What do you do? You change your spin. We’ve seen this everywhere: “subscriptions are out. The real way to make money is with ad revenue!” This is a pretty old-school thing to say, and not very likely to be true. But let’s leave that aside — you feel you can’t compete on a subscription basis so you’ve decided to make a free ad-based game.

Who is your game for?

If you answered “the internet! It’s free!”, you lose.

As game developers we tend to think of people as “hardcore gamers” and “casual gamers”, as if people magically fit into these two buckets. So if subscriptions are for hardcore gamers, then your free game should target ”casual gamers”, right? And there’s a whole lot more of them than there are hardcore gamers! You’re gonna be rich!

But there’s no such thing as a casual gamer. It’s not a real target audience. Here are some of the things people might mean when they say “casual gamer”:

• People who don’t like games very much, but would if they played my game
• People who are really bad at games, so need easy games
• People who only play games at work during lunch breaks
• “Soccer moms” who play during the afternoon
• People over the age of 40 who play on the Wii
• People who didn’t buy our last first-person shooter

And we could go on and on. If your target audience is just “casual gamers”, you have no idea who you’re making a game for. And it shows in your results. You’ll make a game nobody likes, and you will fail.

Let’s look at some audiences you can try to hit with your PC game. (Note that a console game would have a very different list.)

• Traditional gamers. Skewing younger (18-35) and male, these are savvy gamers with decent-quality computers. They buy games from game stores. They are reasonably likely to have played an MMO before and paid for a subscription. When they play games, they tend to play for at least an hour.
• Moms. Skewing older (30-50) and female, these are people with free time (because the kids are at school or because the kids moved away). They do not upgrade their computers very often. They do not buy games at game stores. They like web games, and occasionally download casual games. They enjoy a 30 minute diversion on Pogo.com or Yahoo Games.
• Slacking White-Collars. Skewing younger, and with limited gender information, these are people who play games from work, or between classes, or in the library at college. They can’t install software on their PC because it may not even be their PC. They enjoy a quick 15 minute game session at Kongregate or NewGrounds.
• Older gamers. Over 30 and with a family, these once-traditional gamers no longer have time to play like they once did, but they miss it. They can’t afford to upgrade their computers very often, but they still know the difference between good graphics and bad. They can sometimes find an hour or two on the weekend to play a game.

We could go on making groups of reasonably large PC gamers.

I’m not saying you need to pick one of these groups. If you’re big enough, and ambitious enough, you can pick several target audiences. But you have to do it consciously, and you have to create your game to appeal to those groups. Naturally, the more groups you pick, the exponentially more difficult this job becomes.

Here are some hints.

If your game:

• requires the purchase of a $50 game box at a game store,
• involves a 20 minute install process,
• requires a better 3D card than WoW does, and/or more RAM and CPU power,
• doesn’t run in a web browser

You’ve already narrowed your options for target PC audiences dramatically. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just know what you’ve got to work from, and plan accordingly.

Man I swear I am going to start pointing out each game that launches without a clear understanding of their target audience. People just are not understanding this basic core concept. And they inevitably fail, because they just make a random game for random people. How do you market to random people? You do not.

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Well, actually, that’s a terrible idea — given the level of knowledge the courts have, they couldn’t possibly make an informed and nuanced decision. Hell, we as an industry can’t do it because the rules are changing all the time, and forming a meaningful question is impossible.

But the interesting thing to me is that this argument exists only because of how successful MMOs have been at veiling their true nature. By tying into concepts players are already familiar with, they hide the game.

“Virtual property is property. It’s my stuff. Shouldn’t I be allowed to keep it regardless of what the game company wants? Virtual land is land, so somebody owns it — and if I paid for it with virtual currency, why should the game company be able to take it away?” These are the questions of someone who has bought hook, line, and sinker into the fiction of the virtual world.

Game companies reject these questions at a more base level than these players can even see! From a game company point of view, it’s like a FPS player demanding that they should be able to keep the shotgun from the map they just played, because they “own” it and the game company shouldn’t be able to take it away. It’s so illogical to game companies that it doesn’t mean anything at all: players are effectively talking nonsense.

Suppose that the company had instead chosen to make an epic single-player RPG. But the storyline has a tragic twist (not unlike the one in Ultima 6 or Final Fantasy 7): about 100 hours into the game, one of your most powerful characters dies. Did the company take away something you owned? Can you sue? Most gamers instinctively know the answer is “no” — they no more own the character’s possessions than they own their favorite character on Lost. They are playing through a story told by the game developers. If Mr. Eko dies, you might feel sad, but you didn’t suffer material loss.

But what if you were about to sell your copy of the game, along with your save file? You could have sold it for $100 yesterday on eBay, but now that you’ve overwritten your save game, you lost your most powerful character and your account is now only worth $70. Does the company owe you $30? Again, most people understand that the answer is “no”: even though you found a sucker who would have paid you $30 more for your old save games, that value was tangential on something you didn’t actually control. (Leaving aside your idiocy for overwriting your saved game; or perhaps the game only has one save slot, like Nethack.)

What if the answer was “yes”? Well, then games could never have bad things happen. If the value of your saved game can only go up as you play it, then there can be no losing. This would destroy games as we know them.

From a game company’s point of view, you don’t own your character any more than you own Aeris in Final Fantasy 7. You license a copy of the game in order to enjoy it, but you don’t own what happens in the story.

The neat thing is that players think they do own their characters. The sense of identity is so strong, and the open-endedness of MMO games is so broad, that they perceive things differently. They aren’t in a story, they are in a virtual world where they (the player, not the character) should have rights not unlike those in the real world. Nevermind that those rights would have devastating effects on all of gaming. It just feels like players are being abused unfairly. This is a case of MMO companies being too successful for their own good. If only games weren’t so open-ended, if only the character wasn’t so customizable and nameable, then they wouldn’t have this problem. The very illusion of open-endedness is what creates the belief of ownership.

In fact, the very open-endedness causes some people to feel that it needs a new categorization. “It’s not a game,” some argue — “It’s a virtual world, and should have different laws to protect it!” That argument is hard to defend because nobody can agree on when a game becomes a world. Final Fantasy 12 was a single-player virtual world, and had very similar mechanics to an MMO. It was just offline. Or would you argue that a virtual world can only happen when a LAN cable is connected to your box? What makes MMOs more of a virtual world than FPSes? Is it the persistence of your character? Okay, fine, let’s make an MMO that resets every three months. Is it still a virtual world? How about an MMO that resets every week? When does it stop being a world? These and other questions are very hard to answer because we don’t have enough concepts and definitions to even pose particularly meaningful questions, let alone get answers to them.

The very worst thing that could happen would be for a judge to step in and try to rule on virtual property, because they’d have to define what that means. First off, they would have to distinguish virtual worlds from games somehow. Next, they would have to distinguish designer intent from game player intent. Finally, they would have to rule on how much control game developers have over their own game rules. Imagine Parker Brothers having this trouble with Monopoly and you can see why game companies fight this tooth and nail: they are unwilling to give up any aspect of creative control.

Are there questions a judge might usefully rule on? Sure, someday. For instance, at some point we might need a clearer picture of who owns the rights to player-created content. But questions about player-created content are a million miles away from questions about who owns your level 70 Troll Shaman with all epic gear. The game developers made every aspect of your character and allowed you to license it.

Maybe after twenty or thirty more years of game creation, the distinctions will be clearer, and we might see our way to asking more meaningful questions. Right now, there aren’t any questions that a judge could usefully answer.

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Basic Design

Noblegarden is the in-game representation of Easter in the World of Warcraft. It lasts only one day and has only one activity: finding Brightly Colored Eggs!

• The event starts at 12:01am (server time) on Easter day and lasts exactly 24 hours.
• During the event, Brightly Colored Eggs spawn in the racial homelands (i.e. the newbie zones).
• These eggs are essentially tiny treasure chests. Players who open them receive a token amount of money and either candy or special holiday clothing.
• Each egg has a small chance of containing either a White Tuxedo Shirt (~1%) or Black Tuxedo Pants (~1%), both of which are identical in appearance to tuxedo clothing produced via the tailoring profession, or an Elegant Dress (~0.5%). The Elegant Dress can be obtained no other way; it is essentially a peach-colored version of the wedding dress.

Probable Goals

Of course we can’t really know what the designers’ goals were in creating this content, but we can make some pretty good guesses by examining what they implemented.

First off, Noblegarden was intended to be a fairly small, low-key event without a lot of hoopla. According to the WoW event calendar, Noblegarden is one of only two major events that last only a single day — and the other is New Year’s Eve, which is arguably part of the Feast of Winter Veil. In addition, there are no city decorations for Noblegarden, nor any town crier-style NPCs to let the players know what’s up. And this makes sense: a goodly number of WoW players will likely be spending Easter with family, not in-game. Although Blizzard wants to commemorate the holiday, they don’t want to make players who are spending time with family feel like they are missing out.

Secondly, Noblegarden is an event aimed squarely at new and low level characters. The Brightly Colored Eggs spawn in newbie (level 1-10) zones; the money inside is a token amount for a new character but literally only pennies (worthless, even) to a higher-level character; and the candy inside is equivalent to the lowest level food — again, worthless to anyone higher level.

Based on these factors, it seems likely that new players were intended to run across this content as they played through the low-level areas in a normal fashion. Noblegarden seems to have been planned as a low-key bonus for newer characters, an enjoyable but not especially involved reflection of a popular real-life holiday (albeit without the religious trappings).

Observed Behavior

Unfortunately, our plans as designers last only until they meet the players. In this case, the actual behavior of players during Noblegarden differs rather a lot from what we might hope for from the presumed goals.

• The holiday clothing — and most especially the Elegant Dress — is the real draw in this event. Even though it has no gameplay stats, its rarity ensures a high price on the Auction House — and that means that lots of players of all levels converge on the newbie areas to look for it, whether or not they want it themselves.
• The eggs are widely scattered. Based on my personal experiences and polling random players I ran across, it seems that a player with a mount in an area that is not too overpopulated can find about 20 eggs an hour. But the count goes way down when the area becomes heavily populated with egg-seekers. The more seekers in the area, the less happy — and less polite! — any of them will be.
• The eggs are really hard to find. They can only be identified visually — they can’t be selected with the keyboard and they don’t show up on the minimap. They are small, and although they are bright blue they don’t stand out terribly well against WoW’s over-saturated palette. And for some reason the eggs do not use WoW’s normal quest-item sparkles to draw your attention. To add insult to injury, many of them are also hidden behind bushes.
• Because of these factors, the event quickly devolves into a race for eggs. A low-level character will generally be at a disadvantage: they are unlikely to have any speed-increasing abilities, and they will also have to spend more time dealing with hostile creatures in the area. For higher level characters, it’s all about quick eyes and memorizing the locations where you’ve seen eggs before.

Some low level characters do indeed participate in this event in the manner that we imagined: they find a couple of eggs, enjoy their candy, and go on their merry way. But for many players, the lure of the dress is too strong. They spend hours running in circles desperate to find one more egg. The competition, the difficulty of finding eggs, and the low drop rate of interesting rewards all combine to frustrate many players, and the clear divide between “winning” (finding a dress) and “losing” (finding nothing but candy) makes it easy to feel that you have wasted hours of your life for absolutely no reward except a nasty eye-strain headache.

Since a dress shows up in only one of 200 eggs, the majority of people hunting dresses won’t find one even if they hunt eggs for eight solid hours — and will consequently feel like they “lost” at the event.

Modifications

So let’s pretend for a moment that we are able to make some modifications to the Noblegarden content in order to help it better suit our goals as we described them above. It’s clear that the event as it stands isn’t quite there, but what can we do?

Well, it’s the rare and unique Elegant Dress (and, to a lesser extent, the other holiday clothing) that’s causing all the trouble. So let’s remove the clothing! Without these rewards, there is no reason for higher level characters to flood into the newbie zones in search of eggs. And if they don’t go searching for eggs, they won’t get frustrated. Problem solved! Let’s go home!

Except …

First off, the content is already in the live game. Removing these rewards after the players have already seen them and come to desire them is a bad idea. Secondly … well, let’s face it. The clothing rewards are the only thing that give this event a little flair. While the goal of a laid-back, newbie-friendly event is a good one, a laid-back, newbie-friendly even that also has a little something for higher level characters is even better.

So if we don’t remove the clothing, maybe we lower the demand for it. We could provide an alternative method of getting a dress that looks just like this one, even if it’s named differently (as is already true for the tuxedo shirt and pants). We could just add a tailoring recipe for a similar dress. That will remove a lot of the impetus for grinding the eggs (unless we do something silly and make the new dress recipe too hard to get!). But it won’t remove the demand for all players since some of them will still insist on the original, and it won’t solve the frustration issues for the ones that remain. Plus, we risk taking the sparkle out of our Noblegarden event. We don’t want to spoil the feel of the event we’ve already built, we just want to make it less frustrating.

Of course, we could remove the clothing from the eggs, then add a Noblegarden vendor who sells recipes for making the clothing. This would allow the creation of the clothing all through the year, but still make it Noblegarden-special. The Festival clothing from the Lunar Festival works in a similar fashion. But that leaves the whole looking-for-eggs thing somewhat pointless, and since that’s the holiday activity we’re riffing on that’s not quite ideal.

Okay. So let’s make the clothing rewards less rare. We’ll up the drop rate! Before we do this, though, let’s have a sanity check with other team members to make sure that a more common dress fits our goals — and not just our goals, but the goals of the overall game. For some reason, rarity is one of those factors that can make the most congenial team want to kill each other. What seems stupidly rare to me seems stupidly common to you, and sometimes there’s just no explaining why. The best we can do is try to place the item and its rarity within the context of the broader game.

And once we’ve done that, we’ll need to consider questions like these: Should we let you stock up on dresses? That’s not really an issue now, but it might be if we adjust the rarity. What will happen if we let you stock up? Presumably you sell them in the fall for a profit. Is that bad? To counter stockpiling, we could make the clothing bind on pickup (although that would affect existing items, which is somewhat rude). Or we could make them unique so you can only carry one of each type. Or we can make finding the clothing pieces contingent on a quest, so that you only ever find one. Would that be one ever, or one per year? One ever didn’t work out so well with the Lunar Festival, so probably one per year. But maybe we should just let you stockpile the damned dresses — unless that encourages people to stick around using up all the eggs and being all competitive.

And you know, none of things things fixes the basic underlying issue with the eggs themselves: that they are too scattered and too hard to see.

So we keep tweaking and thinking and trying to predict player behavior. The actual results in this theoretical case aren’t nearly as important as the process of analyzing the situation and thinking through the potential modifications. In the end, my own suggested changes would be something like this:

• More, more, more eggs! Triple the spawn rate of the eggs. The main goal here is to lower competition, although the changes to the rewards will help with that also.
• In addition to money and candy, add an Egg Fragment to the loot contained in each egg. Also remove the chance to drop clothing. You’ll be obtaining that in other ways.
• Make the eggs easier to spot. Two actions could help here: First, the eggs can use the normal quest-item sparkle to draw players’ attention. Second, allow players to buy a buff from the Noblegarden vendor (see below) that let’s them track eggs on their minimap for 30 minutes.
• Stick a Noblegarden vendor in each newbie zone town. In addition to the egg-tracking buff, this vendor would also trade a certain number of Egg Fragments for the White Tuxedo Shirt (20 fragments), the Black Tuxedo Pants (20 fragments), and the Elegant Dress (60 fragments).
• Finally, the Noblegarden vendor also trades Egg Fragments for the recipes to make the clothing: Recipe: White Tuxedo Shirt (60 fragments), the Black Tuxedo Pants (60 fragments), and the Elegant Dress (180 fragments).

Goals: Reduce competition and frustration of finding eggs. Increase utility of finding any one egg. Increase distribution of rewards to all players.
Total new content: 1 generic NPC, 1 quest item, 1 buff, 3 recipes.

I want to emphasize, though, that my suggestions here are really just self-indulgent navel-gazing. Without knowing the actual goals of the content, I’m just guessing. But it’s still fun (and educational) to go through the process!

Conclusion

This little deconstruction exercise shows how we can analyze and modify existing content: determine the goals, observe actual behavior, and then brainstorm methods to make the behavior better fit the goals (or else change the goals!).

I hope that it also shows some of the many skeins of thought that go into MMO design. The point is not Noblegarden, of course — the point is to think about the factors that go into the design of good content — and the number one factor is always going to be the players.

Of course, if I was really a Blizzard designer I would have a couple of follow-up tasks here:

1. Make sure that the goals of the Noblegarden event were clearly documented so that future live team members could more easily evaluate the content’s performance. (This is especially important if the goals have changed. Otherwise it becomes a matter of tribal lore and team politics, both of which are notoriously unreliable.)
2. Document the reasoning behind any modifications I decided to make as well as any modifications I decided not to make, so that future team members can more easily avoid mistakes that seem obvious now but may not in a few years. (They will have to deal with the mistakes that I end up making (because they don’t seem obvious now) on their own.)

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Because of this, many designers are unaware of what’s happened in past games. The typical MMO developer I’ve met has only played two or three MMOs for any lengthy period of time. So when they sit down to create, say, the potion system for their next MMO, they can’t draw on the designs of what came before them. I don’t have a general solution for this (except to play as many MMOs as you can), but as an experiment, let’s try to add a bit of context about this one very narrow gameplay element: potions.

Potions aren’t always bottles of juice that you drink – they can also be magic scrolls or gems, or even theoretical concepts in the case of City of Heroes. The distinguishing feature of potions is that they are one-use items designed to aid or assist you in combat. Their effects are typically restorative or buffing in nature.

In order to keep it focused, I’ll ignore other consumables such as food, which have subtly different game semantics. It’s admittedly a pretty vague distinction, but I’ll do my best.

The following data is what I’ve been able to scrounge up through contacts or personal memory — there are probably plenty of mistakes and omissions. If so, please point them out and I’ll get it as accurate as possible. And feel free to provide a potion overview for other games!

UO: Potions for every occasion

In UO, alchemists could craft potions from collected raw ingredients. Certain potions, such as Night Sight, were fairly essential if you wanted to be able to see anything at night (without hacking your client). Poison-curing potions were critical for survival, as otherwise poison would quickly prove fatal. Most other types of potions were of modest value, although healing potions could be used in PvP to great effect.

Although there isn’t a notion of stacking potions in UO, players could craft Potion Kegs to store up to 100 uses of a single type of potion.

Everquest: Wussy Potions

I can’t find anybody who played EQ1 at very high levels to tell me how potions worked there. At mid-level, potions were impossibly expensive, and did very little. They could be handy for PvP battles, but even there they weren’t really worth the trouble. The lack of information on the web about EQ potions suggests to me that they weren’t particularly valuable even at high levels.

Asheron’s Call: Tools of the Killing Trade

In Asheron’s Call, there were three main types of potions, corresponding to healing, stamina restoration, and mana restoration — the three “bars” of energy that are used up in combat. Stamina potions were absolutely critical for melee classes; and it was not atypical to carry a few hundred with you into combat. (They stacked to a high number.) Each swing of a weapon drained stamina, and fights often ran fairly long, so that it was not atypical to drink several stamina potions during a single encounter. Thus, potions acted as a money-sink for most character types.

Mages typically carried stamina potions also. Though spellcasting doesn’t drain mana, mages could convert stamina into mana, and then replenish their stamina with potions. This was much more cost-effective than directly restoring their mana with expensive mana potions.

Health potions could be consumed in combat, and their repeated use often turned PvP encounters into extremely lengthy affairs.

Potions only provided restoration, but “magic gems” provided potent one-use buffs. These gems were mostly found in loot, though later they could also be purchased from NPC vendors. Thanks to their lengthy durations and noticeable effects, these were very valuable for certain types of twinking and power-leveling.

Dark Age of Camelot: ???

DAoC added potion creation after the game shipped, and I couldn’t find somebody with first-hand knowledge. If anybody can fill in the details, I’d appreciate it.

Clearly there are a vast number of potions and tinctures that can be crafted, but their importance, usefulness, and commonness are unknown.

Asheron’s Call 2: Mystery Juice

Potions in Asheron’s Call 2 could not be crafted, only found as loot. Like most other loot, potions were randomly generated, so the exact effect and potency of a potion varied very widely. Some potions had exceedingly potent effects, while others were almost useless. Because each potion was unique, potions could not be stacked in inventory. Players tended to keep only the most potent potions on hand in order to free up pack space.

Players could drink potions in combat, but a character that drank a potion performed a rather lengthy animation during which they could do nothing else. Drinking potions in combat was still sometimes worthwhile, but was very risky. A more typical use was as a buff before a dangerous boss, or as a boost before engaging in PvP.

EverQuest 2: Modest Tools

EQ2 had several types of consumable items, including potions and totems. The most typically-used potions provided modest buffs for a long duration.

There were also restorative potions that worked instantly (or near instantly) to heal damage or cure status ailments. These potions had lengthy timeouts — after consuming one, players could not use another potion for several minutes. This limited restorative potions’ usefulness to dire emergencies only. Useable in PvP, but not typically something that would turn the tide of a battle.

Totems behaved similarly to potions, but had a more unusual effect: invisibility, runspeed-buffs, or transformation into some other creature type are typical examples. Totems could be used five times before disappearing, rather than one time. Totems couldn’t be stacked in inventory, however, so in effect, totems were stacks of five one-use potions in a single inventory slot.

DDO: ???

The one hardcore ex-DDO player I know doesn’t remember how potions worked in DDO, so they can’t have played too important a role in the game. DDO has various stat-boosting and restorative potions, but my vague recollection is that they are only practical at low levels of play — at high levels, they are too expensive to be practical. Can they be used in PvP?

Lord of the Rings Online: ???

Again, my Lotro-playing friends have failed me. “Does Lotro even have potions? I don’t remember…” A quick glance around the web suggests that they have protective potions, but they appear to be rather expensive for the effects they provide.

City of Heroes/Villains: The Core of Loot

Although not called ‘potions’, CoH had ‘Inspirations’ which fill the same role. In a game with very little loot, Inspirations were the notable exception: players got lots of these, and they had a GUI bar just for storing them. Their effects were quite potent, and by using several at once, they could easily turn the tide of a battle.

They could be used in battle, and were intended for such use. They could typically be used in PvP, too. Their effects ranged from potent restorations and buffs to self-resurrections.

Although they could be purchased, the most potent Inspirations could only be found randomly in combat. High-level guilds could have Inspiration-generators in their hideouts, but I don’t know of anyone who did this, and I couldn’t say how useful that was.

World of Warcraft: Emergency Heals

WoW potions are of medium potency: they had noticeable effects but not enough to turn the tide of a battle. Although usable in combat, a player couldn’t drink multiple potions at once: after the first potion of a given category (such as restoration or buffing), they can’t drink another for several minutes or until the effect has worn off.

Their typical use is for “oh crap I’m about to die” restoration, or as a quick buff before a tough boss. Though potions can be used in PvP, their effectiveness is rather limited by the time-outs. In the past, there were numerous categories of buffing potions, so that players could have many simultaneous buffs. This was an effective raiding tactic, but this was changed relatively recently. The number of categories was dramatically reduced, so now only the most powerful player-crafted buff potions have value in raiding.

In addition to potions, players can find “magic scrolls” in loot. These behave the same as buffing potions, but their effects can stack with potions. Players can also select their target for a magic scroll: that is, they could use it on an ally or a pet, rather than using it on themselves, if they wanted to.

More Input Needed

Obviously I need lots more info for this topic! If you have experience with any of these games, especially ones marked with ???, please feel free to chime in. I’m also interested in hearing about other MMOs that aren’t listed here. Thanks in advance!

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Some of these people are industry veterans with amazing amounts of talent and experience; some are armchair designers with amazingly loud voices. Often, it’s hard to tell the difference.

But here’s my secret method to distinguish good advice from bad: If someone tells you what you should do, you can probably ignore them. There is no ’should’ here. There are only goals and paths towards those goals. If someone offers to share the paths they took and how those worked out for them, that that is incredibly valuable information — take it! Use it! But don’t get caught up in should. We’re too young an industry for should.

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The article says that they expect to make $16m in 2008. Doing some quick math, that gives us an estimated population of about 88k users. ($15 a month for 12 months is $180 per user, and 180 into 16 mil is 88k.) That’s a totally hand-wavy number, but it feels about right. It’s what I would expect from an ultra-niche game like this.

The problem is not that it’s an ultra-niche game. The problem is that Tabula Rasa apparently went through three complete redesigns. COMPLETE redesigns. (I liked version #1, the space-opera with magical guitars.) The total development time was six years, and it cost over $100 million, largely because of how long it took to make the game.

I hate to say this, but three redesigns is an abject failure. If you have to redo your entire game after it’s left pre-production, you’ve lost your chance at the big bucks. The best you can hope for is to break even. If you have to redo your entire game a SECOND time before you launch, you’re screwed. The best you can do is hope your company doesn’t go under.

I don’t mean to rag on anybody at NCSoft Austin — I doubt there were more than a few people who were involved in the decision-making process for all six years. (And if you’re in the know, I’d love to hear how the decisions came about.) But the fact remains that after $106 million has been spent, the result was a game that generates only $16 million a year.

Just as a comparison, the now-dead MMO Asheron’s Call 2 cost less than $20 million. It had even fewer players than Tabula Rasa, but since it cost a lot less to make, AC2 could break even after a few years. Tabula Rasa, on the other hand, will need to keep all of its 88,000 players for almost seven years before it breaks even.

Let’s look at it another way – they could have created three mediocre games with that same amount of money, and they’d have 264,000 players (88,000 * 3) right now. Then they’d be able to recoup their money in only a couple years, and eventually they’d be in the black. Probably even successful.

Tabula Rasa tried to be innovative, but it was not a particularly good innovation. I’m sure that a lot of people will assume this is why it’s a monetary failure. But I want to be clear here: Tabula Rasa failed because it took six years to make. That and only that. If it had been made in three years for $20 million, it could have been profitable in its lifetime. But now, because it took so long to make, it can never be a success.

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The trouble comes at the very beginning of a project, long before most of the team is even on the job. It happens quietly and without fuss.

Attacking the Time Estimates

Let’s look at engineering. Game company engineers are not inferior to programmers in other industries. An experienced game engineer can create as good a time estimate as an engineer in another industry. We all know that no estimate can be perfect, but … if the game industry’s problem were just about flawed estimates, then every software company should have similar crunch issues to the gaming industry. (They don’t, in general.) So what happened? Someone cut the engineer’s time estimate.

Snipping the time estimate is easy for a manager to do. They can do it in such a way that they don’t even feel like they’re doing something bad. Hell, they usually feel good about how they’ve reined in the project’s budget. At least at first.

The trick is to cut something nobody is paying attention to right now. For instance, nobody will notice if a manager trims the beta from six months to two months. At least, they won’t notice early in the project. But later, when they do realize what’s happened, everyone will agree that a six month beta is mandatory. Since the budget has already been finalized, that means everybody just has to get done four months faster so that there’s time for the beta! Four months of crunch time for everybody!

Other easy places to cut: QA passes and bug-fixing time between each milestone, padding time to account for unexpected surprises, art revision time to rework content from contractors. Attacking these boring, tedious parts of the schedule is infinitely easier than cutting down the schedule the right way by cutting features from the game. Everybody on the team squawks and squabbles and gets demoralized when you tell them there’s no time for Crafting, but nobody cries when you cut bug-fixing time from the schedule. Who wants to fix bugs anyway?

Crunch Time Works

The trouble is that, although we often create elaborate explanations about why crunch time doesn’t help a game, it clearly does work in the short term. EA didn’t create a culture of permanent crunch time — and become incredibly rich — by mistake.

For perhaps a year, you can get more work out of your people by grinding them up. It doesn’t work forever, but over the period of, say, an expansion pack? Absolutely. Later, these people burn out and quit the industry. But you can hire more because there’s tons of people who really want to work in game development. You can pay them squat, abuse them for a few years, and let them leave. In fact, in many areas of game development, the economics seem to demand that you do just that.

Economic (Dis)-incentives

Every mainstream game team does this, to some extent. Publishers demand amazing games on shoestring budgets. If your game company doesn’t force slave labor out of their team, some other company will.

For a company like EA, I don’t know why they would ever stop crunching. They can create tons of reasonable-quality games while paying people terrible wages. They are amazingly successful, monetarily. You can’t deny that it works.

But ahh, MMOs are a bit different from your average FPS game, aren’t they? For one thing, they take 3 to 5 years to make, which means if you burn your people out every year, you notice the productivity hit whenever you have to train up new people. And because the project is so long, you can get into morale issues: the team morale can get so amazingly low after a year or two of crunch time that the entire project can easily disintegrate. You can lose everything by over-crunching an MMO.

So in a way, MMOs are safe havens. Smart MMO companies don’t want to perma-crunch their MMO developers. They wait until the home stretch — the last year — and then they crunch them to jelly. But hey, the employees at least got a few years of non-crunch-time work out of it first. Maybe they should feel lucky.

Fixing It

Fixing it has to happen at the corporate-culture level. If your company is content to be a faceless corporation with constantly-changing underlings, then there’s no incentive not to grind people up. A culture that values longevity is a good starting point.

Longevity can bring its own rewards. The best games come out of teams with a lot of experienced team members. But on the other hand, in order to get longevity, your company has to somehow survive long enough to reach old age. If you don’t crunch in the mean time, how are you going to meet publishers’ insane demands? That’s the question you have to answer, at a company level, before crunch time can end.

It is my firm hope — not quite a firm belief, because I have yet to see it first hand — but a hope that it’s really true: that having a team full of folks with 5+ years of experience is much more efficient than having a team full of brand new folks who are working twice as many hours. I can’t prove this is true. But I hope it is.

Other Venues

Crunch is a hard problem to solve for traditional games. It’s not something a middle manager can just fix unless they’re ready to have some epic battles with the senior staff.

The traditional answer to this problem is a union. I don’t think we’ll see a game developer’s union for another decade or two, because the job roles are too variable to create much common ground.

But there is an easier avenue. There are new audiences for games, like XBLA and Kongregate. These don’t yet have the same baggage as mainstream games do, so it’s a bit easier to avoid crunch time. On the other hand, these new niches don’t have a lot of well-defined genres or conventions, either, so the risk of screwing up is very high. But nothing worth doing is without risk.

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But if you’ve ever been forced to design on the spur-of-the-moment (say on a live team, or in the last few days before a project ships), you’ve probably skipped most of that and just gone with your intuition. If you brainstormed at all in those situations, it was tightly focused. Time pressures have a way of taking the ‘blue-sky’ out of your brainstorming.

Yet, in general you probably aren’t any less happy with those designs than with the ones where you explored every avenue, made careful choices, and prototyped before implementing a full version.

Wait, so you’re just as happy with the intuitive, off-the-cuff designs as you are with the ones you labored over for weeks or months? Hmm, does that mean you’re a genius?!

Sadly, that is not what it means. As Dan Gilbert explains, it’s just a trick of our brains. We tend to be happier with decisions that we can’t change, rather than decisions where we have ample time to rethink things. It has very little to do with the actual quality of our decisions, and everything to do with brain physiology.

The point? Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your spontaneous designs are as good as your careful, well-thought-out ones. I mean, spontaneous designs are sometimes brilliant. But the odds are that your mind just isn’t being objective about the experience. So when you have time, use the full brainstorm process. Your design will likely be stronger as a result.

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PS - Go on, click the link above. It’s a 20 minute video, but it’ll go by like a snap. Very interesting material. His book, Stumbling on Happiness, is a good read also. You may not agree with his conclusions, but you’ll definitely be left in thought about his raw data.

PPS - And thanks to Brenda Brathwaite for the link.

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Stage 1: The Eager Newbie

The designer has just landed their first design job and is eager to learn the ropes from seasoned pros. They are desperate for knowledge. They read books like Raph Koster’s and find them deep and interesting. They are hungry for feedback — from their peers, from players, from random people on the street. Anything to help them grow, and quickly!

But over time they realize that most of their peers don’t really have any magic secrets to teach them. The more they interact with the player base, the sadder they are, because players are not kind to developers. They soon come to believe that they have learned all the ropes there are to learn.

Stage 2: The Jaded Artisan

The designer has worked for a while now and doesn’t feel like a newbie. They likely have a key belief like “It’s all about deep story!” or “Balance is crucial for long-term game stability!” or “Dungeon flow is the key to fun!” They interact with the players, but they only absorb the gist of what players say, now. (In the past, they implemented some random player’s ideas and realized that most players are terrible designers, so they no longer really even consider player’s detailed requests.)

But over time they find that their work quality isn’t progressing very quickly anymore. Their key belief starts to seem less logical… they may even come to believe the exact opposite of what they once did. The lack of positive feedback starts to take its toll, too, until the designer no longer approaches their craft in an objective manner.

Stage 3: The Player Hater

The designer has worked on several games (or just been on a live team for more than a year — live teams age you very quickly). They’ve seen players mock their hard work every single time they try to do something brilliant. It almost seems as though players LIKE complaining… so maybe the designer should MAKE them complain! Faced with only negative feedback, the designer decides that negative feedback is GOOD. The designer crafts content that’s tougher, and tougher, and tougher still. They create systems that require players to be extremely good min/maxers just to survive.

The designer takes on an adversarial role with players, all the while saying things like, “Oh, players will complain, but they LOVE it when the new content kicks their ass for a few weeks.” This is sometimes true, but the designer doesn’t really care whether it’s true or not. Subconsciously, they now interpret negative feedback as positive, so it doesn’t really matter what’s right anymore.

But over time they grow bored of trying to evoke passion from players. Without any trusted feedback from any source, they find their enthusiasm waning and their skills no longer growing.

Stage 4: The Burnout

The designer doesn’t care anymore. The stupidity of the gaming industry has overcome them. Budget cuts mean QA won’t be testing the content this week? Sigh, what can you do. The producer wants that perfectly-balanced dungeon redone? Okay, whatever. It’s just a job. The designer puts in their eight hours and goes home. They avoid overtime like the plague (and if they are in a job where they can’t, they have to quit at this stage, or else they’ll soon get fired). They just can’t muster the passion to do amazing work anymore.

There are two paths from here, and they’re equally common: designers can leave the MMO industry completely, or they can work through it. In the latter case, they bide their time. Maybe they take a few months off somehow. Maybe they just stop caring but still manage to put out reasonable-quality work for a year or two, puttering along, until one day…

Stage 5: The Zen Master

The designer wakes up one day and realizes that they understand it all. The simple mantras they believed earlier about story or balance or flow or advancement can now be seen for what they really are: just tiny parts of the big picture. They can finally see the forest, instead of just a few trees.

It makes sense now, and the designer can create amazing work. However, they know it’s easy to fall back into burnout, so they doesn’t work too many hours. And the small stuff doesn’t get under their skin anymore — that way leads to madness. If the designer hasn’t developed an incredibly dark sense of humor already, they develop one now. (You can’t spend more than a few years as an MMO designer without cultivating a horrifyingly dark sense of humor.)

Hopefully the designer can maintain this state for a good while, but eventually they fall back to one of the earlier stages, and the cycle repeats.

Fixing the Designer Cycle

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a good cycle. It’s just how things tend to work. It happens because:

• The work requires long hours for very crappy pay (at least for the first several years).
  • A typical starting designer works an average 60 hour week and gets maybe $30k a year. This works out to about $9.50 an hour, which is about what a teacher makes (teachers are another high-burnout profession). The difference is that teachers don’t have to work 60 hour weeks for prolonged periods of time.
• There’s almost no positive feedback.
  • Players never say nice things. When a player posts on a game forum, it’s usually to complain. If they compliment the game at all, it’s not in a place where the designer can see it.
  • Since the designer works so many hours, they don’t have time to play MMOs much anymore. They don’t see players having fun. Saddest of all, they often don’t even see their own content being played. They lose track of the reason they’re doing this at all.
  • Designers are so busy with their own work that they rarely have time to do solid critiques of each others’ work.
  • In many companies, designers work by committee — they have no autonomy over any game system. So the feedback they get isn’t personal. It’s hard to become invested in the product. (In the worst cases, designers need to get sign off from the entire 50-person team for their ideas. This is extremely draining.)

A lot of this boils down to being overworked: everybody in the MMO industry is overworked, and there are all sorts of trickle-down effects.

Being an MMO designer doesn’t need to be glamorous. It just needs to be a survivable career path. We need to keep designers from coming to hate players, or worse yet, becoming completely burned out and leaving the industry. Ideally, we should strive to push every designer to the “zen plateau” where they’re creating their best work, and then keep them there.

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I prefer MMO games to single player games in large part because of the shared experience. My game experience is more exciting — more important! — because I am adventuring in a shared world where I can see and interact with other players. Character blogging extends that shared experience; it allows me to share not just the virtual world and the big events that happen there, but also the smaller personal events: buying my mount, the battleground I did this weekend, a trick I learned for raising my weapon skill. To turn that around, reading other players’ blogs allows me to connect with them whether or not they play on my server. It gives me more personal (and often more trustworthy) views of other classes, factions, and perspectives.

I also find that character blogs tend to highlight the diversity in our games. Sure, there are lots of twenty-something guys with night elf hunters who post about their twice-weekly raids and PvP pwnage. But there are also a disproportionate number of women blogging about their game experiences, as well as older folks and even families who both play and blog together. We know these people are out there, of course, but these blogs — while perhaps not exactly representative — do help make the diversity of our audience more personal and immediate.

If I were running an MMO team right now, I’d be seriously thinking about how to leverage this character blogging to the benefit of my game’s community. Some basic ideas:

• Spotlight useful blog posts on the game’s official community page. I would focus on particular posts rather than an entire blog: it’s much easier to vet a single post, and since it is also much easier to write the occasional brilliant post, you can hit a wider variety of blogs this way. You can also spotlight interesting stories or opinion pieces, but your bread-and-butter should be informational posts: how-tos, tutorials, game info, and so on.
• Provide and promote some simple tools for blogging players. Some games already provide fansite press kits as well as desktop backgrounds, so you could easily extend this with some simple blog theme elements. Imagine, for instance, a game-themed RSS icon or some sample header graphics. And don’t make the rookie mistake of taking down your theme elements after your expansion-pack promos end, like some games I could name. Blogging keeps your players engaged even when nothing big is happening in the game world, so support that by giving your bloggers tools even during the slow times.
• Aim an occasional contest at your character bloggers. Even if you don’t have a prize, you can suggest a topic (a la “My Favorite Zone”) and assemble a list of blogs who respond with a post on that topic before the deadline.

Really, these ideas come down to encouraging your players to blog about their experiences and then helping your blogging players connect with each other. By fostering this kind of extra-game community you help keep players positively engaged with your world.

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