Free, shiny and simple. A winning recipe for wider audiences?

Scarcely a fraction of gamers are involved in MMOGs. The percentage is a little higher if you're a gamer over 25, but below that, the odds are that only 1-2% of gamers are into MMOGs. But the gamer market is expanding. That is, the number of gamers who are involved in MMOGs is growing at a rate less than a twentieth of the growth of the hobby.

Or to put it another way, the pool of potential customers is growing much larger than the customers the industry already has, if only the industry can find a way to make MMO gaming, as a hobby, more attractive to gamers who have hitherto shown little or no interest in it.

There are several approaches the industry has and is attempting in order to reach out into that broader pool of would-be players.

A monthly subscription, for the average gamer is a barrier. No question. It might not be a very high one, but it immediately shuts out a whole bunch of would-be players right there. Plus, there's only so many monthly subscriptions that the average gamer would be willing to maintain, if they were even willing to maintain a single one.

There's your free-to-play model right there, along with X-day free-trials. It's easier to get money from the customer when they are already playing your game. Nickel-and-diming a million players with an alluring online store can be (but not necessarily is) a whole lot more profitable than getting a hundred thousand to pony up fifteen bucks each month.

Of course a lot of free-to-play MMOGs lack polish. See most Asian MMOGs ported to the international market that don't know how to handle the mouse-pointer when you click and drag to move the camera, forcing you to swipe the mouse repeatedly across the mat.

There's the first item on our increasing-appeal checklist: Polish. The essential slick and shiny surfaces of desire and usability. Easy-to-use, smooth, and glitch-free. Animations that operate smoothly without skipping and jumping, and that don't look like they were intended for placeholders in an alpha-test (I'm looking at you, Flagship Studios -- or at least I would be if you were still in business).

Interface, sound, animations, clipping, spelling and grammar (I'm looking right at you, City of Heroes -- why do none of those strings ever seem to be spell-checked?). All of these contribute to a comfortable sense of command. Smooth and simple actions leading to straightforward, controllable and visually-pleasing results. A delicious treat we don't get enough of.

Complexity falls on both sides of the fence. The more complex the MMOG's systems are, the less likely we are to lure in one (or a hundred, or a million) of those mass-market non-MMOG players and make them a customer. It's a barrier, and simplifying systems and gameplay creates appeal.

Oh, not with you or me, maybe -- but we're already shelling out the bucks every month, right? They don't have to sell us on anything. We're already sold.

Freecell and Minesweeper probably remain among the most popular computer games out there, and they're almost brain-numbingly accessible. Simpler games draw bigger audiences. Bigger audiences increase the odds of squeezing some cash out.

Free brings a lot of people in. Oh, you might be a subscription-snob, grumbling about the diminished polish that seems to come with free-to-play -- and we might think we are too -- but even we're not immune to free.

Actually, between us here at the office, we end up playing more free-to-play MMOGs than we do subscription-based ones. We can resist ease-of-use. We can resist accessible-gaming, but when you're looking for an extra MMOG fix, free is hard to resist -- especially if you're tolerant of rough-edges (and you've got to be, somewhat, in this job).

So, what have we got? Free, shiny and simple. Three legs of a stool that the MMOG industry would like to get the massed non-MMO gamers to sit on; though not everyone opts for all three legs. Most only manage one, or perhaps two.

That makes for some pretty wobbly seating by anyone's standards.

I'll make a prediction here to finish up with. You see, NCsoft's got a bit of a problem in the international market. Tabula Rasa's been shut down, and that leaves an awful hole in things. Guild Wars 2? Well, it looks like we'll be waiting a while for that.

Aion seems to be the favorite to fill the gap in NCsoft's MMOG offerings, and I'm thinking that we're looking at a two-legged offering here. Shiny and not-too-complicated seems to be the thing. With the game pulling in large numbers of users on a time-card model in South Korea, we're guessing that free isn't going to be a third leg of the international release.