gamerDNA.com | The Blog

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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

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.

Read More

(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.

Read More

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:

Read More

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!

Read More

(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.

Read More

Now that the trait system is getting more of a workout, we here at GamerDNA decided the resulting data pile deserved a column of its own. Remember, you too can participate in this experiment by following the directions in last week’s column.

This week’s column is hard to pin down, thematically, so just chant to yourself “not all who wander are lost,” and come with me.

Read More

I have to confess that after years of working professionally with elves and the people who love them, I have a serious thing for zombies, lasers, and rocket ships. Sometimes your mind just needs a palate cleanser, you know? And furthermore, every time I see a multiplayer title with a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic setting, I shake my metaphorical pom poms for it. See, the massively multiplayer industry won’t stop making WoW clones until something besides fantasy hits a home run. Could be Star Wars, could be Starcraft, could be one of the billion things in development, but until it happens, I will turn an encouraging word to any multiplayer title with either robots or the undead.

Read More

There’s no rest for the wicked, or for intrepid start up companies. When the start up company is wicked AWESOME, forget turkey-induced comas – GamerDNA is on the job. I hope all of our readers in the USA had a good feast. For the rest of the world, today is just another day, and we’re not serving up leftovers – here’s your fresh Trends column.

Read More

2.8 million box sales in one day. I guess that means Wrath of the Lich King did pretty well. Of course, the only other team crunching harder than Blizzard is your own GamerDNA team, so our cross game comparison is going to have to wait one more week. So let’s take a look at the basic numbers we’re seeing for the World of Warcraft expansion, and throw in a little GamerDNA flavor.

Read More

You totally expected to see something about Wrath of the Lich King, didn’t you? Well, listen, GamerDNA is for all gamers, not just MMOG nerds like… um… me. And second, if they had launched on a Tuesday like EQ2 and LOTRO are going to, giving us enough time to pull data, maybe we would have.

Okay, seriously. Gears of War was THE shooter hit of 2006 in many ways. Three million copies in ten weeks is pretty awesome. To date, the title has sold over five million copies. Microsoft is currently predicting that total sales of the Xbox 360 will hit 25 million at some point this holiday season, with 22 million having been sold at the end of September. If no one buys a single copy of Gears of War from this moment on, and if Microsoft hits their goal, more than one of every five Xbox households will have a copy of this game.

Expectations for last week’s launch of Gears of War 2 were pretty high, you might say. Two million copies have already been sold. One week! Two million! Man, it must feel good to be Epic right now.

Can the data tell us anything we didn’t already know? To the numbers!

Read More

After our infant son goes to bed, my better half and I have a few precious hours of Adult Time with which we pursue any number of pastimes. Admittedly, we often choose sleep. But we also watch movies together, or we play games together.

We used to, anyway. I haven’t laid eyes on my spouse during Adult Time since October 28th. He’s been blowing the heads off mutant zombies. That’s right, I’m a Fallout 3 widow. I’m not bitter. The sooner he’s done, the sooner it’s my turn.

You’ve probably heard the reviews. “Oblivion with Guns.” “Post-apocalyptic Oblivion.” “The spirit of Fallout, not the sequel.” All that made Steve the Data Man wonder… what is the gaming background of people who are playing Fallout 3? Since 15% of GamerDNA members have tried it so far, and the number continues to climb, we’ve got a terrific sample to draw from! To eliminate any possible inaccuracy due to self-reporting errors, we’re just talking about the Xbox players. If you add in the PC players, I suspect the total is even higher than 15%. But we’ll take the 15% and run with it.

Read More

When a new MMO launches, everyone turns and looks at the previous Big Game to see how badly it’s bleeding. After all, massively multiplayer games are all consuming lifestyle games, right? People only pay for one. Therefore, subscription MMOs are playing a zero sum game – if Carebears Online has fifty subscribers, Fluffy Bunnies Online has fifty fewer than they did before the Carebears launched.

Read More

As promised, we’re back this week with a better breakdown of Horde/Alliance. Also, this week we’re going to try hosting our charts OURSELVES. I would like to congratulate the readers of the GamerDNA blog for collectively crashing the Chartgizmo server by hammering the everloving heck out of our pretty charts. A big salute and a hug to Steve and Sam, who redid the data from scratch (taking into account all the new people who came over to add their voices to the data). And, um, an apology to Chartgizmo. Sorry, guys. I didn’t mean to love your service to death.

Read More

Last week’s article was such a hit that we decided to take your advice and do it again, with WoW.

Side note: Feel free to send a comment and let us know what other titles you’d like to see. Note that the data for a particular title is more powerful the more DNA profiles we have – so if you want us to cover a game that you play, make sure you’ve got all your friends from that game over here as well. That sounds like dreadfully gratuitous pimping, I know, but the fact is I can’t draw any conclusions from a data pool of forty people, three of them female. So if you play a less than mainstream title, encourage your friends to sign up, and spread the word on fan sites!

Let’s get going. First, the class breakdown overall:

Obviously, this is less meaningful than the WAR chart, as there is no way (from the data we used) to tell how many of the warriors are Horde and how many are Alliance, and so on. Still, the spread is pretty even, ranging from 6% Shaman to 16% Hunter. The latter makes sense given the mechanics of many WoW encounters. In a future column, we’ll try to dig out the breakdown by Alliance/Horde for you. All I can say for certain is that my data shows Alliance outnumbering Horde by a hair under 6%.

Next, let’s look at the gender breakdown (Note: Gender of the actual player, NOT the gender of the in-game character):

Here’s where I really want to see the Alliance/Horde breakdown, because I suspect some of this balance has to do with which races can play which classes, as it did with the WAR classes. These results aren’t quite as insanely skewed as WAR, but we can see that women are drastically more likely to choose a priest – and men are three times more likely to choose the warrior class as women are, according to their proportion of the population.

Until we get that Alliance/Horde breakdown by class, we can get a rough idea by seeing the player gender breakdown by race:

Okay, on some level, you know some poor researcher is googling “race gender issues” for a Serious Project on Important Topics, and he’s going to get here and see “elves” and “undead.” Furthermore, he’s going to discover a segment of society that cares a whole heck of a lot more about Taurens and Orcs than anything he’s researching. And I wish I could see that guy’s face.

But back on topic: I’ve grouped the Alliance races first, followed by Horde. Again we see women going for the sexy and the lovely, while almost totally avoiding the less delicate races. Orcs and dwarves are sadly neglected among women. Men’s preferences are less pronounced with less of a range. I note with amusement that a slightly higher proportion of women than men choose to play… trolls.

By the way, due to the fact that men outnumber women in WoW, the percentage of players who play a human (remember, last week I pointed out that while everyone tries the freak races, they tend to gravitate to human before long) is at 38% of the total playerbase, even as it’s 20% of all men and 19% of all women. This is why you really need to trust the person spouting statistics at you – it’s really easy to slant things.

As a side note related to proportion, there are nearly four and a half times as many men playing WoW as women. WAR’s proportion of women is nowhere near that, which makes sense given the marketing choices of both games. However, to be fair, women are more likely to play an MMO after watching a friend or loved one take up the game. They are also less likely to be early adopters, since they tend to form long term connections and are wary of the cost of forming such bonds in an environment with no proof of longevity. We’ll come back and take another look in a few years to see if the proportion of women climbed at all. I suspect it will.

So, how about Bartle? What is the percentage of users with each predominate “type”?

Well, the proportion of users who primarily identify themselves as killers is lower than in WAR, obviously. I find it fascinating that in WoW, Killers and Achievers are almost exactly even. Explorers have a whopping 39.5% of the pie, leaving 13.4% for Socializers – exactly the same percentage is WAR has.

Now, let’s see which Bartle types prefer what classes:

Wow, nothing like the definite preferences we saw with WAR. Most types have several classes they like, with the exception of the Explorer having a decided liking for the Hunter above the other classes. However, you can see that the Hunter appeals to all of the archetypes quite evenly.

Finally, since we’re waiting for next week to break it down exactly, let’s see how Bartle might predict a player’s choice of Horde or Alliance:

Wow. That tells me… nothing. Well, okay, not NOTHING. I see that killers prefer Horde by 15% over Alliance. The other three types have a slight preference for Alliance. The proportion of each type that enjoys a particular race is remarkably even.

Overall, even if I knew nothing about the game or its history, I would look at these charts and say this is a game that has settled into its groove.

What say you?

Edit 10/20/2008 5:45pm ET

Due to a crash of our chart provider we had to regenerate the charts after a significant number of new tests and it yielded slightly different numbers due to a few thousand more tests because of the WoW insider article. We have adjusted the article to match the new data.

When a new game launches, the early adopters rush to make long-dreamed-of characters, and they choose the classes that sounded awesome on paper or in the demos. After that first mad rush, though, people tend to fall back on the archetype that they’ve always played.

Read More

Every time a new MMO launches, it’s an event like, say, a really big meteor creating the Gulf of Mexico. It takes a few weeks for the dust to precipitate from the air before anyone can see what the new landscape looks like. And because no one’s really sat down and compared the numbers (not in public, anyway), it’s hard to predict future performance with any accuracy. We want to change that.

Read More

The answer to last week’s question: I’m crazy.

Okay, I might not be, but the data isn’t going to back me up, here. (Last week, I said “I have a hypothesis that there’s a generation gap here, as well as a number of people unaccustomed to MMOs and DRM in general.”)

Read More