Good session

Some notes, but not comprehensive...

Mapping the Future of Mass Market Online Worlds: From Niche to Mass Market

Jessica Mulligan – Moderator
Greg Thomas – Visual Concepts Ents
Richard Garriott – NCSoft
Won Il Suh – Nexon
Ken Duda – There.com

Q: Won, what’s the difference between today’s niche and tomorrow’s mass?

Won: In the North America market there are niche products like Everquest. Non-niche are games like online poker. There needs to be more titles such as Worms or something more mass to bring the mass audience to the online world. The games need to be more simple than they are now. I’ve seen some lighter games here which show potential.

Richard: Yeah. We’ve commonly talked about the fact that the USA hasn’t found products to appeal to the broader, less niche-y market. What’s interesting is that in Korea, Taiwan etc, they seem to have found the magic formula that takes things out from niche: the press in both areas is really different too. The features that will define broad market in Asia will not be the same features as here in the West. Lineage is clearly a mass market product in Asia, but its feature set is not really finetuned for success in the USA market. Vice versa too. We don’t have the answer yet.

Q: Ken – There.com is really an attempt at a mass market world, isn’t it?

Ken: That’s a huge question. In the long run we’re going after the AOL audience. Focusinga on 30-40 and skewing female. People are going online to play simple games.. what’s going to make that person participate in an online environment? What’s in it for them? Are they going to team up to fight monsters? Probably not. I don’t think anyone KNOWS, but we guess the mass market will come online fundamentally to spend time with people they know who they can’t meet up with in the real world. That’s a core social need. So, you need to make it a meaningful experience, where you truly feel you’re with the other person.. like, your facial expression, eye contact. Then what do you do together? That’s where the huge challenge lies ahead of us... the question is how can any one company produce the volume of content needed to attract the mass market audience?

Q: So what’s more important, gameplay or ease of technology with regard to getting the mass market in?

Greg: Oh god, getting connected is SO important. Ease of technology to start with, because without that you won’t get enough gameplay.

Q: So Won, you guys have like millions of subscribers in Asia. So are they all hardcore, and you just have a lot of hardcore gamers? Or are they really massmarket?

Won: There’s a lot of Koreans playing online games. Is it mass market. Well.. if I think so far we have a lot of online gamers in K who play games, but they’re not the mass market. I think there’s a lot of reasons why Koreans like online games: asia is very crowded. You stay at home for entertainment, and broadband is all over the place. I think you’ll see this all over the place where there’s high density – New York, LA – you’ll see lots of gaming in those communities.

Richard: so I agree with Won, altho the players are numerous they’re marketed to like a hardcore market. In the USA we’re missing the geological and cultural phenomenon, so it’s not practical to compare. It may be that Ken here has the solution with There.com. The parallel of the AOL audience is dead on, that’s the definition of a mass market in the USA. They market on telly, they have reach. Traditional marketing has built and sustained that audience. So Ken’s group has identified the mass market and is inventing a product to fit that need. Our strategy however with Tabula Rasa is to attack the same problem from a different angle. Having come from the Ultima experience, a hardcore game especially online.. difficult to get into to play, and then these types of game EXTREMELY demanding of players’ time in order to feel successful. If you’re a casual player unwilling to spend more than 5 hours a night playing, your peer group moves on without you and you drop out of the experience. So our approach is to say, let’s deconstruct the core of these games.. keep the good bits, highly customisable avatars and item collection and group activiities, but let’s start purging it of those things that are causing it to be difficult to get in or high-bandwidth in terms of commitment.

Q: All those titles you mentioned are sci-fi or superhero or fantasy based. Do you think that enhances the niche?

Richard: Yes, the RPGs are still going to appeal to role playing game customers. I think sports is absolutely one of the great possibilities in how to expand the market.
Won: a lot of the games in Korea are far more simple, less 3d and complex. We have 200k people logged in on Saturdays playing concurrently, and we’re talking simple 2d games, cartoon games.

Ken: I believe that in our lifetimes, the Metaverse will be created. I think online is where people will hang out. There are three paths to this: online games become the metaverse. Or, a platform becomes the metaverse, like There.com. Or the third is that AOL or Yahoo do it, by extending the messenger service, with avatars, and before you know it you’ve got wandering around between games and services...
By the way, Sharding doesn’t work. Imagine if AIM was sharded, or your mobile was sharded!

[ Sharding: splitting a game across servers, where your character and assets lives on one server alone and can only communicate with players sharing that server ]

Richard: (to Ken) I think you’ll be challenged by the Googles and Yahoos of this world. They could become this metaverse backbone.. benig the creator of a confederation of online games is something we’re pondering. We’re getting questions about bundling issues. Subscriptions will be merged into single fees. It’s easy to think that in 5-10 years from now you could take your avatar experience and wrap it into multiple offerings.

Greg: OK, sports. Look at ESPN.com. people tune in ALL THE TIME for round-the-clock information. If you could play along with that information, I think that’s our mini-metaverse. From a console standpoint, you’re buying this machine to play games. With a console you NEED the technology, you need the beautiful graphics and lovely technology because it’s why you bought the machine, so you don’t have to resort to 2d to get the mass market.

Ken: you need to understand the mass market. Why would they go after your product?

Richard: You need reputation to carry over in your characters. You need persistent naming. You need social systems that are recognisable and persistent. Transactional history. We’ve brought social systems into Tabula Rasa where you can recognise encounter histories. What we’ve laid in on top of that is mechanisms like emoting and expressions, and on top of that supporting everything from large through small communities, so players can form peer groups and find individuals or ‘hunting parties’ who have shared interests and activities.

Q: Are you going to address different demographic groups?

Ken: yeah, we’re going for the women. 40% female, and we skew older. We also skew rural, sparsely populated areas. We’ve done that by created an environment that isn’t the case where you drop in and you get KILLED or shot at immediately. Women like to compete, but they like to do it on their own terms.

Richard: For many years I’ve heard people say, ‘we’re gonna create games for women’. And I’ve watched numerous businesses go out of business for that. Here’s my personal analysis as to why this is the case: it’s a marketing issue. These people are going online, but they’re not going to any of the traditional outlets for gaming. So one of the biggest tricks is to figure out how to market the product. Take the game to them, don’t expect them to come to the game.