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I have seen the future, and it involves repetitive tasks!
The current “We’re E3 now! Really! Auf Deutsch!” Leipzig Gaming Conference had a “Future of MMOs” panel with some businessy types from EA Mythic, Europe’s CDV, Korea’s Webzen, and Sigil.
Eugene Evans from EA/Mythic pointed out that the casual MMO gamer as a term is fundamentally oxymoronic and that Mythic isn’t setting out to capture a casual gamer with Warhammer Onilne. Evans indicated that Mythic plans to continue to pursue hardcore gamers. Cindy Armstrong disagrees. “The future is not hardcore,” Armstrong said. She pointed out that in order to reach the masses MMOs would have to move beyond the largely fantasy-driven worlds generally associated with the genre. Armstrong detailed a casual MMO model she’s seeing in Korea (her company, Webzen has had success there) where players are completing six to eight minute quest objectives and then repeating them for two hours.
Sigil Games’ Zack Karlsson pointed out that in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (due sometime this winter), they are finding gamers well outside of the typical 18-35 year-old male demographic. Over a third of the Vanguard players right now are female and of players over the age of 40, Sigil found half of them to be female.
So your takeaways? Basically, the future is in hardcore gamers, except not, and casual gamers like repetitive mindless tasks, and in Vanguard there’s a good chance that elf really is a woman. So there. And you thought the industry had issues!
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about 4 years ago
So that’s where Eugene Evans went.
about 4 years ago
Good old EA. Is there anything they can be right about?
about 4 years ago
“casual MMO gamer as a term is fundamentally oxymoronic and that Mythic isn\’e2\’80\’99t setting out to capture a casual gamer with Warhammer Onilne.”
Not to dis your old company, Lum, but I guess someone needs to tell Blizzard Games that they’re massive success has all been a mirage and they need to wake up.
Not that I have a big double-blind study to back me up or anything, but from a purely anecdotal viewpoint I’ve seen plenty of “casual MMO gamer(s)” in WoW. They’re the folks that have kids, have a job, get to play maybe 10 to 20 hours a week (instead of watching TV for an average 30 hours a week like most Americans can somehow manage to do) with most of that on weekends — and they CANNOT PARTICIPATE IN WOW’S PVP OR RAIDING “ENDGAME”. Yeah, I wanted to raise my voice on that one.
At the same time, these folks make up a LOT of what is apparently the vastly expanded playerbase that WoW managed to pull into the MMORPG-o-sphere: remember when we thought One. Million. Subcribers. would be a big deal? Seems like WoW managed to pass that measure of the “900 Lb. Gorilla” several tons ago. And, from a purely non-scientific anecdotal standpoint, I would argue that a lot of these subscriptions are those same “casual MMO gamer” that Eugene Evans seems to think doesn’t exist.
Of course, WoW continues to bleed those people as they finally get tired or rolling up alt after alt and their kids still aren’t old enough yet to join in the “raid endgame”.
about 4 years ago
I knew it! I AM the only casual MMO player.
I’m screwed…
about 4 years ago
This simply illustrates that none of these panelists, nor their respective companies, have any idea what the fuck they are talking about. It is obvious that they love to hear themselves talk, however.
about 4 years ago
WoW is not casual. Even the people who say they’re casual players aren’t. They’re just addicts who aren’t very good. WoW is a success because it is well designed, not because it is specifically casual. It is very easy at level 1, and very hard at level 60 and beyond, with a gradual escalation and then a sharp jump up right at the bleeding edge.
But its definately not casual. It is designed to breed addiction. WoW is about as casual as heroin.
about 4 years ago
Maybe they can take some advice from this CE-Oh
http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/22/ce-oh-no-he-didnt-part-xii-kiloo-exec-extolls-virtues-of-cra/
about 4 years ago
“from a purely anecdotal viewpoint I\’e2\’80\’99ve seen plenty of \’e2\’80\’9ccasual MMO gamer(s)\’e2\’80\’9d in WoW. They\’e2\’80\’99re the folks that have kids, have a job, get to play maybe 10 to 20 hours a week”
I think you just made his point there for him.
Casual gamers are an oxymoron, 10-20 hours a week is not casual, okay it’s not what MMO gamers would consider hardcore, but compared to most other hobbies it isn’t casual.
Someone who is a casual angler might fish for half a day every 2 or 3 weeks, a casual football player might play one game a week, a casual musician might play for a couple of hours a week.
A serious, non-professional, sports player or musician or artist might spend 10-20 hours a week on their hobby.
A “casual” MMO player is not casual, they are just significantly less obsessive about their hobby than the hardcore.
Of course I could be completely mis-interperating what he is saying and he could be a blithering idiot, but hey.
about 4 years ago
Quoted for truth.
These people are contradictory. I mean, you cant even define the “casual MMO gamer”, is it someone who loves games and competition but is limited to 10 hours per week? Or is it someone who is not good at games and needs a dumbed down version of rock paper scissors to understand what to do?
I think they’re often assumed to be the latter by idiots who make 8 minute quests to be repeated for 2 hours, when in actuality, the focus should be on the former, which is more of a pre-endgame WoW perspective.
Either way, most people are dumb and are going to kill our genre by trying to play to the casual market in the wrong way.
about 4 years ago
Pretty sure you’re right on.
about 40 years ago
Er, I meant that towards comment 8.
about 4 years ago
You stab me in the heart Mist
But yes, lisa is very correct.
about 4 years ago
I’m so gonna have to start putting the apostrophe in more often, and thanks.
about 4 years ago
I dunno. I have a hard time buying those #s. Unless those two games are targetting female gamers. Which they are not. Hmmm.
OTOH, if the typical demo is 18-35, WoW’s not got a typical population. Swamped in 12 year olds, we are.
about 4 years ago
I totally believe those Vanguard numbers… because the truth is that currently there are only 27 people in beta, friends and family of the dev team. Everyone else who claims to be in beta is just lying to appear cool on internet message boards.
about 4 years ago
I completely believe the Vanguard numbers. As you stated, they are in a closed beta where they have handpicked the participants. Their numbers show a higher then average female participation because they skewed their beta invites that way, not because their game is some kind of babe magnet.
Its like a bar having a Lady’s Night and paying someone to stand outside and scream “Hey look, we have women in here.”
about 4 years ago
“the casual MMO gamer as a term is fundamentally oxymoronic”
Good thing I wasn’t there. “SAY WHAT?!” at the top of my lungs would have been forthcomming. Of course no casual gamer would have gone to the trouble of attending.
about 4 years ago
A few more people than that are in the Vanguard Beta, but not many.
about 4 years ago
I completely disagree with the “WoW isn’t casual” crowd here.
You don’t think 10-20 is casual? It may not be if it was all done in 3 days. However, I’ll play that range per week, but in 1-2 hour increments. Some nights not at all, and some weekends I’ll get a 3-4 hour window.
Yes, a big part of WoW is not casual. I cannot attend raids for instance. Up until the last BG change, I couldn’t sit around and wait for queues. I can’t schedule play time since I just basically grab it when I can.
What I CAN do is develop alts, join BG’s for PvP, and get into a few 5-10 man instances from time to time. I can do all of these things in short play sessions.
That same 10-20 hour time would either be spent on TV (which I don’t watch anymore) or reading (2 hours before bed isn’t out of the question for me. Hardcore reader?) I spend most of my evenings working on things around the house (hardcore homedweller?) While I can capture the daylight, I work in the yard (hardcore gardener?) I exercise about 10 hours a week typically. I guess I’m not hardcore there.
You can’t look at the total number of hours spent per week. You have to look at the window of game time and the frequency that game time is spent. When games are being designed to make the player sit for 3+ hours at a time or get nothing for their effort, you’ll lose not only your 8 or less per week, but a large part of your 10-20 too.
AND, you cannot just look at the time it takes to run an instance or raid either. A 3 hour instance will most likely take an hour to plan and organize with another hour added along the way and at the end for item dispursement, etc. Yes, there are guilds that can be more efficient than that, but it requires being in a true raiding guild and there are hours spent outside of the instances just to maintain that relationship compared to a casual guild. Yes, I’m counting time spent on guild forums, etc.
I have to get back to my job where I play a hardcore engineer every week.
about 4 years ago
Glad I’m not the only one
You can get a lot of time and interest from hardcore gamers. They’re a great fit, the ambassadors for MMOGs in particular. However, you can’t grow this genre except incrementally without appealing to casual gamers. And I mean real casual gamers, not someone who’s casual because they only raid two nights a week instead of seven nights.
WoW proved this. The vast majority are not repeating BWL for new drops. They play the game as an RPG and either leave when they realize they can only grow beyond 60 by repeating BWL for new drops, or stick around to play a different portion of the game from a different perspective. And they’ll be back for Burning Crusade because 60-70 is being structured the same as 1-60 was. And leave at 70 because that won’t be.
But forget WoW. Big as it is, it is not the future. It is just one part of it. Segments of the punditry in this genre are fixated on EQ, things like EQ and things that aren’t like EQ but still take a whole lot of time to be successful within. Hardcore, hardcore, hardcore. Other segments look beyond the typical CD>patch>subscription-fee model to see where the real growth is happening. It’s easy to ignore this part because it doesn’t show up on MMOGcharts, but it’s there, real, and is where a lot of companies disinterested in spending $60mil to take on the ultimate diku are looking.
You can get casual people to play MMOGs. Look at the top six titles at one of the hotter destinations for casual games (miniclips). Until recently, three of them were MMOGs (Club Penguin, which has been top almost since launch, Runescape which has been there since their launch, and Puzzle Pirates which appears to have fallen off again).
That’s saying something.
about 4 years ago
Err, meant to say what it was actually saying
The future is not by reskinning diku for hopefully millions more. Rather, it’s about getting more people to join a persistent online ecosystem where they can be plied for more cash by being given more experiences. The average person is not interested in an MC drop to start the tech tree to eventually take down Ony/Naxx/whatever. They want a fun game they can get into and out of that may be part of a longer-term growth strategy. And particularly in the U.S., there’s a lot more average people out there playing casual online games than there are playing massively-multiplayer ones.
Make the persistent long term rewards easy to understand and a natural evolution for people you attract through casual games. Then you’ve got them. Just don’t expect to keep them with raiding.
Here’s something I found funny:
Oh really? Where was this thinking when Nick Yee was qualitatively researching the game these folks originally built back five years ago?!
about 4 years ago
The future is designing games that are fun, and make people want to play them.
If you can’t do that, there will be no future.
about 4 years ago
The problem, as I see it, is that the terms “casual” and “hardcore” are bandied about by various people who mean *completely* different things by them.
There’s:
Casual(1): a player whose total time commitment to a game is low;
Casual(2): a player whose gaming timespan in any one session is low;
Casual(3): a player whose interests do not lie in attempting to ‘beat’ an MMOG or advance further than other characters
and possibly some others.
They may not be in any related. Some people don’t spend much time in a game; others play like crazy but only on weekends; others spend lots of time in game but are alt-o-holics or just aren’t in it for the uber.
‘Hardcore’ is easier to define. Since designers have to build in mind-killing timesinks to keep the 7-day, 16-hour gamers from stomping their game flat, the “achiever” types have to be the opposite of causal(1), casual(2), *and* casual(3); in-game nearly always, in-game for long periods, and in-game for the primary purpose of being at the top of the game.
about 4 years ago
If you design a game, any kind of game, there will be people, a not insignificant number of people, who will try ‘win’ that game instead of ‘lose’ that game. And also add to that there will be an even more significant number of people who also want to ‘win’ but can’t.
about 4 years ago
If you design a game where a large portion of your customers “can’t” win for any reason or method, then you haven’t tried very hard.
While I’m casual and do not expect to ever “win” a MMOG, I do like to have the feeling or knowledge that if I keep working on something, I might actually accomplish a goal.
Currently, there is a ton of content in WoW that is completely locked out to people that cannot attend 10+ person raids. If you don’t do those raids, you cannot get any of the items that drop there, participate in the crafting that rare drops occur in there, etc.
Why is it so difficult to develop a system that allows casuals to work, albeit longer, towards those same goals (items, crafting, progression of the lore, etc.)
While I don’t think I’d like to run 5-10 person raids over and over again at a *chance* to get something epic, I would be somewhat satisfied to know that it was *possible.* Design a game that you can either be guaranteed certain goals with a one time 8 hour session (20+ instance) or with 4x 2 hour sessions for a high *chance*. (10 or less instance)
There has to be a balance that keeps hardcore raiders – raiding hardcore and not picking the casual route as easier AND satisfying the casuals with incremental progression in smaller doses. What that balance is, is up to the designers with testing and time.
about 4 years ago
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… you guys think too much.
about 4 years ago
Crap. I was looking foreward to Warhammer Online, but if I am to become an oxymoron to Mythic, then they can take my ~$20/month and shove it up thier …. ohh wait, they’ll never see my money. Never mind
about 4 years ago
I must believe the Vanguard stats are a devlish ploy to get me to sign up.
about 3 years ago
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