Biz News: EA combines Bioware and Mythic, Lightsabres win.

As a business, especially in the tough economic climate we're now in, it was almost an inevitability that after EA's splurge acquisition spree (a tactic, historically, which is almost guaranteed to destroy vast amounts of shareholders wealth in a wide range of business fields) they are now in a consolidation phase.

It's comparable to waking up after a really, really good party where you felt great, were wildly drunk and finding not only do you have a huge hangover, but some of the white elephants you bought while drunk don't look so great in your house now.

What an interesting comment on their website too:

Today we have important news to share with the community. EA
is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that
includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray
Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes
Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other
co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO
studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to
Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.Mark
Jacobs, co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic, will leave EA on June
23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very
best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his
contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.Mythic retains a strong
team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the
development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was
responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all
development, operations and support. Please join us in celebrating the union of
these two award-winning studios.

It could be shorted to; EA made a huge and expensive bet that WAR would be a wow-killer success and paid huge amounts for the company. That bet failed. Now, with Bioware in the ascendancy, ALL OF THE TOP POSITIONS of Mythic are either being culled or the people now report to Bioware.

In other words, though hilariously we should be "celebrating the union" this looks, from a business point of view like a bit of a bloodbath for EA in restructuring, particularly on the Mythic leadership side of the deal. Bluntly, this doesn't look like a "union", it looks like a palace coup followed by executions.

There's a piece, and some very interesting follow on comments, regarding this on the Broken Toy's site here and here at Gamasutra.

What I do find interesting is the accumulation of tid-bits regarding EA from both their financial statments and general analyst reports etc. After their buying frenzy, clearly they are looking to make some of those business units pay off, and placing a lot of pressure on particular "stars" to perform.

For the sake of those people working at Bioware, I hope they do well with SW:TOR then... At the very least they have the incentive of looking at what happens to their EA colleagues at Mythic if they want to see the results of seeing what happens when EA doesn't get the returns it expects.

I'd predict further cullings in the near future too.


The outlook for the business of gaming over at EA looks rather... PvP-esque....

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Marketing Stupidity: Tooled up at the checkout!

OK, It's a bit of fun, and I'm not exactly worked up about this, as I can appreciate the laugh, and hey, if this is Wal-Mart, the semi-automatics are in aisle 17.. This is very American. It's an American only product after all.

We in the UK, on the other hand, are currently having a government sponsored crackdown on knife crime though, and I just have to laugh at the concept of a TV advert showing someone pulling a 3 foot blade on someone else in a supermarket. Yes I appreciate it, and yes, I find it funny and enjoyable, but I think the UK Advertising Standards Board might actually have some kind of aneurysm if that advert was shown in the UK..

"Scores on the doors"

So I've now closed my research survey, with 2,226 participants of which 1,527 fully completed the survey. Since my "dream figure" for reasons of representativeness was around 1,000 completions, to beat that figure by over 50% makes me a delighted researcher.

I now start the interesting process of data clean up then analysis.

I'm actually excited about the prospect of that..... thus clearly there is something wrong with me!

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Premature e-Declaration's

The (possible) decline of WoW has been discussed on a number of places I've seen in my internet travels here and here recently.

However, as I pointed out to Tobold on his blog (and was largely ignored by subsequent posts) Activision Blizzards most recent quarterly filing for the quarter ended 31/3/09 shows a year on year quarterly increase from $275mn in 1st quarter of 2008 to $314mn in 1st quarter of 2009 in their MMORPG revenues.

The computer games market changes fast, right?

Here's an edited version of the top 20 PC game sales in May 2009 in North America.

1. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard Entertainment)
3. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
4. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment)

I'm astonished, I'll be honest, as these are new box sales figures for the month, each one a new North America subscriber. And this for a game which has been out 4 years, and the latest expansion is 8 months old... and still topping the PC game charts.

As a researcher, I like hard data to support conclusions, and I simply can't see, when you put together the latest PC games sales and Blizzard Activision's latest quarterly results, how you can draw a conclusion of "decline".

The product will eventually enter into a decline phase, and I believe that could even be on the immediate horizon (the 2nd slew of upcoming MMO's hopefully having learnt the lessons of the corpses of the 1st slew... Bioware... If they where a racehorse I'd have a solid bet on them right now...) But I can't see it right now.

Indeed though, I'm sure when the declaration that "World of Warcraft is in decline" finally comes true a number of people will point to their posts now (and for some people, their practically constant predictions) and say; I was right.

Hmm. I'm sure, in a similar vein, if I keep saying "the UK recession will end next month", I'll be right... eventually.


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Skills I learnt in WoW

I've had some IBM research into online gaming and leadership knocking around on my hard-drive for a while now, but a chance e-mail from a research colleague made me interested to see if IBM had subsequently done anything with this further.. and LO.. another very interesting report.

It got me thinking, what transferable skills have I learnt in my near 5 years as a WoW player?

Interestingly, given my position at the University and my job, I'm intentionally never sought a position of responsibility in a guild. I've never wanted the problems which go along with it. One of my good friends is a raid leader for a pretty hardcore guild though and certainly he's got his one-to-one skills cut out trying to keep on top of that job.. and I do mean job, as being in charge of a serious guild is a lot of work, and I have no idea why people would seek that stress in whats supposed to be their relaxation.

Hmm, so what have I learnt from WoW?

The best I can come up with is, at the very least, my typing speed is practically demonic now.

Oh well, for 4 year of investment, at least I've something :-)


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An Environment for Consumptive Tribes?

My weekend certainly got me thinking this week about the nature of consumptive tribes and the possibility of intrinsic, culturally specific elements, which create the... for the want of a better word... environment... (that's such a wrong word, but it'll do for now)... which a consumptive tribe needs to go beyond mere customers to a collective of interested, perhaps (at extremes) rabidly devoted (you should see the research paper on Cliff Richard fans I've read.. no joke!).

Certainly an element of critical mass is needed, but there perhaps needs to be more.. An environment (ARG, that word again!) which allows the consumptive tribe to even exist, a social setting, a social framework which is permissive (or indeed supportive) of such things.

And why was I thinking such things? Well, in the middle of a friends Stag-do we detour-ed into something classically British. A Real Ale festival. Yes, I spent a lot of time on Saturday in a huge pavilion tent at a rugby club (Those of you who are British reading this, consider what culturally related things mean that you where expecting me to say.. "..at a rugby club" there...) out in Corbridge drinking flavourful, if somewhat not-as -cold-as-I'd-like-it (Read: warm), beer. Yes, a British man drinking warm beer in a field; I'd become my American friends stereotype.

But looking around that beer tent, it did strike me how much of a real ale drinkers subculture there was. Yes, there was the typical young things necking as much as they could, but all around me that day lots of people who've obviously been to many of these kind of events meeting friends and catching up on conversations.

Maybe my head is far too much into my research at the moment, but a question struck me; why do we have a real ale drinkers consumptive tribe, fans who'll run festivals, plan social events... And not a.... Fosters tribe? Carlsberg tribe? (or indeed, is the Bigg Market in Newcastle just some kind of continuously worshipped shrine to these products?) Why does that product have a consumptive social tribe..... and that one.. doesn't?

It is culture? Certainly many cultures I'm sure have sub-cultures based around one "preserving the old ways" or another, surely we in the UK aren't the only ones with social tribes based around an alcoholic drink (Indeed, last time I was in Germany it seemed a national pastime, my trip to Erfurt included a HUGE beer festival, cold lagers that time though..).

I find it fascinating though at the products which don't get some kind of following, yet are widespread. Harley Davidsons owners have it (indeed, living where I do, I can say from experience, all types of bikes "have it" ) yet soap powder clearly doesn't (Unless I've missed some kind of really specialist site on the Internet.) Little figurines for Warhammer gaming, Real Ale, MMORPG's all these social games, events or products with there consumptive tribes... Why not other ones?

Or, more importantly, maybe the real question should be, how does a marketeer turn a product currently without some kind of a consumptive social tribe, into a product with one? Is there some basic elements which are needed? (A social nature, a setting, a consumption basis would be three off the top of my head).

In an MMO in many ways it's easier, the designers get to play with the very dynamics of their world to create a consumptive drive, they can create a need to work together (Richard Bartle's book Designing Virtual Worlds is actually an excellent read on this very point) but outside of that environment it would seem to get more difficult. A question has to be the, can many of the concepts or lessons of successful tribe builders be transferred to situations beyond virtual worlds.. Or is the environment (Gah! that word again!) so different that we can't transfer much at all to other businesses?


And.......... as you can imagine, after thinking all that for a while, standing around at a beer festival... I went and got another beer to take away the racing thoughts ;-)


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From Subscription to F2P: D&D Online in for Changes

This story's been out for a while now, and commentated on by a number of sites I frequent here and here most notably. But I've been a little busy worrying over my survey so I've lacked the time to really comment on it.

Now D&D Online was always a shock for me. .. I didn't buy it (Shock-horror!)

Along with all my other completely geeky habits I've, since I was 9 and played Red Box, been an RP-er. Indeed, I still play 4th Ed with a regular group of friends on a fortnightly basis.

And I'm really into MMO's....

Shouldn't I be the perfect customer for D&D Online?

No. As it happens, it never really appealed to me. My problem being that WoW always seemed to do online "D&D" very well, and more importantly, the news from both the beta and the reviews didn't so much entice me, and fill me with a cold dread at the prospect of playing that game.

And I do mean Bad with a capitial B reviews. This is a game which got mauled by certain critical reviewers while still in beta and then after release. Now, that isn't usually a huge issue for me. After all, I also tried Age of Conan, which got hammered by the critics from beta and had some kind of "miracle patch" before release. Bad reviews didn't stop me there.

So why not D&D Online?

A swathe of issues I suppose.

1. It's not Bioware. Thats an issue. I trust Bioware to deliver a good D&D game (Baldurs Gate and it's subsequant sequals... oh, how many hours I've lost to thee...) and I didn't trust Turbine to do the same. Had Bioware made the game, I would have ignored every single bad review printed, including sub 50% reviews, and still bought it.

2. It'd directly got WoW to compete with. In much the same way as any sandbox space-ship based game is going to have to compete with EVE in my head now. D&D Online directly is in a fantasy genre face-off with WoW. And lets face it, as a customer of one fantasy based MMO and comparing it to a near identical product offering nothing new.... It wasn't that appealing.

WAR sold itself on the PVP, the Warhammer IP (another geeky childhood thing).... It had niche. Conan sold itself on graphics, the IP the "more mature" bloodthirsty nature... D&D Online what did it sell itself on? I couldn't really tell at the time to be honest. Certainly their marketing department failed to get the USP across to me (and believe me, I looked). A ruleset (D&D 3rd ed) isn't a USP for an MMO. The D&D IP as a ruleset carries nothing.

What would made me (and perhaps many others) buy D&D Online? Forgotten Realms Online. Perhaps the best known D&D campaign lands. Forgotten Realms has story, substance... an unknown (to me at least) "Stormreach" just didn't cut it.

So... to cut a long story short, I didn't buy it. Indeed. Not many people did. The fabled WoW-killer (Does EVERY fantasy MMO get stuck with that title?) never materialised and D&D Online never really showed up on the radar again for me.

Until now, and the announcement of the change to F2P business model (or, micro-transactions, as it should more accurately be called) .

Firstly, kudo's to the marketing team at Turbine (maybe they sacked the last lot...?) they got the splash they probably wanted. Second, for a game which has effectively "failed" (and the amount of failure an MMO needs to make before it *really* fails on a cash basis is up for debate, I'm sure original EQ still makes money) this looks like a no-lose situation. They'll have a more polished product now, people like myself will come and try it, and hey, thats half the marketing job done.

And for myself, a no-loss situation, if I hate it, it didn't cost a penny, if I like it I'm sure micro-transactions a go-go.

Of course.... For myself, that question still hasn't been answered, what does D&D Online have/do which WoW doesn't? However now, I have a better answer..

"Why don't I go and have a free look?"


I'm sure I'll post some kind of review on the F2P D&D online experience sometime in the future here.


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Research Survey breaks 1000

As of this morning my completions on my research survey broken the 1,000 barrier, so first of all I'd like to say thank you to any and all who have participated.

It's been an interesting two weeks. I've tried to engage with the community sites as much as possible., and reach out to as many MMO community leaders as I can via e-mails and so forth. Some of which has been more effective than others.

Certainly a few individuals such as Totalbiscuit at WCRadio, Tobold on his Blog and the Forum Community Manager over at CCP on the Official EVE forums have been exceptionally supportive. CCP have even stickied my Survey on their General Forum with an endorsement, which was very kind of them. On the whole the response from EVE players so far has been great.

Many of the various forums I've visited over the last few weeks, notably the MMO-Champion Forums and the Official WoW Europe Forums have actually been very useful, and, for the most part, surprisingly generous with their time in filling out the survey.

Of the social networks I've been trying to engage with, probably the most surprisingly positive response has been from the Linkedin WoW Players, who have been very generous with their time, with surprisingly the posts on the main Facebook sites failing to draw a single response.

Additionally, I've mass e-mailed Northumbria University Students and so far had some very interesting responses, not least from the two lecturers who've so far contacted me regarding the fact they also play WoW!

Who says MMO-gaming isn't the new golf?

Oh well, the survey will be open for another week or so, and I'm travelling to the Academy of Marketing Doctoral Conference next month and presenting on my research, which should be a good opportunity to get some feedback.

Now just to figure out how SPSS works and how to use AMOS for Structual Equation Modelling....


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The world of computer game micro-expansions

Well, a new thing for me. A mini-purchase of an expansion. So, how'd it go?

Stardock's, rather awesome and addictive RTS game Sins of a Solar Empire (which I highly recommend) has an expansion Entrenchment. Which adds all kinds of stuff to a game I highly rate.

All for around £6...

So, not much of a question for me to be fair.

A simple download of their nifty Impulse Client which looks suspiciously like Steam re-skinned and a few seconds of entering in my details and I'm a happy customer.

The Client even nicely downloads all the latest patches for me automatically.


So a happy customer of a well designed , highly automated system, and my first happy step into paying for computer games micro-expansions.

Why can't all systems be that easy for me to give the people my money?


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Reading: Halting State

For my birthday I received a sizeable amount of book tokens and I decided to, in something very, very unlike me, not spend them all on seroius business or economics books (though I very much enjoyed both Liars Poker and Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room) Instead, with the holiday season almost upon us, I thought I'd wander through the less well travelled part of the bookshop to me (the bit marked "sci-fi" and "fantasy" and not "crime and "thriller").

I suppose reading habits greatly, greatly change, but I remember as a kid and teenager, and indeed, young adult, I couldn't get enough of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms etc. Now, with so much of my time devoted to reading around work (Reading Liars Poker or Rogue Economics isn't just for pleasure reading after all) or just reading business related books (Wolf of Wall Street, another very interesting book), I've had very little time, outside of my annual summer holiday, to engage with fiction.

And so, back to my trip to Borders, I decided to just go around the fiction section, with my book tokens, and I ended up buying about nine fiction books from people I've never read before (which, given my reading pace, should last about two weeks... no joke).

I was going to save them for my holiday, but, with the only thing in the newspapers at the moment being politics, I decided to make my 40 minutes (each way) Metro journey a little more interesting by reading some fiction rather than a dull business book... and so.. I picked up

Halting State by Charles Stross

and started reading...

And oh boy, is this a book to only read when you're 100% awake.

It's a book about MMO's, fantasy, future scotland, business and..... well........ a crime (thats what I've got so far anyway). It's very, very assuming of it's readership though, the writer clearly knows his stuff, but OBOY does he have little regard for those people who aren't as into the material as him. As an academic in the area, I'm *just* following the book and I (supposedly) an a student and scholar in the area. Heaven help anyone who fails to meet those benchmarks!

That said, it's highly engaging and, so far, moves at a very high pace, and certainly it's kept me reading so far. The authors style of writing (first person singular) takes a while to get used to, but, after a while, is actually quite good for getting to "grip" (for a want of a better word) the situation.

A book MMO-Gamers will understand (... well mostly understand.. or somewhat..) with the acronyms flying around. What I am finding interesting is the near future technology which is used in everyday life in this book. Especially given my thoughts as to the way mobile technology will be used in the future and the ways we, as a culture, are starting to integrate our lives more it. I'm continiously amazed than my sixty year old self confessed technophobe mom for example has a wireless laptop, sends e-mail and buys off Amazon. And my sister, my "computers are for nerds" sister sells and buys huge amounts of things on Ebay etc.

Halting State gives an interesting glimpse of how our culture might start to adapt as the communications technology starts to become more intrinstic top the way we lead our lives.

If nothing else, so far, it's been an interesting read for that alone.

Will post a rating once I've finished.



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How long? 5 years, 10 years, ever?

(My survey is on SurveyMonkey here.)



It's E3 and Microsoft are showing off their blue sky R&D ideas to get some headlines. Or thats my interpretation of the video below. And this news story. I remain highly skeptical that any of this is near the market, whatever story journalists are being fed by a highly adept marketing team at Microsoft.


It's great, don't get be wrong, and I truly look forward to the day that I can be playing a computer game with some of the tools shown in the video, but I'm realistic enough to know that much of this stuff is very much still on the drawing board and very far away from being a purchaseable product.





Does though give you an idea that perhaps an MMO in the future like WoW could be a full body workout!

Update:

And here is the Sony response.



How interesting in this news story that a journalist says "Compared to Project Natal, [the Sony controller] didn't look quite so compelling" as, to be honest, the Sony one looks far, far more realistic as to what we could see very, very soon in the marketplace. Compared to the blue sky Microsoft video this looks like something we might see at least soon.

Sony is showing us a working prototype. Microsoft, a cool looking acted video... Draw your own conclusions.

Again though, the future for gaming looks interesting indeed!


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Research Survey is out!

So, after weeks of pilots, revisions, cuttings and consultations with gamers & academics my research survey is finally out, and the data collection phase of my PhD is underway.

My survey is on surveymonkey here.


One of the biggest problems of any web based survey is participation, so to gain awareness of my survey I've decided to engage with some of the community leaders in the mmo-gaming world.

I've written to TotalBiscuit, of the Blue Plz! WCradio Show, and he's very kindly agreed to promote the survey on his radio show this Friday. I've played WoW for about near on 5 years now, from WoW Europe release, and since then I've been, on and off, a listener to this very good and well regarded series of shows (including the EPIC and other shows TB has done). Generally things discussed on TB's show get sent around the internet very, very fast, and as a leader in the WoW community this show, and the radio station, are very well placed to (hopefully) get the message of my survey out. Admittedly I'm a huge fan of WCradio, and many of it's shows, so I may be biased here, but I think they do a lot for the community, are well respected, and generally, in the past things mentioned on their shows are distributed through the community well (hey! I can hope!)

To access the wider, non-WoW community, I've also written to Tobold, a blogger who I've followed for years now, and who is a excellent weather-vane for what's hot, and whats not, in the MMO-gaming world. He has, very kindly, posted a link on his site for me. Again, Tobold is a well recognised member of the MMO-blogging community, and most web-blogs seem to have him included in their links (like this one does!)

Finally, though I think this won't actually get many responses, I've posted links to my survey on both the WoW-Europe official forums and RPG.net Video Gaming Forums. Though I wasn't originally intending to post on the official forums at all (because I was slightly concerned about the posting rules) after reading the forum posting rules with a fine tooth comb I couldn't see any reason not to put my survey there. Those forums move so fast though that I'm fairly sure that this particular avenue may be lost in the noise.

I can hope though, again, the WoW forums are something I've used for many years now, and, while the signal to noise ratio can sometimes be rather difficult, there are some excellent posts on there sometimes.


Oh well, it's out there, I'll continue the promotion, and I'll hope that engaging community leaders like TB and Tobold that awareness of my survey will be heightened!