Worlds In Motion

GDC: Farmville Reaches 32 Million Daily Users

2010-03-10T03:00:31Z

As part of a technical talk at GDC’s Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day. Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming social game, is one of Facebook’s biggest success stories, earning the small team huge accolades before being purchased by Zynga. The game took only 5 weeks from conception to launch, developing the back end, using off-the-shelf components when possible, but more than that using best practices from both the web and game development worlds to keep the game extremely portable. Multiple times during development, or even after, Facebook’s API or rules changed, and with a strong web development sensibility at the beginning, nothing slowed the team down significantly. This also helped them avoid user fatigue due to lag or errors. The core team was six web developers, two artists and three designers. After launch, they wound up getting 18,000 users in the first 24 hours. At the end of four days, they had 1 million users per day, all without having ever promoted it. Now, the game has more than 110 million installs, and they recently breached the 32 million daily user mark, though the “official” number is still 31 million, and as Mahajan says, that number is still growing.

GDC: VCs Talk Devs 'In Denial', Industry's Social Future

2010-03-10T01:00:19Z

Panelists billed as the world's foremost experts on funding, buying and selling game companies have a view of gaming's future that's likely to be controversial to those working in traditional development. In a panel at GDC 2010, Northwest Ventures' Tim Chang, Trinity Ventures' Gus Tai, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson and Making Fun and Minor Studios CEO John Welch discussed what companies and products will get funded today -- and according to them, it's not triple-A. Gaming is still a highly active arena for venture capitalists, says Chang -- and yet every news broadcast on the industry shows the console games business contracting, presenting a paradox of an industry that's "screwed yet growing," he says. Chang, whose firm has backed Ngmoco and Playdom, says the shift in the games business is a mirror of what has happened in the music industry as much of it goes digital. Now, time and attention is shifting to the online space and the social players that are growing the existing game audience. Developers' attention is best served thinking about "how to use all of your expertise to create this engaging, interesting flow that could lead to a proposition where you can make money," suggested Tai of Trinity Ventures, which has invested in Trion and Playfirst. "The industry is in huge disarray," agrees Pacific Crest's Wilson, who believes console game developers are "in denial." The evolving blend between gaming and media is "scary," he admits. "It was easier ten years ago... when you'd just ship a great product and the users pay you up front," Wilson says. "Those days are over."]]> Guitar Hero phenomena, both of which, strictly by the dollars, are beginning to decline this year. But the industry is still paying too much attention to the bottom line, they agreed. Thanks to current-generation consoles, it's now three times more expensive to develop a video game than it was in 2005. But even the most optimistic industry growth forecasts don't call for three times more revenue, even in the next decade, thanks to changing distribution models. So where are the opportunities for new companies? According to the panelists, look to premium social gaming. Thanks to tech like Unity's development platform, which lets developers create lightweight and browser-based 3D games, users will be playing online and social games for longer and be more engaged with them. New ways of looking at design mechanics are also necessary, say the panelists. Examples like Foursquare, a social app with game-like qualities, are part of the investors' future forecast. The era where profitability on a packaged goods item was the main goal is over, they say. Today's environment has number of users and playtime as the ultimate metric -- and given that many of them will never spend money to play with the product, user acquisition must be the ultimate and primary goal for game developers. And with huge social gaming companies like Zynga, Playdom and Playfish already in the pole position, virality's the word for any new company that hopes to compete. "If you're not working for a Zynga, you have to think of how to get users to be viral," says Wilson. One thing the panelists say they've yet to see accomplished is a major game that's inherently viral by the nature of its mechanics -- not a game that spams friends or is Facebook oriented, but makes users require their friends' involvement in order to play, and requires or results in the accumulation of a community. That way, userbases rise simply as a consequence of the game mechanics. "Focus on one thing," advises Wilson: "The cost of customer acquisition, and how do you build that into the design of the game?"

GDC: Facebook Keynote Discusses True Multi-Platform Gaming

2010-03-09T23:00:48Z

Gareth Davis’ GDC Social Gaming Summit keynote was a mixture of old and new, but his larger takeaway was the potential future of cross-platform gaming, based around your friends. There were quite a lot of congratulatory statistics (rightfully so), including the facts that 70% of the Facebook audience is global (i.e. non-U.S.), 200 million people use Facebook daily, and 400 million monthly. Over a million developers have created over 500,000 apps over the last few years, and more than 200 million people are playing games every month on the service. Davis is platform manager at Facebook, heading up the games division. “We’ve moved beyond the core gamer,” he said, “and we now have people playing games across every demographic.” Much of this was old news to veteran Facebook developers, who packed the keynote on the new summit’s first day. Davis mentioned that the Facebook platform is changing the way games are designed, monetized, developed, and marketed – and that interacting with friends is the true value seen in these games, calling this “the ultimate compulsion loop.” He reminded us that most games throughout history have been social, from backgammon to chess, and that even modern board games and video games are social, from Risk to Rock Band. “Pretty soon all games will be social,” said Davis, “and we won’t call them social games, we’ll just start calling them games again.” This was one of the better points made during the keynote – extrapolating on the sentiment, the way we describe these games may alienate certain developers from appreciating their applications beyond just the Facebook realm, which in fact is a point Davis addressed later.]]> Mario of Facebook, is out there, and will likely come from somewhere in this room.”

NHN To Publish CryEngine 2-Based MMORPG

2010-03-09T21:00:02Z

Korea-based NHN Corporation announced that it signed a publishing deal for a fantasy-based massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that features an Asian theme and uses Crytek's CryEngine 2 game engine. The publisher signed the deal with Polygon Games, which is comprised of the Polygon Visual Works art team and the primarily developers behind free-to-play MMORPG Rohan: Blood Feud. Polygon Visual Works has previously worked with companies like Nintendo for game cinematics. NHN plans to publish the project, which is currently codenamed Project E:st, in Korea and other markets, including North America and Europe. It intends to begin closed beta testing in Korea later this year. You can watch a trailer for Project E:st after the post break. "The project name, E:st, was selected to show the commitment between NHN Corporation and Polygon Games to develop the best Asia fantasy game," says NHN Corporation's Hangame CEO Wook Jeong. "We believe that the high graphical quality realized with CryEngine 2, coupled with an immersive storyline, will strongly appeal to gamers."]]>

GDC: Emergent Reveals New CEO, Growth Driven By Social MMOs

2010-03-09T19:00:43Z

Engine tech company Emergent is under the stewardship of a new CEO -- the company says Scott Johnson took on the role late in 2009. Johnson is former co-founder and CEO of mobile game developer Mobility Entertainment, which was acquired by Foundation 9. Prior to that, he spent seven years with Vivend in various managing franchises like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. Emergent says it has Johnson's leadership to thank for its strong close to 2009, which saw a 35 percent year over year increase in revenues and a 58 percent profitability boost. The company saw particularly strong growth in North America, Japan and China, where it says the success of its Gamebryo Lightspeed development platform drove results. Overall, Emergent boasts 120 licensing deals sealed throughout the year 2009, and says more than 50 games built on its technology are coming from Asia -- most of them free-to-play and social MMOs. Emergent is apparently focusing more squarely on that high-growth space. According to CEO Johnson, the company's tech is ideal for developing within the category. "Over the past 12 months the video game industry has seen a dramatic shift in the way it conducts business. The era of $15 million plus titles is in our rear-view mirror and changing focus to the new way business is done will be challenging for our competition," Johnson says.

GDC: Bigpoint Announces Battlestar MMO, Unity Partnership, San Francisco Office

2010-03-09T17:00:38Z

As GDC begins, German browser games portal Bigpoint has announced -- alongside the opening of a U.S. office -- that it is planning to debut games that allow head-to-head PC versus iPhone play using Unity, and is developing an MMO based on NBC Universal's Battlestar Galactica property. The company currently employs 340 people in Hamburg, Germany and has 110 million registered users for its gaming services -- for which is U.S. is its number three market. "It's not the top market, and we want to make it our top market," Nils-Holger Henning, the company's CCO, tells Gamasutra. The company currently runs 30 free-to-play games which have been developed in-house, with another 20 externally-developed titles, in over 30 languages. The company's mission, says Henning, is "all games must be browser-based without download installation, games you can play from any device you want." The company's U.S. office, announced last month, will be based in San Francisco. In 2008, NBC Universal acquired 35 percent of the company -- which both opened the door to its San Francisco move, and explains the emergence of the just-announced Battlestar Galactica MMO, which is due in the back half of this year and is based on the popular Syfy TV show. Citing a desire to "decentralize" the company, Henning says the SF move is "linked to our partnership with NBCU." Henning notes that the company's founder and CEO, Heiko Hubertz, is making the move to the Bay Area, an area Bigpoint finds attractive because "we love the spirit of San Francisco. You have a lot of talent, and you're at the foundation of everything... It came out of the Bay Area." Henning cites the fact that "all of the internet players", such as Facebook, are in the Bay Area, and so are "excellent schools like Stanford. That's, for us, the place to be." ]]> Poisonville -- a GTA-esque multiplayer crime game -- is Java. Henning describes it as "the first browser game where we invested a couple of million in the production." However, the company is exploring Unity for future multiplayer titles. The cross-platform game technology is built on the Unity platform; that technology already supports Wii development, with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 support either extant or recently announced. Will Bigpoint approach consoles? "In the medium term we don't exclude it," says Henning, but "we're still facing extreme growth in what we're doing... But as we're working closer and closer with Unity, there are new opportunities." Though the company has a lot of experience with Java and Flash, it is moving towards Unity -- "we see what's possible in unity in a much faster time, even cross-platform." Says Henning, "If you have a look at the company, we are very successful in what we're doing right now. But we know, and this is something we want to take care of... In Europe we're the market leader... But we believe that every market has different needs. As it was said, normally when you have an analysis about games, the U.S. is a typical console market whereas Europe is a bit more PC. We want to be really successful in the U.S., and to do it we think we must come up with more 3D action games. We really want to take care about the needs in every market." 

Study: U.S. Gamers Spent $3.8 Billion On MMOs in 2009

2010-03-09T15:00:20Z

U.S. gamers spent $3.8 billion on massively multiplayer online games in 2009, almost 15 times more than other substantial MMO markets in Europe, according to a new study. Consumer data from Today's Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS indicates that the number of MMO players in the U.S. has reached 46 million, 46 percent (21 million) of which paid to play online games; the rest, around 25 million gamers, play MMOs without spending any money. The average paying MMO player spent around $15.10 per month on their games. The report points out that Blizzard's World of Warcraft has the most number of players in the U.S. out of all the MMOs it tracked, just in front of NeoPets and Club Penguin. Other MMOs in the top five include Disney ToonTown and RuneScape. The study also breaks down the $3.8 billion total spent on MMOs in 2009: 47 percent ($1.8 billion) was spent on monthly subscriptions, 15 percent ($580 million) on annual subscriptions, 19 percent ($740 million) on virtual currency, 8 percent ($280 million) on direct microtransactions, and 11 percent ($400 million) on the initial boxed product or client download. ]]>

Globex Opens LA Office With Pandemic Veterans

2010-03-09T13:00:30Z

Star Wars Battlefront and Mercenaries. Electronic Arts closed down Pandemic's physical studio and reportedly cut around 200 employees last November as part of a round of layoffs and restructuring. The pubisher saw its losses widen to $391 million in its second fiscal quarter and plans to cut some 1,500 jobs by April 2010.]]> Other industry veterans leading Globex Studios LA include game designer, director, and producer Troy Dunniway serving as vice president of game development; and game product development and publishing expert Jesse Taylor in the roles of chief technology officer and chief operating officer. Globex Studios is currently working on a slate of MMORPGs based on original IPs that target the Chinese market but are designed with a global appeal in mind. The company says its looking to leverage its "U.S.-based project expertise together with the efficiencies of international production execution", and will initially target online gaming audiences in China and the U.S. "In launching Globex Studios LA, we saw a future success path for the games business that will result in products that are conceived, made and marketed with high levels of quality, efficiency and cultural relevance," says Globex Studios LA president and CCO Cary Chico. She continues, "We are advancing with the industry and, as companies seek the right mix for distributed development/production and access to the cost benefits and growth of regions like China, we will be benefiting from the best of both." "In addition to exploring new paradigms for development, Globex Studios is also well positioned for the transition happening in today's industry from a 'game as product' to a 'game as service' market, with online games as a major focus."

SOE Launches First Facebook Game

2010-03-08T23:00:26Z

MMO developer Sony Online Entertainment launched its first Facebook game, an adaptation of popular turn-based strategy game PoxNora with new social features. Originally released in 2006, PoxNora is part turn-based strategy game, part collectible card game, and is set in a fantasy world of creatures, relics, and spells. The game was originally developed and maintained by Tucson, AZ-based developer Octopi, which SOE acquired in 2009 and set up a Tucson studio around. Since the purchase, PoxNora has brought in more than 2.5 million registered accounts. SOE hopes to expand that userbase to a wider social networking audience by including new features in the Facebook version like the ability to invite friends and post updates of accomplishments. SOE, which typically developers PC and console MMOs like Free Realms, EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and many others, says it plans to create more games for the Facebook platform based on both existing franchises and new intellectual property. “The Facebook platform offers gamers a new and powerful way to interact with and tap into their social communities,” says SOE president John Smedley. “With the launch of PoxNora for Facebook, we are leveraging the expertise SOE has gained bringing entertainment to the online gaming community for over 10 years.”

Level 3 Signs CCP, Icarus Studios, Partners With Solid State

2010-03-08T17:00:54Z

Level 3, a fiber-based bandwidth provider, has announced partnerships with developers CCP and Icarus Studios to deliver various bandwidth services for the MMOs EVE Online and Fallen Earth. The company has separately entered into an agreement with game publishing software developer Solid State Networks that will pair Level 3's content delivery networks with Solid State's acquisition and monetization services. "CCP requires a network that can deliver fast, secure, high-quality file transfers to hundreds of thousands of end-users worldwide," said CCP COO Jon Horodal in a statement. "The agility and reliability of the Level 3 network combined with the real-time traffic and user insight of the reporting platform were driving factors in our decision to work with them." Reykjavik-headquartered CCP, which also operates an office in Atlanta, is responsible for the intricate space-set MMO EVE Online. Unlike most MMOs, which split their player bases across an array of game servers, EVE is notable for concentrating all subscribers in one instance of the game's universe. Icarus Studios CEO James Hettinger also had words of praise for the bandwidth provider. "With Level 3, we have increased our bandwidth capacity by 20-fold and supported peaks of up to 4,000 Megabits per second," he said in a statement. Based in Cary, North Carolina, Icarus markets its own MMO development technology, and last year released its first internally-branded MMO, Fallen Earth. Level 3 says its partnership with Solid State will allow faster downloads and improved analytic services for Solid State's game publishing suite. In a statement, Solid State CEO Rick Buonincontri said, "In combining capabilities with Level 3's network, we have an end-to-end solution that improves the overall user experience. With this improved experience also comes richer data, as our customers now have access to both our reporting and the Level 3 analytics platform."

Mochi Launches Mochi Social, $10M Game Developer Fund

2010-03-08T15:00:48Z

Kingdoms of War, will release next week. Developers can learn more about Mochi Social and apply to participate in the beta at the company's site.]]> "Social gaming exploded during the last year, with the market now estimated to be worth more than $1 billion," says Mochi Media CEO Jameson Hsu. "Mochi Social takes the experience of social games and makes it completely distributable, able to be played on any Web site inside or outside of social networks. Mochi Social helps developers expand beyond the confines of the existing social canvas to reach a whole new audience and growth." Mochi Media and its new parent company Shanda Games Limited also revealed the Mochi Game Developer Fund, a $10 million fund designed to assist "small Flash game development studios and independent game developers worldwide in building world-class games and businesses" through sponsorship, licensing, and publishing deals. The fund is a joint effort between Mochi Media and Shanghai-based online gaming company Shanda. Members from their management team will oversee the initiative and provide access to technical, design, and testing resources from Shanda games to participating developers. Mochi Media will offer development tools and distribution to almost 40,000 sites globally. The fund's initial investments could reach up to $100,000 per game. Shanda and Mochi add that they have a "a longer-term vision of developing relationships with world-class Flash game developers for multi-game distribution deals" with the fund, too. "With the creation of the Mochi Game Developer Fund, we're putting substantive muscle behind encouraging creativity in Flash and social gaming," says Justin Wong, general manager of the fund and Mochi Media's business development head. "We are committed to working with developers all around the world to create games unlike we have ever experienced before and help catalyze growth of the browser-based game industry."

Nonoba Integrates PlaySpan UltimatePoints Into Flash Gaming Platform

2010-03-05T23:00:37Z

Online gaming community Nonoba announced a partnership with PlaySpan to integrate the latter's UltimatePoints universal virtual currency into its GameRise platform. The new deal allows PlaySpan to offer users of PlaySpan Marketplace -- its digital marketplace where customers can buy virtual currencies, digital goods, and PC games online -- access to Nonoba's catalog of more than 4,000 Flash games from over 100 indie developers. Their agreement also enables Nonoba to integrate PlaySpan's UltimatePay and UltimatePoints products into its GameRise platform so that Flash game developers can price and sell entire games, elements of games, virtual items, or gameplay to PlaySpan customers, and receive a 70 percent cut of that revenue. Nonoba's GameRise platform allows both enthusiasts and professionals to develop and manage custom gaming sites with community features. They have control of the site's game catalog, appearance, advertising, and language. They can also manage chat rooms, forum discussions, and mail templates for user feeds. "Integration of PlaySpan’s UltimatePay and UltimatePoints in our Payment API means our developers can now offer payment options to an entirely new and very large population who don’t have a credit card to pay for play," says Nonoba Co-founder Chris Benjaminsen. “We believe this is the future of Flash gaming."

BigWorld Debuts New Indie, Academic Engine Licenses

2010-03-05T21:00:42Z

Hoping to offer its tools to a new userbase, engine developer BigWorld is launching three new licenses geared for indie, student and small commercial MMO developers. BigWorld Technology suite intends to offer a "complete technical architecture" for online game and virtual world developers, and includes BigWorld Server Software, Content Creation Pipeline, 3D Client Engine Package, and Live Management Tools & Instrumentation. It now has three new license types on offer: BigWorld Indie, BigWorld Indie Source or BigWorld Academic. Independent development teams, registered schools and small commercial companies can apply individually for a license. BigWorld Indie, the company explains, is intended for the "casual enthusiast", and it describes the license as the most affordable yet restrictive. BigWorld Indie Source is intended for prototype builds for pitch phases, and support packages are sold separately. BigWorld Academic is solely for registered schools, and it's intended to allow students hands-on experience with MMO technology before they enter the world of professional development. In all cases, the company offers progression plans to help users upgrade to the next stage of availability, all the way up to the full-scale commercial version. "Many developers have been placing solutions for Indies and making available prototype builds for emerging game companies for quite some time," explains CEO John DeMargheriti. "BigWorld has kept its focus on the fully commercial marketplace and to date, there are over 40 commercial licenses in development or launched on BigWorld Technology." He adds: "We are now well positioned to expand our product offerings to include academic institutions and mod and indie developers, who are in our belief, stronger and more capable than ever to take advantage of virtual or graphical social worlds and MMOs."

Gravity Bear Releases 3D Battle Punks To Facebook

2010-03-05T19:00:10Z

Gravity Bear, the social game developer recently established by Flagship co-founder Phil Shenk, launched fighting game Battle Punks on Facebook with an open beta, describing its debut title as "the first 3D game of its kind for social networks". Battle Punks uses a 3D engine to render both character and environments, offering a visual experience that stands out from the typical 2D games that populate the social space. Unfortunately, the new technology employed in the game has made it so Battle Punks is only supported on Windows systems, so Mac users can't join the open beta just yet. In Battle Punks, players create customizable avatars, then duel their friends and others online in virtual towns, forests, and swamps. They can win new weapons, spells, experience, and treasure, and later equip their characters with those items before each match, picking the best weapons for different battles. Shenk formed Gravity Bear in late 2008, enlisting Flagship's (Hellgate: London) former senior software engineer Kevin Klemmick as technical director for the studio. Prior to Gravity Bear and Glagship, Shenk served as lead character artist on Diablo II and as art director on its expansion Diablo II: Lord of Destruction at Blizzard North. Shenk commented on his new studio's social gaming focus last October: "Gravity Bear was formed with the singular aim of creating games that reconnect people to the core of gaming. Our commitment is to bring the caliber of social gaming experiences players want -- as they want them – which means delivering new kinds of excitement and fun that blend the latest in modern game design with fresh technology."]]>

Free Realms Surpasses Nine Million Players

2010-03-05T15:00:19Z

Sony Online Entertainment announced its free-to-play MMO Free Realms has attracted more than nine million registered players since launching last April for PC., and just a month after the game hit the the 8 million user mark. The company partly attributes this growth spike to its marketing support and new targeted content. Players can take part in a variety of activities and mini-games in Free Realms, from ninja fighting to kart racing to raising pets. The family-friendly game also offers a trading cad game that can be played online with virtual cards or offline with physical card decks sold at brick and mortar retailers. SOE says its continuous development of new features and themed in-game events has helped draw in new users. Most recently, the studio introduces Rides, which allow players with optional memberships to travel on top of T-Rexes or Dragons (available in multiple color choices) around the world at 150 percent their normal speed. The developer is working to release more types of transportation in the future, with the next slated Rides option consisting of Horses. It's also planning to release new Owl and Groundhog pets, and a new 3D minigame. "With Free Realms, we’ve been able to reflect the needs and wants of our players by keenly listening to their suggestions and feedback," says SOE president John Smedley, president of SOE, "We believe the persistent exercise of capturing in-game research inside Free Realms has been a huge contributing factor as to why we’ve attracted over nine million players in less than a year; It truly helps us give our players a game where they can do and be whatever they want."