Leigh’s been a friend of F2P.biz since its inception, when she was kind enough to run several of our articles on the site she managed at the time, Worlds in Motion (a Gamasutra “sister” site). Since then, Leigh spent some time at Kotaku before rejoining the Gamasutra family as News Director of the main site, Gamasutra.com.
Leigh recently gave us some of her time at Austin GDC, doing an excellent video interview that fell victim to random audio difficulties. But because the content of that interview was too good to let die, we conducted a written interview with Leigh after the show.
Here is that interview:
You are a well known commentator on the virtual world space. How did that happen, how did you get to where you are today?
Haha, I am? I guess that’s one of the benefits of getting in somewhat early in a space that emerged quickly and got a lot of people excited about it. I was fortunate to be chosen by Simon Carless as the first editor of Gamasutra’s sister site Worlds in Motion focusing on online worlds, and I suppose I learned a lot by covering the space and talking to the people who are pioneering it. I also planned the inaugural Worlds in Motion Summit at GDC in February 2008, and while I didn’t have a hand in the track you saw this year in Austin, a lot of the ideas came from there.
How was the Worlds in Motion Summit this year?
It was good! Austin was sort of an interesting climate for it, because surprisingly some of the presentations I thought of as “Worlds in Motion’s Arena” were taking place across the board during the main conference. I’d hoped that some of the concepts and methodologies finding success in online social spaces would start proliferating across the game space, but I’m surprised it’s happened so quickly! Still, I think we brought some unique stuff to the table.
What were the big issues and stories in the MMO/Virtual World space in 2008?
It seems to me like 2007 was the year that a lot of people, from investors to developers to consumers, realized we had a full-fledged phenomenon on our hands. This year, I think, is the year that a lot of fledgling products will be tested. As we’re looking at what’s launching successfully and what’s not, and what’s taking off and what’s foundering, I think the biggest issue is for individual products to evaluate their substance a bit and perhaps specialize their focus a little. For a while, I think a lot of us operated under the idea that having the word “social” in your product description was enough, and now, I think a lot of these online spaces, even if they operate wholly in a “free” environment — free to play, driven by user-generated content, and free of any kind of video game linearity, are seeing that they do need some kind of backbone in structure, and for that they look back to the game industry.
We’re also seeing a quality bump start happening, I think. For example, even looking at Facebook, at first a Facebook user could get about a billion requests to add apps per day — now that the user’s maybe tried one too many “advertising in disguise” games, or one too many low-quality apps, the industry is having to adapt to a savvier user for whom all this is not so new. One of the ways in which new entries to the social gaming space can differentiate themselves is by presenting a really polished experience that’s clearly grounded in good game design.
So virtual worlds are starting to look to more game structures, and social/casual games are starting to look to more traditional quality levels, and traditional MMOs are now seeing how crucial social elements can be, adding the ability for gamers to dance and make music together. Just today, I believe, I saw an announcement that PopCap is adding a Bejeweled-style game to WoW, because sometimes even hardcore players would like that casual social experience. So there’s a lot of cross-pollination now.
What do you see as the big trends that will emerge in the MMO/Virtual World space in 2009?
I hope that the cross-pollination will continue, wisely. At first there was a lot of excitement around certain key concepts, and what I saw as a rush to implement them, and now I think the trend will favor a disciplined and appropriate implementation of things like social elements and alternative revenue streams, or asynchronous options for multi-user environments — because as Raph Koster said in a panel at AGDC, new products need to tailor their approach a bit to how people are already using the web. I think we’ll see a lot more of that.
And strictly speaking on the MMO space, with World of Warcraft in the position it’s in, and with MMOs such a high-risk and volatile space, I think that traditional online game companies making MMOs are increasingly challenged to find real staying power in the space, to hang in long enough to actually make some money and develop a user community, and they’re going to need to get more creative — I think they’re going to start looking to these emerging trends a bit more to differentiate themselves.
What are the major challenges Virtual Spaces feature before they can truly go mainstream?
The major challenge is how we define virtual spaces! As I said, I think a lot of people are excited about “virtualization” without having yet a standardized idea — or even a clear idea — of what exactly this means, and what it’d look like, and who its users will be, and where we ought to apply it and where we ought not to.
We have all the ingredients for mainstream success — browser-based interfaces that anyone can access, low barrier to entry in design that focuses, as Raph Koster said, on the everyday web user, and we even have mainstream cultural penetration. Your average consumer is already getting hands-on experience with multi-user, web-based interaction via Facebook and MySpace, which are now household names, and even something much more traditional like World of Warcraft is the stuff of evening TV. People are now wholly familiar with and comfortable with paying for things online, with having a user ID, with playing casual games. These things have penetrated our cultural fabric, and we’ve got the city all built to receive the new occupants, but I think where we’re challenged right now is finding a broad implementation that’s beneficial to others beyond those who have already adopted it. We’ll be successful at that when we implement online visual spaces, and avatar-based interaction, for example, in areas where it’s a definitive and clear enhancement on the way we already do things.
Do you think the free-to-play business model is now accepted by the North American mainstream? In the West, its adoption has, at times, been met with suspicion and reluctance. Are we past that and if not how do we get there?
I think the suspicion and reluctance originates primarily in the core video game community, and with designers who have come from a video game or pure MMO background. When games are free to play, they monetize in one of three ways, or a mix of the three: Through paid-for virtual items, through advertising, or through tiered subscriptions. Strictly looking at these options from a game perspective, each of them could possibly unbalance or degrade the gameplay.
For example, with microtransactions, players will likely only spend money on items that have an enhancing effect on their gameplay. So basically, the fear is that paying users will be able to have game advantages that non-paying users don’t. There’s the same suspicion of tiered subscriptions, a fear (that has been borne out in reality, somewhat) that the free players are being “ghettoized,” treated as less valuable by the game operator or simply having a much more limited game experience.
In both of these cases, yes, there is a free option, but not paying becomes a penalty in the context of a gameplay experience. From the designer’s perspective, allowing users to be able to buy game enhancements becomes really challenging, because they need to keep the game balanced in order to make it enjoyable to all, and to achieve this they’re suddenly tasked with managing a highly complex economy, something they might not have bargained for.
There’s always some core gamer resistance to advertising, as well — the vocal core of the game audience is very sensitive to integrity and will lash out against games they see as selling out to brands.
This audience, I think, will never get “past” it. They have declared quite clearly their desires and expectations from their game experience and I think that there should continue to be products that address that. But there’s a broad userbase that exists outside the hardcore gamer, believe it or not! That’s something that it’s hard to be aware of, acclimated as we are to a sort of “internet gamer community.” The people that we see the most often, and that are part of our most immediate culture, are not necessarily the largest percentage of the consumer population.
Just as concerns advertising, there’s been research done that finds that there’s a kind of consumer that would like brands in their online spaces, to enhance realism. There’s a kind of consumer that would prefer to pay in RMTs instead of subscriptions, and the current generation of kids and teens is growing up in an area where everything on the internet is free, period. They’re going to continue to expect that. So the traditional audience might be hostile to a new way of doing things, but my impression is we’re implementing some of these new concepts with the primary aim of welcoming in a new audience.
A few hundred people watched my Red Bull-fueled version of this presentation on Monday, February 18th at GDC. The narration included in this slidecast was done this weekend and is not nearly as energetic.
Game developers the world over continue to explore the free to play model, whether it’s a large-scale MMO or an ad-supported casual game. But one of the more interesting free to play experiments of late comes from Facebook application developer David Gentzel, a 24 year old originally from Roanoke, VA. Mr. Gentzel now calls San Francisco home where he is a developer at SocialMedia, marketing guru Seth Goldstein’s rapidly growing “Social Advertising Network.”
David’s free to play experiment is the incredibly popular Food Fight application.
When the game first launched on Facebook, Food Fight players could sign up to receive a daily allowance of virtual cash that could be spent at the Food Fight cafeteria to purchase one of dozens of available food items. Players would then virtually “throw” said item at one of their Facebook friends. If the recipient had the food fight application, a small image of the item would appear on their page.
But recently, Food Fight’s the resourcing model changed, which is when it became interesting from the perspective of free to play revenue models.
As of mid-September of this year, a player’s lunch money account isn’t cleared at the end of every day - it’s persistent - like a real bank account. Additionally, the daily stipend given to each player was removed, replaced by a model where players earn virtual cash by answering short marketing surveys about a wide range of products. Each multiple choice question takes just a couple seconds to fill out with a reward of one dollar of lunch money per question answered. Interestingly, players earn a higher payout when they answer the same question the same way down the road, an attempt to value accurate answers more highly than one-offs.
Marketers pay for player responses to their surveys, creating a nifty free to play revenue stream and making Food Fight the definitive social networking application for SocialMedia. Seth Goldstein is understandably thrilled about the “craplet” (his words), saying in a recent Business 2.0 article:
People really like to throw piles of poop… So you price the poop high and people have to answer a bunch of questions to pay for it. That’s the future of Internet advertising: throwing shit at people. Literally.
That is it. No scoring, no winners, and no end. Nonetheless, a very successful idea.
How successful?
It takes a bit of conjecture to figure out, but here’s our back-of-the-napkin revenue estimate:
There are 36,257 active daily Food Fight users (among 2M registered FF players)
Assuming each daily user answered just two surveys (reality is likely higher, as the lowest priced item is $2 - requiring two surveys to be completed)
Assuming each survey response cost a marketer 25 cents (reality is likely lower, but Facebook polls already charge clients 25 cents/response)
This would result in $18,128 of revenue per day
Or ~$6.6M of annual revenue for SocialMedia, from one app
That is no small potatoes for an application that likely cost less than $100k to develop.
Since Food Fight introduced surveys, food prices have increased significantly as the game gets balanced. Prices for food items range from $2 to $11 virtual lunch money dollars. For instance, at $10 lobster is significantly more expensive than most items with only Bubble Tea having a higher price tag.
Consider the following price comparison from June 25th of this year till October 26th, a four month time period.
Haggis = $1.75 / $3.40 (194% increase)
Orange = $.50 / $2.30 (460%)
Banana = $.50 /$3.25 (650%)
Sucker = $.25 / $2.30 (920%)
Shrimp cocktail = $1.75 / $3.40 (194%)
So according to these numbers Food Fight items have increased in value by an average of 484%. However, in less than a minute a player can answer enough survey questions to buy even the most expensive item - keeping the game easy and fast to play, while deriving more and more potential revenue from the same virtual items.
Going Forward
Given the fad-ish, viral-flocking nature of social networking apps, it will be interesting to see if Food Fight can maintain and grow their numbers long enough to start capitalizing on this potential revenue stream. In the meantime, SocialMedia is using Food Fight as a beta test for their social advertising network as a whole (and a host of similar apps) - electing not to charge for most, if not all, of the marketing surveys they host. (F2P.biz’s request to SocialMedia for clarification on the “revenue stream, on or off?” point was not answered before this article was published).
Regardless of when SocialMedia turns on the money tap, it’s clear they’re onto a high-ROI free to play revenue model that traditional game developers could do well to emulate.
Koinup is the first social networking site for your virtual life.Not exclusive to Sims gamers, Second Life devotees or WoW weekend warriors, KoinUp is a place where you can give your multiple virtual world identities their own social network.
Koinup was founded in March 2007 and has thus far chosen to focus on Second life, Imvu, WoW and Sims 2 - but are not exclusive to these worlds. The most powerful feature - some sort of integration with these games - hasn’t happened yet, so Koinup instead pledges to be a place to document all your virtual world activities.
I signed up for an account and was very impressed with the ease of registration.I think it tool a minute and a half total with no frustrating or invasive queries for personal information.It was also fun to get the user name I always try and grab on new sites - without resorting to a 36 letter mutation of an English word or a numeric sequence after the handle of choice.
Koinup’s design is fairly straight forward, although not as intuitive as it could be. Where Koinup stumbles is the English language. It doesn’t have the easy colloquialism of most Web 2.0 sites. A couple snippets:
It’s very easy to use and it allow to anyone who have some ideas to tell stories.
Koinup takes your privacy very seriously. For more info, give a look to our Privacy Policy.
But the founders, Italians Pierluigi Casolari (CEO) and Edoardo Turelli (CTO), likely speak their native language better than I. Casolari pulls double duty as the site’s content creator, but there’s room for a translator or English editor on their team.
Koinup allows users to upload videos such as Machinima and tutorials, associated still images and still image series referred to as storyboards.One of the great features Koinup has incorporated is CrossPosting, or the ability to load pictures onto Flickr and other photo sharing sites from within the Koinup uploading system.At this point, CrossPosting doesn’t work with video or storyboards but perhaps that will come next.
One aspect of Koinup that stood out was the site’s emphasis on “Coolness” (their word).Obviously the idea of karma or kudos or cred has been present in social networking sites almost from day 1, but never has it been tacked on quite so blatantly.Site members themselves in addition to the media they uploaded are ranked on coolness.The coolness of media is determined using the usual vectors like views and comments, but member coolness is determined with a “unique” metric.
Members are ranked on coolness based on the popularity of their work (naturally) but also by the number of times that member has flagged offensive material in other people’s profiles.
This is a bit of a head scratcher. It’s akin to incentivizing programmers for finding bugs. Obviously peer moderation is crucial in a user created content environment, but such a direct rewarding for overzealous policing seems destined to backfire.
Ideas like Koinup are inevitable, but Koinup is in need of much refinement before it serves its audience well. I’m looking forward to the next iteration of an avatar social network - whether it’s Koinup or not - as we’re certain to hear a lot more about social networking for the metaverse.
Three questions, a couple that Koinup might answer:
Do people use similar avatar personalities in different worlds?
How many people use multiple virtual worlds concurrently?
Couldn’t Facebook or myspace easily incorporate avatar profiles - either on their own or as a section of your primary profile - thereby eroding the market for standalone avatar social networks?
As has already been reported on several sites, the videos from June’s inaugural Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford are now online. Thanks to the organizers for making the videos freely available - I wish more conferences did this.
I took a heap of notes at the Summit, so why not share them now as well, both in “Top 10″ and raw format.
My Top 10 Notes from the Virtual Goods Summit:
1. James Hong of HotorNot.com
On HotorNot, users can purchase a $10 rose to send to other users. The rose dies 2 weeks later. HotorNot figured there were three value propositions inherent to a real life rose: the flower itself, the gesture of giving it, and the trophy effect of having received it. HotorNot figured that for virtual roses, 2 out of 3 of those values weren’t bad - and they were right. The $10 rose is HotorNot’s highest priced item, but it is still their best seller. James Hong said re: price elasticity, “It’s not impossible that if we raised the price of the rose, we’d sell even more.”
2. Paul Thind of Habbo Hotel
Habbo puts spending caps on every payment method to control economy & keep parents happy - so users can spend money only on 2-3 set days of the week.
3. Craig Sherman of Gaia Online
Gaia has three full time people on staff whose job it is to open envelopes filled with dollar bills and coins because people are desperate to get money into their accounts but can’t find a suitable payment method.
4. Min Kim of Nexon
Average user lifetime in a Nexon game is 2-4 years; Audition, Nexon’s newest game, is 50% female; Maple Story and Kart Rider are 20-30% female.
5. Tim Stevens of Doppelganger The typical console game would not benefit from virtual item sales because of its lack of a continuing connection with its audience. I.e. the game launches, everyone buys and plays it, then most if not all of them leave very quickly for the next game. The community doesn’t grow and care about their presence in the game long-term.
6. Daniel James of Three Rings
The average Puzzle Pirates user spends 2.5 hours per day in the game. Some drop in and leave, but others spend up to 9 hours a day in-game.
7. Raph Koster of Areae
Regarding preventing and tracing fraud: “You need to serialize everything - so you can trace the path of a virtual coin right back through to its minting.”
8. Kyra Reppen of Neopets
Neopets builds their item packages and costs around a template metric of $10-15 per complete outfit.
9. Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners - Facebook’s VC
The Facebook gifting service was just an experiment. A third party will use the newly-launched Facebook Application Platform to deliver a far more successful gifting solution. He said if he were an independent developer, he’d be working on that right now as he believes it is a huge opportunity.
10. Eric Bethke of GoPets
GoPets users are 80% female, one third of whom are in North America. Users are spread throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s age groups. Interestingly, GoPets highest ARPU is from the low 30s age group.
All of my raw, totally unedited notes from the Virtual Goods Summit, after the jump.
It would certainly make sense given the post-penguin acquisition fever. Gaia Online is the very popular anime hangout for US teens. And they’re boasting some excellent numbers these days:
World’s fastest growing hangout for teens.
#2 forum with 1 billion posts, over 1M posts yesterday, 2M monthly unique visitors.
Avg simultaneous users 64K. 3x growth since May 2006.
Gamasutra.com.
