Please give this article a read, and let me know what you think.

Facebook Games: Where Monetization Gimicks and User Growth Matter More Than Good Game Design

I look forward to your opinions.

And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the internet — I hate to use that broad-based term in quotes — had gotten. Like, people love flaming. The whole thing is all — they want controversy. They’re going to say things. It’s like, “Hey, you don’t know who I really am. I can say whatever I want.” You see it in the press now.

He blames “the internet” and flaming, but still after all these years cannot admit it was their absolute despicable and deceitful business model.

Amazing.

Roper is like a drug addict. Until he admits his problem, you can’t deal with him.

Nobody in the world should hire this guy until he admits the #1 reason people hated Hellgate and Flagship with such a passion was their absolutely disgusting business model.

I talked to people in the industry, they thought, “I thought that was a great idea, especially at the time, for a business model.” “Hey, the game is free to play? Oh, but if I want to give you $10 a month, I’m going to get everything you ever do? Sure, I’m in.” But gamers hated the idea.

Clueless. He acts like everyone in the industry thought it was a good idea. Did he talk to idiots? Hellgate was roundly mocked for its business model months before it came out, and they didn’t do anything to change it.

How could he not understand that you’re either subscription or not. And even if you must go with some kind of weird partial-subscription system, you can’t TAKE AWAY the content people already paid for.

If my subscription gets me access to Zone X, you can’t take away Zone X when I stop subscribing. You can stop giving me new zones – fine. But taking away old ones I paid for? Stupid.

Or even worse, locking characters because they are one of the “subscriber only” classes? Or locking out gear? ANYONE thought that was smart? Really?

I think I was very disappointed that followed into going Cryptic. You know, people go, “Oh, great. Now this guy is going to come here and screw everything up.”

Which he did. The Cryptic “C-store” is an absolute abortion of a “freemium” attempt. The things you pay for are grossly overpriced, and they are charging extra for things that should be core gameplay elements.

We even at one point just realized, “We’re never going to make money off box sales. Even if this game sells multiple millions of copies, we might never make our money back on the box sales. We’re going to have to make our money on the back end, on the online.” Because that was a much lower nut to crack every month. But we just didn’t get the number of players.

Perhaps this explains the stupidity and the greed: desperation. They realized that the online/subscription method was their only hope to break even, so they got desperate and greedy. Instead of figuring out a Guild Wars type model where they charged a fixed price for chunks of content – or mini-expansions – they were hoping for the cash cow of subscriptions (and the free money from “sleepers”). Stupid move.

Bill Roper joined established MMO developer Cryptic Studios as design director in 2008.

Less than two years later, Roper would resign from the company after the launches of Champions Online and Star Trek Online, each of which was criticized by gamers and reviewers.

Reconcile that “resigned” part with the fact that he hasn’t been able to find a job – ANY job – for 8 months.

Translation: Roper was fired. This guy appears to be allergic to honesty.

Today I learned about this really amusing parody “television commercial” for Evony. It is worth a watch:

News articles like this are definitely a nail in the coffin of the subscription model: Turbine: Lord of the Rings Online Revenues Tripled As Free-To-Play Game.

It is a shame that SW:ToR decided to go with a subscription model. I remember early on in its development there were rumors they were going to be F2P/micros. I really wish they’d stuck with that. I think that would have given them a huge advantage over WoW once they released. Instead, they are now going to have to compete with WoW head-to-head for subscribers. I wish them luck.

This seems like a moderately huge disaster for Frogster

The short version is this. Some group of people claim to have obtained the login details of just about the entire customer base of Frogster’s games (not just Runes of Magic). They have been making demands that Frogster improve various things about their games.

Putting aside what a PR and business disaster this is for Frogster, I wonder about this:

1) What if this is successful? What if Frogster has to cave and make some or all of the fixes demanded by this group. Is that basically “negotiating with the terrorists”? And will that encourage more people to do such things?

2) How long until a group like this decides “wow, if it can happen to Frogster, maybe we can hit WoW.” Or heck, what if this group decides to one  up themselves and go after WoW.

3) What can MMO developers do to guard against this? I haven’t read anything yet that implied Frogster did anything particularly sloppy in its security measures.

This F2P maneuver by CO is one of the most laughably absurd attempts at changing from subscription to F2P I have ever seen. They have locked F2P players out of the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the game which is character customization. F2P players have to choose rigid classes, whereas everyone else gets the “real game” which has an open power selection system. You would think having Bill Roper on their staff for a year or so would have given them the institutional knowledge that segregating your players like that is a recipe for failure.

I predict this will be a total failure. I leave you with this (click on it for full size)

“The present invention provides a system in which video games may be widely distributed and played without the need for multiple platform-specific hardware units or purchase of an optical disk to play a particular video game,”

That’s incredibly obvious and completely undeserving of a patent. So obvious that there are other companies doing it already, like David Perry’s Gaikai. I attended Perry’s talk at GDC Online, and his company has been doing this sort of thing at the same time. And just in case there was any doubt that OnLive intends to abuse the broad scope of this joke patent:

“Therefore, the following description should not be considered as limiting the scope of the invention.”

Freakin’ disgusting. Intellectual property law in our country is absolutely broken in nearly every way.

2) Tom and Jerry MMO from Turner Interactive. WTF? It will supposedly be released first in India. Are Tom and Jerry super popular over there or something?

3) Study on assumptions gamers make about people based on the looks of their avatar.

I hope never, but I fear that is a pointless hope. Last night I read this article: Google Stops Wi-Fi Mapping Project After “Mistakenly” Scoring Personal Data. It got me thinking about the accelerating violation of “customers’” private information for profit by so many companies out there.

Zynga has already gone down this path with so much of their gameplay based on nagging people into spamming their own friends about their games for free marketing.

Facebook and Google are legendary for it.

When will we have our first MMO that makes the gathering and selling of customer data a major part of their business model?

As a gamer, how much of this would you tolerate? And try to be honest, because the continued use of Facebook and Google by so many of us shows we are actually willing to tolerate quite a lot.

How do you think an MMO could successful move in this direction to make money without completely alienating their customers?

Subscription MMOs often run various promotions and events to try and lure people back. Sometimes they are called re-activation weekends. Often these events coincide with other special events like double XP (note this), new content, special events, etc.

A few days ago I received an email from LOTRO trying to convince me to return. Among the amazing incentives were:

1. 5% bonus xp.
2. Free stable master travel.
3. Collect tokens from defeated monsters and trade them in for special rewards.
4. Play your old characters.
5. Play LOTRO for $9.99 a month

Lets break that down a bit. #4 and #5 are kinda stupid to even list there. #4 is freakin’ obvious, and #5 is the same price everyone pays…. yipee. #2 is functionally irrelevant. Even as a lowbie I never even paid attention to stable master travel. #3 is vague, and might be interesting, but most likely the rewards are meh or silly.

So the big lure, and the thing they listed FIRST, is the “whopping” 5% bonus XP.

Who is the idiot marketing buffoon who came up with this idea and rammed it home?

Who in the heck is going to give a crap about 5% bonus XP?

I cannot remember the last time I saw a major MMO have an xp related event that was not 50% or more bonus XP. The common bonus is DOUBLE XP (+100%).

Does anyone know someone at Turbine they can ask about this? Because this has to be one of the most laughable MMO promotions I’ve ever read.

But to make this more than mocking LOTRO’s promotion, let us also discuss the larger issue:

1. How important do you think it is, and how much focus should be put on, luring back former customers at an MMO?
2. What methods do you think are likely to be most effective at doing so?