Artica
Imperial Kitten
Long before the recent Vanguard scandal, f13.net sat down with Raph Koster to chat about a wide variety of topics relating, at least tangentially, to the gaming industry. Earlier this week, we released the first installment in a short series of transcripts from the resulting brain-dump.
Today, instead of beating a dead horse, we bring you Part Deux, including some of Raph's thoughts on journalism, the handling of scandals from both press and industry points of view, the future direction of MMOs, and the relevance of independent and Korean games to the market.
f13.net: So, on that same kind of track, have you been following the Kotaku debacle in the past few days?
Raph: Heh, yeah.
f13.net: I wanted to get your reaction and, you know, see what your thoughts on the relationship between independent press and development houses. Particularly ones, at the moment, like yours, that is currently very concerned with what it releases and what you don't...
Raph: Was it you that just editorialized that they weren't actually press?
f13.net: That would be Schild, I believe...
Raph: Yeah, Schild editorialized... There's kind of an interesting line there, I don't know if... I mean...
f13.net: Is what I do press? I mean, I'm sitting here with you, with a recorder...
Raph: Well, you're the one with the money hat. (laughs) It's kind of a weird thing, right? You look at that and you go... That ecology is always weird, right, so one part of me wants to say, "Tough shit, it's out of there." And, you know, it's pointless to get pissed off at press people for doing what they do, right?
f13.net: Finding out stories and leaking them?
Raph: Finding out stories and... well, not leaking them, you know, reporting them, right? And I say this as somebody that Kotaku personally burned really badly last year! Kotaku leaked that I was leaving SOE, and frankly, that was a massive pain in the ass and hurt a whole bunch of people, badly! I was pretty damn pissed and really annoyed and frustrated, but I also go, "Well, that's what they do..." Right? So it's a weird tension...
f13.net: And they're kind of a tabloid...
Raph: Well, you could argue that pretty much all the blogging sites are kinda tabloids. Right? There's no... They don't go through the kind of training in journalistic ethics, whatever that may be these days, but... Professional journalists take that really seriously, and random blogger dude doesn't, necessarily. So they're kind of a weird thing there. I'm watching all the people breaking the Kaneva NDA, all the people who broke the Lord of the Rings NDA, or whatever, it just comes out, right?
f13.net: Does that make you more cautious, less likely to talk to smaller sites?
Raph: Err, well, more cautious in terms of going off-the-record with them. Because, you know, a professional journalist who breaks the on-the-record thing, that gets out...
f13.net: He's lost his job.
Raph: He's loses his job and possibly his career! A blogger? No! He's not going to lose anything! So, you gotta be...
f13.net: They'll shuffle some guys around, maybe get a new front page man, but, even then, it's not likely.
Raph: Yeah, but on the other hand, with the smaller sites, you can develop more of a relationship, where it's like, "Well, I know where you live..." But it's more of a personal relationship, where...
f13.net: It's more of a trust...
Raph: A trust relationship develops. Yeah, I have a trouble seeing the F13s or the Stratics or most of those out-of-the-fandom kind of communities. They get trusted with lots of secrets, all the time, actually, and they don't come out...!
f13.net: Well, we actually have developers posting on our boards, which is very unusual...
Raph: Yeah, there's a trust thing that's developed there over the years. And I think that's a good thing, but I think you still have to be careful. If it's a big enough story, anybody could be tempted... So yeah, it's a tricky line to walk.
f13.net: Now, on the other side of that same fence, we have CCP. Have you watched CCP's latest debacle? With the developers playing and cheating?
Raph: Yeah, I watched it, it's like "here we go again".
f13.net: What do you mean, "here we go again"?
Raph: This has happened before!
f13.net: On the same scale? In the same way? And in what games?
Raph: Yeah, on the same scale in the same way! Do I have to muckrake ten year old history? Does no one remember GM Darwin?
f13.net: Well, I don't, personally...
Raph: You don't remember GM Darwin. You have some Googling to do. Yeah, there's been plenty of cases historically of admin abuse, even for financial gain. And usually the companies want to deal with it very quietly, right, because nobody wants to admit it...
f13.net: No-one wants to drag each other's reputations through the mud.
Raph: The company, from a liability point of view, can't! They run the risk of being sued. So the company's always... there's no good reason for the company to want it out there, right? Selfishly, on many different angles. I think that there is a level of responsibility to the public to come clean and say "Hey, this won't happen again." But they really can't delve into what happened, exactly!
f13.net: Even if the public is screaming and wants that, they really can't do it, legally...
Raph: They REALLY can't do it, legally. It's a tricky line. They can't tell you... it's the same thing, they can't tell you why somebody left the company. There's all kinds of things companies can't do. So, you know, I feel for the CCP guys because I'm sure they never intended for it to happen, I'm sure as soon as it did happen, they moved on it, but they're between a rock and a hard place.
f13.net: They're in a particular situation because they have a relatively zero-sum PVP game. If someone gives someone else the best armor in WoW, it doesn't affect your play, in general...
Raph: I'm not sure, in terms of the public perception, that even matters. The players still feel screwed over, zero-sum or not. So... (shrugs)
f13.net: So, with Second Life, we've been seeing a lot more social relevance. A lot more press, a lot more high-profile activity taking place. Take the Edwards campaign, for example.
Raph: They were on the Today show last week.
f13.net: At the same time, we're seeing more invasions, more vandalism. And it doesn't seem that Linden Labs is increasing their security...
Raph: I don't know if we're actually seeing more. It might just be more high-profile. You'd have to ask them, I think certainly more stuff gets publicly reported. You know, the sex and the furries and the ageplay and all that have always been there, it's just now getting pushed into the limelight because of the kinds of attention Second Life is getting. So I don't know if there's necessarily more.
f13.net: Well, you have SomethingAwful penis monsters attacking real estate tycoons...
Raph: One of the first things that happened in UO was that somebody took fish and spelled "FUCK" on the bridge. I mean, come on. That stuff has always been there, it's just how publicly visible it was.
f13.net: So, cook a man a fish, he'll eat for a night, give a man a fish, he'll spell "FUCK" on your bridge.
Raph: (chuckling) Yeah, pretty much. It's just a question of visibility.
f13.net: So, you're also looking for a very community-oriented MMO, er, game or experience...
Raph: He tries to slip one past!
f13.net: Game or experience, sorry! I have to pick my words carefully. Are you looking at these sorts of security problems? Are you using any sort of non-technical approaches to try to prevent people from doing these sorts of things? Reputation systems...
Raph: Well, yeah, you can extrapolate a lot of that from the stuff I've done before, so I guess I'm not spilling beans to say "sure, of course". I mean, also, because of the fact that we keep saying Web 2.0, reputation systems and rankings and ratings are one of the core pieces of Web 2.0. So, it's unsurprising that I'm going to be paying attention to user content. But if you look at the kinds of user content that I've always done, it's a different kind of mode from Second Life, and, um...
f13.net: Well, you've gone for a lot of user customizability as opposed to full-on genesis, full user creation.
Raph: Well, yeah, I've always... even if you go back through old GDC sessions. There was the one with the big inflammatory statement where I told the movie guy "Get over yourself, the rest of the world is coming!" But part of that was saying that the rest of the world is coming, but they'll be working with Legos instead of with atoms. So, you can extrapolate from there. Nothing there is something new that I'm saying, I've been saying similar things for a while.
f13.net: So, what other things you're looking at while you're here at GDC, that you're excited about?
Raph: Gosh, it's all meetings... (laughs) So many of the sessions I want to go to I can't, it's very frustrating. I want to go to Nicole Lazarro's session on her new research, because I'm really interested in her research on... She examines, watches people as they play, figures out what emotions they're having and what in the game triggered them. That's really cool stuff. This is gonna sound all so dry and academic... I'm interested in going to the top ten lessons from academics. Because last year, it was a great session. I really want to go to a bunch of the MMO talks. Damion's running his "Beyond Men in Tights", his "Men in Tights" talk was fantastic, so I really want to hear how he... He ended it on this note of wistfulness, "here's why all this stuff works and we're gonna keep making it... there must be more though!" So, I'm really curious... I don't know if I'll get to go to any of them. There's a lot of the indie MMO guys. Daniel James is going to be talking about MetaSOY...
f13.net: MetaSOY?
Raph: Yeah, I'm really curious about it. They're revealing everything... Their cowboys, pirates and ninjas session. I'm really curious to see what happens with that, but it's opposite a talk of mine, so I can't go. He and Matt Mihaly are doing that microcurrencies and whatever stuff they've learned... I don't think a lot of people have been paying attention how well doubloons has gone for Puzzle Pirates. It appears to have gone REALLY well.
f13.net: Well, they're still in business, they can't be doing terribly...
Raph: Not just still in business, still in business and making more titles, which means they must have done pretty well. And of course, Matt's been doing it for a long time and is now gearing up with Earth Eternal, which looks really cute...
f13.net: Everything he does is kinda small and on the side and out of the mainstream, he's still focused on the text world.
Raph: Yeah, he is, but you know, his games are really good. Those are really good games, and I'm a lot less interested in the direct mainstream of the MMOs right now.
f13.net: Well, the mainstream is still swords, sorcery and hitting things in the head for points.
Raph: Yeah, and I'm kinda done with that... well, I shouldn't say I'm done with it, I still think it's an important piece, but it just can't be all there is...
f13.net: That is what's attracting a lot of the investment right now. Do you see that as a problem?
Raph: The investment's kinda split, actually. Half the money seems to be going towards, "Hey, let's beat WoW!" And the other half is seems to be saying, "Let's beat anything but WoW, because that's what... Too much money is going into beating WoW." So there's kind of two splits... And some people say some is the dumb and some is the smart money, but I don't think it's quite that simple.
f13.net: A lot of the high-profile developers, the Biowares, the non-Blizzard large names. They're all starting to build their own MMOs, and they all seem to be designing on the WoW side...
Raph: Well, that's true, but we're also seeing Red 5 and Trion and those kinds of guys. That's one strain and they've gotten tens of millions of dollars. Whatever Romero's doing, there's all this stuff going on that side. And the money coming in from the media companies, there's a lot of it! I like to make the point that the company that has shipped the most MMOs in the last six months isn't NCSoft, it's Viacom.
f13.net: They've done a lot of little, online web stuff, haven't they?
Raph: It's not little! Nicktropolis is a full-blown MMO, Virtual Laguna Beach is a full-blown MMO, The Hills is another full-blown MMO. They've shipped three in six months, and it's like, "whoa!"
f13.net: How successful are those? Persistance-wise, as opposed to just when the headline hits.
Raph: I have no idea how most of them have done, but Virtual Laguna Beach is apparently pretty popular, they've got hundred of thousands, according to the articles I've read. There was a Wired article not that long ago. So, keeping an eye on these guys is important. Honestly, I'm a little worried that the mainstream game industry has missed the boat.
f13.net: Well, you gave a talk about that at AGC.
Raph: Yeah, I think that the center of gravity of where MMOs are happenin', I don't think it is WoW. I think that the happenin' spot any more, I think the happenin' spot is elsewhere and I think it's below the radar of everybody else. I just keep seeing more... You ever heard about Webkinz? Webkinz sells plush toys. Each one comes with a dogtag with a code on it. You go to their website and you punch in the code, you land in this MMO where you have that plush toy as a virtual pet.
f13.net: As an avatar, or as a pet?
Raph: As a pet. And it's... Essentially, the cost of the plush toy is your year-long sub. And they have a couple million uniques in December alone. And it's like... "Whoa, this is bigger than WoW is", in the West. I think you have to keep making this territorial comparison. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute. I look at the Habbos, the Puzzle Pirates, the Webkinz, the Runescapes, the Gaias, the... all of these things. I'm going, holy crap, is anybody noticing that all of the most popular MMOs are actually over here? It's weird...
f13.net: If you look at them, they're not hardcore, 6-hour-a-day experiences. They're things you can log on to from work or from school...
Raph: Yeah, they're not, they're not. I constantly get people posting on the blog, going "I'm a little worried you're going to abandon us gamers". There have been a lot of threads about how we're ignoring the gamer and stuff. And that's not actually true, I'll say that much on the record, okay! IT'S NOT TRUE! (chuckles) But, I can see why people say it, because we are paying a lot of attention to these models, and I think it's, in part, because those things are as important, if not more important, to what happens in the next five years than WoW is.
f13.net: What do you think the core gamer demographic sees... sees the play it's learned to like, maybe, learned to love... and see it threatened by something new and different?
Raph: Frankly, it's like being a wargaming fan, or something...
f13.net: In the 1980s?
Raph: Yeah, it's like, hey, we're the #1 genre. Nobody would predict that, five years later, they'd be off the radar entirely. And I dunno if it'll be off the radar entirely, but I do think that elves in tights is kinda nichey in the real world, even if it isn't in our world right now. And it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens there, really really interesting. And so many of the things that go with that, the high production values, the hardcore mechanics, the 200-person teams, none of that flies with the mass market at all. At all. And I think what we're going to see is more population in that stuff. Have you looked at Xfire? Xfire publishes a whole bunch of stats...
f13.net: No, I haven't...
Raph: You should go check out Xfire's site, because they publish top ten games played by hours. And in their MMO category, you will be blown awaaaaaay.
f13.net: I know I've seen the Xfire banners around, but... what are the top three?
Raph: Well, so, the thing is, the number one is WoW. But rounding out the top ten: Silk Road Online, RF Online, Flyff?!
f13.net: I would not have guessed that.. Is it primarily Western-facing? Because I would never have guessed that RF Online was that big in the West...
Raph: But, you know, Eve is on the list, Galaxies was on the list.
f13.net: Most of the triple-A titles are on the list, somewhere?
Raph: No, not in the top ten, no. There's only a couple of triple-A titles, the rest are mostly Korean games.
f13.net: That says a lot for the silent penetration of Korean games to US shores.
Raph: I don't think it's that silent. I think that the Korean games have penetrated to an enormous degree, and most of the West just isn't paying attention. It's the Western press and also the Western hardcore gaming community. I think that if you go around and start asking fifteen-year-olds, they'll all list Korean games. My kids are nine and ten, and they're in the Cub Scouts, my son is in the Cub Scouts, and one of the things they had to do was visit somebody's workplace. They visited my workplace...
f13.net: (chuckling) That had to be a fun experience for a kid.
Raph: Yeah, although we don't have much to show off, honestly, being a new, small office. And the first thing they asked was "Did you make LEGO Star Wars?" They saw the Star Wars Galaxies poster and they're like, "Did you make LEGO Star Wars?" And I said, no, sorry, we're making a different sort of game, we're doing a lot of stuff with the Web and stuff like that. And he said "Oh, do you make games for...?" And he started rattling off portals. This is a NINE-YEAR-OLD, and he was rattling off, "Oh, do you make games for Gametunnel?" Do you make games for this, do you make games for that?
f13.net: A nine-year-old knows about Gametunnel?
Raph: Yeah, rattling 'em all off. It's like, oh, holy shit, they're way more connected than any of us really expected. That's how Runescape spread, right? And I think what we're seeing, actually, is that these kids play the Flyffs, the Silk Roads, the whatever, because they can't afford to play WoW. Until the day that they graduate to WoW, I think there's a lot of that going on.
f13.net: We get 'em young.
Raph: Yeah, I think that the penetration of those free games... Do a search sometime for free online game or free multiplayer game, and you're gonna find these portals... There's these portals that do nothing but index the Korean games and rate them. And there's hundreds of them, they're all tabulated, and there's tens of thousands of ratings on them. So, somebody's out there playing them, and the people who read F13 aren't it!
f13.net: Of course not. I mean, the Western press, the Western hardcore gamer, it's very hard to separate those two things. The Western press primarily caters to the Western hardcore gamer, and the Western hardcore gamer primarily gets his news from the Western press. It's this incestuous little whirlpool.
Raph: Yeah. I think there's a whole bunch of people playing a whole bunch of games that we pay no attention to. And I think that it's hard for us to break out of that model and that narrow perspective... That's not a dis on the hardcore games and the hardcore gamers, it's just a recognition that, look... It's like looking at television and thinking that Heroes and Lost are the only things on TV, and forgetting that there's a whole freakin' golf channel.
f13.net: And that golf channel has quite an audience...
Raph: Quite a lot of people, right? I think it's important to see the overall perspective. I think even G4's core demographic likes venturing over to watch Law & Order or the History Channel sometimes. Or whatever. I think it's worth it to know that more is going on, because I think there's things we can learn from those other worlds, those other channels.
f13.net: Particularly the free client part seems to drastically increase a game's popularity.
Raph: It does. It certainly drives trials, anyway, if not net popularity. It's true, part of that is packaged-box companies are just not set up to think that way. They still derive huge amounts of revenue off the box sales. The amount of revenue derived off the boxes right now is actually really big. It's a significant amount of money.
f13.net: At least on the triple-A titles, not the medium-size, digital-only titles?
Raph: Yeah, you're making the gamble that bypassing retail will actually increase your reach. And that's not necessarily true, because a lot of people don't have the marketing and distribution muscle to make up for the lack of retail presence. Some people do though.
f13.net: Or you go by word of mouth and hope you snag a fifteen-year-old who gets his entire school addicted to it.
Raph: Yeah, but that's very tricky too. Often very hit and miss. Very hit and miss...
Source
Today, instead of beating a dead horse, we bring you Part Deux, including some of Raph's thoughts on journalism, the handling of scandals from both press and industry points of view, the future direction of MMOs, and the relevance of independent and Korean games to the market.
f13.net: So, on that same kind of track, have you been following the Kotaku debacle in the past few days?
Raph: Heh, yeah.
f13.net: I wanted to get your reaction and, you know, see what your thoughts on the relationship between independent press and development houses. Particularly ones, at the moment, like yours, that is currently very concerned with what it releases and what you don't...
Raph: Was it you that just editorialized that they weren't actually press?
f13.net: That would be Schild, I believe...
Raph: Yeah, Schild editorialized... There's kind of an interesting line there, I don't know if... I mean...
f13.net: Is what I do press? I mean, I'm sitting here with you, with a recorder...
Raph: Well, you're the one with the money hat. (laughs) It's kind of a weird thing, right? You look at that and you go... That ecology is always weird, right, so one part of me wants to say, "Tough shit, it's out of there." And, you know, it's pointless to get pissed off at press people for doing what they do, right?
f13.net: Finding out stories and leaking them?
Raph: Finding out stories and... well, not leaking them, you know, reporting them, right? And I say this as somebody that Kotaku personally burned really badly last year! Kotaku leaked that I was leaving SOE, and frankly, that was a massive pain in the ass and hurt a whole bunch of people, badly! I was pretty damn pissed and really annoyed and frustrated, but I also go, "Well, that's what they do..." Right? So it's a weird tension...
f13.net: And they're kind of a tabloid...
Raph: Well, you could argue that pretty much all the blogging sites are kinda tabloids. Right? There's no... They don't go through the kind of training in journalistic ethics, whatever that may be these days, but... Professional journalists take that really seriously, and random blogger dude doesn't, necessarily. So they're kind of a weird thing there. I'm watching all the people breaking the Kaneva NDA, all the people who broke the Lord of the Rings NDA, or whatever, it just comes out, right?
f13.net: Does that make you more cautious, less likely to talk to smaller sites?
Raph: Err, well, more cautious in terms of going off-the-record with them. Because, you know, a professional journalist who breaks the on-the-record thing, that gets out...
f13.net: He's lost his job.
Raph: He's loses his job and possibly his career! A blogger? No! He's not going to lose anything! So, you gotta be...
f13.net: They'll shuffle some guys around, maybe get a new front page man, but, even then, it's not likely.
Raph: Yeah, but on the other hand, with the smaller sites, you can develop more of a relationship, where it's like, "Well, I know where you live..." But it's more of a personal relationship, where...
f13.net: It's more of a trust...
Raph: A trust relationship develops. Yeah, I have a trouble seeing the F13s or the Stratics or most of those out-of-the-fandom kind of communities. They get trusted with lots of secrets, all the time, actually, and they don't come out...!
f13.net: Well, we actually have developers posting on our boards, which is very unusual...
Raph: Yeah, there's a trust thing that's developed there over the years. And I think that's a good thing, but I think you still have to be careful. If it's a big enough story, anybody could be tempted... So yeah, it's a tricky line to walk.
f13.net: Now, on the other side of that same fence, we have CCP. Have you watched CCP's latest debacle? With the developers playing and cheating?
Raph: Yeah, I watched it, it's like "here we go again".
f13.net: What do you mean, "here we go again"?
Raph: This has happened before!
f13.net: On the same scale? In the same way? And in what games?
Raph: Yeah, on the same scale in the same way! Do I have to muckrake ten year old history? Does no one remember GM Darwin?
f13.net: Well, I don't, personally...
Raph: You don't remember GM Darwin. You have some Googling to do. Yeah, there's been plenty of cases historically of admin abuse, even for financial gain. And usually the companies want to deal with it very quietly, right, because nobody wants to admit it...
f13.net: No-one wants to drag each other's reputations through the mud.
Raph: The company, from a liability point of view, can't! They run the risk of being sued. So the company's always... there's no good reason for the company to want it out there, right? Selfishly, on many different angles. I think that there is a level of responsibility to the public to come clean and say "Hey, this won't happen again." But they really can't delve into what happened, exactly!
f13.net: Even if the public is screaming and wants that, they really can't do it, legally...
Raph: They REALLY can't do it, legally. It's a tricky line. They can't tell you... it's the same thing, they can't tell you why somebody left the company. There's all kinds of things companies can't do. So, you know, I feel for the CCP guys because I'm sure they never intended for it to happen, I'm sure as soon as it did happen, they moved on it, but they're between a rock and a hard place.
f13.net: They're in a particular situation because they have a relatively zero-sum PVP game. If someone gives someone else the best armor in WoW, it doesn't affect your play, in general...
Raph: I'm not sure, in terms of the public perception, that even matters. The players still feel screwed over, zero-sum or not. So... (shrugs)
f13.net: So, with Second Life, we've been seeing a lot more social relevance. A lot more press, a lot more high-profile activity taking place. Take the Edwards campaign, for example.
Raph: They were on the Today show last week.
f13.net: At the same time, we're seeing more invasions, more vandalism. And it doesn't seem that Linden Labs is increasing their security...
Raph: I don't know if we're actually seeing more. It might just be more high-profile. You'd have to ask them, I think certainly more stuff gets publicly reported. You know, the sex and the furries and the ageplay and all that have always been there, it's just now getting pushed into the limelight because of the kinds of attention Second Life is getting. So I don't know if there's necessarily more.
f13.net: Well, you have SomethingAwful penis monsters attacking real estate tycoons...
Raph: One of the first things that happened in UO was that somebody took fish and spelled "FUCK" on the bridge. I mean, come on. That stuff has always been there, it's just how publicly visible it was.
f13.net: So, cook a man a fish, he'll eat for a night, give a man a fish, he'll spell "FUCK" on your bridge.
Raph: (chuckling) Yeah, pretty much. It's just a question of visibility.
f13.net: So, you're also looking for a very community-oriented MMO, er, game or experience...
Raph: He tries to slip one past!
f13.net: Game or experience, sorry! I have to pick my words carefully. Are you looking at these sorts of security problems? Are you using any sort of non-technical approaches to try to prevent people from doing these sorts of things? Reputation systems...
Raph: Well, yeah, you can extrapolate a lot of that from the stuff I've done before, so I guess I'm not spilling beans to say "sure, of course". I mean, also, because of the fact that we keep saying Web 2.0, reputation systems and rankings and ratings are one of the core pieces of Web 2.0. So, it's unsurprising that I'm going to be paying attention to user content. But if you look at the kinds of user content that I've always done, it's a different kind of mode from Second Life, and, um...
f13.net: Well, you've gone for a lot of user customizability as opposed to full-on genesis, full user creation.
Raph: Well, yeah, I've always... even if you go back through old GDC sessions. There was the one with the big inflammatory statement where I told the movie guy "Get over yourself, the rest of the world is coming!" But part of that was saying that the rest of the world is coming, but they'll be working with Legos instead of with atoms. So, you can extrapolate from there. Nothing there is something new that I'm saying, I've been saying similar things for a while.
f13.net: So, what other things you're looking at while you're here at GDC, that you're excited about?
Raph: Gosh, it's all meetings... (laughs) So many of the sessions I want to go to I can't, it's very frustrating. I want to go to Nicole Lazarro's session on her new research, because I'm really interested in her research on... She examines, watches people as they play, figures out what emotions they're having and what in the game triggered them. That's really cool stuff. This is gonna sound all so dry and academic... I'm interested in going to the top ten lessons from academics. Because last year, it was a great session. I really want to go to a bunch of the MMO talks. Damion's running his "Beyond Men in Tights", his "Men in Tights" talk was fantastic, so I really want to hear how he... He ended it on this note of wistfulness, "here's why all this stuff works and we're gonna keep making it... there must be more though!" So, I'm really curious... I don't know if I'll get to go to any of them. There's a lot of the indie MMO guys. Daniel James is going to be talking about MetaSOY...
f13.net: MetaSOY?
Raph: Yeah, I'm really curious about it. They're revealing everything... Their cowboys, pirates and ninjas session. I'm really curious to see what happens with that, but it's opposite a talk of mine, so I can't go. He and Matt Mihaly are doing that microcurrencies and whatever stuff they've learned... I don't think a lot of people have been paying attention how well doubloons has gone for Puzzle Pirates. It appears to have gone REALLY well.
f13.net: Well, they're still in business, they can't be doing terribly...
Raph: Not just still in business, still in business and making more titles, which means they must have done pretty well. And of course, Matt's been doing it for a long time and is now gearing up with Earth Eternal, which looks really cute...
f13.net: Everything he does is kinda small and on the side and out of the mainstream, he's still focused on the text world.
Raph: Yeah, he is, but you know, his games are really good. Those are really good games, and I'm a lot less interested in the direct mainstream of the MMOs right now.
f13.net: Well, the mainstream is still swords, sorcery and hitting things in the head for points.
Raph: Yeah, and I'm kinda done with that... well, I shouldn't say I'm done with it, I still think it's an important piece, but it just can't be all there is...
f13.net: That is what's attracting a lot of the investment right now. Do you see that as a problem?
Raph: The investment's kinda split, actually. Half the money seems to be going towards, "Hey, let's beat WoW!" And the other half is seems to be saying, "Let's beat anything but WoW, because that's what... Too much money is going into beating WoW." So there's kind of two splits... And some people say some is the dumb and some is the smart money, but I don't think it's quite that simple.
f13.net: A lot of the high-profile developers, the Biowares, the non-Blizzard large names. They're all starting to build their own MMOs, and they all seem to be designing on the WoW side...
Raph: Well, that's true, but we're also seeing Red 5 and Trion and those kinds of guys. That's one strain and they've gotten tens of millions of dollars. Whatever Romero's doing, there's all this stuff going on that side. And the money coming in from the media companies, there's a lot of it! I like to make the point that the company that has shipped the most MMOs in the last six months isn't NCSoft, it's Viacom.
f13.net: They've done a lot of little, online web stuff, haven't they?
Raph: It's not little! Nicktropolis is a full-blown MMO, Virtual Laguna Beach is a full-blown MMO, The Hills is another full-blown MMO. They've shipped three in six months, and it's like, "whoa!"
f13.net: How successful are those? Persistance-wise, as opposed to just when the headline hits.
Raph: I have no idea how most of them have done, but Virtual Laguna Beach is apparently pretty popular, they've got hundred of thousands, according to the articles I've read. There was a Wired article not that long ago. So, keeping an eye on these guys is important. Honestly, I'm a little worried that the mainstream game industry has missed the boat.
f13.net: Well, you gave a talk about that at AGC.
Raph: Yeah, I think that the center of gravity of where MMOs are happenin', I don't think it is WoW. I think that the happenin' spot any more, I think the happenin' spot is elsewhere and I think it's below the radar of everybody else. I just keep seeing more... You ever heard about Webkinz? Webkinz sells plush toys. Each one comes with a dogtag with a code on it. You go to their website and you punch in the code, you land in this MMO where you have that plush toy as a virtual pet.
f13.net: As an avatar, or as a pet?
Raph: As a pet. And it's... Essentially, the cost of the plush toy is your year-long sub. And they have a couple million uniques in December alone. And it's like... "Whoa, this is bigger than WoW is", in the West. I think you have to keep making this territorial comparison. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute. I look at the Habbos, the Puzzle Pirates, the Webkinz, the Runescapes, the Gaias, the... all of these things. I'm going, holy crap, is anybody noticing that all of the most popular MMOs are actually over here? It's weird...
f13.net: If you look at them, they're not hardcore, 6-hour-a-day experiences. They're things you can log on to from work or from school...
Raph: Yeah, they're not, they're not. I constantly get people posting on the blog, going "I'm a little worried you're going to abandon us gamers". There have been a lot of threads about how we're ignoring the gamer and stuff. And that's not actually true, I'll say that much on the record, okay! IT'S NOT TRUE! (chuckles) But, I can see why people say it, because we are paying a lot of attention to these models, and I think it's, in part, because those things are as important, if not more important, to what happens in the next five years than WoW is.
f13.net: What do you think the core gamer demographic sees... sees the play it's learned to like, maybe, learned to love... and see it threatened by something new and different?
Raph: Frankly, it's like being a wargaming fan, or something...
f13.net: In the 1980s?
Raph: Yeah, it's like, hey, we're the #1 genre. Nobody would predict that, five years later, they'd be off the radar entirely. And I dunno if it'll be off the radar entirely, but I do think that elves in tights is kinda nichey in the real world, even if it isn't in our world right now. And it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens there, really really interesting. And so many of the things that go with that, the high production values, the hardcore mechanics, the 200-person teams, none of that flies with the mass market at all. At all. And I think what we're going to see is more population in that stuff. Have you looked at Xfire? Xfire publishes a whole bunch of stats...
f13.net: No, I haven't...
Raph: You should go check out Xfire's site, because they publish top ten games played by hours. And in their MMO category, you will be blown awaaaaaay.
f13.net: I know I've seen the Xfire banners around, but... what are the top three?
Raph: Well, so, the thing is, the number one is WoW. But rounding out the top ten: Silk Road Online, RF Online, Flyff?!
f13.net: I would not have guessed that.. Is it primarily Western-facing? Because I would never have guessed that RF Online was that big in the West...
Raph: But, you know, Eve is on the list, Galaxies was on the list.
f13.net: Most of the triple-A titles are on the list, somewhere?
Raph: No, not in the top ten, no. There's only a couple of triple-A titles, the rest are mostly Korean games.
f13.net: That says a lot for the silent penetration of Korean games to US shores.
Raph: I don't think it's that silent. I think that the Korean games have penetrated to an enormous degree, and most of the West just isn't paying attention. It's the Western press and also the Western hardcore gaming community. I think that if you go around and start asking fifteen-year-olds, they'll all list Korean games. My kids are nine and ten, and they're in the Cub Scouts, my son is in the Cub Scouts, and one of the things they had to do was visit somebody's workplace. They visited my workplace...
f13.net: (chuckling) That had to be a fun experience for a kid.
Raph: Yeah, although we don't have much to show off, honestly, being a new, small office. And the first thing they asked was "Did you make LEGO Star Wars?" They saw the Star Wars Galaxies poster and they're like, "Did you make LEGO Star Wars?" And I said, no, sorry, we're making a different sort of game, we're doing a lot of stuff with the Web and stuff like that. And he said "Oh, do you make games for...?" And he started rattling off portals. This is a NINE-YEAR-OLD, and he was rattling off, "Oh, do you make games for Gametunnel?" Do you make games for this, do you make games for that?
f13.net: A nine-year-old knows about Gametunnel?
Raph: Yeah, rattling 'em all off. It's like, oh, holy shit, they're way more connected than any of us really expected. That's how Runescape spread, right? And I think what we're seeing, actually, is that these kids play the Flyffs, the Silk Roads, the whatever, because they can't afford to play WoW. Until the day that they graduate to WoW, I think there's a lot of that going on.
f13.net: We get 'em young.
Raph: Yeah, I think that the penetration of those free games... Do a search sometime for free online game or free multiplayer game, and you're gonna find these portals... There's these portals that do nothing but index the Korean games and rate them. And there's hundreds of them, they're all tabulated, and there's tens of thousands of ratings on them. So, somebody's out there playing them, and the people who read F13 aren't it!
f13.net: Of course not. I mean, the Western press, the Western hardcore gamer, it's very hard to separate those two things. The Western press primarily caters to the Western hardcore gamer, and the Western hardcore gamer primarily gets his news from the Western press. It's this incestuous little whirlpool.
Raph: Yeah. I think there's a whole bunch of people playing a whole bunch of games that we pay no attention to. And I think that it's hard for us to break out of that model and that narrow perspective... That's not a dis on the hardcore games and the hardcore gamers, it's just a recognition that, look... It's like looking at television and thinking that Heroes and Lost are the only things on TV, and forgetting that there's a whole freakin' golf channel.
f13.net: And that golf channel has quite an audience...
Raph: Quite a lot of people, right? I think it's important to see the overall perspective. I think even G4's core demographic likes venturing over to watch Law & Order or the History Channel sometimes. Or whatever. I think it's worth it to know that more is going on, because I think there's things we can learn from those other worlds, those other channels.
f13.net: Particularly the free client part seems to drastically increase a game's popularity.
Raph: It does. It certainly drives trials, anyway, if not net popularity. It's true, part of that is packaged-box companies are just not set up to think that way. They still derive huge amounts of revenue off the box sales. The amount of revenue derived off the boxes right now is actually really big. It's a significant amount of money.
f13.net: At least on the triple-A titles, not the medium-size, digital-only titles?
Raph: Yeah, you're making the gamble that bypassing retail will actually increase your reach. And that's not necessarily true, because a lot of people don't have the marketing and distribution muscle to make up for the lack of retail presence. Some people do though.
f13.net: Or you go by word of mouth and hope you snag a fifteen-year-old who gets his entire school addicted to it.
Raph: Yeah, but that's very tricky too. Often very hit and miss. Very hit and miss...
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