case. While working at McDonalds in high school, I encountered people that would whinge like crazy when their 59 cent coffee was too warm or too cold.)

  
  
• 
  Players give each other hints - Once a game allows chat (which an online adventure game will), players will give hints to one another. This will (at least) double the speed they chew through content. That means the adventure game must provide twice as much content, basically doubling its cost of development. (This is in addition to the costs incurred by adding Internet support.)
  
• 
  Advertising - If a game is only distributed online, advertising is more difficult. Retail games are advertised in magazines, internet-sites, etc. They are also "advertised" by their mere presence in a game store. Online distribution misses this second form of advertising.
  
• 
  Credit cards - People are not eager to give their credit-card details over the Internet. They are even less eager to sign up for a reoccurring credit-card payment over the Internet for a product they can't hold in their hands. Low monthy credit-card fees also result in a higher percentage of the payment going to the bank.
  

Model 4: Achiever vs. Explorer content