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MMObility: Fifteen fun free MMORPGs for your tablet or smartphone
Mobile MMORPGs are still hard to come by. Sure, there are a ton of pseudo-MMOs and developers who claim to have created an MMO, but the fact is that persistence -- a key to defining what an MMO is -- is often gone from many of these games. I want to be able to log out of the game while the rest of the digital world goes on without me. Or better yet, and in the case of most MMORTS titles, I want to log out of the game and continue to have an effect on the world through trades, wars, or the fallout of diplomacy. Even though the market is often bare, there are still quite a few MMOs out there. Many of them are fun as well! I know, I know, I am making it seem as though the smartphone or tablet MMO market is empty of all content, but the truth is that for its age, it's doing very well. There are more and more coming out all of the time, and hopefully I'll be there to cover them. In the meanwhile, enjoy a list of the specific titles that rest on my Nexus 7 3G tablet, just waiting to be played anywhere and any time!
MMObility: Find yourself in this updated list of location-based MMOs
Location-based MMOs have a long way to go. I can only imagine how the genre will appear in 10 or 15 years and how common it will be to load up a virtual world on our mobile devices. Even with the advances that still need to be made, location-based gaming is pretty darned impressive. Think about it: These are games that use the real world as a playing field. While most do not employ the literal square mileage of the Earth in exact scale, most of these games can boast a very large map. These titles can also utilize the weather and other events that happen on it at any given time, blending them with our real world so that it appears there is a secret, veiled world right beside us. I wanted to recap some of my favorite location-based MMOs for those who might need some advice on which ones to try. My favorites are marked with a "latest update" marker, but all of them are worth checking out. So pull out your phone or tablet and get to it!
Free for All: Free-to-play and mobile at GDC Online, part 1
GDC Online was fantastic this year. Really, it's great every year, but I found more bits of goodness this time around than ever before. It's simply my favorite convention, possibly because it's aimed more at press and devs than at fans. There's a wonderful lack of loudspeakers booming dance music and only a handful of booth babes. In other words, GDC Online is quieter, smaller and more professional than a typical fan convention. For a grumpy old gamer like yours truly, it's heaven. I can actually talk to developers without having to scream over music. What did I find, and what excited me this year? A lot. We've already written up or recorded many interviews so far, but I wanted to take this week's Free for All and MMObility to recap the stuff that truly got me excited. Let's get to it... there's simply too much to see!
Indie dev PerBlue makes millions, sees Android dominating iOS
Justin Beck launched PerBlue while finishing college in 2008. He got to work on the company's first title, Parallel Kingdom, with his co-founder and a staff of seven in Madison, Wisconsin, surviving on $20,000 of savings from a stint at Microsoft. Today, PerBlue generates $3 million a year, supports 35 employees and has successfully launched three free-to-play MMOs in the Parallel universe on Android and iOS.PerBlue's Parallel Mafia and Parallel Zombies both hit mobile devices in 2012, but during his talk at GDC Europe, Beck discussed the specific finances of Parallel Kingdom, which has been live since 2008.Parallel Kingdom doesn't have a massive number of players, hype or notoriety in the wider gaming world, but it proves that when managed efficiently, a mobile game can provide huge profit for a small developer. Parallel Kingdom has 1.5 million registered accounts, but only 15,000 daily active users, which Beck admits is "not that big." These users, however, represent $0.40 - $0.50 per user, per day for PerBlue. Extrapolated to 50,000 monthly active users, that's more than $200,000 each month in microtransactions from one title alone.
MMObility: Fourteen MMOs that you can play anywhere
I thought it'd be fun to make a list of go-anywhere MMOs this week. It's not really hard to find portable MMOs that run on laptops or netbooks. The real issue is locating MMOs that can be played on your desktop while you're at work (while the boss isn't looking, of course!), then on your phone at lunch, and then on your laptop while you sit in bed later that night. The technology to make constantly accessible MMOs is there, namely in the form of HTML5. Adobe recently announced that not only is it moving away from Flash for mobile devices, but it is also specifically targeting Android Jelly Bean. There is a new wave of web technologies coming that will hopefully, once and for all, put an end to the need for special lists like this one. Not all of my choices are HTML5-based, but I tried to keep all of them open for all devices. If you notice any oddities while playing them on a certain device, let me know in the comments section so I can note it. I get a lot of requests for lists like this, so I want to keep things tight. In the meanwhile, enjoy the list. There are others out there, but I wanted to pick out some that give pretty much the same result across whichever device you use.
MMObility: Parallel Zombies, Glitch's new butlers, and a new space MMO
It's been a great week for mobile MMOs. That's a wonderful thing to type up, especially considering how few mobile MMOs are released when compared to standard browser- or client-based games. This week, I found myself logging in quite a bit of time with a few titles, but I still want a lot more time to explore some of these games. One you can't play yet, another you have played probably quite a bit already, and the last one promises to suck up a lot of your time in between meetings. It's neat to see another iOS MMO. iOS doesn't seem to get as many MMOs popping up in its market as with Android, but things are slowly evening out. The imbalance right now might be due to the fact that Android phones feature larger screens and sometimes more power than the latest iOS phones, something that is simply appealing to gamers. I wonder whether we'll see a larger iPhone screen anytime soon? Probably so -- and that would mean more MMOs!
E3 2012: Fragging undead on your phone with Parallel Zombies
The hardest thing about E3 is finding a place to sit. Well, that and making yourself heard above the din of squeeing fanboys, clicking cameras, and bass lines that would wake the dead. Per Blue CEO Justin Beck and I eventually found a couple of seats, but we didn't quite find the quiet, so we spent the better part of a half hour talking very loudly about the company's new Parallel Zombies mobile title. If Per Blue and the Parallel prefix sound familiar, it's because Parallel Kingdom has been out for the better part of three years now. But what's this I hear about zombies, you say?
MMObility: Dark Legends' cash shop, Thinix, and Parallel Mafia's launch
I know this is not what you want to hear if you are a fan of Spacetime Studios and were really excited about it new title, Dark Legends, but here goes: The energy mechanic that seems to have so many players upset is really not that bad at all. See, at some point many games decided to use a limited amount of energy to fuel character actions, and once it runs out, it seems like game over. It has always been the case (ever since Farmville first made the mechanic so popular that misguided gamers thought Zynga had somehow invented it) that energy in these sorts of games refills naturally, over time, for free. I played through Dark Legends on launch night and was able to complete an entire campaign with some energy left over. Sure, I had to pause once to refill a couple of bars (they take five minutes each to refill), but other than that, I had no issues with it. If the energy becomes an issue at later levels, I do not know. Let's not confuse things here: The energy mechanic in Dark Legends is nothing new, it's not a scam, and it does not force players to do anything. Allow me to explain, then we're moving on to other mobile MMO news.
