Market Trends
Plenty Of Market Opportunity In MMOs
When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft’s market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard’s success, and copied/are copying WOW features – without copying WOW’s reasoning, methodology, or execution. The result are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WOW’s market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WOW’s (even if WOW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.
Kicking… Tail, In Fighting Games
You know what was fun, back before there were MMO games (or the Wii) to make an essentially solitary hobby a social event? Street Fighter tournaments. A bunch of people would pile into a den or a basement, throw on Street Fighter, and duke it out. There were lots of different kinds of players at one of these events. There were the Game Masters, who bragged about being able to kick your ass with any of the available characters. There were the Specialists, who studied one particular character and its associated moves, mastering the most complex and thumb-spraining sequences. There were Strategists, who analyzed every fight to develop “if/then” patterns and plans.
Then there was me. The most feared archetype of all. I was… the Button Masher. I had no idea what I was doing, and I utterly lacked the dexterity required to execute the fancy moves. Well, intentionally anyway. I could pull off the most astounding routines by crushing every button on the controller at the same time. I also got really excited and shrieked like a cross between a hyena and a banshee, which could throw off anyone’s concentration. Finally, I was subconsciously convinced that if I lifted the controller up very high, my character could jump, and if I lunged to the right, so too would the avatar. You couldn’t predict me, plan against me, or even think while you were fighting me. I was undefeated for weeks.
So it is with much nostalgic joy that I note that fighter games seem to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance. At the end of last July, we saw the release of Soulcalibur IV. Mortal Combat vs. D.C. Universe came out in November. And Street Fighter IV released last month. (The old 2D Street Fighters are now on the Xbox Live Arcade.) Today, we at GamerDNA are going to take a brief look at how that niche is performing.
A Tale of Traits, Live @ Gamasutra
Hey, guys, just a little something to hold you while I finish tonight’s serving of data fun: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22486
Also Played, Round Two: The Free to Play Edition
One of our more popular older columns was a look at “second favorite games.” We were trying to see if your love for one game predicted what your OTHER favorite games would be. Now we’re wondering… does the amount you love a game predict your other favorites? Let’s take a look.
We chose for our survey a bunch of Free To Play titles, just to keep it consistent. Of course, we included WOW just to establish a benchmark, but for the most part, we were kind of hoping to see patterns among a series of games that analysts tend to lump together.
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Off To the Races: 70 to 80 in World of Warcraft
(Note to readers: We will be updating this blog with this kind of column every other Friday for the foreseeable future. Thanks for hanging in there with me while we figure out the best plans of attack!)
If you play WoW, chances are that you know someone who stayed home from work or school on launch day for Wrath of the Lich King, just to make progress on the brand new levels. You may even see that person in the mirror every day, and you know you should be embarrassed but you’re totally not.
We took a look at a sample of our WoW players from the launch of Lich King until now, just to see how the leveling went. Come along and see how the ponies ran.
Death Knight Data Goodness
Back in October, we ran a couple articles that gave you a snapshot of the kind of person who played the various classes in World of Warcraft. (I know, in internet time, that was ages ago. If you want to frolic down memory lane, the links are http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/17/bartle-gender-and-wow/ and http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/24/horde-vs-alliance-data-smackdown/ – enjoy!)
Now that the Death Knight class has been out for nearly three whole months, we figure the flavor of the month kids have had their turn at bat, and the real fans of the new class are settled in. The sample for today’s column is a little more than 500 people, all of whom were active WOW players before the launch, and actively playing their Death Knight. “Actively” as measured by playing sessions – just having one of the new class in the character list isn’t enough to count here.
On with the show:
The Hits of the Holidays
By now we’ve all seen the sales charts. Games make great holiday gifts – easy to wrap, and the recipient vanishes from underfoot for days afterwards. No one even pretends that video games are a niche market and strictly for pasty-fleshed young males, especially now that WOW is a firmly established mass market success – over the holidays that title was being advertised on For Better Or For Worse’s website, for crying out loud. (FBOFW is a “domestic” comic strip detailing the adventures of a young stay at home wife with two small children. X-Men, it is not.) EVE’s flashy ad peeked out at me this morning from the Washington Post’s opinion section. Facebook wanted me to try all kinds of games in the waning hours of 2008.
Anyway, under the tree or the shrub or the menorah or whatever were all kinds of games – many of which were bought by people who do not actually play games. Holiday sales are therefore often the triumph of advertising and end cap display tactics. If BigPublishingCompany can convince Aunt Myrtle that everyone is dying for a copy of “Big Guns Go Blooey: Electric Bugaloo,” never mind that it’s a hunk of derivative and badly scored crap, they will win the sales chart game. And their investors will love them. And the whole scam resets and plays through again.
But if you’re reading this, you know better. Real success is what people actually play past that first post-holiday morning. Those titles pick up word of mouth and come to own the coming year. Look at Call of Duty 4 (specifically, look at the chart from the last column). That puppy launched in November of 2007, and picked up serious steam as the year wore on. I don’t know if we can call the next COD4 based on one week of data, but what the hell, ya’ll, it’ll be fun to try. Let’s see what we’ve got!
GamerDNA Year In Review Part 2
(Note: You may have already seen this article on other sites. This is my clever way of telling you that we’re exploring partnerships with awesome news sites, where they publish our ideas and data as exclusive news, and then we post a few days later. You’ll always be able to find the material here, but probably not on Fridays anymore. But, hey, you’re reading the blog every day, right? Right?! *looks hopeful*)
What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that’s been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs. Come along with us as we look over the second half of 2008.
