GamerDNA

Stories By GamerDNA

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  Gaming

  Gaming By GamerDNA

  GamerDNA: A brief look at free to play games

  By Sanya Weathers for GamerDNAWhen you're the market leader in MMO games, you can afford to do a little innovating – though not so much as to disturb or ruffle the customers you've already acquired. When you're making a top drawer MMO with thirty million dollars of other people's money, you can't afford to innovate. Refinements, sure. But no big risks.So where's the innovation? These days, you see it in the free to play genre, and its close cousin, the "freemium" game. Both of these games make their money from microtransactions. In order to get a customer to fork over a microtransaction, these games require customers that are vested into the world.But free to play means the player has invested nothing but the time spent downloading the product. And there's a perception among some industry professionals that "easy come, easy go."%Gallery-65681%

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  Entertainment

  Entertainment By GamerDNA

  Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs [part 2]

  Another good measure of player engagement is by the average number of hours in a particular play session. Remember what I said about EQ2 being a success by any rational standard? The number of hours the EQ2 player spends in his game is illustrative of that point.

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  Gaming

  Gaming By GamerDNA

  Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs

  Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya looks into the numbers and just what the breakdown for MMO players means.When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it's easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft's market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard's success, and copied/are copying WoW features – without copying WoW's reasoning, methodology, or execution. The results are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WoW's market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WoW's (even if WoW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.Still, when you just look at the data, it's hard to avoid the desire to copy WoW. As we saw last week, WoW players log in more often, and play for longer sessions.

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  Gaming

  Gaming By GamerDNA

  How much do guilds matter?

  Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya runs down some interesting and illuminating statistics about players and guilds, and just how they fit in to the macrocosm of MMOs. A long time ago, in a fantasy world far far away, I wrangled guilds as part of my job. At first, I wrangled them because it was terribly efficient for one person struggling with a beta. Why deal with thousands of individuals when I could deal with fifty, and put them in charge of their own groups? Guild leaders will always be more informed, more tuned in, and better suited to herding their own cats than a studio representative could ever be.But what started as expediency turned in to more.As a community weenie, I had my dearly beloved "frequent flyers" – people who sent in feedback, usually through email no matter how many systems I built for them to use, with a regularity previously reserved for clocks, robots, and dripping faucets. If it was 3 PM on a Thursday, it was time to get mail from him, him, her, and what I was pretty sure was a him but hadn't ever asked.

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  PC Gaming

  PC Gaming By GamerDNA

  GamerDNA and Massively offer up Death Knight data goodness

  By Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA Back in October, we ran a couple of articles that gave you a snapshot of the kind of person who played the various classes in World of Warcraft. Now that the Death Knight class has been out for nearly three whole months, we figure the flavor of the month kids have had their turn at bat, and the real fans of the new class are settled in. The sample for today's column is a little more than 500 people, all of whom were active WOW players before the launch, and now continue to actively play their Death Knight. "Actively" as measured by playing sessions – just having one of the new class in the character list isn't enough to count here. Read on to see how the Arthas' legions stack up!

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  Gaming

  Gaming By GamerDNA

  GamerDNA and Massively look back at the MMO year in review

  var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Lord_of_the_Rings_Online_overcoming_WoW_and_2008_in_MMOS'; Continuing on from GamerDNA's year in review (pt. 1) Massively and everybody's favorite gaming social service have come together to feature some great MMO numbers for 2008. Written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers, these stats will run down the winners and not-so-much winners for the last six months of MMO gaming. This kicks off a series of article collaborations between Massively and GamerDNA - we hope you enjoy them! What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that's been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs. Come along with us as we look over half of 2008 Today's column features data from July through December. GamerDNA being a startup, our data collection in the first half of the year was not consistent enough to use for anything but wild guessing and drinking games. Listen, a start up tech company can make ANYTHING into a drinking game. On to the Analysis >> %Gallery-40244%

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  Gaming

  Gaming By GamerDNA

  GamerDNA's Year in review pt. 2

  Aside from that, what do the numbers tell us? Let me begin with one caveat – GamerDNA's own growth is not accounted for with these numbers. In other words, a slight growth line is actually a function of more members for GamerDNA, NOT the product. In previous Market Trends columns, we've addressed this by using the same group of players and taken snapshots of their playing habits over time. With this year in review column, we are looking at total logins for every member. And since the number of members is growing, so too are the logins. Upward trends are not as good as they appear, and downward trends are actually worse than they look. So keep that in mind as you're reading.

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