Post by Morreion on May 6, 2010 6:53:07 GMT -5
Social Media Gaming – Buying your way out of being social (Of Course I'll Play It)
This is a very good point and I think will lead to less social interaction (as we know it). As players get older, they have more disposable income and are willing to pay to progress. Companies are more than willing to take their money.
Don't wait around for the old MMO model to make a comeback. I'm afraid the only way that will happen will be in retro niche games.
Time for some history. Back in the golden days of MMO’s, before WoW came along, the golden rule of MMO development was that social bonds were crucial. It was a well understood (and completely true) notion that the games players formed social bonds in were the games players stayed in. And as we all billed on a month to month basis, we wanted players to stay as long as possible. So the idea was to create situations that encouraged (or more often required) social interaction as much as possible. So the way MMO designers like Brad McQuaid and Raph Koster answered these problems back in the day was that they said “after you’ve been introduced to the game and have pretty much learned how to play it, we’re going to make things hard – so you’re forced to group together to progress. And we’re going to create interdependencies on things you build or craft – so if you want to make something, you must interact with other players to make it. And by forcing players to play together, players will create social bonds, and by forming social bonds they’ll stay in the game. And to a certain extent this worked.
But then in 2004 some very smart people over at Blizzard, whom loved these kinds of games and wanted to make their own, realized, simply, that a lot of people just didn’t like being forced to group with others to progress. So they came up with a solution. They said, “okay, social bonds are good, and we’re not sure about this, so we’re going to create some content that requires people to group in order to progress. But what if we just allow people to play our game, without help, from beginning to end. What if we provide a development path that allows even traditional support roles to progress on their own, all the way to the very end of the game.” And guess what. Millions more people loved this. They paid their monthly dues and they didn’t have to group, and in fact it was often faster and more efficient not to group, WoW pretty much crushed every other MMO known to man. And immediately what you saw was entire games scrambling and tearing things up at the root to realize this new design paradigm – that it was better to just let people play.
But then in 2004 some very smart people over at Blizzard, whom loved these kinds of games and wanted to make their own, realized, simply, that a lot of people just didn’t like being forced to group with others to progress. So they came up with a solution. They said, “okay, social bonds are good, and we’re not sure about this, so we’re going to create some content that requires people to group in order to progress. But what if we just allow people to play our game, without help, from beginning to end. What if we provide a development path that allows even traditional support roles to progress on their own, all the way to the very end of the game.” And guess what. Millions more people loved this. They paid their monthly dues and they didn’t have to group, and in fact it was often faster and more efficient not to group, WoW pretty much crushed every other MMO known to man. And immediately what you saw was entire games scrambling and tearing things up at the root to realize this new design paradigm – that it was better to just let people play.
Social Media games don’t rely on you being social to make their money. Rather, they rely on the fact that you don’t want to have to socialize to progress, and you’re willing to pay to avoid it. Social Media games set up complex interdependencies that require cooperation – granted, asynchronous cooperation, but nevertheless cooperation – in order to progress. In exactly the same way MMO’s did 10 years ago. But the difference now, is they allow you to spend real money to bypass those interdependencies altogether. So you can ask for bricks from your friends, or you can spend farmbucks and buy the bricks yourself. And of course, to get farmbucks, you have to buy them with real money, or spend weeks and months in the game waiting for the slow trickle of the occasional farmbucks to accumulate. Now of course there are still millions of player buying vanity items and spending money pink bales of hay or better clothes for their avatar. And companies like Zynga and Playdom aren’t offering up any breakdowns on things like what percentage of people spend money on vanity items versus game progression items. But when I look across my fellow player’s farms and I see the kinds of things that they have, and I think about the things that I would be most likely to want to spend my money on — well it’s things that I could use to progress right away. Things that I wouldn’t have to spam my friends to ask for help on. Because I don’t like spamming my friends. I don’t like asking for help, it’s uncomfortable. And if I could pay a small amount to just continue playing – well that’s sorely tempting...
If there aren’t MMO’s out there already re-working their billing model to account for this, I guarantee you you’ll be seeing them coming very soon. Because social media games have taught us that people are willing to pay, and to pay big, to actually avoid the social interactions that these games tout as key to their success.
If there aren’t MMO’s out there already re-working their billing model to account for this, I guarantee you you’ll be seeing them coming very soon. Because social media games have taught us that people are willing to pay, and to pay big, to actually avoid the social interactions that these games tout as key to their success.
This is a very good point and I think will lead to less social interaction (as we know it). As players get older, they have more disposable income and are willing to pay to progress. Companies are more than willing to take their money.
Don't wait around for the old MMO model to make a comeback. I'm afraid the only way that will happen will be in retro niche games.
