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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%
Tweetmygaming.com tracks the Twitterverse of gaming
Last week GamerDNA launched TweetMyGaming.com, a Twitter stat tracking site covering games. Using fancy mathematicals and internet juice, TweetMyGaming follows the 140-character conversations in the Twitterverse in real-time.Tweets and play patterns are graphed by the site, with the percentages on the homepage displaying the daily increase or decrease of tweets for that particular game. The "attention numbers" found on specific game pages are based off gamerDNA data. We're definitely curious to see how the site evolves, not to mention that we love statisticals.
GamerDNA's Left 4 Dead stats reveal power of Steam sales, promotions
Left 4 Dead on PC appears to receive a shot of zombie reanimation every time Valve's Steam service does a promotion, according to proprietary Xbox Live and PC GamerDNA statistics. The chart above, which is calculated based on "equal percentages of Xbox and PC users," shows that engagement on both platforms was almost equal for three months after release. The PC receives its first major bump during Steam's 50 percent off sale in February. Both platforms received a boost with the release of the free Survival Pack, but then engagement spiked dramatically during Steam's "Freaky Free Friday" promotion and stayed strong.Sam Houston, community manager at GamerDNA, tells us that typically the engagement graphs for games "start high and just drop off." He notes that Steam sales and promotions can obviously give a shot of adrenaline to a game's engagement. He questions, "Could Microsoft do something like that? Then it would appeal to both platforms pretty highly. But, you know, Valve owns Steam and the game, so they have more flexibility."
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.
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.
Charts galore: Halo 3, Halo Wars player comparisons; other RTS titles get in mix
Considering Halo Wars was built from the ground up to establish an RTS audience for consoles, and obviously used the Halo name to get gamers excited, we were curious to know if it accomplished its mission. With a sample size of over 150,000 mostly core gamers, we asked social networking website GamerDNA if it had any data we could work with. Not only did it give us what we asked for, but did a full comparison of Halo Wars to other console RTS titles as well. The data not only gave us a better understanding of Halo Wars' success from being associated with the Master Chief franchise, but also how it compares to other RTS games on the console.
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.
Numbers support players returning to World of Warcraft
With the recent launch of World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, industry watchers have been poring over the numbers, trying to see what can be gleaned from the data. With 2.8 million copies sold in the first 24 hours, Blizzard's 800-pound-gorilla continues to break records. Following the flood of numbers, our friends over at GamerDNA have just come out with their own Wrath reports, based on their member data from anywhere between a few days to a few months before Wrath's launch. As expected, there was an increase in the number of returning players, out to experience all that Wrath has to offer. We admit we're curious about potential skewing of the numbers, though. On the surface, it would be largely what one would expect - Wrath launches, the numbers went up. However, we'd note that they started running a World of Warcraft-themed contest for Razer gear on the 12th, and a SwagDog guild promotion on the 19th that may account for at least a small portion of the metric increase; how much of a difference remains to be seen. Also noted is the number of WoW pages created on their service after the launch of Warhammer Online, which is by itself, a fairly interesting point. Overall, if you're a numbers fan, they've certainly served up some interesting observations based on their member statistics. Definitely worth checking out if you're curious about how things are trending for Blizzard's MMO behemoth.
