It’s of concern when the most entertainment I got from my time at the Melbourne Mana Bar was by myself in the toilets. Continue reading
Filed under Multiplayer …
City of Titans: I Disbelieve the Illusion
City of Titans has launched its Kickstarter and has been fully funded. Although it offers an attractive dream of brining City of Heroes back, it isn’t going to get anywhere near what it is promising. Continue reading
Virgin Gaming: Place Your Bets
Would you be interested in earning money playing video games? To place a ‘bet’ on yourself to win a game versus another human opponent, where if you do win you’ll get real money back?
Or does the thought repulse you? Can you see the problems in letting people bet money on the outcome of video game contests? Continue reading
Borderlands 2: Girlfriend vs. Girlfriend Mode
What happens when a gamer-who-totally-has-a-girlfriend (Gamer) tries to get their non-gaming girlfriend (GF) to play Borderlands 2? Continue reading
What Can We Learn From Picking Winners?
Having spent a bit of time looking at some infamous AAA MMO failures, it’s worth trying to see what lessons can be learned from them. Continue reading
City of Heroes / Villains: A Limited Bounce
When the first quarter of financial data landed following City of Heroes / Villains conversion to a free-to-play model, it showed a positive-if-only-moderate bump from 2812 million Won (or US$2.41m) in Q3 2011 to 3435 million Won (or US$2.97m) in Q4 2011. Going F2P saw about a 20% jump in revenue. It certainly wasn’t in … Continue reading
There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills… Somewhere: Minecraft
I thought it was interesting to see that Minecraft has made over US$80m in revenue since launching in October 2010, but ‘only’ US$13.5m in earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA). The overall revenue figure seems pretty easy to calculate – 5m paying downloads at a variety of different price points from €14.95 for … Continue reading
How Many Players Did City of Heroes / Villains Have After Launching Freedom?
Converting from a pure subscription-based title to a hybrid free-to-play (F2P) is something than more than one MMO title has seen happen. And generally the indication from the studio is that such a move makes mad bank. When Cryptic Studios converted Champions Online to F2P, they said revenue went up 1000%; when Turbine Studios converted … Continue reading
How Many Players Did City of Heroes / Villains Have Before Launching Freedom?
In the rush before Xmas, I missed NCsoft’s investor relations release for the Q3 2011 period. NCsoft is unique among MMO developers in that its quarterly earnings releases include a breakdown of revenue collected from each of their key titles in that period, making it very easy to track how a title is performing. Although … Continue reading
Looking (Again) At MMO / RPG Quest Types
A long while ago I looked at the types of quests that MMOs (and indeed, even single player RPGs) are limited to and came up with 10 different types. However, over time I’ve thought that the list was incorrect in a number of ways, especially since it didn’t consider the ‘reverse’ version of each quest … Continue reading
World Class Villains 