FreeToPlay.biz

[Editor's Note: Contributing writer Simon Newstead is CEO & Co-Founder of girl avatar game Frenzoo, a 3D fashion startup.  He can be contacted at: simon at frenzoo dot com.]

Billing itself as one of a new breed of pure play web publisher, True Games Interactive opened shop at the beginning of 2008 is expanding its team and title list. We invited CEO & Co-Founder Bob Drobish to reflect on their first year and where free-to-play social games are heading.

How did you start True Games and how has the first year been?

We began True Games by stepping back and doing our home work.  We looked at player interests, trends in the industry, and the gaps between the two. From that we built a business model and a plan that was compelling enough to attract the best professionals and business partners in the industry.

We were fortunate enough to attract people like Peter Jarvis formerly of NC Soft and Peter Cesario formerly of Namco Bandai.  We were also fortunate enough to attract business partners like Petroglyph, GOA, and Possibility Space.  Of course, one of the highlights of the year was connecting with global media giant UTV as both an investor and strategic partner.  It has been a great year.

Your first game announcement was Warrior Epic.  Are you focusing on any particular type or genre of games?

We have exclusively focused on micro-transaction based online games.  Our immediate titles are exclusively designed for PC.  The two titles that we have announced so far, Warrior Epic (Developed by Possibility Space) and Mytheon (developed by Petroglyph) will be downloadable clients, but with a twist…

From a gamer point of view, are there any synergies between games on your platforms?

Yes, there will be synergies in terms of billing and currency, but we feel that this isn’t the most compelling aspect to gamers.  We believe that it is the overall quality of the player experience throughout the full lifecycle of a game that gamers want and need.  That being said, our platform will offer user-friendly, mechanical conveniences that will add to the quality of the overall player experience.

How do you view the economic climate and how that will affect the F2P market either good or bad?

The economic climate is of course challenging for us as it is for all business.    As an industry however, I think that online, micro-transaction based games offer a uniquely compelling entertainment value proposition.  In these economic times, we’d expect that the most cost-effective entertainment options would have an advantage and we think our business model fits into that category.  Gamers do not have to spend $60 up front on our games.  They can download it at no cost, play as much as wanted with no subscription charges; while having options for micro-transaction purchases.

Is True Games targeting a global audience or focusing on US and English speaking markets?

All the IP’s that we establish are designed with a global audience in mind. Some western markets we will serve directly. Others we will serve through syndication partners with local expertise; but always designed for and distributed to a global audience. Player interest in games is global.  The internet is global.  So yes, we have developed games from the ground up to cater to players all over the world.

Many believe that old subscription models will give way to pure micro-transaction models, what’s your take?

There is an undeniable trend toward micro-transaction based models.  Our research shows that this will continue in the years to come.  However, I think the market will continue (at least for the foreseeable future) to offer subscription and micro-transaction based models; in some cases both for the same title.  We believe there will be a rise in various hybrids of the two forms.  Ultimately, the most successful model will be the one to serve the player best.  This will require extensive testing and research.

What is the most exciting development you anticipate in 2009 for the industry?

The most exciting development we anticipate in 2009 (and what our business is built upon) is the launch of AAA games with a free-to-play model.  Clearly, there are a lot of free-to-play games and AAA games.  However, there is no successful AAA game with a micro-transaction based model in the western market.  To develop this will be our most exciting endeavor in 2009-not just for our company but for the industry as well.

[Editor's Note: Before embarking on his own startup, contributing writer Adam Martin was CTO at NCsoft Europe. Adam is a voracious gamer with a professional background split between programming and business. He blogs at T-Machine and can be reached at adam.m.s.martin at googlemail.com]

At FreeToPlay.biz, we’ve spent a lot of time examining how free-to-play (F2P) games work: their advantages, challenges, demographic appeal, etc. But we haven’t yet looked as closely at who makes these games what they are and who shapes the future of the F2P sector: the Publishers.

In the online games industry, there are three separate categories:

1. Who makes the games? (the “Developers”)
2. Who funds and markets the games? (the “Publishers”)
3. Who supplies the games to the users? (the “Operators”)

Historically, the core games industry (i.e. retail) has had just two categories: Developers and Publishers. With the advent of online games, a major offshoot of Publishers has appeared: Operators, who take none of the up-front risk of a traditional Publisher and focus instead on capitalizing on the game once it’s made (usually by taking it to territories and languages that the original publisher cannot reach).

This article looks at the Publishers: the businesses that take the bulk of the risk by financing the game. If a game is fully developed, and launched, but fails to earn out, the Developer makes no profit but no loss; the publisher, on the other hand, makes a net loss of whatever the development cost was, minus the game’s revenue.

Operators don’t usually enter the picture until the game has already gone to market in at least one territory, and set an expected level of popularity / revenue, so they have the lowest risk of all. Ultimately, the Publishers have the greatest control over what future games get developed.

For each Publisher, we start with their Name, Country, Incorporation year, and 2008 revenues (as estimated by the company in their latest financial report, or as estimated by me based on similar companies and markets).

1. Nexon, South Korea, 1994, $300m (est)

Nexon is probably the most famous of the F2P publishers, thanks to two hugely successful games - MapleStory (2003) and KartRider (2004) - which have both attracted many tens of millions of players. Although MapleStory came first and has been the bigger global success with over 100 million players internationally, KartRider did much better in its home market of South Korea. Some reports allege KartRider has been played at one time or another by more than a third of the population of the country.

Maple Story (2003)

But it’s not just about sheer number of players. Nexon has also consistently made a huge amount of money out of their virtual item sales revenue model, with quoted revenues of $230m revenue for 2005, most of it coming from F2P offerings. Unfortunately, the Korean head office has been uncharacteristically quiet (for a Korean company) for the last few years, with the only good data coming from Nexon Publishing North America, a subsidiary with a games operations office in Los Angeles and an original game development studio in Vancouver, Canada.

Apart from pioneering the use of F2P, it’s worth noting that Nexon was also a pioneer of subscription-based online games. They developed one of the first ever MMOs in Asia - The Kingdom of the Winds (1996) (subs). One of the lead programmers, Jake Song, left to be part of a newly-founded company - NCsoft - and develop their first MMO, Lineage (1998). NCsoft is now one of Nexon’s major competitors. Lineage for many years held the world record for largest number of players for any MMO, and NCsoft is still an almost entirely subscription-based MMO publisher.

2. Giant Interactive, China, 2004, $240m (est)

Giant Interactive is currently the top Chinese F2P publisher by revenue, although if NetEase’s rumoured conversion from subs to F2P for their main games goes ahead, Giant could slip down to a close second. Giant was founded by Shi Yuzhu, who made a fortune from selling diet-supplement pills… and then lost it all when the original Giant Group went bankrupt in 1997. He made a personal comeback with a new company based on similar pills, Nao Baijin (”Brain Platinum”) - and an exceptionally aggressive and intensive marketing campaign - then went on to found Giant Interactive in 2004.

ZT Online (2006)

Which all helps to explain Giant’s leading game, ZT Online (2006), which with around 10 million players and an ARPU of over $40 a month generates the bulk of their revenue. That ARPU figure stands out for being around 50% higher than most other operators.

Shi’s Nao Baijin pills were helped to huge sales through a massive nationwide marketing and sales team, and for Giant he went a similar route, using a thousands-strong sales team to personally visit the Internet Cafe’s around China and promote the game. This contrasts with the other online game publishers and operators, who - like their Western counterparts - generally do their marketing through much cheaper means, such as online advertising and industry events like conferences. According to the company’s website, they now have over 3,000 sales and marketing people. It seems fair to say that this is a marketing-lead business, and that we can expect to see Giant consistently getting every ounce of revenue out of its games over the coming years.

The creation of an alternative, Pay-to-Play (PTP) version of ZT may be an example of this. ZT Online PTP (2008) comes with a $2 / month flat subscription, or $0.01 an hour, and no item-purchasing allowed. Where operators and publishers go for parallel monetization, its nearly always the other way around: making available an F2P version of an existing subs game. Indeed, NetEase appears to be doing that right now with their major titles, in an attempt to shore-up the losses in players they’ve seen, with many of them allegedly moving to ZT.

3. Perfect World, China, 2004, $200m (est)

Perfect World (2005)

Perfect World (which is the name of both the company and their first MMO) is a Chinese MMO company that has developed and launched seven games in four years. Like all the Chinese MMO publishers, they are young, and yet have seen huge revenues on the back of massive player numbers and rapid, consistent, growth.

Interestingly, their first MMO was a traditional RPG using the subscriptions model, but for the sequel, Perfect World II (2006), they decided to switch to an item-sales F2P model.

Although (like many of the Chinese publishers) largely unknown in the Western world, they established a USA subsidiary in April 2008, and so that may well change fairly rapidly.

For 2008 Q2, their ARPU for paying customers is a decent but not unusual $27 per month.

4. Disney, USA, 1994, $1000m (entire online division)

Club Penguin (2005)

Disney is the largest of the US companies making major use of F2P at the moment. Like Nexon, their earliest forays into online gaming were subscription based, with the likes of ToonTown Online (2003), which was also one of the first virtual worlds aimed at children, and peaked at over 1 million subscribers. They later acquired Club Penguin (2005), one of the biggest Western F2P games, acquiring approximately 10 million new users. Outside of children’s MMOs they’ve been less successful, and although they’ve used F2P in major MMO titles such as Pirates of the Caribbean Online (2007), it’s not been so well received, with numerous accusations that the F2P element was too heavily crippled.

TTO pioneered child-safe worlds, with features such as SpeedChat to protect children from other players, whose identity can never be confirmed. To those afraid that F2P worlds allow for “anyone” to play, without any way to identify them, it’s worth noting that the subs-only TTO had the same problem, and never completely avoided it. Interestingly, in 2007 Disney switched TTO to F2P.

5. CJ Internet, South Korea, 2000, $180m

CJ Internet has around 23 million people playing games at its NetMarble games portal. CJ Corporation (which acquired Plenus/NetMarble in 2004 and renamed it to CJ Internet), was originally a sugar-producing subsidiary of Samsung, and so the CJ stands for Cheil Jedang (lit “first sugar”). This may sound strange, but is a classic example of South Korean Chaebol (family-owned, government assisted, major corporations with ownership of businesses across a very wide spectrum of unassociated industries).

Sudden Attack (2005)

Their best-known game is probably Sudden Attack (2005), a clone of the hugely successful Counter-Strike (2000). Interestingly, CS’s owner, Valve Software, has commissioned Nexon to develop an “official” F2P version of CS for the Korean market, named Counter -Strike Online, due out in 2008.

Elsewhere, CJI appears to have taken a leaf out of EA Sports’ book by licensing the MLB (Major League Baseball) club names, logos, and famous players for use in their MaguMagu online Baseball game.

6. Gameforge, Germany, 2003, $100m (guess)

With 60 million users, Gameforge is one of the biggest Western F2P publishers. Although they have never released revenue figures, their quoted 11 million “active” players suggest an annual revenue figure somewhere in the region of $75m - $150m. Given that their games tend to be light browser-based games, I’m guessing they’re at the lower end of the spectrum.

OGame (2002)

They started off only running their in-house developed browser-based games, with the biggest (around 2.5 million players) being OGame (2002), but in the last few years they’ve branched out, and now operate several client-based games imported from Asia. One of those, Metin 2 (2007?), was originally launched as a subs game in Germany, and then switched to F2P for the localized versions launched throughout Europe. As a private company, figures are hard to get hold of, but they have quoted an ARPU of $26 for the 1.1 million M2 players in Europe (although its not completely clear if that includes the German subscribers).

Gameforge is particularly interesting because by focussing on rapid, high-quality localization of games to different languages (they claim to have localized into 25 distinct languages already) they’ve successfully moved from simple game developer to a major importer/operator of South Korean games. This is almost the opposite of Acclaim, but they’ve done it more slowly and until last year self-funded, so they appear to be taking the slower, harder, but more defensible and lucrative approach.

7. HanbitSoft, South Korea, 1999, $65m

HanbitSoft came to fame in 1999 for being the South Korean distributor of Blizzard’s multiplayer (but non-MMO) StarCraft (1998), a best-selling game in USA/Europe, and one of the biggest-selling games ever in South Korea. SC was monetized as boxed retail sales only, with no ongoing revenue stream, and in South Korea became (and still is) a major competitive sport, with two TV channels running their own live SC leagues.

Granado Espada (2007)

However, right now HanbitSoft is probably best known outside Asia for being the main publisher of the failed Hellgate:London game from the now-defunct, ex-Blizzard-led, Flagship Studios. They’re one of the few companies in this list to have made a substantial net loss on funding games, and it’s interesting that this happened with a game that most closely bridged the game between “traditional mainstream Western action game” and “F2P MMO”. Hellgate had a troubled development and probably failed for many reasons, but one of the frequently cited complaints was that the monetization model was neither F2P nor subscription, but a mix of the two. This appears to have fared poorly.

In May 2008, T3 Entertainment, best known as the developers of Audition Online (published by Yedang Online), became the largest shareholder in Hanbitsoft. This may be T3’s first move into being a major publisher in their own right.

8. Bigpoint, Germany, 2002, $25m (est)

Bigpoint has been through two name-changes, starting out as “m.wire”, a self-publishing developer of browser-based sports games such as IceFighter (2003) and Soccer Manager (2004). In 2005 they underwent a change of name to better reflect this specialization, becoming “e-sport”, before switching the company name to match their gaming portal - bigpoint.com - in 2007. Their portfolio now is diversified away from sports games.

Bigpoint may appear at first glance to be nothing more than a smaller version of Gameforge (see above), with around one third of the annual revenues, and half the number of players, and a narrower portfolio (unlike GF, BP hasn’t started to operate any Asian games, nor branched out into client-based online games). That changed earlier this year when the 3 main VCs (all low-end investors) exited in a buyout split between the CEO, another VC fund, and … NBC Universal, selling 70% of the company for $110 million. The link with NBCU has already started to show, with their SCI FI channel website now carrying two item-based F2P games from Bigpoint (although not exclusively). This buyout made clear the company’s intentions: they swapped a group of small European funds for a 35% stake from a mainstream USA-based entertainment giant (more than $15b a year in revenue).

There are also signs that they may be one of the first wave of companies to get F2P games on PlayStation 3. To date, all games distributed via the PSN store have been allowed free demos but with extremely limited functionality. Now, along with demoing one of their games running on a PS3, Bigpoint’s CEO has stated that their games will be available on console “with free registration as usual, and ready to play right after download”.

That gives Bigpoint two major relatively untapped markets for their style of F2P, and with their powerful media partner, they may yet leapfrog Gameforge and secure a large chunk of one or both of those markets.

9. Frogster, Germany, 2005, ? (Frogster’s IR website is offline)

Spellborn (2008)

Over the past ten years there’s been a clear trend for the young, fast-grown, cash-rich South Korean online game companies to look for their next round of growth in the West, and so establish subsidiaries in Europe and the USA, starting with NCsoft’s acquisition of Destination Games in 2001. Frogster is one of the first companies to actively reverse that trend by taking wealth generated in Europe and the USA, and establishing a subsidiary in South Korea. This subsidiary is managed by a previous General Manager of Gravity, a Japanese online games publisher (non-F2P).

Originally formed as a management buyout of a standard middle-tier PC games publisher, Frogster has been focussing on repurposing as a pure MMO publisher / operator, and spun off it’s conventional PC games division in 2007. Like a couple of operators and publishers, they’ve been switching or parallelizing their subscription games over to F2P, e.g. in 2008 they added an F2P server to Bounty Bay Online (2006).

10. Zynga, USA, 2008, ? and Social Gaming Network, USA, 2008, ?

For the final entry, we’re going with something a bit different: not one company, but two, and not based on revenues, but on market and consumer base. And both companies are less than a year old. There’s a reason for this: unique in the F2P world, they’ve both risen to fame (and around 50 million users each) on the back of other people’s hosting platforms in the guise of Social Networking sites, especially Facebook. They’re included as a pair because, to be honest, there’s so little to distinguish between them.

WarBook (2008)

They represent a second wave of disruptive F2P businesses, thanks to that tie-in with the major Social Networks; without any partnership deal, in less than a year they’ve achieved user figures - as high as 18 million active - that are a notch faster again than the super-fast-growing Chinese F2P publishers. We’re seeing them uncharacteristically early - it took the games industry a good 5 years to even notice the existence of games like Runescape (now running at well over 1 million subscribers). So it’s no surprise that things like revenue levels are unquoted and relatively meaningless for these two - those will become established over the coming year or so. What we’re looking at here is very early businesses whose only direct, clear, measurable value (and indicator of probable lasting success) is the huge audience they command. These are almost typical web businesses, not games businesses, but the expectation among many is that with hindsight we’ll look back and say that they were the start of the new combined web + games industry, which is widely expected to eclipse traditional games.

Of course, they could easily sputter and fail (although it’s quite hard not to be profitable when you’ve got tens of millions of users), so they’re here at number 10.

Notes on inclusion

Direct revenue comparisons are difficult

Approximately 1/3 of publishers don’t publish their revenues, and another 1/3 don’t separate out their F2P revenues from their other revenue. The most accurate known figures are quoted for each company, sometimes these are F2P revenue, other times it’s an aggregate including non-F2P and even non-games revenue.

Many Operators think of themselves as Publishers

There are different definitions of “Publisher”, and the line between the two is often blurred. I’ve tried to include only companies who are are substantial publishers by the risk definition given above, but some publishers may have been accidentally categorized as operators. A followup article will look at the companies who are primarily Operators.

Companies have to be mostly F2P

Several major companies with large revenues have been excluded because the vast majority of their online-game revenue comes from subscriptions. Only companies that gain the bulk of their revenue from F2P, or have made major switches from subs to F2P, are included here.

Warrior Epic is a new free to play online RPG being developed by Possibility Space, a company founded by Gage Galinger and Feng Zhu; a pair that share a wealth of experience between them, from Starcraft to Gears of War.

As a free to play game it comes across as competent and quite polished, and it’s just leaving closed beta. Essentially a dungeon crawler, players own a great hall that stores their characters and serves as a meeting place for quests.

There are a number of different warrior classes (and some that must be paid for), but the hook is a sort of metagame wherein players can choose to harness the spirit of one of their fallen warriors as a power for their next warrior. It’s well scoped and well designed to be a free to play RPG, but what’s most interesting is how they plan to handle paid content and digital downloading.

While the usual cosmetic items are part of the plan, Warrior Epic is taking a refreshing stance towards satisfying both free players and paid players – a problem Flagship’s Hellgate London ran into when they offered paid players better gear, bigger inventories and faster travel times.

Brice Lukas, Community Manager for Possibilty Space had this to say about sustaining that balance:

“In Warrior Epic you cannot purchase power or progress. The best gear and items can only be obtained by playing the game. There is also no exchange of earned items with paid items. So anything that a user buys with real cash cannot be obtained with in-game currency.”

One of the things a player can purchase (for a small price) are buff items that will help players get through dungeons and closer to the real loot.

“Each mission in Warrior Epic is designed to be roughly 15 minutes long, and the number of these buffs you can carry is limited, so they will not unbalance the play.”

Last but not least is Possibility Space’s distribution model, what the company has dubbed “Download on Demand”. Players register on the site and then download a small .exe file that will stream content from seed servers. The whole system is similar to torrents and is expected to allow the game to be quite portable. Since account information is stored on the seed servers, players can download the same .exe on any computer, which is run from the folder it’s in rather than needing an install.

We’ll have to wait and see if Warrior Epic proves to be a game that lets players download and start playing within minutes, but it’s safe to say that players will appreciate the lack of usual hoops to jump through. The more players get exposed to a free to play game the better, and with an approach like this there is a good chance that a significant amount of players will at least consider getting involved enough to start paying for items and warriors.

“Our intention is to expose a much larger set of people to the fun of online gaming. We want to take all the fun parts of games that hardcore gamers enjoy, and package those up in a product that everybody can experience. The key behind this is to lower the barrier to entry.”

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OnNet USA is the American subsidiary of OnNet Korea a developer of multiple free to play online games. The American branch of the company acts solely as a publisher through their portal site Games Campus.

Today, OnNet releases their newest game, a free to play third person shooter titled Manga Fighter. We spoke to YJ, Manga Fighter’s Producer, about the project and the free to play model in general.

What is the relationship between OnNet Korea and OnNet USA?

OnNet Korea is an software developer creating search engines and other similar products. OnNet USA is an online publisher of free to play games. They’re two different ideas with two distinct identities.

OnNet USA opened it’s doors three years ago with the launch of our golf game Shot Online.

What did you learn from that experience and what has been carried over to Manga Fighter?

We weren’t very well organized which was a big challenge so this time out we made sure to have the proper management in place. That’s the real risk area with a project like this you need excellent management.

The other important lesson concerning constant content updating. With a free to play game and a virtual goods revenue model you have to make sure that there is always new content for the players. We found that to be the key to player retention.

It’s hard to discuss MMOs without mentioning secondary markets for virtual goods and currency. What are your thoughts?

We’re very aware of the secondary markets and the emerging issues associated with them. At this point we’re taking a neutral stance and kind of waiting to see what the industry trend as a whole is.

Why have the global launch of a manga style game with the virtual goods model in America. Why not use the Korean market where both of those things are more mainstream?

Well in a lot of ways this is a new game for any market. It’s a fast-paced third person shooter aimed at a younger audience and there’s not much out there like that. We believe the US is a great testing ground for our new content.

Just three years ago, some declared the free to play model wouldn’t work. Today it’s beginning to get big. It’s not quite mainstream yet but we’re heading in that direction and America is a huge potential market. There are a lot of gamers in America.

What about the release cycle. OnNet ran two beta tests and a boot camp? What was that?

The Boot Camp was just a term for our third beta. In fact even now that we’ve opened the game up we still haven’t implemented all the commerce aspects of the game. This is more like an open beta and then we’ll see how the market responds before launching the money aspect.

What kind of marketing has gone into the launch of the game?

We haven’t done any big budget marketing campaigns but viral marketing has worked well for us. We’re also mailing collectible cards to players with a code on them. The code unlocks premium content in Manga Fighter and down the road we’re looking at getting these cards into retail outlets.

The other thing we’re excited about is the possibility of getting some famous faces from the rest of the manga universe in game. I can’t release any details yet but we’re in discussion with some major publishers.

Thanks for your time YJ and good luck with the launch of Manga Fighter.

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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.

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I spent a couple hours today pretending I had infinite time and money to attend free to play-relevant conferences the world over. The result is this list of the top 10 conferences for those who want a crash course on F2P development and a slew of contacts in the sector.

Over the last year, there’s been a deluge of new virtual worlds conferences, but not all are created equal. So in addition to sorting on quality, I decided to sort for those that were at least partially geared toward English speakers.

Some of the following conferences occurred in the past, but have been included in the hopes that they become annual affairs.

1) Virtual Goods Summit
June 22, 2007 - Palo Alto, California

The Virtual Goods Summit is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets.

The Virtual Goods Summit was a one day affair at the Annenberg Auditorium featuring a series of one hour panel discussions and presentations. Notable speakers included the CEO’s of Gaia Online, Three Rings, Kongregate, GoPets and K2 as well as the Director of Business Development at Nexon. The topics discussed included virtual goods as the next big business model, industry success stories and the forces driving user adoption.

Check out F2P.biz’s summary of the Virtual Goods Summit.

2) Virtual Worlds Forum
October 23 - 27, 2007 - London, England

Our pan-European virtual worlds confex connected brands, major corporations, digital and virtual worlds agencies, media and entertainment players and games companies, technology suppliers, analysts and commentators, lawyers, regulators and venture capitalists and all those harnessing the power of virtual worlds to engage with clients, suppliers or customers.

The Virtual Worlds Forum lasted two days and was by no means focused just on games. The keynotes and panel discussions we’re about many things including brand recognition, corporate opportunity and revenue possibilities. Panelists included Paul Hemp- Senior Editor, Harvard Business Review; Ginsu Yoon- SVP International, Linden Lab and Thomas Bidaux- Director of Product Development, NCSoft Europe.

Check out Wonderland’s summary of the Virtual Worlds Forum.

3) Virtual Worlds Conference
April 3-4 2008 - New York; Autumn 2008 - West Coast

Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo helps businesses harness the power of virtual worlds to engage with their customers, partners and employees. The event follows our sold out Virtual Worlds Spring New York conference.

Speakers from this year’s conference included Paul Yanover, VP and Managing Director at Disney and Anthony Zuicker- creator of CSI. The event featured hundreds of speakers overall and some major corporate support. This year six streams will be available with an emphasis on the financial and operational aspects of virtual worlds. Where as some of the conferences on this list are art or design orientated the Virtual World Conference seems to be strait business.

4) Game Developers Conference
February 18 - 22 2008 - San Fransisco, California

If you are going to attend one industry event in 2008, this is the one. The core objective of this year’s conference is to promote Learning, Networking, and Inspiration. The GDC team has been working hard to create the most exciting and compelling conference yet. Most notably, we have adjusted the timing for the call for papers forward to ensure that we’re presenting you with the most up-to-date topics facing game developers today. You won’t be disappointed.

The GDC isn’t exclusively interesting to free to play followers but in the wake of E3’s fall from grace this is the game industry’s flagship event.

Also at GDC is the Worlds in Motion Summit debuting this year, an event focused on virtual worlds. FreeToPlay.biz was asked to speak at the Worlds in Motion Summit and as a result, Adrian Crook will be presenting a primer on the F2P revenue model at the event. Also giving talks are Raph Koster, Nabeel Hyatt, Eric Bethke, Min Kim, Chris Romero and others - making this a great conference for the F2P sector.

5) Indie MMO Game Developers Conference
March 29 - 30, 2008 - Minniapolis, Minnesota

IMGDC is a venue for Independent designers and developers to come together to share ideas and learn in all areas related to MMOGs. IMGDC 2.0 has positioned itself to be an even larger venue with three fantastic tracks covering design, development and business aspects of Indie MMOGs. The present is a time of MMOG giants, but the future lies in the hands of the passionate Indie developers. Do you have the passion?

2008 will be the second year for the IMGDC featuring presentations from Richard Bartle author of Designing Virtual Worlds, Raph Koster and Gordon Walton who was previously VP/Exec Producer at Sony Online Entertainment, Maxis, Origin Systems and Kesmai Corporation.

Check out Gamasutra’s summary of the Indie MMO Conference.

6) South by South West Interactive
March 7-11 2008 - Austin, Texas

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

Though SXSW doesn’t provide a ton of events catering specifically to the free to play crowd, it is a phenomenal collection of creative people working in emergent digital entertainment fields. Couple this with the fact that the event is part of North America’s largest music festival and party and attendance seems like more than a good idea.

Check out Throwspace’s summary of SXSW.

7) Austin Game Developers Conference
September 5-7 2007 - Austin, Texas

The Austin Game Developers Conference attracts over 1,100 attendees and provides educational, networking, and business opportunities for game development professionals driving the $11 billion videogame industry. It is the a global forum where programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals and others involved in the development of interactive games gather to exchange ideas, network, and shape the future of the industry.

Austin GDC has become synonymous with MMO design due primarily to the city’s deep MMO development scene. The conference features talks and panels focused on free to play, “Web 2.o,” MMO development and micro-transactional revenue models.

8 ) Online Game Developers Conference
May 13 -15 2008 - Seattle, Washington

Building on the great success of the 2007 conference, OGDC 2008 will expand the plenary sessions from two to three days, and feature a wide range of keynotes, sessions, and panels, giving attendees new views of the online game universe—everything from an overview of the latest business, product, and legal developments to in-depth looks at scalability, player psychology, and in-game economic systems.

This event features Erik Bethke, founder and CEO of GoPets; Alan Crosby director of global community relations at Sony Online and Steve Goldstein of Flagships Studios. 2007’s OGDC was a good start - hopefully 2008 is a big step forward.

Check out MMORPG’s summary of the OGDC.

9) Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008
April 6-10 2008 - Las Vegas

Each year, Symposium/ITxpo: Emerging Trends is founded on a framework of six megatrends that Gartner sees as critical to how business and technology will evolve in the near and long term.

A mere sampling of the trends and technologies we’ll focus on includes:

• User Generated Content
• Social Networking
• Community Source
• The Metaverse
• Relationship Assets
• Hyperconnected Enterprise
• Collective Intelligence

Gartner attracts a different crowd from the game-centric conferences listed here. Typically, Gartner attendees come from the IT or VC worlds. The value of Gartner attendance lies not in the curriculum, but in your fellow attendees.

10) DigiWorld Summit
November 14-15 2007 - Montpellier, France

The 6th Video Game seminar as part of IDATE’s DigiWorld Summit 2007, is organised with financial support from the City of Montpellier. A host of opportunities have opened up over the past two years: the development of serious games, Massively Multiplayer Games and persistent universes, online capabilities incorporated as standard features in home consoles, the emergence and growth of mobile gaming, the development of online poker that’s been as swift as it has been surprising… All constituting innovative technologies and ways to play which, in this era of growing convergence, involve or induce an overhaul of business models.

I’m sure I missed some relevant conferences, so if you can think of any leave a comment for our other readers.

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B-Side reprinted this article on 5 Alternative Revenue Streams for the Music Industry. (I’d link to the original article, but B-Side “cited” the source without a link, so I can only link to their repost.)

In any case, the article outlines 5 revenue models for the faltering music industry. They are:

1. Free (ad or sponsor supported)
2. Pay What You Want (donations)
3. Pay By Popularity (price increasing with popularity)
4. Subscription (Rhapsody style music services)
5. Music Tax (ISPs add tax to offset industry losses = bad idea)

The article puts forth these revenue models after asserting that “iTunes isn’t the answer,” but I’d say that it’s a darn good start. iTunes was at least partially responsible for weening me off music pirating entirely (kids and declining music savvy also deserve credit). And while some of us in the game industry like to snicker at “old media” such as music and its antiquated business practices, the game industry is behind the music business in at least one way:

The iTunes model hasn’t been applied to games yet.

We’re still out there trying to get people to buy the whole album, rather than just the tracks they want. Services like Steam and episodic games like Sam and Max are great steps forward for the industry, but neither one allows consumers to instantly purchase and enjoy only the portions of the game they desire, like iTunes did for music.

One way to stop people loading up their Nintendo DS’s Revolution R4 card with 100 pirated games from BitTorrent is to give them all those games “for free” and charge a capped micro license based on which games they play and for how long.

For instance, if I play 10 minutes of Pokemon, 2 hours of Touch Darts and 50 hours of Puzzle Quest*, I would then be billed something like 10 cents, $1.20 and $20 (or whatever the cap for PQ would be). Couple that with electronic distribution’s removal of COGS and you’re right back to the same profit margins you already enjoy (on titles that cap out), with the added benefit of monetizing lesser played titles that would otherwise have been pirated.

While this may be new for traditional AAA games, casual games already have a fledgling version of this model courtesy of Double Trump’s Micro License scheme. Their PlayOn Arcade site has the details, for those interested in creating an iTunes-esque service for big budget, retail games.

* These are actual figures. I finished Puzzle Quest.

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From a Fortune article, EA CEO John Riccitiello had this to say about the free to play business model and how it will affect traditional retail games.

Riccitiello says the $31 billion gaming industry will suffer if it doesn’t start to reevaluate its business model. Game executives at Sony (SNE), Microsoft (MSFT) and Activision (ATVI) must answer some tough questions in the coming years, like how long they can expect consumers to pay $59 for a video game. Riccitiello predicts the model will be obsolete in the next decade. [Ed: emphasis mine]

“In the next five years, we’re all going to have to deal with this. In China, they’re giving games away for free,” he says. “People who benefit from the current model will need to embrace a new revenue model, or wait for others to disrupt.” As more publishers transition to making games for online distribution, Riccitiello says he expects EA will experiment with different pricing models.

As a colleague just said to me in an email, “It’s encouraging to see they (EA and big publishers as a whole) recognize the issue”.

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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 (2008) - 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.

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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…)