Free To Play

Is there a season for conferences? If so, it feels like it’s upon us.

GDC and SXSW went well. Here are some links to coverage of my talk at GDC and my panel at SXSW.

GDC

• Kotaku
• Gamasutra
• Bret Terrill
• Coobico

SXSW

• VentureBeat
• Virtual Worlds News
• Tony Walsh’s Liveblog
• New Media Buzz

Random local press

• WestEnder magazine

Next up for me is ICE 08 in Toronto.

I’m on a panel there called “Worlds @ Play” moderated by Lucie Lalumière (VP Interactive, Earth Rangers) in discussion with Leigh Alexander (Editor, Worlds in Motion / Staff, Gamasutra.com), Matt Daly (Cofounder, Metaversatility.com) and Barbara Lippe (Art Director & VP International Relations, Avaloop). I’m only in Toronto from Wednesday afternoon to Friday afternoon, but if you want to grab coffee at the conference, let me know!

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

I’ve been a bit remiss in putting general news stuff out there, so let me catch up in a quick and timely manner:

1) I’ll be at GDC next week, Sunday the 17th to Friday the 22nd. I’m giving a talk called “The Power of Free-To-Play” (GDC chose the Anthony Robbins-esque title) at the Worlds in Motion Summit on Monday at 2pm. I’m up for coffee with any interested parties, so email me if you’re one of them.

2) I’ll be at SXSW in Austin, March 8-11. Michael Smith (CEO of Mind Candy) was kind enough to invite me to be on a panel called Casual Multi-Player Online Games: Serious Revenues, along with Nabeel Hyatt (Conduit Labs), Jeremy Liew (Lightspeed Venture Partners) and Joe Hyrkin (Gaia Online).

3) Lastly, I left Relic in early January after three great years with the company. Since then, I’ve been doing some design & production work on a variety of exciting free to play projects. So for the time being, you could call me a hired gun.

I hope to see some familiar faces at GDC and SXSW. Take care!

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Back in May, Chris Anderson, WIRED editor-in-chief and author of 2006’s much-buzzed-about “The Long Tail,” announced his next book. Due out in 2008, the book will be titled “FREE” with any one of the following subtitles:

1) FREE: The story of a radical price (zero)

2) FREE: How $0.00 changed the world

3) FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing

4) FREE: The economics of abundance and the marketplace without money

5) FREE: The past and future of a radical price.

Having read Chris’s original Long Tail article in WIRED and being subjected to endless recitations from his book over the last year, I’ll wager a guess that “FREE” will be equally influential. Chris is writing “FREE” not only about games, but from a pan-industry perspective - which means by this time next year boardrooms the world over will be dreaming about how they might make more money by giving away their product free of charge.

Since October, Chris has started using a “free” tag in his blog posts, which gives us a glimpse into the type of content that might be included in the book. It’s worth checking out.

On a related note, I found an interesting post entitled “There’s No Money in The Long Tail of the Blogosphere” over on Read/Write Web today. It makes the excellent point that the long tail benefits the aggregators of long tail products much more than it does the makers of said products. Although the “products” discussed in the article are blogs and their associated authors, you can see the parallels for games.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

For those of you who read F2P.biz regularly, you might recall an article I wrote about Asia’s virtual goods lead. In it, I talked about Brad and Kyle, my cousins aged 7 and 13 years old from the Southern Ontario city of London.

During a visit, I chatted them up about their gaming habits and watched them play for a while. It was clear that free to play PC games had almost entirely usurped retail, pay-to-play products in their personal gaming library. Their favourite games were titles like Puzzle Pirates, Habbo Hotel and Runescape.

Well check out the latest NPD study, “Kids and Gaming,” as reported over at Worlds in Motion. The most relevant stats for me were:

• 91% of online gaming among kids ages 2 to 17 is free
• 9% pay to play - these are primarily kids from higher income households
• The likelihood of a child paying increases with their age and time spent gaming
• Half of all kid gamers are “light users,” clocking five hours a week or less
• The other half were medium, heavy or “super” users, at 6-16 or more hours/week
• The average time spent playing online was statistically higher among females

Look at that first stat.

That is so incredible that it has to be wrong or misinterpreted by me. If that’s true, where is the retail, pay-to-play gaming industry headed as the next generation of kids comes of age? The study does say that eventually kids (males, mostly) graduate to consoles in their late teens, but as new free to play games start catering to a “new adult” demographic, fewer and fewer teenagers will make the jump from free to $59.95.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Start your engines!

Finally, the game that captivated Korea - where a third of the populace have played it, allegedly - comes to North America.

From Pimp My Wii:

KartRider’s open beta will be open to anyone with an internet connection and the need for speed. With several distinct characters to choose from, open beta racers will compete on a multitude of elaborate race courses ranging from the smooth asphalt of Zoomtown to the scorching sands of Desert Drift. The open beta will additionally provide testers with two different karts, numerous paint and license plate modifications, a scenario/story mode, and a useful ‘My Garage’ feature. The ‘My Garage’ feature included in open beta allows users to hang out with friends, modify and show off karts, and try out new items if racers are in need of a pit stop.

Open beta testers can also enjoy different single and team race modes including item mode, an anything-goes mode featuring the use of creative items used to gain an edge, and speed mode, a test of driving skill focusing solely on speed and drift. While item mode racing often results in humorous exchanges and unpredictable outcomes, speed mode rewards drivers for their drift technique. By combining the elements and weapons of a fantasy racer with the precision of drift, KartRider blends an optimal balance between racers who prefer either the spontaneity of item use or the driving skill required by drifting.

Head over to Kart.Nexon.net to see what the hype is about.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

From this post on NCsoft’s Dev Corner, Richard Garriot discusses NCsoft’s plan to build free to play console games.

PS3 NCsoft games would incorporate “traditional subscription models, micropayment systems and free-to-play games with membership options,” according to the CEO.

Elsewhere in the post, Garriot indicates we might see the first NCsoft PlayStation 3 game by Christmas of next year (200 - a product that sounds likely to be a re-use of one of their existing IPs, i.e. City of Heroes, Guild Wars or Dungeon Runners. He notes that original IP console games will take 2-3 years (i.e. 2009/2010).

Garriot also suggests that NCsoft intends to start a new studio to handle console development, but more likely is that the work will be farmed out to existing studios, not a new one.

“…We are also looking at specific projects that we may house in other studios. This includes our Austin offices or our other currently existing studios. Console game development won’t just be at one single location,” he added.

Garriot hints that Xbox 360/XBLA is not NCsoft’s first choice for their F2P products due to the restrictive nature of Microsoft’s Live infrastructure. Aspects of my earlier post, The Economics of a Free To Play Console Game, may be relevant here as I examined the feasibility of doing a F2P XBLA game.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

An old friend of mine from my EA days today launched an innovative service called PlayTeeVee.com that allows Tivo users to play games for free on their sets. Right now it’s primarily family / casual games, but I know he has plans for deeper games in the near future. I can’t reveal exactly what, but it’s cool stuff.

If you have Tivo Series 2, definitely check it out. It’s free to play, after all.

Full PlayTeeVee press release after the jump. (more…)

Just announced today, “Game Show” seems to be a free to play, ad-supported sports trivia game with daily streaming video content updates. But it’s more than just a game as the game features a live host and prizes for the winners. Game Show launches this fall.

EA SPORTS GameShow allows participants from around the country to compete head to head, answering a series of multiple choice questions related to the world of sports. The live game show host will facilitate each session, streamed over the Internet in real-time. Questions will be presented through a variety of media, including text, audio and video. Players will also be able to track their performance instantly, with prize incentives. The online sports trivia game will also feature customizable avatars and leader boards, with call outs to regional and national winners.

For more, check out the full press release or the last paragraph of this Peter Moore interview for more details.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Actiontrip has just posted a 2 pager on what it believes are the five most popular game communities, presumably in the world. Although the list isn’t ranked and doesn’t include any of the bigger Asian success stories, it has some interesting numbers.

Here are some highlights.

On CounterStrike:

Last we checked, the CS community had just over 174,665 active servers, with approximately 276,552 gamers playing online at the time we did our research (so just over 2 players per server, eh? - Ed). If the statistics on Steam are to be believed, this should translate into roughly 9.423 billion (yes, that’s the correct amount) minutes of play time per month.

On Runescape:

Recent research indicated that 13.1% of all PC gamers have played Runescape at some point throughout June 2007, with the average RuneScape player spending 673 minutes per week within the game. After this RuneScape became the 5th most played PC game just behind Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and games like Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and, of course, The Sims.

On Halo:

The most recent update showed that almost 12,706 players were online in Halo 2 at the time when we checked. Also, around 261,820 unique players were registered, with 688,136 matches logged (data from the last 24 Hours).

The lack of Asian representation likely stems from the all-North American sources used for the article: NPD, Steam, Bungie.net, Google Trends and Nielsen Media Research.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

US-CA-Glendale-Executive Producer, Neopets

Here’s an opportunity that doesn’t come around every day. Neopets is looking for an EP.

The Neopets Executive Producer reports to a VP and interacts with the longest list of Director types I’ve ever seen included in a job description. I quote:

This position will interact closely with:

-Director, Technical Development

-Director, Multimedia Applications Development

-Director, Casual Game Development

-Director, Marketing and Operations

-Director, Promotions Marketing

-Director, Fraud Management

-Design Director, Neopets Creative Resources

-Director, Consumer Products

-Director, Research Analysis

But as we all know, the market for talent is tight. So I wasn’t surprised to see a relatively light set of prerequisites:

EDUCATION/EXPERIENCE:

-BA in a related field or equivalent experience. MA a plus.

-3+ years working as a Product Manager, Producer or Associate Producer on multi-player on-line games or similar position.

-2+ years experience with project budgetary processes.

And after listing off 23 bullet points under the KNOWLEDGE/SKILLS section, I always find it odd when companies throw in a line like this:

-Proficiency in the following software or systems:

-Microsoft Office, Visio, MS Project, Outlook

In any case, it’s late at night and I’m being overly critical. If you’re interested in this opportunity, email Mia Burgess (mia.burgess@mtvstaff.com) or go straight to the top by tracking down Kyra Reppen, SVP & GM of Neopets.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::