[Editor's Note: Contributing writer Simon Newstead is CEO and Co-Founder of Frenzoo, a 3D Fashion startup and the writer of the VR Fashion blog. He can be contacted at: simon at frenzoo dot com.]
Much has been written on why Google pulled the plug on Lively, its 5 month old virtual world.
The consensus, as Google themselves explained, was a need to “focus more on our core search, ads and apps business”.
Most observers viewed the cancellation as a tough but correct decision during a major slowdown in its core online advertising market. Many questioned the launch of the service in the first place. A search company moving into 3D cartoon chat and online gaming without a clear business model seemed a bit of a stretch.
Even Lively engineering manager Niniane Wangadmitted at Virtual Worlds London last month there was still no internal decision on Lively’s virtual economy model - not a great sign for a public service several months after launch.
However there were other factors that also helped contribute to the demise of the Lively service. These may not have grabbed as many headlines, but they had an impact, and not in a good way:
1. Rarity (or lack thereof)
Why do World of Warcraft players grind for hours and hours on end to level up or gain a new weapon or skill? Why do millions of Stardoll fans log in every day just to get their daily StarDollar allowance? Why do Gaia Online users save for months (or plead total strangers) to buy that one special item at the top of their wishlist?
Rarity.
The cardinal rule: make items rare. I.e. require effort and/or money to acquire items, and those items become highly sought after. Desire breeds addiction, addiction plus good, fun gameplay = many repeat visitors.
Yet the day Lively opened its doors, all items in their catalog were free. With that precedent set, nothing “felt” valuable. With that, there was no “desire” factor or goal to strive for - and far less motivation to keep coming back.
This design decision made Lively feel like a “throw away” environment, and users responded in turn.
2. Too powerful and complex an interface
As Ars Technica observed in its launch review, the user interface was difficult.
Unlike Second Life, Lively was designed to be a casual “pick up and go” experience for the mainstream - yet the UI wasn’t designed that way.
For example, many users (myself included) didn’t know how to make our avatars walk around a room.
Frustrated right clicking, left clicking, and hitting arrow keys yielded nothing. It turned out that the way to walk was to hover the mouse over your avatar, then drag and move the mouse to cause your avatar to walk around. Not intuitive.
You might think that the way to solve that was to use a more standard control, for example left click on a place and avatar walks towards it. However this brings up a higher order question: Why was walking even allowed in the first place?
Walking didn’t add anything to the social chat experience except complexity and confusion.
Lively’s competitor and 3D chat leader IMVU recognized this fact and even years after their launch, IMVU doesn’t support avatar walking.
Why?
It doesn’t need to.
3. Too rough, too early
Unlike an unknown startup, anything Google launches to the public is going to attract a day one audience of millions.
That’s what happens when you are the most visited web company in the world. You had better make sure that it’s ready. In Lively’s case, it wasn’t just the lack of Mac support that caused fits among its early user base (although that didn’t help).
It was other issues such as lack of an open content program, leading to a dearth of selections in the store on the first day. A few months would have made all the difference as Google had truly promising and unique content ecosystem in development which could have been a game changer.
It was also many little things:
Anger and confusion greeted a friend who had spent an hour decorating her room, yet returned a few hours later to find strangers had put sofas on the ceiling, tipped over chairs and rearranged plants into a jumbled mess.
All because at launch it was too easy to unknowingly allow others to edit your public room. This and many other small, yet very frustrating user experience issues surely would have been cleaned up with more time in a closed beta.
First impressions count even more in a spotlight.
4. Audience and art
Lively tried to be everything to everyone right from day 1.
Unlike other games based around a theme - be it anime lifestyle in Gaia Online, music in vSide or 3D Avatar Fashion in Frenzoo (disclosure: this is my product) - Google went for an audience of everyone. Or, as Google put it themselves, “Be who you want to be on the web pages you visit.”
This was always going to be an ambitious goal, but it was very difficult to create a cohesive experience with a mix of radically different art styles for the avatars.
In successful services such with Nintendo Mii or Habbo Hotel, there can be plenty of diversity in look but yet a single unmistakable avatar style glues the whole experience together.
However in Lively, you had tiny bears hugging tall skinny cartoon girls, while pigs walked around in circles.
The goal - total freedom of art style - may have been worthy, but put them all together in a chaotic 3D chat environment and the net effect was chaotic and off-putting for users.
5. No profile to call home
It’s an irony that a service that pushed the outer limits of web technology, the most basic social web features such as a profile page, were conspicuously absent.
Nearly every successful online game or web community has a profile page or home screen, as the center of the social experience and to build your own virtual identity - be it for role playing or just making friends.
IMVU’s profile pages are buzzing with user expression and customization, MySpace and Facebook have built their social businesses entirely around profile pages. Yet surprisingly, Lively, which billed itself as the next step in the “social web,” didn’t support web profile pages at launch.
Conclusion
Does the demise of Lively spell the deathknell for virtual worlds?
I don’t believe so. Whilst there has been some excess in hype in parts of the industry, for many players abundant opportunity is still there. The rapid growth of other virtual worlds from IMVU through to Buddypoke and Stardoll and growing revenues seem to bear that out. Not to mention the massive growth in MMO revenues in the past three years.
However in Lively’s case, Google made several big and small mistakes. Combined with a confused business model and no long-term commitment from the Google mothership, this ultimately doomed the otherwise promising service to brief and inglorious lifespan.
The problems could have been fixed and focus found for Lively. IMVU’s first year was plagued with bugs and issues; but as Silicon Alley Insider put it succinctly, in Google’s case they didn’t even try.
Raph Koster of Metaplace gave a video interview with F2P.biz during last month’s Austin Game Developers Conference. It was embargoed until just recently, so here it is now. Thanks, Raph!
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.
Austin GDC is over and we’re back up in Canada. We flew through Houston on the way back, which wasn’t nearly the Atlantis it’s made out to be on the news.
Our final video interviews from the show are posted below. Thanks to those that gave us their time. Enjoy!
Dave Grossman
Dave Grossman, Design Director at Telltale Games (makers of the episodic games Sam & Max, Strongbad and Wallace & Gromit), talks about upcoming games from his studio, the challenges of episodic delivery, player input on design and more.
Thomas Bidaux
Thomas Bidaux, VP of Strategy at Avaloop, talks about their debut product, Papermint, the free-to-play business model and what teenage girls want from their virtual goods.
Here we are at Austin GDC! First order of business was attending the Lane Merrifield Keynote, entitled “At Their Service: Making a Difference By Putting Players First,” where I took copious notes. I have 40 mins while our first video interview (Mike Zummo of Acclaim) downloads from our camera, so here are my notes, cleaned up a bit:
Also, here is our photofeed from today, updated when we can.
Lane’s Talk
Lane’s plane landed at 4:30 this morning due to Ike travel complications. He jokes that if he’s slow today, it’s not because he’s Canadian. I take minor offense, being Canadian myself.
By putting the player first, better customer support is natural follow through. But we also build better games and stronger businesses.
Lane is a huge fan of Walt Disney and was with the company long before they acquired Club Penguin. Lane first job was manning a float in the Lion King parade at Disneyland (shows his employee pass from Disneyland, including Flock of Seagulls hair). He rode the float every day after school and also controlled a 300-pound animatronic crocodile.
While at Disneyland, Lane observed that trash got picked up fast and drinks got replaced instantly when spilled. All the staff had a great attitude of service and took care of each other behind scenes. The environment was all about taking care of each other and service.
The passion for serving at Disney came from Walt Disney himself. He built it for his kids. Without realizing the parallels, Lance and Lane built Club Penguin for their kids to play in. Lane strove every day to find news ways to make it safe and fun for his kids.
Lane makes the point that “Serving must be genuine” - providing his dad’s “shirt off your back” gauge of someone’s service integrity as proof. In a snowy Canadian winter, someone who would give you their shirt is gold.
(Big story about how he’s called Jason at his local starbucks. Point was likely about Customer Service Reps (CSRs) not taking time to know their customers.)
Lane then reads from a note he sent to his development team after Club Penguin initially launched amid the usual dev team chaos and late nights. The letter was a story about when Lane saw parents and teachers shepherding kids across a snowy road. His analogy to the net was that some companies thought crosswalks and stoplights were the solution to keeping kids safe on net, but kids still felt isolated and unsafe and confused. Danger still existed to those trying to cross. Club Penguin believes kids need advocates - holding their hand, walking with them - and Lane hopes that as a company they always go one step further to pick up that hand and cross the street together.
“Crush the Joy” - Lance, co-founder of Club Penguin, coined this phrase. Lance is convinced that before anyone joins the team, they need to have their ego turned down a bit. Hence, Crush the Joy. Dev team members need to work together to serve audience and let go of ego that gets in the way. Devs often wind up front and centre of what we build - we end up building for ourselves and not the player.
Club Penguin has worked tirelessly to find people who had a passion for serving kids. Without it, they wouldn’t be hired.
Pixar has a saying: we put people through a gauntlet to get in here, but once they are here, we treat them so well they don’t want to leave.
Club Penguin was once fired by a staffing firm as CP consistently turned down highly qualified candidates who weren’t right for the position. CP has hired a lot of CS people from Starbucks because they know how to talk to people face to face.CP also hires people out of summer camps, boys and girls clubs, teacher’s assistants, etc to take care of player base.
Most of the CSRs have rarely done more than email and web browsing with PC before coming in - deep tech knowledge is not as important as people skills. CP does not use automated responses… CSR team personally responds to 5-7000 emails a day.
Programmers stand over CSRs shoulders to measure things like mouse travel to make minor changes to CSR interface to optimize work flow.
Because real people answer player inquiries, players are more likely to relay qualitative info back to CSRs about issues like game difficulty, suggestions for “white fur” found randomly in game, etc. CP approached this feedback in a revolutionary fashion: “we didn’t do what the kids said would be lame and did do what the kids said would be cool” - applause
“If it doesn’t matter to a kid, it doesn’t matter” - this is the mantra CP works toward. Easy to get distracted and focused on ourselves - easy to get caught up making what we think is cool or what our friends think is cool, but need to remember what the kids think is cool. Should always be striving to serve our audience. That will create better games, work environments and a better business as a result.
Q&A Period
How do you differentiate between vocal minority and whole audience when acting on feedback?
CP deals with a certain demographic that can barely type and read. Full time staff reads blogs and forums, play testing is done in office, etc.
Do you use any metric systems for pooling user data?
CP does not have a lot of systems for that. We rely heavily on people… emails come in by the thousands focused around certain topics, CSRs gather that info and compile top 10 issues and send out to dev team.
Does CP have any plans to do microtransactions?
This is a tough thing for CP to do, due to age of audience. Subscriptions are easier for parents to moderate spending. Subscription model makes it easier to focus on parental needs, versus an ad-supported model. For instance, CP just launched a timer that kicks kids off after a parent-determined aount of time.The cool thing is that there are no advertisers to get mad at CP for doing that - parents wanted it, parents got it.
Any other recommendations for fellow kids world devs, besides serving?
Know your audience, keep them in the forefront. CP is fortunate we did not take on any VC as we didn’t think it was going to go as far as it did. We used our own credit cards to start it up and didn’t need to be accountable to anyone but parents and kids. There were no VCs in our ear talking about the latest research and focus groups, etc.
Would you like to open up new avenues for users to give feedback?
There is never a bad way to get feedback from customers. CP also had phone support to talk directly with users. They are open to any new method for feedback.
You slated a percentage of profits to go to charity in the beginning. Was that maintained when you were acquired by Disney?
Yes it was maintained and continues to this day. CP does not talk about it a lot as we don’t want to turn it into a marketing pitch. “Coins for Change” was our first public charity event - it allowed kids to give their coins to one of three charities. Then, CP took $1M and distributed it proportionally according to how kids put their coins between the three charities. Two billion coins were given, which is remarkable due how difficult it is to acquire coins in the game. Disney never questioned keeping the charity program.
How do you give kids what they want when, depending on the age group, kids can be bloodthirsty llittle monsters? How do you distinguish about what they say they want and what they really want?
Kids always ask for beds for their igloos, but it leads to inappropriate stuff so CP will never do it.
What are some of the key personalities or traits you look for when hiring?
A lot of it comes from gut If the people doing the hiring are not the type of person CP is looking for themselves, it gets a lot harder to hire the right people. Up in Canada, it’s a very relaxed environment well suited to producing those sort of people.
Does CP appeal to an older audience?
CP actually has a wider demographic than people realize: 6-14 years old. It takes on a geeky cool thing at the older ages, like Napoleon Dynamite. Older kids spend more time on Xbox but will still hop on for snowball fight wtih friends in CP.
What percentage of your budget goes to Customer Service?
Two thirds of our staff, 150 ppl, are dedicated to CS. We are opening offices in Brighton, Australia, Brazil, etc.
What kind of predator protection tools do you use?
Predators are not much of a problem for CP due to our filtering tech and massive human presence on CSR. We remove several hundred words a day from system. i.e. “lollipop” takes on undertones due to pop song, so we remove it. Then we review it a few months later to see if it can be reintroduced. A lot less gets through than people realize. Reportable incidences are how these issues are measured and to date CP has not had one. Nothing is ever perfect, but in a sea full of unlocked cars, CP is low-jacked and locked up. Plenty of easier targets for predators.
With two thirds of staff being CSRs, are costs a concern? Would you ever outsource?
CP worked hard to build a scalable model and work on efficiencies in CS. We support English alone in Australia, UK, North America, so it’s really important to have people in each country that know that region’s slang, etc. CP is so passionate about CSR system that we have never brought up outsourcing it.
How will your product evolve to accommodate a more mature userbase?
CP has a substantially large writing staff working hard to make sure there is relevance across the board, but realistically, CP will never be able to compete with a 17 year old’s console gaming habits, etc. So at some point we need to let them go. Now with Disney we can look at developing other products for those older demographics.
I heard Penguin Times is the most widely read newspaper in the world - is that true?
An article recently compared it to a lot of leading newspapers and it is substantially large, but CP does not keep a lot of hard metrics on it. CP did track it for a while and it was impressive - especially intimidating to the 2-3 writers who work on it full time.
How did you come up with the backstory you have?
Story is everything in entertainment. From day 1 we had a writer who started as a support person. She built a team, but a lot of the ideas come from the kids. Lot of logical - and illogical - ideas. CP introduces characters very slowly - we don’t introduce 30 chars at once and call it a day. 90% of our internal conversations revolve around what CP can’t do re: story, but ultimately the 10% that makes it in, makes sense to audience.
How often do you get feedback concerning the flash platform?
Lance is great at working backwards. CP was originally developed in Flash 6 and most of it would run today in that environment. We’ve always looked for the highest install base and built for that. One of the biggest issues is ports not being open on routers, so we spent a ton of time making sure it just works for everyone. New issues are constantly coming up - i.e. new browsers coming out - but our audience is quite patient as we work through issues.
What other non-English markets do you plan to launch in?
CP has 7 or 8 translations in the works now. None are public yet, but our goal is to roll them out quickly. That is one of the reasons CP joined Disney. In the next 6 months there will be several announcements around that.
At what point did you realize you needed more than out of pocket money to move forward?
We started CP with aggressive budget, low salaries. We worked really hard to build a scalable model, so as audience grew, CP could cover costs. There were lots of VCs out there, but CP needed infrastructure help not just money. John Lassiter and the crew at Disney were always consistent with what they said would happen and are still consistent.
How can you handle the support tools and requests from other regions and languages?
That is one of the reasons we can’t just push a button to launch in other territories. We need to ensure the tools work for those regions. CP brings people from that country to their office for 6 weeks, then sends people from CP to the regional office for 6 weeks.
What was the biggest challenge working with Disney?
The largest challenge CP has was the size of Disney. Every Disney division has a 50:1 ratio compared to CP’s team, so it was easy to be inundated with emails due to difference in size. Bob Eiger called Lane after acquisition and said “If you ever feel that Disney’s size is stifling you, I want to be the first to know”
What level of importance does mobile play have for your audience?
We are trying to track demographics of our audience and how fast they are adopting mobile. We have a few things in the works for mobile now, but we want to make sure it is done purposefully and not just to check a box. Need to make sure it’s as fun or more fun than PC.
How do you deal with banning players?
One thing we do is to purposefully keep CSRs who ban from seeing whether it is a member account or non-member account, to prevent bias from creeping in. We issue 24 hour, 72 hour and permanent bans. We’re able to see not just chat logs but also what a user was trying to say - i.e. what didn’t make it through filters.
[Editor's Note: Contributing writer Simon Newstead is CEO and Co-Founder of Frenzoo, a startup in the 3D fashion and lifestyle space and the writer of the VR Fashion blog. He can be contacted at: simon at frenzoo dot com.]
Entranced by the success of IMVU, Club Penguin and Habbo, investors have poured millions into virtual worlds with new services blossoming out of stealth mode every week.But where is the space headed?
At last week’s Virtual Worlds Expo, several hundred insiders huddled to offer their own opinions on the future.Operators new and old alike, technology providers, and a smattering of advertisers and Hollywood players came together, and five interesting trends emerged:
1) The War on Geekiness
Electric Sheep Company’s Sibley Verbeck summed it up well, coining the phrase “Multi-Global War on Geekiness”.
There was recognition that to hit mainstream, the industry has to leave its geeky roots behind and focus on a simple and fun user experience.Barriers to entry plaguing early entrants - difficult navigation, large downloads and complex user interfaces - have to disappear.The presented alternative to shedding our geekiness was fairly stark: waiting years until Generation Z “Club Penguin” kids grow older.Not a new idea, but one that is really being taken seriously.
New players are paying attention – one example debuting in the US market at the show was Freggers – a game that made avatar signup and orientation a breeze.And it’s working - already Freggers has picked up a user base of over 500,000 in their home market of Germany, which interestingly includes many users in their 20s and 30s - despite a young, pixel-art style.
2) Say No To Large Client Downloads
“If uses have to download a client, you’re dead. You’re a science project only.”- Sean Ryan, Meez CEO.
One of the most lively panels was with the founders from Meez, Vivaty, Three Rings and Small Worlds and all shared the same opinion: standalone, heavy-client virtual worlds were going to fall away.
Daniel James from Three Rings, makers of popular Puzzle Pirates, believes 90-95% of visitors will not install a separate client. His new MMO, Whirled, is 2D Flash and his previous projects have both been Java.
However the panel disagreed about whether Flash was the only option for the masses, weighing up its lack of support for hardware based 3D.
Vivaty CEO Keith McCurdy argued for a light, single-click install, plugin being viable for masses. Installed in under a minute, he approximated a successful install rate of interested visitors in the 40-50% range (note- with Frenzoo we also see similar rates in our early field testing).
Google has taken the browser 3D plugin approach with its Lively service. And Avatar chat plugin Weblin recently hit 1 million unique users.
In Korea, a bellwether market for many a trend online, 3D browser plugins have been successfully used for some time, including just recently in MiniLife from Social Network pioneer Cyworld.
3) Virtual Brands Go Terrestrial
With so many entertainment and consumer brands moving into virtual worlds, it’s easy to overlook the opposite trend starting to emerge.
A handful of successful online brands are starting to move onto store shelves through licensing and partnership agreements.
Neopets is the poster child in this space and Habbo, on the back of some early dabbling in the space, hinted at the show of a major offline brand tie-up to be announced soon
Look out for more of these crossovers to come in coming months.
4) Branded Items: Not Free For Long
So far, in many virtual worlds such as Meez, branded items have been free. But at least for some items that will soon change.
WeeWorlds head of marketing, Lauren Bigelow, explained the plans of the 25 Million strong WeeMee community: to date, all branded items had been free, but some items will soon cost money, such as premium branded items like an upcoming Paris Hilton.
Why? Charging money for branded items increases exclusivity - and therefore buzz - driving the marketing campaign’s objectives. Obviously a revenue stream is a happy side effect as well.
Used well, it sounds like a win-win.Expect experimentation on branded item pricing to happen in coming months.
5) Taking Virtual Responsibility Seriously
Kids world Dizzywood, which announced at the show it had hit 500,000 users, recently used in-game activities topromote respect and responsibility by partnering with the Arbor Foundation for Earth day to encourage kids to plant virtual trees.
Club Penguin has done a lot with WWF and Habbo also has embraced social responsibility when it comes to their users, with a policy in place now restricting the maximum that can be spent on coins each month.
Do these socially responsible activities really pay off?It’s too early to say but respecting users and building up trust surely can’t hurt.
[Editor's Note: Contributing writer Simon Newstead is CEO and Co-Founder of Frenzoo, a startup in the 3D fashion and lifestyle space and the writer of the VR Fashion blog. He can be contacted at: simon at frenzoo dot com.]
We’ve all have heard the 1% Rule for content in online communities, as described by Bradley Horowitz. It goes something like this - within a community of 100 who consume content, there may be 10 synthesizers and only 1 true content creator.
That well accepted rule of thumb generally holds true on most community sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook.
How about in 3D virtual worlds?
With commercial incentive added into the mix, is there a much larger contributing group where more than 1 in 100 create their own content for use by themselves and their peers?
The answer is no.
The “0.1% Rule” in Virtual Worlds
In fact, “The 0.1% Rule” would be a better description. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The thriving 3D avatar chat community has over 20 million users generating $US 1M in item revenue a month. This explosive growth has been driven by arguably the largest catalog of virtual items in the world, virtually all created by users:
So, in this community there is a rate of approximately 0.5% of the registered users who have become developers (having paid the $US 7.95 fee to be able to create and publish content to the IMVU shop).
Over the past month, a couple of us did an informal study with developers to try to find out what they are actually creating. Here’s what we found:
Source – Polling & discussion with 50 developers, August 2008
What’s striking was that around 1 in 5 in our rough poll are actively creating true 3D content. That is, they are creating new 3D models / animation / meshes / morph targets as well as textures. We’re not privy to internal IMVU numbers which may be higher or lower, but the conclusion looks to be that 3D creators are in the minority of user generated content developers.
The majority, therefore, are using only 2D to create their content.
Returning to the content creation pyramid within virtual worlds, it now looks like:
3D Content Creation is Hard
An artistic sense plus at least a year of training and thousands of dollars for 3DMax or Maya present a very high barrier for 3D content creators. Even with free open source tools like Blender, the technical skill and time required to create quality 3D models or animations is significantly more than most people possess.
With such a low proportion of users in the community creating new 3D models, how does the whole system survive and prosper?
The conclusion: a well designed derivation system.
Deriving Power
Being able to take a single 3D product from the shop and then swap 2D textures to create radically different derived items is the key to unlocking contributions from the 2D-only crowd.
With new texture and transparencies, an elegant evening gown becomes a dark gothic dress. Blonde hair becomes black with bronze highlights… and so on.
And with a robust in-game economy, there is an incentive for creators to encourage derivation of their original products. Because when the derivative products are sold, the original creators - and anyone else in the item’s derivation chain - gets paid their cut.
2D makes the whole scheme work. Why? It’s simple and accessible, and there are probably over a billion people in the world who have access to Microsoft Paint. Of course, those with artistic talent will always be more successful, but almost anyone has the skills to create a simple 3D T-shirt with a photo on it.
Where Content Creation is Headed
The IMVU 0.1% example has shown that even with a small number of true 3D content creators, the power of derivation can spawn content diverse and numerous enough to feed a hungry userbase. So what’s next?
Here are three of my personal predictions for the future of content in virtual worlds:
Line Between 2D & 3D Blurs
With a few clicks and drags in the ridiculously easy Creature Creator from EA’s anticipated game, Spore, almost anyone can create their own unique, animated 3D creatures. Are these classed as new 3D content?
Cheap and Easy 3D Content Creation
As free tools such as Google Sketch Up get more traction in the marketplace, the required investment of time and money associated with creating 3D content is decreasing. That said, industrial-strength 3D model creation (Maya, Max) will remain far from mainstream.
One Step Textures
Today, it’s a two step process to generate 3D derivative items. First, users must create 2D images in a tool such as Photoshop, then import and integrate those images into a tool such as the standalone IMVU Previewer. Soon these steps will be distilled into an integrated web-based tool, as is already being done in some 2D avatar communities.
FreeToPlay.biz is looking for an insightful industry commentator to join our team. FreeToPlay.biz covers social games, online games and virtual worlds for industry insiders. For more info on who we are, see the “Who is” section of this site.
Our selected writer will be capable of creating news with analysis, crafting fact-supported feature articles and conducting insightful interviews. The job can be done from your laptop anywhere in the world, but some paid travel (i.e. to cover conferences) may be involved.
Application criteria:
Please provide only one submission. Must be online game or core game business related, not a game review.
If you don’t have a submission directly related to the topic, submit your best piece of critical analysis and explain your background/knowledge of the online gaming or core game business.
Must have passion for business side of the game industry, be professional and articulate and available to post with consistency and meet editorial deadlines.
Regular online writing rates apply, with performance bonuses.
Please review some our most popular posts (here, here and here) to get an idea of what we’re looking for before applying.
Express your interest by sending the aforementioned materials to:
The job market seems as hot as ever. As a result, I’ve had a few interesting free-to-play related jobs flitter through my inbox this week.
David Perry, Chief Creative Officer of Acclaim (in that company’s new, F2P-only format) and Kyra Reppen, SVP of Nickelodeon, send word of very compelling vacancies in their respective companies. Nickelodeon’s posting is based in LA whereas Acclaim seems open to remote-work scenarios. Kudos to Acclaim!
I promised I’d post their opps on freetoplay.biz. Click through for the full text of each posting.
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!
