A few weeks ago my esteemed colleague and galactic squid racer extraordinaire, Xerin, penned an interesting article titled To Market, To Market that focused on the metrics for success in Guild Wars 2. In his original post, Xerin addresses a number of questions that arise based on the lack of a subscription fee and other important factors:
"If a games success is now based on selling millions of units and a subscription based product is gauged on active subscribers, how are we to assess ArenaNet’s inevitable success? With no subscriptions, would selling 1 million copies or less be seen as a failure? Or are expectations even higher?"
Apparently this was a topic that resonated with our friends over at ArenaNet, as the newest post to hit the official blog addresses that very same subject. While strong box, digital download, and micro-transaction sales will obviously be an important factor, in his new blog post Colin Johanson tackles the biggest metric of them all when it comes to gaming in general: is it fun?
According to Colin, this simple question has been at the heart of the development culture for GW2 from the very beginning:
This metric of success impacted a lot of our early content-related design decisions for GW2. Some examples include:
- Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.
- Fun impacts decisions. Every time you finish a dungeon you get tokens you can trade in for reward items that you want, rather than having a small chance of getting it as a drop, because it’s more fun to always get rewarded for finishing with something you want to have!
- Fun impacts development. Explorable dungeons have multiple paths you can take and random events in them. Because of this you don’t feel like you need to play the same dungeon over and over again if you want to chase the prestigious rewards at the end, but can instead mix up that experience to keep it fresh and fun.
- Fun impacts customization. The event and personal story systems allow you to get a sense of customization from your characters. Playing through the game, each character can experience completely different content, and the world can always stay fresh and new in the pursuit of new story lines, and an ever-changing dynamic event world. It means going back to a place you’ve already been with a character can be fun, and it means making a new character on an entirely different personal story chain can be fun as well.
- Fun impacts gameplay. The pursuit of fun in content led us to make many gameplay decisions, including: Everyone who helps kill a creature gets experience and loot, so you’re not competing with other players; everyone gets rewarded for events with karma they can spend to buy rewards they want, rather than get a random roll of stuff you might not; content that scales in difficulty, so if more people show up, there is still stuff for you to do; everyone is able to revive one another, so you view other players as assets that can help you achieve your goals, rather than people who might get in your way; and the ability for everyone to harvest from resource nodes and get the rewards in the world together, rather than racing other people to them who might steal it from you. All of these things are just more fun!
The quest for fun doesn't end there though. The massive beta weekend events have been instrumental in helping ArenaNet determine how much fun players are having in-game. One of the tools being used to determine the fun factor for various aspects of the game are the mini-surveys that appear upon completion of various parts of the game such as events, dungeons, PvP matches, and personal story missions.
Even if you don't provide feedback through other channels, you should absolutely make sure to take a few moments to fill these surveys out as they can have a direct impact on the game's development between now and launch.
Be sure to head over to the official ArenaNet website to read the rest of Colin's latest and greatest blog post: Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success.
Comments
I know that I have been having a lot of fun with GW2 so far.
I've played through the Queensdale map with every single character I've created (all professions except ranger have been experimented with) and I cannot wait to get back there again! Each time I go through it (so far) I've found different nuances to my experience of it.
I didn't discover the jumping puzzle until my 4th or 5th play through... (stuff, stuff, stuffy-stuff...)
I think I found the pygmy moa trainer asura on my 3rd...
The "kids" treehouse at the overlook was simply spectacular, but I didn't see it until my 7th and last character created on Sunday of the 2nd BWE.
And I'm absolutely positive that I've still missed things because of my voracious pace due to the extremely limited time of the BWEs. Once the game launches and I can actually take my time with each map I intend to devour them down to the marrow of the bones!
And "yes," I've had fun with each and every character I've played through there. Can't wait to see the rest of the game!
I agree with Archer. Once the game goes live I am going to explore every nook and cranny of each area. At the end of BWE 2 I had to force myself to stop playing a couple of my characters so as not to spoil the PvE game at release.
I am a little bit divided in what i should think about the blog post at Arenanet. Of course "Fun" is a big motivator and i think everybody agrees that "having Fun" in a game is a success. But i do not believe that companies like Bioware or Blizzard are saying "Who wants to have Fun in our games, let´s bore the hell out of our Players, who cares" I think every Game company tries to entertain their audience and make something that other people enjoy. It might be that if you do not have a subscription model you can make other decisions but let us one thing not forget. In the end of the day Arenanet is a commercial enterprise and with "Fun" alone nobody is able to pay bills. So commercial success is as crucial to Arenanet as to Blizzard. Maybe for Arenanet a bit more because of the involvement of NCsoft. So i do not believe that Arenanet would make decisions that would be Fun but punishing business.
Draugris,
I'm not sure how you came away from this with nothing more than the conclusion that Arenanet is accusing Blizzard of wanting to "bore the hell out of their players". What they are saying is that they are both banking their success on two different development strategies. Blizzard has built its success mainly on heavily funded marketing and production, while exploiting addicting game mechanics to keep people doing the same monotonous tasks over and over again, believing that they are actually having fun (a.k.a. "grinding"). Arenanet is taking the more risky strategy of banking their success mainly on things like innovation, highly replayable content (straight out of the playbook of most online non-MMO games), and just plain fun.
Yes, Blizzard's developers also care about fun, but the subscription model sometimes gets in the way of making that the main focus. When you don't have such a business model, it allows more flexibility in your design choices. What Arenanet is saying is that Blizzard has painted themselves into a corner with their current strategies and that there is nothing more that they can really do other than continue with the same development model until people get sick of it.
Whether or not you believe what Arenanet is saying about itself is an entirely different matter altogether (sure, they could all be lying about their true motivations), but the fact that most people are sick of games like Rift, WoW and STWTOR is no secret in the developer and gaming community. It just doesn't work anymore.
I don't think this is what the article is saying. Its not thatAnet wants their players to have fun and Blizzard doesn't...its that what drives their content is based primarily on keeping them playing for months on end by crafting content that takes longer to get through, where as Anet's model for content developement is based on making content that doesn't take longer, but rather players want to repeat because its fun.
In short, they are saying that other companies are focused on longevity of play, where as Anet is focused on voluntary repetition of play.
That said, of course they both are looking to make money, and even though Anet is basing most of their income on that software purchase, they are suplimenting it with the Gem Store. But here again, they are focused on a more fun element. The MT's of Anet's Gem Store are based on fun, frivilous to many extent, things as well.
I believe that was the main point of the article. Not that other companies doen't want their games to be fun, of course they do, but rather that fun is not the driving point for how they build their content. they wan't fun content of course, but fun is not the driving force in its developement. time and repetition is.
Galen
Galen
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