AGDC: From Dragons and Daggers to Kart Racing, Cooking and Concerts...It's a Whole New MMO World

AGDC kicked off in earnest with the keynote, "From Dragons and Daggers to Kart Racing, Cooking and Concerts...It's a Whole New MMO World":

"In MMO development, companies can slip into habitual processes derived from targeting the same audience over and over. This session will explore Sony Online Entertainment's first tween/teen title, Free Realms, including market research, focus testing, business intelligence, online and retail distribution, and customer acquisition and retention strategies. Attendees will learn about the challenges and lessons learned when creating a full-blown MMO for kids together with a ground-breaking new business model; and how developers can re-educate their teams to move from stagnant and dated MMO design toward mass market success."

I like John Smedley - I think he's a sharp guy who's accomplished a ton for SOE and for the game industry (gamer gripes for Star Wars Galaxies aside).

To set context, Smedley shared some traditional MMO statistics (a la games like EverQuest) - like 33 is the average age of players, 85% are male, 15% are female, and SOE wanted to tap into more of the female / kid gamer market - thus birthing Free Realms, a free-to-play tween MMO, which represents a significant portion of SOE's new direction (DC Universe Online notwithstanding).

Free Realms is fascinating to me for a number of reasons.

First, I like the blue ocean(ish) aspirational aspect of the title.

Secondly, Smedley and a lot of the folks working on the game are family folks with kids, working to create a safe game that everyone can play. I appreciate they're working to keep it safe.

I like how serious SOE is about monetizing Free Realms as a free-to-play, genuine powerhouse of a worldwide brand, and paying attention to the significant differences in this gamer market.

To this end, they've really pushed formal usability testing (daily use of an on-campus focus testing lab, changing interfaces and user experience quickly to adapt to what the data indicates, etc.).

FR is a micro-transaction-based, with in-game items (clothes to pets to items that help your chosen profession, etc.), and I was surprised that they're doing back-end revenue share with retailers - which evidently is going very well. There is also in-game advertising, that seems to be tastefully handled, and largely within the Sony family.

There were also some compelling stats and anecdotes for the efficacy of TV ads for their target demographic.

Age breakdown of Free Realms players (to compare to traditional numbers above):

• <13:51%
• 13-17:29%
• 18-24:12%
• 25-34:5%
• 35-44:2%
• 45+:1%

Smedley could not emphasize enough how much data mining they do. Sounds like they're doing the business intelligence analysis to do something cool with it.

There's also some interesting gender data in the mining they've done. Boys and Girls are different. Shocking. (But not as shocking as those who pretend they're not. <flame/>)