The shift of the game-playing population to internet-based games is analogous to the growth of the American supermarket, according to EA's Ben Cousins.

In a talk Friday at the Game Developers Conference, Cousins explained how studying the history of the American retail experience solidifies his somewhat controversial theory that quick, convenient, internet-based gaming will overtake traditional retail-based products completely.

According to cousins, the retail dynamic at the turn of the 20th century was a high-quality, boutique experience - consumers would interact directly with an expert behind the counter, who would suggest and personally package up products. It was expensive, inconvenient, and slow.

With the rapid adoption of automobiles and growth of paved roads, what we call "supermarkets" became the norm, and consumers gravitated toward the convenience, speed and lower prices they offered.

Cousins argued that traditional packaged retail games are going the way of the old-fashioned market, pointing as many GDC speakers have this year to FarmVille as his primary example. FarmVille's 80 million users make it the most popular game in the history of the Western world, despite the experience not being as high quality as a traditional, high definition retail game. Consumers, he said, are willing to look past a game's quality if the game is free, quick, and easy to access.

Continue reading "GDC: EA's Cousens Talks Social Gaming's Wal-Mart Parallel" »

Casual gaming portal and developer Big Fish Games announced the release of My Tribe, its second Facebook game and a port of its downloadable Mac and PC game originally released in 2008.

The company says the new release is the second in a series of social game initiatives its launching in 2010. Big Fish Games has redesigned and extended My Tribe for the Facebook platform, adding microtransactions by letting players level up faster and "enhance [their] gameplay experience" by buying virtual goods.

In My Tribe, players pick a unique island with varying levels of natural resources and mysterious objects. Players maintain a group of tribespeople, helping them develop specialties like construction, fishing, agriculture, science, and more. Each member of the tribe grows from child to you to adult, learning new skills ,having children of their own, and becoming respected elders.

Players can unlock knowledge as their tribespeople grow and learn, allowing them to create customized clothing and accessories, build shelters, provide food, and make scientific discoveries. Gamers will also earn trophies and quests, and can visit other islands within their friend network to help with those challenges.

"Social gamers are increasingly drawn to game experiences that offer greater depth of gameplay in easily accessible, social formats," says Big Fish Games's vice president of social games Will O’Brien. "My Tribe is precisely that."

He adds, "What’s cool about My Tribe is that when you’re actively playing, you govern your tribe, but while you are away, your tribespeople will take matters into their own hands. Your teenage tribespeople, for example, may choose to sleep or eat instead of chopping wood!"

Casual gaming network WildTangent announced that social game studio Playdom is incorporating its recently launched BrandBoost advertising platform into the developer's Tiki Farm Facebook title.

BrandBoost enables Playdom to reward gamers with virtual items and premium content in exchange for viewing a video or a "rich media advertisement" within Tiki Farm. WildTangent points to a recent Nielsen survey of 27,000 consumers indicating more than 85 percent of gamers prefer not to pay for digital game content, and that its platform allows gamers the choice of receiving content for free by viewing ads.

Launched last December, Tiki Farm has more than 5 million monthly active users. Other companies that have integrated the BrandBoost platform into their games include Sony Online Entertainment (free-to-play MMO Free Realms), MMO publisher and operator Outspark.com, and online gaming portal and developer OMGPOP.com.

"BrandBoost offers a new, frictionless option for our players to get access to valuable game items courtesy of trusted brands," says Playdom's Business Development VP Sean Phinney. "This means more of our players will be able to experience the benefits and thrill of premium virtual goods while playing play Tiki Farm.

R.A. Salvatore, the popular fantasy author best-known for his Forgotten Realms novels starring Drow Elf Drizzt Do'Urden. For the past several years, he's been working with Curt Schilling's 38 Studios to produce a game codenamed Copernicus, an MMO.

With the disclaimer "I'm not here to tell you how to create a world. I am certainly not here to tell you how to design a game. What I am here is to tell you the principles I use when I create a world," Salvatore began a journey through his gaming and writing careers and espoused core concepts of his world building methods.

"The first thing in an MMO is the size of the world. Any discussion of game design is about hitting sweet spots. For me, one of the most important things in an MMO is the size of the world," said Salvatore. "[EverQuest] is still the game that I look to as the best world in a game," due to its size and scope.

As an avid EverQuest fan, Salvatore also said "I've come to believe that one of the problems of gamers going forward if we're not careful is how mechanics will take all of the pain out of the games." At 38, he's gotten in many arguments about death penalties -- EverQuest can actually de-level you if you die.

"If you take out of a world two things: the pain of losing, it will diminish the accomplishment of winning. And if you take the element of chance of out it, I won't enjoy it," said Salvatore. "You need that in games. It's harder to do that in a computer game, because your phone lines will light up. Never listen to your customer service guys when you're designing a game."

Continue reading "GDC: R.A. Salvatore On Building Worlds, Copernicus" »

In a lecture Thursday at GDC, Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo shared Blizzard's core design concepts, offering examples of places where the World of Warcraft developer succeeded and failed in creating compelling multiplayer experiences.

Pardo offered a plethora advice to the designers present, stressing that these lessons may not necessarily gel with other studios and suggesting that everybody go through this same exercise to set down their individual design team's rules.

Below are a few of Blizzard's rules that we found particularly helpful. Some may seem obvious, but often it is the obvious advice that we tend to forget about first.

Gameplay First

Blizzard's core design philosophy is to design around the core fun gameplay concepts, rather than working around other aspects such as tech. By way of example, significant changes had to be made in the world's lore between Warcraft III and World of Warcraft in order to make a more fun and balanced game, despite pushback from some who felt the lore was sacred.

Continue reading "GDC: Blizzard's Core Game Design Concepts " »

Independent consultant and lawyer Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco gave an impassioned talk Thursday at GDC, urging developers to examine the inherent "espionage" metagame of EVE Online and take inspiration from it for other products.

"In my opinion, espionage is the ultimate in user-generated content," said Gianturco. "You don't constantly have to crap out new raids, players will amuse themselves by trying to tear each others' throats out."

The metagame Gianturco referred to is practically unique to EVE Online: high-level players may manipulate others through means outside of the game client itself in order to attain their goals, be it that player's in-game currency, the advancement of his affiliated group, or something else entirely. While this is not an official feature of the game, it is supported by developer CCP's hands-off approach, meaning players have practically created it from scratch.

"Players in an espionage metagame get to use cunning and manipulation as a skill, which is rare in games," he continued. "For those of us who like that sort of thing, it's a huge draw."

Gianturco defines an espionage metagame as having three key components: player-created factions, significant consequences, and a developer-supported environment.

"Espinage cannot exist in an arena where nothing is risked," said Gianturco, explaining that a loss in World of Warcraft might result in an annoying temporary setback, but a screwup in EVE can literally cost a player $4,000 in assets.

There are of course significant risks in giving your players as much freedom as CCP does with EVE. According to Gianturco, game makers who might allow and foster an espionate metagame must be prepared to field significant user complaints.

"You have to deal with people whining and complaining," he said. "If you can't deal with that, you can't have an espionage metagame worth playing."

Social advertising and analytics company Sometrics launched its first direct-to-consumer product, GameCoins.com, a community where gamers can meet friends, participate in forums, and discuss news about their favorites games and virtual worlds.

The site is also an online marketplace for virtual goods and currency. Members can use the Sometrics Offer Solution to participate in advertising offers and earn in-game cash and digital goods for their favorite MMOs, virtual worlds, and social games. Sometrics say that publishers can expand their reach to more gamers through the increased exposure GameCoins.com offers.

Sometrics initial publisher/developer partners on the community site include GamersFirst, IMVU, and Playdom. GamersFirst, which created free-to-play first-person shooter War Rock, says the site helps it market its title to new gamers while providing added value to its existing players.

"This is the first time we’re going to consumers directly with our virtual currency products,” says Sometrics co-founder and CEO Ian Swanson. "Until now, our solutions for earning that game’s virtual currency have lived within the individual games themselves."

Swanson continues, "But with Game Coins we can broaden the reach for all the publishers and games that partner with us. It serves as a hub for consumers, to enable them to share their enthusiasm for a game with others and, while there, discover new games for themselves."

As part of its recent efforts to compete against rival social networks Facebook and MySpace in the thriving social games space, hi5 has announced a new Game Developer Program designed to encourage developers to release games to its platform by offering various promotion, distribution, and monetization benefits.

The Game Developer Program will provide developers who release their games exclusively on hi5 with a free marketing and promotion package comprised of free banner ads, placement on the hi5 Games page, inclusion on the hi5 Games tool bar, user recommendations, and more. hi5 says it will allow partners to receive a share of advertising revenue generated from their games, too.

Select developers will receive access to the hi5 coins payment interface, the site's virtual currency system for in-game microtransactions, which offers more than 60 payment systems through 30 currencies. The site notes that its system allows studios to avoid the technical and business development work required for integrating other payment systems into their titles.

Developers working on the platform will have access to game-specific AIs for incorporating user profiles, user achievements, and high scores into their titles. They can also use the social network's newly announced Facebook-compatible APIs, which enable developers to take their games initially created for Facebook and run them on hi5 with "little to no revisions".

"To date, social games have been distributed on open platforms competing against thousands of other titles with nothing but their own spamminess to get them discovered," says hi5's recently appointed CTO and president Alex St. John, formerly CEO and founder of casual gaming studio WildTangent.

He adds, "As the market has saturated, getting noticed has become more and more difficult and expensive, particularly for smaller developers. hi5’s new Game Developer Program solves this problem by providing great games with free promotion, rapid audience acquisition and favorable revenue share for new content on hi5.com."

Prepaid card company InComm has acquired virtual currency provider Zeevex, a move the two firms believe will help them grow sales of prepaid digital content and speed consumer adoption of open virtual currency.

Zeevex offers a platform that supports both token-based and point-based virtual currency models. It provides an open virtual currency through its Zeevex Extreme Game Card, which is sold in more than 31,000 retail locations like GameStop, Blockbuster, and 7-Eleven across the country.

Founded in 2008, the company has offices in Atlanta, Georgia and Palo Alto, California. InComm says its purchase of the virtual currency startup as "an integral component" of its digital content strategy that will support its "commitment to innovation in the prepaid environment.

"Our move into the virtual currency and microtransaction space strengthens our position as a pioneer in digital content at retail and helps InComm drive value to our digital partners allowing them to monetize their content immediately, at a lower cost than many other options, while establishing an unprecedented connection to retail consumers," said InComm's Consumer Products and International SVP Brian Parlotto.

"This represents a great opportunity for our existing digital content partners and the consumers who have come to rely on Zeevex tokens to enhance their online experience," adds Zeevex CEO Ron Williams. "Aligning our virtual currency platform and innovative Digital Locker with InComm's proven expertise in marketing and selling prepaid digital content products at retail will speed the adoption of an open virtual currency."