PopCap's chief creative officer Jason Kapalka recently said in an interview that the golden era for Facebook games was over. Not that Facebook gaming would suddenly disappear, but that there would be so much competition, so many new companies rushing very similar games to the market, that the genre would become less and less profitable.

I can believe that. I recently got an "invitation" to review a Facebook game that I'm not even going to name here, which anyone here could have designed on a napkin in 5 minutes. It was a different setting than Mafia Wars / Farmville / Frontierville, but otherwise played EXACTLY like those. You advance by mindless clicks. You advance FASTER by buying stuff in the item shop or lassoing in your friends. You can spend more money on decoration. And that's all there is. There are hundreds of Facebook games like that now, and it is likely that sooner or later market saturation sets in, if it hasn't already happened.

Frankly I'm not overly worried if some new game companies making shoddy Facebook games flounder. It would be good if the message arrives in some places that casual games are NOT the future of gaming. They are a *part* of the gaming market, and a part that was underdeveloped. But the gold rush is over, and now normal economic rules will prevail: If you want to make money in a competitive market, you need to offer a better product than your competitors, or the same quality at a cheaper price. The latter is difficult, with the price being already misleadingly advertised as "free", so companies will be forced to make better games.

Another factor here is the evolution of gamers. There will always be some people who really don't want more from a game than what Farmville can offer. But there are others who start out with a game like Farmville, and then want something a bit more challenging. I think that this is a good thing, to have "introductory" games. You can't just shove people into the deep end of a hardcore game and expect them to like it. Market segmentation ultimately helps everybody, as it creates a larger overall market. And when investors realize that the "make easy money with Facebook games" phase is over, maybe we'll get more investment in the kind of games we would like.

CNN has an article with a headline asking whether video game piracy is good for business. Fortunately the article has nothing to do with the headline, but instead presents an interesting idea: Why don't we go and make single-player games "Free2Play"? Nobody pirates Farmville, so why not do the same business model for single-player games?

Basically the proposal is that games would all come as free downloads, with minimal content, just enough to see whether you like the game or not. For everything else you need to open an online account and buy various downloadable content (DLC).

While the idea sounds interesting, I don't think the solution is all that easy. First of all it doesn't solve the problem of offline gaming. If you need to be connected to the internet to validate that you are allowed to use that DLC, that is equivalent to Ubisoft's hated copy protection scheme, and people can't play while offline. If you don't need to be connected, because you already have that DCL downloaded and installed, then what is to prevent you from copying the DLC and putting it on Bittorrent?

The other problem is that if the free version of the game has only minimal content, players will feel that they are nickled and dimed for everything. And people who don't play a game much will also not buy a lot of DLC, so the game company needs to make people who want everything pay more than they used to pay for a full game to get the average back up to the previous business model. Suddenly hardcore gamers will have to pay $100 or more if they want to have access to all the content of a game.

I like the idea of using online registration as a copyright protection scheme, but I think that is better handled in different ways. For example only being able to access the online multiplayer part of the game after registering the game. As you can't play online multiplayer offline anyways, nobody can complain that this keeps him from playing offline. And the registration could be "free" with a code that comes with the box. Lots of games are already working like that, e.g. Starcraft 2. Going further and making single-player games completely "Free2Play" is probably not going to work all that well.

There has been a lot of talk about grinding lately. Beta players found Final Fantasy XIV grindy. People talked about grinding heroics in World of Warcraft. And Larísa even found progression raiding in WoW a grind. But what exactly is The Grind? And why do we play that way?

I don't know if there is a generally accepted definition of The Grind, but my version would look something like this: "The Grind is doing an unfun activity in a game repeatedly, in order to get a reward which allows access to fun content". That has been parodied by South Park in their Make Love Not Warcraft episode in the kids killing 65,340,285 level 1 boars. Killing the same mob over and over is one of the most typical forms of grinding. It often is a possible way to level up (although killing 65 million level 1 boars usually won't work), but games in which this is the most effective way to level will often be described as grindy.

And there we stumble upon an important truth: Grinding is very often by choice, because The Grind happens to be the most efficient way to advance your character. In most cases it is not that there are no other activities in the game, often there are even other ways to advance. But one activity is often more efficient than another activity, so players follow the most efficient path, which leads them to repeat the same activity over and over, instead of seeking out a variety of different activities, which would advance them slower, but be more fun.

Imagine you play a MMORPG for a year, about 20 hours per week, for a total of 1,000 hours, and then stop playing. Does it really matter what you "achieved" in the game during that time? Given that there is no win condition, does it matter how far exactly you got, how efficient you were in advancing your character? I would rather say the premise is that you'll spend 1,000 hours of unproductive activity, for your personal entertainment. As levels or epics aren't worth anything outside of the confines of the game, being more efficient in gaining them has no value. It's like trying to be more efficient in watching TV by recording everything and then watching it in fast forward. You get through content faster, but that only diminishes the entertainment value of the content and serves no purpose whatsoever. Isn't game activity A which amuses you but isn't very effective in gaining levels/gold/gear better than activity B which is effective but not fun?

If you can do whatever you want, there is no grind. The promise of fun later if you grind now is an illusion. The joy of the reward lasts only for a very short time, while you wasted hours of your valuable free time with unfun grinding. That gold making guide telling you what is the best method for making gold in World of Warcraft is misleading you. The *best* method for making gold is the one that is most fun to you. And that might well be doing many different things, from daily quests, to fishing, to gathering herbs, to running dungeons, to playing the auction house, each for as long as your having fun, and then switching to something else. And the same is true for the best way to level up in this or that MMORPG: Most of the time you have various options, and its better to try everything, and switch between activities, than to do the same activity for hours on end.

The Grind is a consequence of the false worship of the cult of efficiency. Once you realize that it is by definition impossible to win a MMORPG, and efficiency gets you nowhere, you are set free to play whatever way is fun for you, and The Grind just disappears in a puff of smoke. If there is no fun activity in the game, why would you even want to play it in the first place?

In a stunning news announcement Blizzard just declared that they weren't changing World of Warcraft to a Free2Play business model this year. They said: "Are you crazy, guys? We already rent half of Silicon Valley for our servers, if we went Free2Play we'd grow to a 100 million players and wouldn't know how to handle the hardware!"

Coincidentally CCP also announced that EVE Online wasn't going Free2Play anytime soon: "We have a solid business model charging people for the priviledge of waiting for their characters to gain skills while offline. If people could do that while not only not playing, but also not paying, we'd be ruined!"

Meanwhile Square Enix denied that Final Fantasy XIV would be released with a monthly subscription model, but change to Free2Play before Christmas. "We can't admit being scared by all those negative beta reviews. And anyway we are so bad at designing account management and billing systems that a change like that would never work for us!"

Coming up: The competition in which YOU get to guess which game isn't going Free2Play next!

Am I the only one who finds it strange that the first announcement in the August 2010 Producer's Letter of Warhammer Online is that WAR is *NOT* going Free2Play? Stay tuned for a series of exciting news announcements, I might reveal tomorrow that WoW isn't going Free2Play either!

Rebecca Judd from MMO Melting Pot recently mailed me and asked me for an interview. I replied with a challenge, asking her to Google the existing interviews with me, and come up with some questions I haven't already answered before. She rose to that challenge admirably, thus her interview with me goes beyond the usual "how did you start blogging?" fare.

Hmmm, and now that she posted that, I should finish and publish that blog post about The Grind® I mentioned in the interview.

Imagine I wrote phrases like the following about a newly released game: "But the game wasn’t released early. The game was released poorly. Head in the sand syndrome imo." and "The point is, the issue here is far far worse than many of you think it is. I wish it was an issue of the game being released too early. That’s an easy thing for a company to “fix”. Elemental’s launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment". You'd conclude that I was writing a hate review, ripping the game to shreds. But these harsh remarks in fact aren't from me, but from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. And the last quote continues as "Elemental’s launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part."

After having been blasted by Stardock fans for saying much less harsh things about that game, the admission by Stardock's CEO that Elemental *really* was bad at launch has a certain gratification for me. Even self-described Elemental fanboi Darren, who gives an excellent description of the game says at the end: "Don’t get the game yet unless you are of the patient type who wants to help Stardock make the game better. I can’t recommend it for gamers who are not use to the Stardock beta process, cause we’re still in beta, IMHO. Wait until after Christmas to get the game if you want to “play it when it’s done”…cause it ain’t done yet. Get Civ 5 when it comes out…play some other games…but wait on Elemental for now. Stardock screwed up on the release of Elemental, and nothing can be done to reverse the damage that was done."

And there is the big question: "nothing can be done to reverse the damage that was done"? Do games ever get a second chance? Me, personally, I'd be willing to buy Elemental in lets say early 2011 if I hear reports that some patches fixed the game. I am willing to give kudos to Brad Wardell for his "Mea Culpa" admission and apology, we don't get many of those. And that forgiveness isn't limited to Elemental: If I read next year that Final Fantasy XIV plays very well on the PS3, I might buy that game for that platform (instead of the lousy PC port trickily released first).

But maybe I am more forgiving than other players. "Game X releases full of flaws!" is headline news, "Game X fixes flaws 6 months after release" might not even get reported anywhere but on specific fan sites for that game. The internet has a long memory, and everybody looking for reviews of Elemental will find the bad reviews written right after release, not the little known fan site reporting that patch 1.17 finally made all of the original complaints obsolete.

So how forgiving are you? Would you buy a game which had a catastrophic launch later, after major patches fixing most problems? Or does a game only get one chance to make a good first impression and is then disregarded forever?

I was going to write a detailed description of how my first play sessions in Final Fantasy went, but then stumbled upon this blog, where Rank-n-Vile describes exactly my play experience, up to and including the point where our spellcasters get killed by fungus due to the combat interface being as unintuitive as it is sluggish. Quote: "One thing of note is there is next to NO hand holding. You are basically told NOTHING." And that is key to the new player experience of Final Fantasy XIV: Everything works differently than you'd think it would work, and the only way to find that out is by trial and error, as the game refuses to tell you anything. I strongly recommend reading some FFXIV websites with player guides before trying to play the game.

Several hours of struggling with the game later, and armed with a lot of previous experience of similar games, I got to the point where I understood the game much better. Unfortunately the frustration doesn't end there. Even after you understand the UI, it remains overly complicated and sluggish. The game is pretty, but you pay for that by looking at black "now loading" screens often and for long whiles. And every command you give seems to lag by several seconds, so even gathering and crafting are slow to the point of draining all fun out of the activity.

The basic premise of Final Fantasy XIV is that you not only *can* play many classes with the same character, you more or less *must*. You've already read about the hard xp cap of 8 hours xp gain per character class per week, but long before that you will run out of quests for your class. Then you either grind, or you equip the tools of a different class, which lets you level and quest as another character class.

What is really good is the epic main story quest lines, of which there are three, based on which starting location you chose. These are told with extensive cut-scenes using in-game graphics, and putting your character right in the middle of them, just like they did in FFXI. The problem is that at least in the beta that sort of content is limited, and you better not make a second character in the same starting area, because the long cut scenes are only really good when you see them for the first time. And while that sort of storytelling works great in a single-player game, it isn't what I'm looking for in a MMORPG.

So I remain with my decision not to buy Final Fantasy XIV. Not only is much of the gameplay rather tedious, but the general slowness of the unresponsive controls make the basic elements of the game not much fun. If the basic elements aren't fun, then I just dread having to repeat them over and over. Final Fantasy XIV is a game which looks great on screenshots and videos, and even the feature list doesn't sound so bad. But the implementation is so convoluted and often just plain bad that it makes Final Fantasy nearly unplayable. Try the open beta and give the release version a miss.

Locked out of the Final Fantasy XIV beta again, due to the patch downloader being stuck at 94.8% for hours. I'm starting to wonder if Square Enix is deliberately trying to keep most people out of the "open" beta, because so many people who actually got into the beta cancelled their preorder.

After taking days to get into the Final Fantasy XIV beta, I finally made it and had the opportunity to play for several hours. And as I have it from a reliable source that the NDA is lifted (trying to find any information on the Square Enix site is an exercise in frustration), I can tell you about the game. My first impression was a good one, the game is truly beautiful, and the opening sequences are well done. Unfortunately that good impression ends the moment you have control over your character. Because saying you "have control" is somewhat stretching the truth. If you would study the best practices of how to make a user interface for 20 years, and then DO THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE, you probably still couldn't design a user interface so completely horrible, unintuitive and user-unfriendly as Square Enix has designed for Final Fantasy XIV.

Thus my "playing" session is better described as a "struggling with the controls" session. The UI is apparently optimized for the PS3, and trying to play it with a mouse and keyboard is like trying to steer a car with an outboard motor and a rudder. Worst of all is combat, where everything feels so unresponsive that it isn't fun at all. But the horror isn't limited to that, everything else is also done in the most complicated and least intuitive was possible. Want a quest? Well, you first have to get the quest description in the city, only then can you go to the quest hub, start the quest there, and then go to the actual location where the mobs are. And that's the kill quests, which have the huge advantage of actually working, I repeatedly failed an escort quest because the escorted NPC had pathfinding problems. And if you want to look up information on the beta tester site, the game crashes when you alt-tab out.

I would like to tell you how to improve your gear, but fact is that I already made several levels and did a number of quests without yet getting any gear upgrade. My loot up to now consisted of strange stuff like a "walnut +2". Maybe its crafting material? At least if you try to sell it you only get 1 gil per item, which makes me think that selling isn't what you are supposed to do with it. The starting quest leads you to a crafting guild, but if you haven't selected a crafter to start with, you can't do any crafting before you learned how to switch classes.

While I did like the graphics and the cutscenes that open liven up the quests, I couldn't get myself to like the combat system. And if the basic activity which you need to repeat over and over isn't fun, there isn't much use in playing the game. Thus the first thing I did after ending my play session was to cancel my preorder for Final Fantasy XIV. I'll still try the beta for a bit, trying if the controls get better if I install a gamepad, but right now I don't have high hopes for this game.

In a forgotten corner of an old thread on this blog there is a debate raging between Nils, Nils, Nils, and a bit of me, in which he argues that the Dungeon Finder is bad, because it allows him to optimize the fun out of World of Warcraft. I think that is a totally valid argument: A developer offering a game with different modes of gameplay must count on players choosing the most efficient path en masse, and ignoring less efficient activities even if they are more fun. WAR very much suffered from that in its first few months, because doing PvP scenarios was so much more efficient than doing public quests that in the end the public quests nearly died out. And in WoW it is certainly possible to ignore much of the game now, and just sit in Dalaran all day and queue up for dungeons all day long.

Thus from this point of view we could demand from a developer to restrain a player's activities in order to FORCE him into a more varied and fun content, instead of letting him optimize the fun out of the game. Quote Nils: "Rules need to restrain me. That's what they are there for. That is what the game company is there for."

But there is a Catch-22: To prevent players from optimizing the fun out of everything, the game has to be what some people dubbed a "theme park", not a "sandbox". Or in other terms, the game can not give the players much freedom, and certainly not a huge range of infinite possibilities, because in a range of infinite possibilities some are always more efficient than others. Developers *can* balance a game by creating rules that restrict what a player can do, and make all activities equally efficient. But that only works for a limited number of different activities, each of them being strongly guided.

In a completely different game, Magic the Gathering, the developers where asked the question: "Card X sucks, why do you put such a sucky card in the set?" And their answer was that if all cards were equally strong, players would not have the freedom to make the mistake of choosing a less good card. Picking cards for your deck is more fun if there are good picks and bad picks. If every choice you can make is equally valid, the choice becomes meaningless.

Thus the idea to create rules to prevent one activity to be more efficient than others clashes with Sid Meier's theory that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. Instead of the players optimizing the fun out of the game, you'd pass that task to the developers, and it would be THEM who optimize the fun out of the game.

So what do you really want? Freedom, including the freedom to make bad decisions? Or a game which prevents you from optimizing the fun out of it by making all choices equally efficient? Me, I prefer choice. Because I have the self-control to prevent myself from optimizing the fun out of a game, and explore less efficient but more fun other options. Games shouldn't be terribly unbalanced, but there should be enough difference in efficiency of different paths to allow players a meaningful choice.

[I have the feeling that this is another post in a strange series of posts where syncaine and me agree on something.]

This is why I don't have a blog roll. I rather link to interesting posts I see, instead of getting into stupid fights who should and who shouldn't be on my blog roll. By definition a blog roll is a selection, and the very act of selecting somebody is going to cause somebody else to be unhappy.

Direct2Drive is celebrating its 6th anniversary with 4 weeks of sales. Every week different games are on offer for $6 each. Now the general idea of such a sale is that you don't know what games will be cheap next week. But Atari / Cryptic sent me a press release celebrating *their* (1st) anniversary, in which they told me not only of the free trial this week, but also of the opportunity to buy Champions Online from Direct2Drive for $6 in the week of September 15th to September 21st.

I'm not sure if Direct2Drive is totally happy about that press release, as they are still trying today to sell you Champions Online for $20. The game is even more expensive on Steam. So if you are at all tempted to try out Champions Online, do the free trial now, and if you like it, wait until the 15th to buy the game for just $6.

So Square Enix found and fixed the bug in the Final Fantasy XIV beta and decided to start the open beta today. Which would be good news if you could actually get into the open beta, which you can't: Square Enix failed to give their account and billing server enough hardware / bandwith, and if you try to sign up for the open beta you only get a "server overloaded, try again later" error message.

Actually that happens quite a lot. Not just for betas, but also right after release, there have been numerous cases where the game servers were up and running, but only very few people could play, because the server for making accounts and entering credit card details had broken down.

All those players wanting to get into a new game as early as possible are somewhat similar to a Denial of Service attack. But that onslaught is predictable. If a game company shipped a million copies of their game, they must install the hardware to handle a million players wanting to open an account. Or they must manage account creation and billing differently, so you can already make a character and play, and have 30 days time for the administrative stuff. Square Enix is obviously failing here, and I'm pretty sure they won't be the last ones.

The Final Fantasy XIV open beta, which should have started today, has been postponed because, oh my god, the devs found a bug!!! Obviously you can't release a beta with a bug in it, so the open beta has been postponed for an unknown amount of time.

On the other hand I am in another beta, where "being in the beta" is more of a theoretical exercise. Due to serious bugs the majority of the players are stuck at the loading screen since the weekend. Before that you could play, but other serious bugs made it impossible to advance in the game, unless you read on the forum how you could exploit another bug to circumvent the bug that prevented you from progressing.

Clearly different companies have rather different opinions on what a beta is, and what level of bugs are permissible in them.

I am currently playing mostly A Tale in the Desert, and occasionally a bit of World of Warcraft. I'll be playing Final Fantasy XIV next, and then Cataclysm. How about you? What are you currently playing, and what are your plans for the months to come?

I've been trying out the Mafia II demo, and I'm considering buying the game. In the last decade or so a strange inversion happened: It used to be that shooter games were just about, well, shooting, while if you wanted a story you needed to play adventure and roleplaying games. But then roleplaying games went multiplayer, and their storytelling part withered away. Today shooter games like Bioshock or Mafia II have significantly more and better storytelling than roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, EVE Online, or Everquest 2. On the other hand Mafia II also shows that telling a strong story has its price: Compared to a GTA, Mafia II has more story, but a less open world.

One particular interest Mafia II had for me is that it supports APEX PhysX from NVidia graphics cards, the perfect opportunity to test out my new Geforce 460. That turned out to require some fiddling. When I simply turned APEX PhysX from "off" to "high", my framerate in the Mafia II benchmark dropped from 60 to 25. Ouch! But the culprit is a particular sub-module, APEX clothing, which for some curious reason appears to be running on the CPU instead of the GPU. The solution I found on the internet was to go to the APEX/Cloth directory of the game, and delete either all the files, or all files except those for the main character, Vito. That way I could enjoy all the nice physics effects of the destructible environment, plus have Vito's trenchcoat still flowing, and the framerate dropped only to 45.

Not being good at shooter games, I died several times in the demo, which doesn't have a variable difficulty level, but still managed to "win" the mission. As far as I could find out the real game has three difficulty levels, from easy to hard, and I assume the demo was on "medium". My main difficulty was camera controls, which either don't exist, or are so well hidden that I couldn't find them. The actual shooting wasn't so hard, once you realized that you should always remain in cover and only shoot while leaning from cover, not run guns blazing into a group of enemies.

Mafia II sure is violent, but in the way a Godfather movie is violent: The violence somehow makes sense in the context of the story, and characters aren't void of humanity. Even the enemies have a good reason to shoot at you, which makes a change from the typical aliens or zombies you shoot at in so many other games. But as the shooting is part of the story, there is somewhat less of it than in some other shooter games. That is something I have no problem with.

The main reason I haven't bought Mafia II yet is that I don't know yet when I will have the time to play it. One thing I learned after buying games on Steam for a while is that you shouldn't buy games before you actually want to play them, as the price can drop any day. If this weekend or so I feel a sudden urge to play Mafia II, I can buy it full price, but if I'm busy with other games, I can wait until I can get it for half price in a Steam sale or the typical price reduction you get for buying last year's games.

Wolfshead is again posting a long rant on how everything was better in the past, or more specifically how the original Everquest was the best game ever, and all newer games are just shallow pieces of shit. Well, first of all somebody needs to tell Wolfshead that Everquest is in fact still running, so why does he waste his breath crying out for Everquest 3 (aka EQ Next) to be just like Everquest 1 instead of just playing EQ1? And then he has to realize that the understandable love we all feel for our first major MMORPG is due to the fact that it was our first major MMORPG. You can't turn back time, and the "sense of adventure" he remembers from EQ was *NOT* an inherent game feature, but simply due to the fact that playing such a game for the first time and being completely bewildered *IS* an adventure. People whose first MMORPG was World of Warcraft feel exactly the same way about WoW, remembering, quote: "Danger. Risk. Survival. Freedom. Mystery. Fantasy. Discovery. Camaraderie. Community. Escape. Defeat. Victory. Gain. Loss. Excellence. Skill. Excitement.", they had in World of Warcraft and somehow missing those elements in the games they played after that.

The only part where I agree with him, in parts, is where Wolfshead talks about why Everquest 2 was less good than the original Everquest. Quote: "With the original EQ I had 7 spell buttons, with EQ2 I had 52 buttons." I tried Everquest 2 not once, but twice, with a few years in between, and the above quote pretty much sums up that game for me. Everquest 2 is so full of features and options and buttons and collectibles and stuff that it ends up being completely unplayable for me. I completely agree with Wolfshead's advice that SOE should learn from Blizzard and make a game that is, quote: "Easy to Learn - Hard to Master".

What I absolutely don't agree with is his idea that you can take some features directly out of EQ1 and stuff them into EQ3, like "no instances", or "better community", which isn't a feature at all, but a consequence of both game design and a particular history. Some things only worked in Everquest 1 at the time because the community was smaller, more homogeneous, and of a different generation than it is now. Hoping that if you'd recreate EQ3 on exactly the same rules as EQ1, only with better graphics, and you'd get back that same community spirit and self-organization back is just foolish. Times have moved on. You can't just make a game where raid bosses aren't instanced and hope that guilds organize themselves into an orderly raid calendar any more.

Wolfhead's basic idea for EQ Next is to make that game so horribly unappealing for modern MMO players that only a handful of diehard EQ1 veterans would be willing to play it. What he forgets is the small detail that SOE probably wants to make money with EQ Next, and Wolfhead's concept is a recipe on how to lose millions of dollars on a MMORPG. Maybe he should read up on the economic concept of "utility", where it says that people spend money on things that have "utility" for them, therefore a product that makes more money is by definition better than a product that is less popular. If Wolfshead really thinks SOE is planning a game with naked corpse runs, xp losses, and forced grouping, he should really stop smoking whatever it is that causes those hallucinations. A time machine is more realistic than SOE trying to redo the original Everquest with those same features.

Gordon from We Fly Spitfires is wondering how it comes that some people are discovering EQ2 only now, that it went Free2Play, when in fact the game is older than WoW (by two weeks). He thinks that this is due to marketing, but an economist would give a very different explanation: The demand curve. Economic theory predicts that the demand for something goes up when its price goes down. That even works if the lower price is just an illusion, because once you buy this and that in the item shop of Everquest 2 Extended, you end up spending more money on it than if you had bought the regular version with the monthly subscription.

But that is the beauty of the Free2Play business model: Some people are reluctant to sign up for subscriptions. And most game companies are extremely stupid about it, demanding your credit card details before you get to play, in spite of you already having paid for the first month by buying the box. Behavioral economics are full of studies that show the difference between opt-in and opt-out plans. While opt-out plans can be profitable due to customers that keep paying because they failed to opt out, that almost invariably leads to some sort of resentment. Thus people who got tricked into some magazine subscription or similar which then ended up being very hard to cancel are understandably reluctant to sign up for future subscriptions to anything else. Opt-in plans don't force potential customers to commit, and thus have the attraction of greater freedom, even if effectively they are often more expensive. Some people buy every issue of their favorite magazine at the newsstand, in spite of a subscription obviously being less expensive.

The unresolved question regarding MMORPG pricing is how price sensitive MMORPG players really are. A monthly subscription MMORPG costs about $200 per year, including buying expansions. That sound expensive compared to a typical $50 computer game, but then that $50 computer game is not likely to entertain you for a year. Most people who moved from single-player games to MMORPGs report spending *less* on games now, because the $200 MMORPG eats up all of their available time, so they don't buy a new $50 game every month. Furthermore the $200 annual subscription is cheap compared with the cost of the computer and internet connection you need to play the game. Playing MMORPGs is also rather cheap if you compare it with other hobbies.

So maybe MMORPG players aren't so much price sensitive as they are committment-averse. That would explain the curious observation that several games reported earning going UP after changing from a monthly subscription to a Free2Play business model. But that suggests it could be possible to create a better monthly subscription model by simply taking out the "subscription" part from the model: You buy the game and get 30 days play-time for free. You aren't asked for your credit card details when you create your account, in fact creating that account might be as easy as just choosing a username and password. Only after 30 days you get a warning that your game time is running out, and given various options on how to buy game time in batches from 30 days to 180 days, from scratch-code game time cards, to PayPal, to buying game time with a credit card. That way people wouldn't feel trapped in a subscription, but the basic price and business model would be exactly the same as in the monthly subscription business model.

So how about you? Are you wary of subscriptions? Or are you rather price sensitive, and it is the actual price tag that prevents you from playing monthly subscription games?

The best number on APB players I could find was that All Points Bulletin has 130,000 "registered users". Note that this isn't "subscribers", but basically represents the box sales, each box coming with 50 hours of play time, and extra play time has to be bought and paid extra. While it was revealed that paying players spend on average $28 per month on APB, it wasn't said how many of the 130,000 buyers are "paying players". Free2Play games usually convert only 5% to 10% of players to "paying players", but as APB wasn't free to start with, the people who bought it might already have been more invested in the game, so maybe 10% to 20% of the buyers got converted into "paying players". So for all we know there aren't all that many people playing All Points Bulletin. So why does APB get so much discussion in the MMO blogosphere? Isn't that a waste of breath, talking about the failure of some insignificant game nobody plays?

The significance of the fate of All Points Bulletin comes from another leaked number: The development cost of $100 million. As much as we like seeing hyper-enthusiastic game developers giving interviews on how much their games are a labor of love, deep down we know that making games, and especially MMORPGs, is big business. Nobody invests $100 million because he loves games. Big investments are done in an expectation of big profits. And the great successes or catastrophic failures of previous games influence the expectations of investors. What games succeeded or failed determines not only how many, but also what games will be produced in the future.

Imagine you were the boss of a independant game development studio, and you were talking to investors, asking them to invest $100 million into that great MMOFPS you are planning. The investors will have done their research, and ask you questions on why you think that your game will be a success. What previous shooter MMOs have made their investors filthy rich? With a list of games like Hellgate London, Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault, and All Points Bulletin you are unlikely to persuade any investor to give you money. Even the shooter MMOs that are still up and running, like Fallen Earth or Global Agenda, don't look as they were extremely profitable. Global Agenda, which by all accounts is quite a good shooter MMO, went subscription-free this summer, and is sold for half the price of a regular PC game on Steam.

On any single game it is possible that other factors, e.g. the widely cited "bad management" is responsible for the game's lack of success. But if there are lots of similar games all in the range of failure to middling success, the question whether it is at all possible to make a game like that a success certainly pops up.

MMOFPS have some serious fundamental obstacles to overcome. One is competition from non-MMO first-person-shooter games: Nearly every shooter you can buy comes with some sort of multiplayer mode, and usually that multiplayer part of the game has no additional cost. What can you offer players in a MMOFPS that would make them want to pay more to play online? The usual answer to that is the same answer as for fantasy MMORPGs: You offer a persistent world with continuous character development. But that is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire: There is a strong clash of cultures between the fundamental rules of a MMO and the fundamental rules of a multiplayer shooter game. People who buy shooter games are very much used to their success in the game being determined by their skill at aiming. People who play MMOs are very much used to their success in combat being determined by their level and stats. It would be *extremely* hard to create a MMOFPS in which these two are perfectly balanced, so that success is both determined by skill and by character progress, if that is even possible at all. While it might be possible to make a good MMOFPS PvE part of the game, the moment you make a PvP part you run into huge problems. And the more open and free-for-all the PvP part is, the more likely it is that a lack of balance between skill and time spent causes players to leave the game. You can always make a PvE game in which the player always wins, gets rewards, and is happy. But in PvP by definition half of the players must lose, and any cry of "not fair!" can have serious consequences on long-term profitability of the game.

So, some investors lost $100 million of their money on All Points Bulletin, creating a game with a Metacritic score of a measly 58%. It would be surprising if that doesn't give others investors reason to think twice when asked to invest in some "GTA Online" or other shooter MMO. So even if not many of us played APB, we will be affected by the repercussions of its failure. And the question of "will there ever be a highly profitable shooter MMO?" remains open.

I got married yesterday, but only in virtual life, and not to somebody else: I married my main character and my second character in A Tale in the Desert. ATitD probably has the most extreme implementation of marriage in any MMORPG: If you are married to somebody, you have complete access to all of his possessions, and you can even log on as him. That is great for mule characters, but requires a big amount of trust when marrying another person. Worst case scenario is a bad divorce where your angry spouse first takes all your belongings and destroys your house before hitting the divorce button.

Many MMORPGs do not have marriage features at all. The best my wife and me could do in World of Warcraft was found a guild together and share a guild bank. But even in games which don't have any marriage game functionality, it is often possible to role-play marriage. You can get a suit, flowers, and a wedding dress in WoW, and role-play a big marriage in the Stormwind cathedral.

A long time ago I was playing Dark Age of Camelot, I was leader of a guild, and I was playing a friar. So when two members of my guild wanted to marry, I searched the internet for a transcript of a marriage ceremony some people had held in a MUD, and role-played the priest doing the marriage ceremony. And that is as close as I ever got to role-playing marriage. Because virtual marriage has one serious downside: Your real-world significant other might object if you marry somebody else in a video game.

This is one of the curious instances in which the virtual world somewhat overlaps with the real world. We are reasonably confident that shooting another player in the head in the virtual world doesn't mean anything in the real world, "it's just part of the game". But online relationships, cybersex, and virtual marriage aren't 100% confined to the virtual world. If you have a stable relationship in real life, a virtual marriage with somebody else is posing some moral questions: Isn't a virtual romance as much infidelity as lets say a steamy exchange of e-mails would be? You wouldn't want you significant other to write love letters to somebody else.

What do you think about virtual marriage? Is that cheating on your significant other, or is it just a part of a game with no meaning for your real relationship?

Readers were asking me about what was so bad about All Points Bulletin as game that it failed so miserably, and I didn't have an answer. I never played the game, which shouldn't surprise anybody, given that APB is a PvP shooter game. But I kept an eye out on reports which could shine some lights on that question. And I found this interesting analysis at MMO Tidbits which basically says that ganking killed APB.

Apparently by playing the game hardcore you would get your "rating" level up, which would make you deal 30% more damage and withstand 30% more hits than a new player. And some players used various hacks to make themselves even stronger. And then APB paired new players against those hardcore players, who would just mercilessly gank them over and over. Thus the newer players gained rating levels only very slowly, and pretty much lost every fight. As a result the server the author was playing on went from 2,334 players on a Sunday evening to 1,221 players on the Sunday evening two weeks later.

It is extremely hard to get somebody to pay for the privilege of constantly losing in a PvP game. And especially new players that start a game and always lose will often give up very quickly. This is why successful PvP games have safe spaces in which new players are completely or at least mostly safe from being ganked. APB didn't have that. It died of the fundamental incompatibility of MMORPGs with free-for-all PvP, where the "making your character stronger" part of the MMORPG clashes with the "only fair PvP is fun" principle. If you set up a PvP MMORPG in which players are actually rewarded for ganking newbies, you are doomed.

Blogger recently installed an automatic comment spam filter. Unfortunately it doesn't work all that well, and frequently puts a comment in quarantaine which isn't spam at all. The comment doesn't appear on the blog until I check the blog and mark the comment as "not spam". There isn't even a notification, neither to me or the commenter, that the comment got caught in the spam filter. And worst of all, the spam filter cannot be turned off.

Also the new system apparently still has a few bugs, giving out error messages when a comment is posted, making it look like the comment hasn't arrived, when in fact it has. As a result of the spam filter and the bugs I now frequently get double, triple, or quadruple comments from people frustrated they don't see their comment on my site right when they wrote it.

Please be patient, there isn't much I can do about it except for "teaching" the spam filter what comments are not spam. If you get an error message, refresh the site instead of reposting. And if you still created multiple posts, please delete the extra copies.

All MMORPGs have some sort of limitation of what a single character can do. That is useful in as far as it fosters cooperation between players. But it also enables a different solution: A single player opening several game accounts and controlling several characters, sometimes simultaneously. I reported on me "recruiting" myself as a "friend" for a rocket mount reward and triple xp in World of Warcraft. In some games you can only have one character per account, or only one character per account gets certain benefits, like skill training in EVE, so making a second account enables you to play alts. And in some Free2Play browser games having several accounts gives you so much of an advantage that it is actually forbidden by the rules. So this is the story of me trying out playing A Tale in the Desert with two accounts, where the only restriction is that you can't use more than one Free Trial account.

The reason I made the second account was actually a mistake I made: I had understood one of the tests in A Tale in the Desert wrong. I mentioned that there are seven disciplines in ATitD, each with 8 tests, of which one is the initiation. I had the initiation of 6 of those 7 disciplines, but was lacking the 7th initiation, to the discipline of Worship. The initiation to Worship test needs two players. They to a starting ceremony together at an altar, then one of the two players goes and performs a series of tasks, while the other player stays at the altar and recites a specific prayer after each of the tasks is performed. There is a 25-minute time limit, so the second player spends up to 25 minutes standing at that altar waiting for the first player to do his stuff, and gets to do nothing but type in a sentence into main chat 7 times during that time. What I got wrong was that I was convinced that only the first player, the one who does all the running and needs all the materials, would pass the initiation test. So I was reluctant to ask around for another player to help me with the test, and decided to create a mule character for that purpose. But once I finished the closing ceremony if the initiation to Worship with my two characters, they *both* got their test passed. Duh! Different story, instead of bothering somebody to stand around stupidly for half an hour I would actually have helped him pass his test without him needing any materials.

What else can one use a "mule" character for in A Tale in the Desert? As I mentioned, ATitD has a huge range of different activities to gather or transmute resources. Many of them are mini-games, or do in some other way require your full concentration, so doing them on two computers with two characters on two accounts isn't all that feasible. But there are some activities that are limited for example by your endurance stat: You can perform them a few times, usually 3 times, until you are tired and need to wait about a minute to fully recover and do the next 3 times. That is tedious to do with your main character, unless you manage to find another activity which you can do during a 3 clicks - wait 1 minute - 3 clicks - wait 1 minute cycle. But it is a perfect activity for a mule on a second computer, as you need only little input from time to time, while your main character is free to do more interesting stuff.

And then there is travel. In A Tale in the Desert you *can* move using the arrow keys if you set that up in the options, but the usual method of movement is to click on the place where you want to go to, and your character starts running there. While that is something that takes getting used to if you are more familiar with a classic WASD movement, there is actually one advantage to that click to move method: You can press F7 and zoom way out, then click once on the horizon, and your character will run for a while without needing any input from you, unless he runs into an obstacle on the way. The map of ATitD being so huge, using a mule to do some of your running works quite well, for example for hauling ore from a distant mine. Thus the term "mule" for a character mainly used to carry stuff for you. :) A variation of that theme is travel by teleport, which consumes "travel time" of which you only have limited amounts accumulated while offline. Using a second character effectively doubles your accumulated travel time. Or it can be used for other "offline chores", like gathering onions to feed your sheep.

So having a second character is helpful, but not to a degree where I would consider it necessary. Thus I paid for my mule for only 1 month, and won't use the second character after that. Note that this way I found out that one shouldn't use the "cancel account" function in the Billing menu for cancelling your subscription. "Cancel account" completely kicks you out of the game, and if you try to log back in you can only do it after answering affirmative to the question on whether you want to resubscribe. While that was a bit unsual and disconcerting, I didn't actually lose the rest of the month I paid for. By doing first "cancel" and than "resubscribe" I ended up back in the game, with the account still being paid for for the rest of the month, and my credit card details not on record any more, so the account will expire at the end of the month. That could have been programmed more elegantly, but the final outcome was the same as cancelling your subscription in any other game.

MMO Fallout is reporting on bitter ex employees blaming their management for the failure of All Points Bulletin. I've seen that happening a lot, and always found that discussion a bit one-sided, as most managers not named Derek Smart either have the common sense or a legal obligation to not reveal internal company information about the development of a game. Mark Jacobs recently resurfaced and mentioned that he had been under legal obligation to keep his mouth shut for a year after being fired from EA Mythic.

There is absolutely no doubt that bad management can do great harm to any project, including the project of developing a game. But I always found the story of "management is to blame for everything" a bit too smooth and easy. If the game had been a big success, would the developers have said "oh, I didn't play any part in this, the success is all due to good management"? I find it more likely that in cases like these there is some blame to be shared among all participants, from investors, to management, to game developers, and even other employees. What do you think?