MMO Tourism

I’ve read a very insightful post at MMOSH about how MMOG gaming is deteriorating in what is Hawley called MMO Tourism.

I completely find myself in the depiction of the modern, superficial and bored to life MMO gamer that switch title as soon the free trial is ended and still continue to buy and subscribe every major game coming out soon.

Just yesterday, while in a gaming conversation with my girfriend Sara, I expressed my concern about that, and made a resolve to stop wasting time (a month playing a superficial game that you won’t be playing anymore in the future is precious gaming time wasted for nothing), to concentrate on more fulfilling and rewarding gaming (online and offline) experiences.

E74 for me, too!

Well, figure this one: you are done playing COD:WAW and shut down the console to prepare some late-night coffee. Then you return to the desk, anticipating some quality time on Lost Odyssey, turn on the console again and you see that:

I was a fool, I never, ever should’ve plan to play Lost Odyssey again. The poor console couldn’t cope with depression and emo drama like I do. That’s why I played it for the last time several months ago: that day my X360 was scarred for life and today I only helped it to take its last jump.

I tried EVERYTHING to make it work again (including the towel trick), but in the end my X360 looks like it needs to be serviced. I talked to MS and they kindly arranged a pickup with UPS, saying that I will get an Xbox Live refund and some additional goodies to cover the hassle. In Italy that kind of error will be serviced in ten days average but Microsoft says that it can take up to three weeks.

I guess I did the right thing to pick up Metroid Trilogy

AppStore hints, by the numbers

Apple did a very great result this trimester, and I’m pretty happy, too (read: stock trading was good).

The iTunes store performed pretty well, reaching $1Billion (gross profit). This allows me to disclose some confidential numbers without breaking any NDA from other analysts and consulting firms.

We’ll try to quantify the average income of an AppStore application to see if it’s convenient or not. It’s not a fair way to quantify things but at least helps to see things in perspective.

We start with a great simplification: music and other medias has no influence in the iTunes store. That’s not true, music and other medias are a big deal on iTunes, but let’s consider a very best case: everything they sell are Apps.

The AppStore has 91.000 active applications as now.

We can further simplify things, saying that every application can earn about $1.000.000.000 / 91.000 a year. That’s about $11.000 a year, rounded up. Those are gross incomes and still includes the 30% Apple takes for itself due to their uselesess priceless marketing. So you will end up with an average expectancy of circa $7.700 a year. That’s a gross profit, man!

Now we’ll think about how much time you have to invest to make an application.

In average, an application takes about a month to build for a professional, full-time staff of about 3 people. A game usually takes about 3 to 6 months for a team of the same size.

The estimate doesn’t count the approval waiting time, that can be very long. Since the approval process almost always asks you to fix stuff and resubmit, you should keep some the staff around. Outsourcing development to a sweatshop may seem smart but it’s a bad way to lose expertise and to candidate your app to be swamped by clones. A smarter way should be to start to develop another application. The smartest is to have at least three titles in the pipeline, for multiple platforms. It will help in case one of them busts or is lost in the quirks of Apple (or everyone else) approvals.

Another wrong assumption is that your app will be able to net $7.700 a year. AppStore doesn’t know honor the long tail rule typical of shareware and indie sales, it honors a special and very interesting sales model that sees spikes of about one or two days every time your app is updated. Chance and sheer luck play a fundamental role in this model. Being the last published title between a pause of several hours can be better of any paid advertisement! Be realist and consider that you can’t support every application you launch indefinitely. The approval is still time-consuming, so supporting an app will be costly. It’s up to you to invest in new titles or promote the older ones. Remember that newer titles can advertise older “hits”. Another nice way to keep your Apps fresh is to hire a marketing firm to keep the buzz going. They are not cheap, though. They come in the hundreds of thousands.

Believing that your app will stay afloat due to pure quality is naive, there’s simply too much noise to hope your app will be profitable because it’s good. Nobody will brave the backlog of AppStore to reach your App: chances are that he will find something similar before reaching your six-months old title. And it will be probably free!

Don’t be influenced by iPhone success stories. Despite the huge quantity of applications, individual success stories are almost always confined to the early days of AppStore. Just remember that, more than often, success stories are marketing stunts to attract customers and investors. Even when they happen in respectable newspapers and website. You aren’t iFart.

Be wary of the Apple (or other publishers) success: it’s not yours. Success stories of publishers with hundreds of titles under their belt aren’t necessarily encouraging for developers. That’s called shotgun strategy: produce and promote a lot of different stuff, since every copy sold is an earning and the development risks are taken by someone else (YOU, in this case). To be more clear: an application that sells only one copy is a catastrophe for you but it’s just another 30% gross income for Apple, strong of thousands of other titles. You can’t win this war.

My evaluation is, of course, purely instrumental to quantify how big the AppStore is and how difficult is for anyone to emerge. Despite music there’s no way a start-up can promote something sold only in AppStore outside AppStore. That’s why most indie games are coming to AppStore after they reached success in more accessible marketplaces, like Steam, WiiWare or Xbox Live and AppStore game developers pretty much stay and die inside the platform.

Just look at the weekly iPhone top tens: estabilished brands pushed by strong publishers sell well. But they’ll sell pretty much everywhere!

First play-through done!

Yesterday, despite a big headache I was able to finish Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2.

I was missing only Wakanda and the final Nanite relay tower, so I grimaced through it. What can I say? The end boss was a partial letdown, he doesn’t have the charisma of other super villains, despite the cinematic battle (I really love how the environment “feels” boss battles in MUA2). It won’t change my overly positive feeling about the game. After all, it’s not the first action RPG that fails to deliver a respectable endgame boss: Diablo 2, Divine Divinity and Dungeon Siege bosses are equally uninspired, compared to the overall game pace.

After completing the game, the heroes remains in Wakanda, to let you replay older missions and unlock missed content. The Wakanda mission terminal allows you to start a new game plus, where all the stats and unlockables are carried over. As soon I will get The Hulk (I’m not really sure where and what I missed, yet), I will try to bite the game in online co-op at Legendary difficulty. Heroic was too easy for the most part and I don’t feel to play Pro-Reg on Super Heroic and going through the game again to unlock Legendary achievements.

To add insult to injury, I inspected the heroic deeds of my characters and aside the cosume ones I’ve plenty to do to reach at last half of the total team boosts available. What I learned is that a tactically placed team boost can be a huge difference between triumph and defeat, so to play decently on Legendary I will try to recover the most of them.

Delighted by Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

Color me naive or just stupid, I like the game a lot and I really don’t understand all the negativity around it. Maybe is just because superheroes aren’t as much accepted as fantasy and sci-fi setting?

The over-criticized simplifications go in the right direction in my opinion. They let the game gain more accessibility and are pretty much compensated by the ability to reconfigure all your team, characters and powers on the fly, to adapt to every situation.

Being mostly a Marvel nerd I cannot help to like the game, even because this time the storyline is solid and the characters are more fleshed out. My only gripe is that, in general, baddies are much better portrayed than heroes, even when the line is blurry, the wrong side of the fence is better. Your team is mostly a bunch of passive heroes, enemies express anger, frustration or just lunacy in a delightful and lively way.

The boss battles are a real step up, so once again, I can’t help the criticism. I’m midway to my first play through (as anti-reg) and battling Titanium Man, Bishop, Lucia Von Barda and Yellowjacket was a blast. I can’t say the same for other MUA1 villains. After clearing the game six times, the last a bit more than a year ago, I really have a bad time to remember anyone aside Fing Fang Foom, maybe because every other seemed just a standard Brawl.

If you are a comics buff or you just are fascinated by super heroes, the game will be a more solid alternative to MUA1, too bad online multiplayer is badly implemented as I write, despite several urgent patches.

It was a long time since I was able to lose track of time playing a video game.

Saiyuki, once again

To perfect an old article about Saiyuki: Journey West for Ars Ludica, I was hooked by the game once again. It’s a truly masterful, yet mostly unknown, SRPG.

I feel like my backlog of newer games will slip again…

Zone of the Enders: shorter is better?

Car broken for the second consecutive week, a huge backlog of current games and wonder what I did on Sunday? I played Zone of the Enders for the first time. I started the game around 14:00 and finished it at 21:00, of the same day, that means 7 hours worth of gameplay, including a short pause to listen one of the most racist debates about Italian muslims, taking place in one of the entertainment TVs of our prime minister.

The experience was short and moderately sweet. Moderately because the game is a pile of unexpressed potential, packed with a storyline that, basically, is a Z-Gundam redux. No wonder Sunrise (the makers of Gundam Anime) was in charge with the OAV prequel and the Anime sequel.

The playability is polished and very high, to the point you will hope that Armored Core will start to copy the control scheme but the game is aimless, excluding for boss battles and drama (mostly condensend in the incipit and the prologue of the story). Wandering from location to location without a clue, fending off the same three types of repetitive enemies is not my kind of long-lasting fun, so kudos to Kojima Production to make the game short, instead of boring players to death (now, if even the new MGS would have followed this pattern…). It makes the sad thruth (ZOE production was sacrificed to cope with Metal Gear Solid 2 delays and expensive development) less evident but still economically relevant.

Games like that rise questions about game pricing. Was ZOE worth a full price purchase? Not really. Was worth a bargain bin purchase (€10, in my case)? Hell yes, still a better experience than a passive movie, especially if you’re a mecha fun.

It likes sleeping!

Sorry for the italian text!

Champions Online polls for next content update

Instead of deciding in their ivory tower the future of the game, Cryptic decided to involve players in the selection of themes for the next content update. While the poll comes with a warning that the winning option will not necessarily be top priority, it’s nice to be able to express an opinion about the direction of changes.

The choice fan is wide and varied, take a look:

Modern Urban (super-crime in modern-day cities)

Dark Urban (gritty street crime in run-down cities)

Exotic Wilderness (mountain-top monasteries, hidden valleys)

Mysterious Locations (Bermuda Triangle, Stonehenge)

Other Dimensions (the Astral Plane, Faerie, the Netherworld)

Alternate Earth (alternate reality, alternate history)

Outer Space (Moon, Mars, Alien Worlds)

Historical Time Travel (ancient Egypt, Dark Ages)

Future Time Travel (high-tech future, post-apocalypse)

Being a SciFi buff, my choiche went for Outer Space, I was temped with Other Dimensions, too.

Call it an understatement…

Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service, we want to inform you that on October 15, 2009, at 5:00 PM PT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star WarsGalaxies servers:

• Corbantis
• Europe-Infinity
• Intrepid
• Kauri
• Kettemoor
• Lowca
• Naritus
• Scylla
• Tarquinas
• Tempest
• Valcyn
• Wanderhome

It’s the first time in my life I see an MMOG success that causes a massive shutdown of servers… Not even EverQuest was so successful!