Getting the Social Marketing Side On: Rift

So I decided to check out Rift.

For purely academic purposes of course! Rift is a new MMORPG launched in March 2011 which, since release, has been able to suck quite a sizeable slew of customers away from WoW. Indeed, it’s been called by many a WoW-Clone for its similarities to WoW which I think it a very unfair attributation (and let’s not even start with the WoW is just an Everquest Clone discussion…). Indeed it’s not a WoW clone at all, it could only be called that by someone who hasn’t played another MMORPG apart from WoW in the last 5 years. It’s actually a Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Clone (WAR) (which itself was a WoW-Clone) with strong WoW threads stuck within it. With Age of Conan-like graphics. Indeed, if WoW, WAR and Conan had a love-child it would be Rift. From WAR it takes public/open grouping, fast and furious PvP battlegrounds and an interesting take on public quests/instances. From WoW it takes, well, almost everything else (and fortunately all it takes from Conan is the graphical look!)

It’s literally as one friend put it, as if a number of game designers who happened to be WoW players all sat down and went through WoW with a list and chose what they liked about WoW, and then changed what they didn’t like or didn’t work for them, keeping within the spirit of the game. So it keeps the gear based system which builds game capital and player investment (and thus buy-in), and it keeps the tiers of raid progression etc. But ditches quite a bit of the class based stuff in favour of a quite interesting innovative take on skill trees etc.

From the social and community side Rift developers Trion have wasted no time at all with social networking and web 2.0 integration. With Riftconnect you can play and update your Twitter, Facebook and even Youtube all at the same time. Kill a cool mob in-game? Screenshot it and upload it straight to your Facebook page or even straight upload your instance footage to your Youtube to criticise your tanks ineptitude. The social networking side is of a great fascination to me, and I wonder how many people have been drawn into the game because of seeing a friends Rift update on Facebook or Twitter and decided to try out the 7 day trial?

And on the subject of trials, yes, the game has the typical starter zone trial package, but also (very much like WoW introduced) it has all the customer-to-customer sales tricks up its sleeve as well. Certainly the designers seem to have skimmed the best selling ideas from their competitors with their recruit-a-friend scheme, which one friends of mine rightly pointed out is a very interesting take on pyramid selling. Recruit one friend and get a small ikkle bonus, recruit more and get unique in-game items etc. And all the “teleport to your friends side” etc socially orientated game design functions which you’d expect to go along with it. Is this the standard now?

The social networking side is, of course, just the start. Where’s the websites? Well, currently the fansites are building up. There’s quite a forum community and a fansites programme, but in many ways these are the basics. What they HAVE done really well, far better than any game since WoW is there use of Portal sites like Zam to quickly build online resources for players to use. A number of games miss this critical step (particularly WAR and Age of Conan) but there’s nothing better as a former WoW player than having a number of talent builders, skills explainers and resource search engines at your fingertips. Why? Because that’s what you’re used to! You’re used to being able to go to WoWhead and MMO-Champion and everything else you use as a resource. These online resources help the player feel that they’re in a well supported community. Not all players will be interested in podcast shows or having a constant feed of information, but in a sizeable community a number of them will, and what’s likely is that these people will be your most gamic-social (did I just make up a word there?) people. Your guild leaders, your class leaders in guilds who talk to and influence people to get them ready for raids etc. They’re your influencers and “game paragons” who create and maintain your games social capital structure, so they’re an important stakeholder you need to make sure are kept flooded with what they need (though not necessarily what they want; there’s a distinction).

So overall, a nice little game which has come a long way in just 2 months of release with the social marketing side of the equation. Let’s hope SW:TOR learns similar lessons from its predecessors.

Update:
Thanks to a reader for e-mailing me to remind me of the online Youtube campaign. Some great usage of vid's here to capture the imagination of potential customers.

BMAF Conference 2011: BMAF Paper Presentation on Online Blogging as a Learning, Teaching and Assessment Technique

Went down to Bournemouth on Tuesday 10th May – Wednesday 11th May (First experience on Flybe… wasn’t too bad…) and delivered a paper on the use of Online Blogging as an learning, teaching and assessment tool. Overall BMAF was a great little conference, and as someone going for the very first time I generally found everyone who went as extremely positive, and I certainly gained some very useful feedback about my research when I presented it. Currently turning this into a paper which hopefully should be out soon.

 

Of the greatest interest to me at the conference itself though was a great little presentation on the use of Second Life from Suzanne Kane (“In-world team management activities: Team Avatar”) from London Metropolitan University which hopefully should be up on the BMAF past conference page soon. I’ve worked on a little project with students before using Second Life, were we were involved with the Tyneside Cyrenians and some of our Corporate Management students built an in-world “soup kitchen” (or something like that). Certainly, as I said to Suzanne Kane on the day, I think “live projects” of that kind (particularly charitable ones) are great learning vehicles for students. That said, I still hold out hope, one day, that we’ll be able to teach the basics of management though an online MMO game like SW:TOR or WoW (Hey, a guy can wish can’t he?).

... The International Journal of Role-Playing?

What an interesting find on my digra news roll; The International Journal of Role-Playing! With some really interesting articles in it as well. Including a great one about the stereotypes about role-playing gamers. From an MMORPG perspective though the most interesting article was one by Dr. Christopher Paul & Jason Pittman, both from University of Alabama who looked at Role-Play In Table-top Gaming and World of Warcraft. Their results are both unsurprising and confirmatory to my own experiences

“The imagination and open-endedness of table-top roleplay is a dynamic that is often stifled in WoW.”

“online gaming comes with the notable cost of losing complete control of the game world, which increases ease of play, but dramatically decreases feelings of ownership about game play.”

In other words, not only do you lose the pure creative spirit of many role-playing sessions (which cannot be replicated by anything requiring pre-programming), because of that, your sense of shared ownership of the game is also decreased.

Anyway, it’s certainly an interesting little journal that I’ll be keeping an eye on (and have added to my “required reading” feed) Alas, unless I have some great undergraduate students next year who want to do role-playing game orientated research (and produced a good paper) I can’t foresee myself trying to publish in an unranked journal of this kind (who knows I could be lucky…) But it’s certainly a readable publication (abet an unranked one) and looking at the editorial board, which includes Richard Bartle and a host of other worthies, it’s actually surprisingly strong from a peer reviewed editorial perspective.

If only it was ranked at least 2 star in the ABS ranking lists of dooooom… <sigh>. Honestly, whilst I understand the need to have some kind of system for understanding research output quality, I do feel newer and more off-the-wall journals get crushed (particularly in the UK) by this “league table” approach to REF-able submissions only.

Customer Retention?

One of my students pointed this (a bit old at 2006) video out in his undergraduate dissertation to me, and I must admit, given my frequent adventures in Customer Service, I'm astonished at the lengths this AOL salesman goes to.



Weirdly the video and experience itself has become a meme on Youtube with The Rock and Christian Bale (very rude, but very funny) parodies, and there seems now a whole host of videos on Youtube of people cancelling their accounts, credit cards and so forth now, showing clearly the sometimes outrageous blocks put in their way.



I'm not sure I have a point here, certainly on the one side, you could argue, that the salespeople at least tried every possible thing they could to retain that customer and stop them leaving the company. On the other hand, the sort of negative publicity this in-itself could bring.... Is it worth it?

Would I give the guys at the other ends of the phone medals for their services to Customer Retention? Or the sack for going over-the-top? And especially when you impliment sales targets and retention bonuses to motivate salespeople (I know of at least a couple of companies where if a customer comes on the phone to cancel and you persuade them to not cancel, you get a cash bonus) is this what you end up with?

Just how deadly for DC Universe Online and the industry as a whole?

Evil has triumphed, Superman and Wonder Woman and the host of DC Comics storylines have been crushed in the online realm.. by Lex Luthor you ask? Nope, by some quite non-speculative fiction people with real world criminal intent. Now, and for about a week or so Sony's Playstation Network has been crippled and in particular it's MMO games have been hardest hit. Is this the end of the (DC) Universe as we know it? Puns aside, it's a huge blow to the design team and programmers of a game which (if internet rumors are to be held to be true) was not blazing with success post initial launch. Already a server consolidation was being proposed, and now the servers have been off for some time. Perhaps even the industry as a whole may be hit.

What does this all mean? Well certainly from my research this would seem to be quite a critical period for Sony. Their subscribers have had the initial buy-in of trying the game and are making that critical decision as to whether the game is worth continuing with. Importantly this also creates a huge decision point for them regarding their value for money evaluation. Many MMORPG's do well in removing decision points (automatic re-subscription being a great tool in this), and for good reason, at every decision point you introduce, you're going to lose a swathe of customers. The game being offline for a long while now is going to make people re-evaluate the buy-in and their subscription (even with the free month Sony is giving away as compensation). Worse still for Sony, particularly the more hardcore gamers out there have probably already moved on to new pastures (Rift) or games they're know well (I'd be fascinated to know this month's re-subscriptions figure for World of Warcraft!).

And this is all ignoring the large elephant in the room of many people's Trust in Sony being rather shattered. Customers will of course react to this in a very individualistic way, but generally you'd expect those with large "sunk capital" in Sony products to be more forgiving than relative newcomers (this being the internet however, I readily expect to see a video of long term customers spitting on their PS3's...). Hardest hit of course will be the newer customers of the new products (DC Universe again) who have little built up trust and capital, and have insufficient ties with SOE to be as forgiving.

Can it get worse? Well yes, it can. Already a number of fan forums and websites are talking about some "Justice Leagues" etc (the DC Online version of Guilds/Super-Groups/Corporations) moving on-mass; in many ways MMORPG's a very much confidence products. If we have the confidence that the game is going well, and I have a lot of people to play with, the game will do well. Without such confidence I'm worrying who I'll game with, and if I'm playing a "dead game" and when the servers are going to die. In other words, the community can actually self-cremate very easily the game they love though sustained negative output. More importantly they can kill the "newbie hose" which most MMORPG's survive on in some way though such bad reviews/news (interesting I’ve found that CCG’s can work in very much the same way!).

My prediction? Either very late this year, or in the 1st quarter of next year we'll see DC Universe Online (which I think is a graphically great game by the way, and I really did enjoy it myself) go F2P (Free to Play). Especially with the competition from forthcoming superhero games like the future Marvel game which is rumoured to be built around the Free-to-Play model (then again with the Marvel MMO so far off, Marvel may just be opportunistically putting some heat on the burner regarding this due to Sony’s issues; Champions Online is a much more solid F2P issue). A free to play model for DC Universe will certainly rebound it's subscriber numbers and with the highly instanced nature of the game would probably work well for content/micro-transactions payments.

And that's just last week's news.... with Square Enix (Final Fantasy)being in the next today for similar attacks on their databases to what's hit Sony, is this going to be a trend? Consider the impact for example if EA Bioware and their Star Wars MMORPG got hit by what's happened to Sony in its second month of launch. How many subscribers would they lose? Could they ever hope to recoup the reputed $300m of the budget?

Huge commercial issues here, and indeed, the possibility of corporate espionage.

What? You think I'm dreaming here? Joking? If you have the knowledge that you can cripple your major competitors huge multi-million dollar project with some minor hacking actions and drive transient customers back to you as a result, it's a tempting possibility. Certainly I've heard of hugely less destructive acts that major corporations have undertaken against competitors over the years, ranging from the minor such as the recent Google and Facebook issues over a PR company and privacy concerns, to outright bribery, bugging and hacking.

Great recent news story on this can be found here on the BBC news site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13251608

And I've dropped some similar stories below as well:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12125864

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7220063.stm

And a great overview of Corporate Espionage here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4595745.stm

..... a partially successful experiment...

Trying to get it all tied together as a single media platform has been partially successful it seems. With an e-mail I’m able to update my Blog, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin all simultaneously, however the Academic.edu (which seems honestly to be the poorer, less developed child of social media at the moment) doesn’t seem as well connected. Which is a pity, because as a social media platform to reach the professional academic community at large, I feel that it has huge future potential. Unfortunately it seems currently to be rather “under construction” at the moment rather than completely sorted. They do have a bit at the bottom of their webpage where they (perhaps desperately) are asking for engineers to help them out, so perhaps theres an opportunity there for someone reading this.

I’m slightly amused that firstly, it’s taken me so long to get around to this (I’ve been meaning to have a single platform arrangement for an age now, just never found the time… the marking made me do it… I’ll be cleaning the house next or something…) simply due to the fact that I’ve always known how to do it, and bearing in mine my research area, it’s always seemed rather embarrassing that I never found the time (there’s the nature of PhD time-sinks for you). Secondly the considerably more amusing thing for me is that the arrangement, the glue if you like, which holds this particular single platform arrangement together is Twitter. I despise Twitter! I have no use for it, yet, it’s the glue between my Google Feedburner (Thank you Google for such a beautiful free app) and my Linkedin and Facebook accounts.

As an academic I find that an interesting issue (hey, is there a research paper in that, or at least an undergraduate dissertation for one of my students I wonder?) how many people like myself don’t really use Twitter beyond it’s “glue” ability to link to other social media platforms? Is someone who has a Twitter account, but is merely using it to put together their various social media platforms REALLY a Twitter user? Well, both “of course”, but from an advertiser’s sense, and a marketer’s sense, no. As a marketing platform as a company, I’d be interested in numbers, but I’d also be interested to learn that possibly a (Sizeable? Small?) number of Twitter users never really check their Twitter accounts at all. I’d be interested to know if this is an issue at all. Potentially Twitter could have quite grossly inflated Marketing importance as a Social Media Platform is lots of people use it like I do.

A (Possible) Brave New World of Social Media Interaction

So, I upgraded my phone today, but along with that (and to hopefully get the most out of social media in general) I've decided to see if I can get everything to work together.

 

 

 

This is the concept... (sing the song of hope with me!)

 

 

 

The email's connected to the... Blogspot..

 

The Blogspots connected to the... Google Feedburner....

 

The Google Feedburner's connected to the.... Twitter...

 

The Twitter's connected to the.... Facebook...

 

The Twitter's connected to the... Academic.edu

 

 

 

 

It's never going to work is it! Oh well, the plans of mice and men and all that.

Game On

A nice little piece about my research in this months Inspire magazine.