gdc-online-2010
Latest
GDCO 2010: LotRO's revenues double as Turbine lays out a promising future
According to Turbine, it's been a bonanza month for Middle-earth. At GDCO, the studio announced that revenues from Lord of the Rings Online have doubled in the past month since switching to a free-to-play hybrid model. What's even better is that Joystiq reports that LotRO has added a whopping million new accounts over these 30 days as well. Turbine is monitoring the server loads and have additional servers waiting if needed. It turns out that the F2P launch was even bigger than the original launch of LotRO back in 2007. The good news doesn't stop there, either; LotRO has seen 20% of previous subscribers return, three times the numbers of concurrent players at peak times, and over half of the players using the hotly debated LotRO store for a purchase. Speaking of the store, the top-selling item has been an increase in shared storage, followed by tomes (stat boosters), the riding skill, and the Mines of Moria expansion. Looking forward to the future, LOTRO Weekly wrote a summary of Massive Online Gamer's first podcast in which the Turbine devs outlined a few of the goodies in store for players in coming months. They are hoping to roll out updates every two to three months in a similar fashion to DDO's schedule, but are still committed to big expansions such as next year's Isengard. A new multi-boss raid is slated for early 2011, about the same time that the Radiance mechanic will be vanquished from the game forever.
GDC Online 2010: Spacetime Studios and the making of Pocket Legends
Pocket Legends has been out on the App Store for quite a while now, but if you (like me) haven't seen it in a while, you might want to check it out again. Spacetime Studios has been steadily updating the game, and the title they showed off at GDC Online 2010 this week was pretty impressive -- an instanced MMO, running in full 3D with three character classes, dungeons and loot, and almost all of the other trappings you'd expect from the genre. This week, I got to sit in on both Cinco Barnes' panel about the studio and its up-and-down background. I also chatted with the company's CEO, Gary Gattis, both about Spacetime's history and what it's done with Pocket Legends so far, and what's in store for the growing title.
How Star Wars: The Old Republic tackles the grind
Star Wars: The Old Republic systems director Damion Schubert hosted a panel at GDC Online 2010 this week about that excruciating aspect of gameplay known as "The Grind," which he defined as any time developers ask players to do something they don't enjoy in order to open up something that they will enjoy. Most developers use the grind to fill out gameplay content -- handcrafted, "gold standard" content is much tougher to make, whereas grindy content is cheap to put together. But sometimes it comes in handy, said Schubert. While making SWTOR, BioWare actually found that it was putting "too much gold-quality content into the game." Players would be confronted with a Star Destroyer to fight through, a lost Wookiee to save, and a Sith quest to complete; and Schubert said that "we had, by jamming all of this good stuff together, actually made it grindy." So to fix the issue, BioWare first cut some of the least powerful stories (the lost Wookiee didn't make the cut, Schubert confirmed), and then spaced the rest of them out. Additionally, a feature called "bonus quests" will create optional tiny grinds -- players will be offered extra grind-style goals ("Kill 10 Stormtroopers") while running other quests. That "keeps the activity level up, but lets the gold-standard content breathe," according to Schubert. He admitted that the grind isn't always a bad thing -- developers sometimes have great reasons to add grinding, and there's a perception factor to consider, as well (one player's maximum effort is another's boring grind). But developers should be able to balance the grind with content and activities that players do care about, Schubert urged, creating a full experience that requires different kinds of efforts for equally different kinds of rewards.
Lord of the Rings Online doubles revenue since going free-to-play
Lord of the Rings Online Executive Producer Kate Paiz announced during a panel at GDC Online 2010 today that Turbine has done it again: Lord of the Rings Online has doubled its revenue and created over a million new accounts since going free-to-play early last month. That's the second MMO Turbine has taken from a paid subscription to a hybrid microtransactions-based business model, with Dungeons and Dragons Online doing the same thing last year (important to note: Paiz was in charge of both transitions, switching to LotRO in July). Paiz told us after the panel that LotRO wasn't in trouble, but rather that Turbine did the math and decided the switch would work. "We knew there was more out there for us," she said. Paiz also shared that 20% of LotRO's former players have returned to the game since the switchover, and that the game has seen a 300% increase in peak concurrency, with three times the number of players online simultaneously, and a 400% increase in active players total. 53% of players have used the in-game microtransaction store (which sells everything from mounts and outfits to XP boosts and character slots), and as you can see above, extra storage slots are extremely popular in the store. And even paid subscriptions have increased. Turbine's lesson seems to be that, as Paiz said during the panel, "when you tell people you no longer have to pay for it, they come in droves."
NPD at GDC: PC retail to grow, physical and digital purchase gap closing
PC gaming is set to grow in 2010, according to NPD's Michael Klotz. Klotz hosted a panel here at GDC Online 2010 this afternoon, and said that expected growth can be attributed to two things: StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. PC revenue has reached $303 million as of August this year, and Klotz expects the WoW expansion to put the total over the top of last year's $538 million. Klotz also talked about the ongoing transition of customers simply buying physical copies of games to buying both physical discs and digital downloads. In terms of revenue, physical sales still outweigh the digital side, but digital purchases (including both full game purchases and DLC) have overtaken bought discs in terms of numbers. That means, said Klotz, that physical purchases are still selling at full price, while customers are paying much less for digital games, either because of sales or because they're buying casual or just cheaper titles online. Klotz credited Rock Band for pioneering the digital move -- lots of players weren't sure about digital purchases until they saw how seamlessly the Rock Band Marketplace worked, and then they were OK with downloading games and game content. Finally, Klotz shared an interesting stat: Physical point cards (like those for Microsoft points on Xbox Live) have overtaken gamepads as the largest accessory category for game retail in just the past six months. As long as he could remember, Klotz said, game controllers have always been the best selling game accessory, with power cables next on the list. But cards for DLC are now on top of the charts after a 37 percent increase in the past year, showing just how important it is for game retailers to try and get a piece of that pie.
GDC Online 2010: Hands-on and preview of WINtA
WINtA is probably the best brand new game that I've seen so far at GDC Online 2010 (this week in Austin, Texas). It's a title published by a group called OneBigGame, which is a nonprofit video game publisher. They commission and publish games, which are created for free by luminaries in the video game field, and then they sell them to customers for money that goes straight to charities around the world. Founder Martin de Ronde took the stage at GDC to allegedly talk about how to take an app from iPhone to the iPad, but what he actually did was show off this really amazing game and music platform, and he gave a road map to where the iPad version will eventually go. "WINtA" stands for "War is Not The Answer," which is what game creator Masaya Matsuura felt after September 11th, and that's what he wanted to transfer into game form. WINtA itself is actually a rhythm game -- Matsuura is well known in the gaming community for making PaRappa the Rapper, which is a highly regarded PlayStation game known for pioneering the genre that eventually launched Guitar Hero and Tap Tap Revolution. de Ronde approached Matsuura under the OneBigGame banner, asking if he would create a game to sell for charity, and with the help of Dutch developer Triangle Studios, Matsuura came up with WINtA. The app will be out on the App Store for free later this year. Check out more, including a video of the demonstration, after the break.
GDC Online 2010: Mark Rein on iOS and Epic Citadel
If you are an iPhone gamer and haven't tried Epic Citadel yet, you're doing yourself a disservice. Epic Games wowed the crowd at the recent Apple event with the free demo, showing an astoundingly beautiful virtual town running in full 3D graphics on the iPhone and the iPad. Epic's Mark Rein is here at GDC Online 2010 this week to talk to developers about Unreal Engine 3 on iOS and other platforms (he can't keep from showing off the game running on Android, even when you tell him that you work for an Apple blog and don't write about Android anyway), and I cornered him to chat about Epic Citadel and Project Sword, the game it's serving as a demo for. My first question was what drew Epic to a platform like the iPhone in the first place -- the developer is known for titles like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, which are big flashy titles that sell Microsoft's platforms, not Apple's. Rein told me that it was "the power of the hardware. It was capable of doing what we wanted it to do in mobile. That's always been our driving philosophy, is when we have platforms that are powerful enough to run our technology, and there's a good business case for supporting them, that we would."
GDC Online 2010: OpenFeint after Game Center
The last time I spoke with the folks at OpenFeint, we were all waiting for the arrival of Apple's official Game Center app and wondering what effect it would have on third-party social networking platforms for App Store apps. Now, of course, Game Center is out. And despite the dire predictions of onlookers, OpenFeint is still rolling right along. The network continues to offer functionality to developers above and beyond what Apple's official solution provides, and it provides cross-platform services even outside of Apple's purview. OpenFeint's VP of Marketing, Eros Resmini, met up with me here on the floor of the Game Developers' Conference (going on this week in Austin) for a quick chat about what he thought of Game Center's launch, how OpenFeint is doing with Apple's official network up and running alongside of it, and what's next for the service and the network. Click "Read More" to read our interview.
TUAW's Daily App: Cut the Rope
At every one of these gaming shows (it's GDC Online this week, which I'm at for TUAW), there's usually a "game of the show" that emerges. It's something, either on the show floor or demoing behind closed doors, that everyone starts to talk about. The buzz starts at parties and in the hallways, and then it carries over into panels and starts to crop up in those casual discussions about "what you've seen this week." But so far, the game everyone's talking about this week isn't even on display at the show. Epic's Mark Rein even recommended Chillingo's newest title, Cut the Rope, to me. It's a brand new game that's already making a huge splash this week (as of this writing, it was number two on the App Store paid list), and it's all the rage among app developers and journalists here at GDC. The phrase being passed around is "Angry Birds meets Fruit Ninja," and those comparisons are apt. The idea is that you guide a little piece of candy, by cutting ropes and manipulating other items in the environment, to a cute little monster that's hungrily trying to eat it. Cut the Rope has the cute characters of Angry Birds and the fun, tactile interaction of Fruit Ninja all wrapped up into one extremely polished and shiny package. For only US$0.99, you get four stages full of levels, three stars to collect in each level (to add replayability), and to top it all off, Game Center integration for achievements and leaderboards. The iPad version is $1.99, but there's also a lite version on that device to check out. I'm not even that big of an Angry Birds fan, but I found myself giggling as I pulled off Cut the Rope's little puzzles. I was very charmed by Om Nom, the little monster who just wants that hanging candy. Cut the Rope has just barely gone live, and this is an app that is already getting into people's heads.
Free for All: How will F2P fare at GDC?
GDC Online is one awesome event. Although I attended the event in the name of a different site last year, I remember it well. It was a mass of my favorite developers and inside-thinkers, clumping together to discuss customers, design and community. Of course, there were some panels and talks that, frankly, bored me to tears. Then there were many that were so exciting that they strengthened my resolve to be a games writer. In fact, it was around this time that dreams of design began to take a back seat to visions of writing. That's the power of attending such events. On the other hand, these events have the ability to convince writers of almost anything. When attending, we must promise to always stay skeptical -- no matter what anyone says to us. Let the information sink in for a while before we take it as gospel. Let the varying ideas of the various speakers blend together a bit -- then let's form our opinions. I am most excited to see how the last year's wave of free-to-play games and switch-overs will affect the chats. In '09, social gaming was the whipping boy (everyone said he/she hated it, yet everyone seemed to be planning some sort of social game), so will free-to-play receive the same treatment?
iPhone dev cheers short development, quick patching at GDC Online
Vijay Thakkar is the technical director at Newtoy, the company responsible for iPhone hit Words with Friends, as well as a former developer on Star Wars: Galaxies and at the late Ensemble Studios. He took the stage at GDC Online 2010 this morning to run a panel about how to embrace mobile gaming, and while extolling the virtues of Apple's mobile platform and its constant online connectivity, he took aim at the traditional game industry's long development times and buggy releases. Thakkar railed for a bit on a bug found recently in the latest title of his "favorite gaming franchise ever," Metroid: Other M. When the save-breaking bug appeared in the game, Thakkar recounted, Nintendo couldn't use the Wii's internet connectivity to patch the game. Instead, Thakkar pointed out, the company had to "ask players to 'send us your memory card.'" "That's awful," Thakkar added. It's 2010, he said, developers should have ongoing access to update and patch their games when necessary, and he pointed to the iPhone as a platform where games could be released and patched quickly. "At Newtoy, we've completed full games in less time than it took me to design systems for older triple-A titles." This agility means that developers can not only fix bugs quickly after launch, but they can also prototype new ideas ridiculously fast (Thakkar said that Newtoy had created one internal test game in just two workdays). Plus, this business model lends itself to filling in and growing features according to player demand after release -- something that a lot of big, lumbering developers haven't figured out how to do yet.
GDC Online 2010: Booyah's InCrowd, or how to develop an app in four weeks
Booyah first made a big splash on the App Store with the check-in game MyTown, then they stepped over to Facebook to release a game called Nightclub City before returning to Apple's platform a little while back with a title called InCrowd. Most App Store releases are known for their short development times (usually around six months or less), but InCrowd might set a record. As Booyah's Jon Parise explained in his panel at this year's GDC Online conference, Booyah created the app in just four weeks. There were a few reasons for doing this. First and foremost, the app is designed to work in conjunction with Facebook's new Places service, and because of Booyah's success with Nightclub City, Facebook granted them early access to work on and release an app for launch day (just four weeks after development began). While Parise didn't say it directly, his speech gave the impression that Booyah just wanted to try it -- could they really take an idea and turn it into a viable App Store product and brand in just four weeks' time? That, as Parise pointed out, is just about the length of Adobe Photoshop's trial period. In fact, one of their developers downloaded and used the expensive photo editor's trial all within the time of development.
GDC Online 2010: Newtoy and Words with Friends' 10 million downloads
Newtoy is the company behind the popular Games With Friends brand on the App Store, featuring Chess With Friends and the extremely popular Words With Friends. If you're on Twitter, you probably already knew that Words With Friends was popular (it's all over the service), but you might not have realized just how popular. Newtoy's own David Bettner took the stage here at GDC Online 2010 in Austin, Texas for a panel and said that the game has had 10 million downloads so far. That's allowed him, his brother Paul, and their cousin to take Newtoy from a company of three people working on laptops in a library (though they admittedly had a lot of good experience as developers at Age of Empires dev Ensemble Studios) to a 30-person game studio with a bright future in what Bettner calls "turn-based asynchronous mobile gaming." And that stat isn't the only interesting one that Bettner shared. Of those 10 million downloads, half have played the game in the last month. The Words With Friends app has two million daily active users and five million monthly active users. And of those users, 60% were brought in to the game by their friends (which makes for a very viral cocktail), and a whopping 40% play the app ten times or more per day.
TUAW's Daily App: Blue Defense: Second Wave!
One of the best reasons to come to a conference like GDC Online (which I'm at this week in Austin, Texas) is touching base with others in the iPhone and iPad community and sharing your favorite apps with each other. I've been hooking as many people as I can on Pocket Frogs (I just passed 50% of awards completed, and the app just added Game Center integration in a new update), and my colleague Jeff Scott of 148Apps recommended Blue Defense: Second Wave! to me. Blue Defense is a top-down shooter with an iPhone twist -- instead of moving your ship around as it shoots down enemy ships in 2D, you tilt your iPhone (or just touch the screen) to aim a planetary cannon, taking out ships as they come to you. The tilt interface is very intuitive, and there are even some fun multitouch functions. You can split your fire by double-tapping anywhere to create fixed aiming sights, or even grab and drag away from the planet to shoot a gigantic screen-clearing gun. This is actually the second version of the game, so there are multiple modes to get through, including two infinite modes that you can use to try and raise your score up on the game's leaderboards. There are also lots of levels to play and medals to earn while doing so. The graphics are 2D, with a simple but smooth and well-designed look, and the Retina Display makes the game look great. Blue Defense: Second Wave! is an excellent title for just US$1.99. It's also a universal build, so I bet it'll look even better on the iPad. I've heard some other good app recommendations from the panels and attendees here at the show, so stay tuned all week for more.
GDC Online 2010: Limbic Software's route to App Store success
I'm here in Austin, Texas this week for the Game Developers' Conference, and Limbic Software's Arash Keshmirian kicked off the iPhone gaming track this morning with a panel about how the company found success with their TowerMadness tower defense game. Limbic's story is similar to a lot of others that we've heard before -- the app released to little fanfare, but a few solid tweaks, strategies, and even lucky breaks after release led to lots of sales and lots of development lessons. "What really started the company," said Keshmirian, "was when we decided to make the game free." Like many other developers, he and his team found that having a huge audience is extremely important on the App Store. Releasing a free version created opportunities for in-app purchases and monetization through ads, and it even drove sales of the paid version of the app. Keshimirian shared a number of other interesting facts about what they'd found on the App Store during development as well.
Ngmoco's iPhone titles nominated for a few GDC Online awards
Nominations have been announced for the Game Developers Choice Online Awards (to be announced at the upcoming GDC Online conference in Austin), and iPhone developer Ngmoco has secured a few spots in among the rest of the big PC game developers. We Rule picked up nominations for Best Online Game Design, Best Online Audio, and Best New Online Game, and Godfinger was recognized in the Best Online Visual Arts category. iPhone developers Booyah and Digital Chocolate also got nominated, but both of those companies were chosen for their Facebook titles, not their iPhone creations. So congrats to Ngmoco -- the company has certainly made a splash on the App Store with its freemium model, but these nominations show that former EA exec Neil Young's company is competing on quality with much larger PC titles like League of Legends, Aion and Dungeon Fighter Online. The awards will be given out at GDC Online, taking place October 5-8 in Austin, Texas.
MMOs nominated for Game Developer's Choice Awards
The nominees for the Game Developers Choice Online awards have been announced, and MMOs made more than a respectable showing. The nominees are separated into new and ongoing categories, and awards are given in eight different categories including best community relations, best audio, best visual arts, and several more. Seven of the eight categories carried at least one familiar MMO title, such as Champions Online, LOVE, Free Realms, Guild Wars, EVE Online, Dungeon Fighter Online, and of course World of Warcraft. The awards ceremony will take place during GDC Online in October. The full event runs from October 5th - 8th, with awards being presented on the 7th.
Game Developers Choice Online Award nominees announced
The nominees for the first-ever Game Developers Choice Online Awards, which will be presented during the similarly named GDC Online on October 5 - 8, were announced earlier today. The list of candidates reads like a who's who of heavy hitters in the online gaming space, such as World of Warcraft (nominated for the Best Ongoing Live Game award), Star Trek Online (nominated for Best Online Visual) and League of Legends (nominated for ... like, everything.) Winners will be announced and accolades will be distributed at the conference on the evening of October 7. To see who's in the running for what, check out the full list of nominees posted after the jump.
Game Developers Choice Online Awards to knight Richard Bartle as a "Game Legend"
If it's cool to be officially dubbed an "Online Game Legend," then it's doubly cool to be the first person to ever receive such an award. Richard Bartle will be rocking cool two ways from Sunday this fall, as the Game Developers Choice Online Awards plans to honor the good doctor this October. The Online Game Legend Award stemmed from a pool of open nominations and was chosen by the GDC Online Awards advisory committee. They specify Bartle's co-creation of MUDs and his 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds as the key reasons why he deserves to be named a capital-L Legend. Bartle isn't the only one due for a special award, however. Ultima Online will be inducted into their Hall of Fame as "a specific online game that has resulted in the long-term advancement of the medium, pioneering major shifts in online game development and games as a whole." The full awards ceremony will take place on October 7th, and will include a number of other categories including Best Online Game Design and Best New Online Game. You can eyeball the full details over at GDC Online Awards' website.
First Game Developers Choice Online Awards to be held in October
Creators of online games, be they MMOs, addictive social networking applications or anything in between, will soon receive recognition in the form of impressive statuettes. GDC Online (formerly titled GDC Austin) will play host to the Game Developers Choice Online Awards on the evening of October 7. According to the event's announcement, awards will be distributed based on "excellence in live services, technology, game updates, online game design, and more." In addition, one lucky online game visionary will receive the Online Game Legend Award, and one "all-time classic online game" will be inducted to the GDC Online Awards' Hall Of Fame. Finally, anyone can nominate and vote for their favorite titles in the Audience Award category. As soon as the FarmVille nation finds out about this, it should become number one with a bullet, so get your votes in while things are still even.
