One of the hardest things for indie game developers is getting the word out about their game so they can get a nice core of early players who will test, give feedback, help them iterate on their design, and get their game polished.

Personally, what I would really like to have early on is about 100-500 hardcore, dedicated players who will play the heck out of your game and stick with it for a few months. You want them to stay dedicated so they can understand where you’ve been and become a core group of tested players whose feedback you can benefit from for many years to come.

So the $64,000 question is: how do you get those couple hundred players?

GAMING FORUMS:

Gaming forums SHOULD be a great place to get the word out about your game. Thousands of gamers, many of which are always looking for something new and interesting, gathered in once place, in a medium that has self selected people who like to communicate.

Unfortunately, many (most?) gaming forums are completely insane with how rapidly they shut you down if you post about your game. They accuse you of spam even if all you do is make one post. Even if you check back regularly, answer questions people post, etc. (which is something an actual spammer would never do), they will warn, ban, block, etc. with impunity. I hate that so many gaming sites do this, and I wish they’d change, but I lack the power or influence to make this happen.

I don’t know if this is just overzealous moderation or bad policies. Either way, it is really disappointing and terrible for the industry as a whole. The mega giant blockbusters don’t need to communicate directly with gamers so they aren’t affected. It is the smaller games and indies that need a way to talk to gamers, and the best medium for this is being consistently made unavailable.

Are there any gaming sites/forums that aren’t like this? Where you can post about your game and actually get a bunch of people who will try out your game, give you feedback, and potentially join your hardcore group of early adopters? If so, please share in the comments!

GAMING BLOGS:

I read a lot of gaming blogs, and there are people on tons of them that I would love to have as testers or early/trial players. But blog topics are determined by the blog author, and I rarely see an opportunity in a discussion to say “Oh speaking of (topic being discussed), you guys should try my new game.” It doesn’t feel natural and instead feels disruptive or just too far off topic.

I have tried mailing blog authors and asking them to write about one of our games, and in a number of cases some awesome bloggers have done this. But these blog posts seem to get mostly ignored by the readers. I think blog readers are generally looking for commentary, analysis, or controversy. So when they see an article that is a nice, calm “hey check this cool thing out”, I think blog readers tune it out or say “oh yeah I will check that out later” but never get around to it.

So as much as I love blogs, I am not sure how well they work for getting the word out about your game. Perhaps if there are some specific blogs designed to promote indie games or to help gamers find new and unique games. Again, if anyone knows of such a thing please post about it in the comments.

ADVERTISING:

In my experience this is just a money pit. Indie companies don’t have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to dump into advertising, so chances are you won’t ever be able to get enough coverage to break through the din of marketing noise. People in marketing know that repetition is the key to making your advertising message effective. It isn’t the first time someone sees your game ad that they try it out. It is more like the 5th or 6th time they see it. Then they say “oh hey, there’s another ad for that game I keep seeing. Maybe I should try it out.”

It is hard enough for an indie company to get enough ad coverage for someone to see their ad once. Getting the ad in front of the same person 5 or more times? Nearly impossible.

Advertising on some smaller, specialized sites might be effective, and once again I’d love to hear some suggestions from readers about sites where an indie company could advertise and actually have it generate some good results.

GAME AGGREGATORS/PLATFORMS:

This is where sites like Kongregate (flash) or Pheeva (html5) come into play. I’ve never made a game that would work with these types of sites, so my experience here is zero. I’d love to hear from people who have put games on sites like this – especially if you did so with the purpose of driving people to your “main” or “bigger” gaming site.

FACEBOOK:

Ugh. I hate the dominant position Facebook has taken as a gaming platform, mainly because it is a pretty bad platform for gaming in general. Tons of screen/UI real estate is eaten up by Facebook, a third party can (and does) change the API on you at will, and if you want to charge money they force you to use THEIR currency from which they take 30% (at least) of your gross.

The only option here, imho, for indies is to make a light or simple version of your game and put it on Facebook just to entice people to play your real game (similar to the aggregators above).

Alternatively, what about just sending updates, high scores, etc. to people’s walls. Does this still work? If so, is it effective? Also, how hard is this to build into your game?

Former Mythic boss explains EA split

It sounds like Jacobs’ is saying that from the time EA bought Mythic, the direction of game design didn’t go the way he wanted or the way he felt was best.

Very interesting.

Perhaps this starts to show a little more insight into what went wrong with Warhammer Online.

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.

It is the first game where I did not write a single line of code. It is the first game playable by people of ALL ages. It is our first game without built in chat!

This article explains the basics of Coin ‘n Carry while also delving a bit into some general aspects of the social gaming space and why putting your game on Facebook is not necessarily the best move.

Coin ‘n Carry: Putting the GAME back into Social Games

Check out the article, and then give our game a try please!

http://www.coinncarry.com

Blown up:

Full section:

The inside front cover of the magazine, that shows the date and other contents:

Now, I could be cheeky and leave it up to you to draw the same conclusion I did. I have very smart readers, so I don’t think it would be that tough. But just in case members of the lesser entertainment mediums blow through here, I’ll summarize:

In 1991, Secret of Monkey Island cost $70. That’s 20 years ago, and the cost of the game was HIGHER than what you’d pay now for a similar quality release.

It just goes to show you that the value of video games is not just great, but getting greater over time. No wonder the gaming industry is destroying movies, music, and all other forms of entertainment. We’ve got them beat on quality, depth of experience, AND price.

Major Cancelled MMOs:

Motor City Online (EA): 2003
Earth & Beyond (Westwood/EA): 2004
Asheron’s Call 2 (Microsoft/Turbine): 2005
Matrix Online (Monolith): 2005 (effectively)
Shadowbane (Wolfpack): 2006
The Saga of Ryzom (Nevrax): 2006
Auto Assault (NCSoft): 2007
The Sims Online (EA): 2007
RF Online (CCR): 2008
Hellgate: London (Flagship): 2009
Tabula Rasa (NCSoft/Destination Games): 2009
Dungeon Runners (NCSoft): 2010
Mythos (Flagship): 2010
Earth Eternal (Sparkplay): 2010
APB: All Points Bulletin: 2010

Pre-Release Cancelations:

Dragon Empires (Codemasters): 2004
True Fantasy Live Online (Microsoft): 2004
Mythica (Microsoft): 2004
Ultima Online 2 (EA): 2004
Imperator (Mythic): 2005
Marvel Universe Online (Microsoft/Cryptic): 2008
Dark & Light (NPCube): 2008
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (Perpetual Entertainment): 2008
Stargate Worlds (Cheyenne Mountain/FireSky): 2010
The Agency (Sony): 2011

Studios/Companies Closed:

Westwood Studios: 2004
Wolfpack Studios: 2004
Nevrax: 2006
Perpetual Entertainment: 2008
NPCube: 2008
Destination Games: 2009
Flagship: 2010
Sparkplay: 2010
Realtime Worlds: 2010

1) “Designed by The Children’s Television Workshop” – He notes a failure to maintain the cool, original design of the Worgen, and “the Star Trek Ferengi inspired goblins with their ridiculously flamboyant starting zone that puts a stake through the heart of any semblance of high fantasy that WoW ever had.”

2) Trivialized Advancement: “1-85 being utterly devoid of any semblance of challenge or intensity. Mob density has been nerfed to almost nothing in outdoor zones and in those occasional outdoor mini-dungeons; killing these mobs takes zero skill as player power has reached all-time heights in WoW.”

3) No Challenge. “For the vast majority of what constitutes WoW, the following is true: the challenge is gone, the risk is gone, the suspense is gone. the wonder is gone, and the immersion — well it left town years ago. It’s one big Bacchanalian orgy of advancement and rewards. Eventually players become immune to this mindless routine and have realized that gear and levels mean nothing.”

4) Dungeon Finder: “Recently flawed design including the Trojan Horse of all MMO features — the Dungeon Finder — has resulted in the mechanization and trivialization of the beloved dungeon crawl. Dungeons have become nothing more than mob and loot conveyor belts designed to dole out instant gratification to mute loot addicted participants culled from various servers.”

This section leads to my favorite point he makes in the entire post, as it is one I have been making to people ever since I first heard about Dungeon Finder:

“Players are wise to the reality that being outgoing, friendly and polite has no value in WoW all thanks to the geniuses on the Dungeon Finder development team.”

One of these days I am going to write an entire blog post about this concept: making things easier and more convenient is not always better, and is very often worse.

Dungeon Finder seems like a great concept. It is super convenient and helps people do something they really want to do: dungeon crawl.

The problem is it absolutely killed the concept of a game world. It whisked you around the game universe instant-teleport style, and originally you didn’t even have to find the dungeon even once to be teleported to it.

Worst of all, it killed the necessity of making friends and allies in order to put together a solid tank-healer-dpsx3 team. You could be the biggest jerk in the world, but you still had the same dungeon timer queue time.

In the old days, jerks languished in misery as they couldn’t find groups while people with a decent, mature attitude reveled in fun and productive groups. That’s how it should be!

5) Culture of Entitlement. “The players through no fault of their own have become virtual slackers addicted to a steady drip feed of rewards. Shooting fish in a barrel would require too much skill for today’s average WoW player. People don’t want to work for anything anymore; they feel entitled.”

==============================================

With all of that out of the way, do I agree with his final conclusion? Do I think Cataclysm is the worst MMO expansion in history?

No, I do not. I believe that title still goes to Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis (DAoC: ToA), and I don’t even think its a fair fight.

DAoC: ToA was released October 28, 2003, a year before WoW in a time where Everquest was the WoW of the MMO industry. It wasn’t the quality of the content that made Atlantis such an utter failure. It was the fact that DAoC used an entire expansion, all that budget and manpower, to create an expansion that essentially tryed to EQ-ify (in the same way games now try to WoW-ify themselves) the game.

ToA introduced massive raids – some of them requiring 12 hours of straight gameplay with groups 50-100 large. It introduced massively powerful artifacts that completely dominated the PvP (RvR) landscape. Within a few months, if you did not have a full complement of fully leveled up artifacts you simply couldn’t compete in RvR.

This was an absolutely titanic shift in the game. Before ToA, you could cap all your stats, resistances, etc. with crafted gear. It might be expensive, but it didn’t require any raiding or specific boss farming. People lovede this because it made PvP a level playing field where skill, team composition, etc. were everything.

ToA utterly ruined and destroyed this, and the shockwave was fast and brutal. Within a few months, this expansion caused DAoC to lose approximately two thirds of its userbase, and it never recovered. Even Mythic staff (including Mark Jacobs, the founder) eventually admitted ToA was a gigantic mistake.

Can you imagine investing millions of dollars and zillions of man hours into an expansion – all with the goal of GROWING your game – and the net effect is to lose TWO THIRDS of your customers? Spending the ToA money on guns and booze would have been more productive. In order to stop the exodus of players, they had to release non-ToA enabled servers. That’s right folks: ToA was so bad, people preferred servers WITHOUT it. The non-ToA servers were the most popular, and probably saved DAoC from completely shutting down.

For that reason, I believe Trials of Atlantis is still far and away the worst MMO expansion ever made, and I think it is unlikely it will ever be dethroned.

Bright Hub is one of the top 200 most popular web sites.

Most of you know I am the Managing Editor for Gaming at Bright Hub. We produce about 300 articles (including guides, analysis, walkthroughs, and reviews) for games on all platforms (including pen-and-paper and board games!). I have been working there for almost 3 years now am proud to have been a part of its meteoric growth. I truly believe it is one of the best destinations for gaming information on the internet.

I was excited to learn today that Bright Hub has now become one of the top 200 most popular web sites in the US. We are closing in on 30 million monthly page views per month globally, and over 15 million views per month in the US. This is an excellent achievement that is a testament to the excellent management at Bright Hub as well as the hard working staff of writers and editors. I’d like to think I played my part, as the gaming section alone is about 3 million views a month of that traffic.

If you aren’t familiar with Bright Hub, here are a few quick links to get involved:

Bright Hub Gaming – all the articles, guides, walkthroughs, etc.

Bright Hub Gaming on Facebook – discussion on games, news updates, beta key giveaways, and more.

Bright Hub Gaming on twitter – basically a feed linked to the Facebook updates.

And if you are someone who would like to get paid to write about games, send me an email at mhartman@editors.brighthub.com. We are always looking for more good writers.

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.

Five Revolutionary Games That Amazed Us

It got me thinking about revolutionary games that really made an impression on me both as a gamer and a developer.

1) Age of Empires: In many ways, this is the game that got me back into playing games after many years away from them (with the exception of MUDs). My wife got me into it while I was visiting her once, and we played the living daylights out of it. I know that AoE did not revolutionize the genre, but the combination of history with RTS mechanics made it a lot of fun.

2) Diablo: This is another game my wife introduced me to during my early days of “returning” to gaming. This was also the first game I ever modded. In addition to the sheer joy of mindless mob killing and loot grinding, the introduction to modding was a very significant one for my gaming life.

3) Threshold: The first game that I ever created, completely on my own. I have to list it here, right? I feel it was certainly revolutionary, in that it was possibly the only LP mud out there that required RP. It was certainly the first (and still only) commercial game that enforces RP. The impact it had on my life was pretty enormous, since it resulted in me cutting short my career as a lawyer and becoming an entrepreneur and game developer.

How about the rest of you?