What Are The Rewards Of Free-To-Play MMOs?

Nachtrag zu meinem Vortrag beim Virtual Worlds Camp: dieser Artikel bei Gamasutra nennt die gleichen Zahlen für ARPU in Free 2 Play MMOs und Browsergames.

Der ARPU liegt "from 30 cents up to $2", je nach Gameplay und Stärke des Engagements der User: "Sports and gambling games tend to be a bit higher, social games a bit lower."

"[Revenue] typically comes from 5-10% of the total number of users in any given month"

Na bitte. Meine Rede. Genau so stand es in unserem Businessplan. Realistisch aber immer etwas auf der konservativen Seite.

_happy_gambling();

Weblin is a Major Virtual World Example

The discussion is still going on the mmox mailing list about what the MMOX WG is going to do. David Levine from IBM posted a very good proposal to define the scope of the WG.

Now comes the point: in chapter 3. "The problem space" there is a list of virtual world platforms, the who is who of massively multiplayer and it includes .... weblin.

"The group's roots, and interests are largely, but not exclusively shaped by Virtual Worlds, including MMO games, Virtual worlds, Collaboration and Simulation Environments and shared online streaming environments. Examples of these platforms include, but are not limited to World Of Warcaft, ProtonSphere, Eve Online, Forterra's OLIVE platform, Club Penguin, Linden Lab's Second Life, IMVU, There.com, Croquet, OpenSimulator.org, Weblins."

Isn't that great.
Well, 3 Mio users is really not bad and 1/3 of the Second Life's online population either.

_happy_cheering()

IETF MMOX WG

The ITEF is discussing to charter a working goup about MMO/Virtual World Interchange. The WG shall be called MMOX in the Applications area.

"The objective of the MMOX working group is to provide an application-layer wire protocol for Virtual Worlds to a) enable interoperability between applications, b) provide for access and exchange with other systems on the internet such as web services, e-mail and other information storage systems, c) allow network layers to recognize VW traffic and make routing decisions based on its characteristics."

The effort ist very Second Life centric. It is driven by people from Linden Lab, IBM and OpenSim. In other words, they have the Second Life glasses and try to standardize Lindens protocols and formats or something very similar.

Our approach to virtual worlds comes from a different direction. We build a web of virtual worlds based on chat protocols and small extensions. This is much leaner than the legacy laden protocols of existing 3d virtual worlds. I doubt that the RFCs would be fun to read, because the specs will be huge. It might be worth to look at a VW-interoperation protocol from the "lean" perspective.

We get a feeling for the essentials of a virtual world, if we use a chat room as communication channel for a region domain and then extend it to create a world. We should start with a small base and add features rather than starting at complex systems and protocols to find a common denominator.

But the current effort is so Second Life oriented, that I doubt they accept any other approach. I am a bit afraid, that the sheer man power of IBM at the IETF will bring us a very un-IETF-like standard for virtual worlds interoperability.

According to the frst charter proposal the WG will standardize LLSD, OGP Base, OGP Virtual World Primitive Object Formatt, OGP Authentication, OGP Teleport. The WG should be called OGP, not MMOX. I remember the IMPP WG where several early instant message companies tried to get "their" protocol standardized under the name of a general IM and Presence protocol. Long discussions were ended by re-chartering the WG to only define requirements. Later there where 2 WGs with appropriate names, which defined real protocols: SIMPLE and XMPP. That's probably a good idea also in this case.

We have many strong VW protocols and one of them tries to get the standards approval under the very general label MMOX. MMOX should create just a requirements RFC and then there will be time for real protocols. Interoperability is not really limited by the lack of standards. Currently it's the lack of interest. Until there is real interest from more than one virtual world community, there is really no need to hurry. If the SecondLife/OpenSim community wants to be interoperable with themselves, then they should just do. A MMOX requirements WG would give the time to find out if there is interest from others like Everquest, WoW, There, EVE Online, Runescape, Google Earth (?), etc.

_happy_chartering()

Big and Bigger Systems

I started to compile a list of guidelines for developing big systems. So, what is a big system?

• "Big" means 5k - 100k concurrent users.
  

Of course, there are even bigger systems. There is also

• "Massive" 50k up to 1 Mio. concurrent and
  
• "Mainstream" 500k up to 10 Mio. concurrent and beyond.
  

The guidelines are for the smallest one the of 3 noteworty categories: "Big". This is the category I am experienced with. 10 or 20k concurrent is significantly different from normal/sparetime/hobby systems. But it is still conventional technology (e.g. on standard LAMP). I can imagine what needs to be done to get a massive system up and keep it running. ButI have never done it, yet. I can only dream of a mainstream scale system, especially a unique and not sharded one (see below).

Examples:

• "Big": Xing, major online newspapers, Wikipedia, many browser games,
  
• "Massive": Second Life, EVE-Online (barely), Runescape (I guess), Habbo, Facebook,
  
• "Mainstream": WoW (barely), major IM networks (QQ, ICQ, MSN), Google search, mobile networks.

In other words:

• "Big" ranges from "substantially over the top of your single server" to "the complete cluster would appear in the Top 500 Supercomputers list". EVE-Online is at the top of "Big" by sheer numbers, but it is on the brink to "Massive" because of its complexity. Xing: more than 10k click around on the web site at any time, sometimes twice as much.
  
• "Massive" is really large. Think about thousands or ten times more servers. That's a decent farm. Second Life is at the lower end. Their server numbers are a bit high for the user count, because of their architecture. Facebook is somwhere in the middle with 50 TB cache memory alone. This number is already 20,000 times more than your PC and growing. We are talking about the large web services, companies with 10 B market capitalization. These are "Massive". The big guys.
• "Mainstream" is unthinkable. Can you imagine half a million servers? If you stack them, they scratch the International Space Station. If you plan a system like this for everyone, then better avoid the hazzle and make it distributed like the Web. It's made for 10% of the world population (registered users not concurrent). There are few such systems on the planet. Few people managed to build in this order of magnitude. I am sure they grew into it with the system. Nothing that you can buy.
  

Of course there are differences in complexity between a static web site and an MMOG. A static web site, e.g. a newspaper may need much less resources for 10k concurrent readers, than a vitual world for 10k concurrent players. Comunication in an IM network is very different from a MMOG. MMOGs enter the "Massive" category earlier than browser games.

But there are also factors, which make the complexity similar or at least in the same order of magnitude.

• As an example, 10k HTTP/HTML readers make more network connections (easily 10k conns per sec.) than 10k players (100 conns per sec. when people log in).
  
• The data delivered may be in the same order of magnitude. Lets face it: a web site consists of min 100 items and active readers fetch 0,1 pages per second. This makes 10k x 0,1 x 100 = 100k items/sec. I doubt, that MMOGs deliver more than 100 items/sec to clients. This is 10 times more than what the web server does, but most MMOG items are just IDs of data pre-installed at the client. The web-items are all completely transferred. This reduces the difference. SecondLife transfers really many items by data. For a virtual world it is still an exception and it shows in the bad performance when discovering new areas.
  
• Then, there is a stupid reason, why web servers may feel the same load as MMOG servers: average web server technology is much worse, especially if they use scripting languages. Nobody would make MMOG servers in PHP. They are compiled code, C++, C#, compiled Java, compiled Python. But many "Big" web sites run on (uncompiled) byte code. Better than the script, but still byte code.
  
• Also, apart from good and bad technologies, there is good and not so good (=stupid) code. This happens to all types of systems and can make an MMOG more responsive than a web site at the same number of users.
  
• Across all types of services, some are sharded, some are unique worlds. EVE-Online is unique, which means everyone can play with everyone. WoW is sharded into 1,000 (?) servers of up to 3,000 (?) concurrent players. Your friend is on a different server? you do not even chat to him. Sharding largely reduces communication and DB load. If shard=host then communication overhead disappears. A DB per shard allows for 100 or 1000 times less DB load per instance. This helps a lot.
  
• After all, each category covers an order of magnitude. There is much room for "small" or "large" inside a category.
  

All in all, the classification into "Big", "Massive", "Mainstream" works.

Distributed systems do not really count here. This is about operating the resources required to support concurrent users. E.g. the Web is not operated by a single entity (though you could count the DNS). The Skype network has a (cool) architecture, that lets Skype, the company manage the network without the need to provide all required resources. Skype is also not an issue here. But most systems are operated by someone with a server farm and this is about what these people do.

So, these lessons are for "Big" systems. Actually primarily for web servers but also some messaging issues and general remarks. Some lessons are obvious, some are obvious in hindsight, some are not so obvious, some may be interesting even if you are one of the few (thousand) architects of big systems worldwide. Read the (far from complete but growing) list of lessons here.

Virtual Worlds 2008

Eigentlich wollte ich ein paar gemütliche Tage auf der Virtual Worlds 2008 verbringen. Fachvorträge hören und nebenbei in Ruhe was coden. Dann aber haben wir kurzerhand beschlossen, auf der zugehörigen Expo einen Stand zu machen und vorbei war es mit der Ruhe. Wir hatten zu dritt so viel zu tun auf dem weblin Stand, dass ich nicht eine einzige Session besucht habe. Alle drei waren ständig am Reden und Vorführen. Daniel hatte in Flash ein geniales Demo-Tool gebaut mit dem wir die wichtigsten Features und Anwendungsbeispiele aufrufen konnten. Zwischendurch natürlich auch immer wieder Life-Demos von Client und Lite trotz langsamem WLAN. Meistens waren die weblins schneller da, als die Webseite.

Insgesamt waren auf der Konferenz ca. 1200 Teilnehmer, alle Fachbesucher, keine Beutelratten. In der Expo war fast alles was Rang und Namen hat in der virtuellen Welt. Die großen Welten: SL, There, Habbo, ActiveWorlds, die großen Agenturen: Electric Sheep, Millions of Us, und viele andere Welten, Dienstleister, Plattformen und Engines (z.B. Metaverse, BigWorld, VastPark, elektrotank, iLemon, 500 Mirrors), Payment-Dienste, Avatar-Generatoren (z.B. Cyber-Extruder), andere Avatarsysteme (z.B. weblin, xtra-normal), usw. Auch neue 3D Welten waren da und/oder wurden sogar auf der Konferenz "gelauncht" wie mycosm.

Second Life öffnet sein Grid und erlaubt anderen (vor allem IBM) SL Server selbst zu betreiben. IBM versucht seit einiger Zeit "was mit virtuellen Welten" zu machen, hat mehrere eigene Welten, und will den Content selbst hosten. Bei einer "kleinen Firma" Content hosten reicht eben nicht für Dienstleister, wie IBM, die gegenüber Ihren Kunden dafür gerade stehen muss.

Multiverse bietet jetzt sogar parallel 3D (exe-Client) und 2D (Flash) Interfaces für die gleiche Welt an. Wenn sich eine Figur in der 3D Welt bewegt sieht man die das auch im 2D Viewer. Das ist technisch interessant, aber der Content wird nicht automatisch konvertiert. Man sagt, es gibt doppelt gemacht werden. Multiverse ist damit Metaplace (Areae, Raph Koster) voraus. Areae bietet zuerst nur 2D-Flash, später 3D. Areae war durch Jason Hable vertreten. Mit dem allgegenwärtigen Corey Bridges von Multiverse hat der sonst allgegenwärtige Raph Koster einen ebenbürtigen Mitspieler.

Überhaupt gibt es immer mehr virtuelle Welten, die sich in Webseiten einbetten lassen. Die meisten davon machen eine "anständige" Architektur, und nur "zuerst mal" einen Flash Client weil Einbetten in Webseiten, Blogs und Social Network Homepages gerade so cool ist, siehe Areae, Multiverse, Ogoglio, Media Machines. Daneben gibt es natürlich die für Flash gemachten Welten: Habbo, Barbie Girls, aber auch Freggers, DinoKids, MyMiniLife, SceneCaster und viele viele andere.

Sehr cool: xtra-normal, ein scriptbarer Movie-Generator.

CCP's Chance

CCP is working on a secret project. It is assumed that they work on a new MMOG based on the World of Darkness IP. But maybe they will surprise us. The EVE ambulation project may be their way to get experience with avatar/first person technologies. CCP claims that they want to provide for more socializing but that there are no plans for more. I agree that avatars will give more socializing and might even attract gamers with other mindsets (read: women) but I doubt, that CCP has no plans beyond walking on stations.

Here comes what I wish they had in mind:

The new MMOG could be a science fiction life simulation with strong role play and melee combat elements. A kind of future Sims with RPG. If you want to reach the mainstream, then you need more socializing. People must be able to meet in person and not just as small squares on the black space background. In other words: you need avatars which people can style and a home where people can visit each other, maybe even player housing. Call it World of EVE.

The normal game life would happen in a hyper developed privileged world, surrounded by technology and lifestyle with current western and asian street trends. Starting in this futuristic environment players would adventure in the "upper world", uncover conspiracies and safe the world (see The Longest Journey). They could easily switch to cyberspace (Otherland) for parts of the quests. And where there is light, there is also shadow. The underworld of the distant future is big, dark and old. It is a perfect environment for a World of Darkness where technology meets arcane arts and monsters. Vampires? no problem: a product of criminal bio engineering or uncontrolled nanotech. Or they just developed over thousands of years in kilometres deep dungeons of a planetary megalopolis.

Of course adventures in both worlds will have combat with the full range of skills, guns, quests, shooting, nano/bio weapons, field effect, casting, regeneration, healing, vicious enemies, robots, cyberspace hacking, monsters, all you need for Anarchy Online on speed. And here we meet the old dream of EVE-Online players: melee combat in stations, not just walking (ambulation), but also fighting in hallways, conquering stations, using ground troops to throw pilots out of their (not so safe anymore) bunks, capturing command centres and infrastructure and solving quests in abandoned parts of old stations to safe the world (station). And ... what EVE-Online players do not dare to dream: landing on planets to enter a hyper developed living and adventure world.

This would be the perfect combination for CCP: a triplet of socializing/lifestyle with melee combat and seamless integration with EVE-Online. It would make EVE-Online more attractive for the mainstream and create a new world which might even sweep away SecondLife, but still leave enough room for a dark side.

MMORPG, MOG, MMOG?

Heissen virtuelle Game-Welten eigentlich MMORPG, MMOG, oder MOG? Traditionell sind es MMORPG "Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game". Aber die 6 Buchstaben sind ziemlich unhandlich. Deshalb geht der Trend zu den beiden kürzeren Bezeichnungen.

Es immer mehr virtuelle Game-Welten in dem der Rollenspiel-Charakter schwach ist. RP im engeren Sinn ist aus dem Mainstream verschwunden. RP heisst heute Leveln, Questen, Raiden. Die Buchstaben RP verschwinden langsam aus dem Sprachgebrauch. Bleibt MMOG. Doppel M: "Massive Multiplayer". Gibt es auch Multiplayer-Games ohne Massive? Antwort: Ja, aber immer weniger. Viele Einzelspieler-Games hatten auch einen Online Modus in dem man mit anderen spielen konnte, meistens kleine Gruppen. Also Online=Multiuser-Online, weil Singleuser-Online wenig sinnvoll ist. Wenn Online schon multiuser impliziert kann man ein M weglassen und das einzige M in "MOG" bezeichnet den Massive-Character.

Ich vermute sogar, dass später sogar das "Online" in Gefahr gerät, weil 1. M immer O impliziert und 2. die meisten Spiele Online sein werden, manche zusätzlich mit einem Offline-Modus.

Es gibt sogar Leute, die behaupten, dass Singleplayer Games ein temporärer Irrweg waren, der nur durch fehlende Onlineverbindung enstanden ist. Im RL sind Games fast immer Multiplayer, von Solitaire mal abgesehen. Aber von Brettspiel bis Sportspiel gibt es im RL immer mehrere Spieler. Vielleicht sind Computerspiele bald wieder Synonyme für MMOG, weil immer online und selbstverständlich mit mehrern Spielern. Dann heisst es einfach nur noch "Spiel" oder "Welt". Spiele im RL sind dann ein bisschen retro und heissen "Brettspiel" so wie es "Pen and Paper" RPGs schon jetzt ergangen ist.

_happy_coding()

EVE Online at its best