If you obtained an Aion beta key from Fileplanet back at the start of July, don’t bother patching for this weekend’s beta event. The Fileplanet keys aren’t valid for this weekend.

Mostly a trailer about full voice acting, but check out the cover system we get a glimpse at somewhere around the 3:45 mark.

GoGamer is running one of its “48 Hour Madness” sales, and one of the items is a 60 Day Timecard for NCSoft games for $18.90 + a couple dollars shipping and handling. Good deal if you’re playing, or planning to play, an NCSoft game sometime. Again, it’s a 48 hour madness sale (though the countdown actually says 90 hours) so you have to act fast!

Virtual Worlds News: QuickStat: Free Realms on the Cusp of 5M Accounts

Recently a new scifi / space opera MMO for the iphone has been announced. The game focus on resource trading, PVP combat and hauling, and will be available also for PC/MACs as a browser game.

Signup for the beta in their website for http://outer-empires.com/

Alganon is an upcoming fantasy-based MMORPG that is about to add many testers to private beta so sign up now at http://bit.ly/SVxH4 and post on our forums at http://bit.ly/sTedx to get on the list for keys. You can find out more about Alganon at http://bit.ly/1MYDOj

a little while ago, i tweeted about freemium mmos ensuring metaplace success.  i thought i’d just elaborate on that a bit.  the core of what i think?  well.  lemme tell you:  freemium mmos are a catalyst for metaplace world domination.

fidelity and accessibility

in interactive applications, there’s always a trade-off between high fidelity and high accessibility.  and before you ask, no.  i’m not talking about accessibility in terms of section 508 compliance.  i’m talking about how visually and aurally stunning your application is vs. how easy it is to get in and use.  let’s look at some examples:

high fidelity, low accessibility

• Crytek Engine (how many people can actually run this?)
• Fancy Animated Splash Screens (ahh…  the old days…)
• Designer Portfolios (that is really cool!  what is it again?)
• Flac Files (really?  you can’t hear the difference?  rookie.)

high accessibility, low fidelity

• facebook (visually stunning boxes of text)
• tetris (the 3d!  it feels like you’re really there!  …oh.  nevermind)
• twitter (you get 140 characters you can post from anywhere.  have fun with that.)
• the sims (point.  click.  drool.)

now, while you might think fidelity is only for snobs and accessibility is pretty much drowning in the unwashed masses, you’d be…  well.  okay.  you’re totally right.  that’s basically what they are.

fret not, tho!  eventually, in all things where it’s a battle headlined “form vs. function”, there’s AWESUM that eventually arises — the television, the world wide web, the microwave oven, the ipod — it’s awesome ubiquity!  yay!

so, now that we’re on the same page as to fidelity and accessibility definitions, lemme get back to my original point:  freemium mmos and metaplace.  while it may seem like they are worlds apart, they’re actually headed toward the exact same functional point of convergence — high fidelity and highly accessible.

what is metaplace?

so what exactly is metaplace?  glad you asked!  a lot of people have a common misconception as to what it is.  a lot of folks think it’s just a new massively multiplayer online role playing game.  nope — it’s so much bigger than that.  it’s a two-part, interlocking platform consisting of a) a place where anyone can build their a virtual world and b) the index and name service that glues all the virtual worlds together.  we call that second bit “world name service” or wns for short.  i’ll get back to wns in a second.

basically the core components of metaplace:

• high accessibility - we’re available anywhere flash 9 is available. (and, technically, we can be available anywhere with a net connection)
• relatively low fidelity - tho we pretty regularly get 50fps in 2d rendered flash.
• highly social - with web being so integral to our strategy, we can easily leverage social networks.
• user generated content - there’s always, always, always something fresh to see.
• horizontal scaling - our badass server is basically a self-aware, auto-sharding, resource-juggling tower of awesome!

if you look carefully at that list, you’ll see that it all adds up to a slow, horizontal spread as 4 of the 5 pieces kick in. (accessibility, social, server and ugc)  what’s missing is a nice, rich 3d client.  (luckily for us, once one appears, we’re already running a full 3d simulation on the backend! whew!)

then what are we waiting for?  that’s pretty simple: a hardware accelerated 3d solution that meets our accessibility needs. there are just too many competing for marketshare right now.  as soon as there’s a clear, widely-adopted 3d rendering engine for the web?  we’re there!  (and no, it’s not o3d or unity or torque yet.  it needs to pretty much come pre-installed with the majority of browsers.)

now, back to wns.  it enables us to jump around between worlds. basically, any application can just call a common web service and get back connection details on that world - bang! you have world-to-world travel!  in fact, here’s an example of what that looks like:

http://api.metaplace.com/api/v0.2/public/game/get/world-name-service/name=MPCentralLive

which returns something like this:

[S_WORLDLIST]|33351|Metaplace Central|game01.metaplace.com|5000|Discover+new+worlds%2C+share+your+vision%2C+change+your+look%2C+or+just+hang+out.|Metaplace|MPCentralLive

as you can see, it tells you where a world is running — server and port — and has a few details on the world itself.  a name, short description, world owner, world id, and a url safe world name.

you know what’s really, really cool about that? imagine someday swapping out that domain for something like doomhammer.worldofwarcraft.com.  that’s what we’re always talking about when we say things like “Long-term, we see ourselves evolving into a network service provider that handles things search, DNS and other network-level services.”

which is the first part of metaplace ftw — we’ll be ready when freemium mmos join our network.  what’s the second part?  the freemium mmos being ready to join, of course!

what is a freemium mmo?

let’s start by examining what a typical non-freemium mmo is:

• a single world
• rich mythology and setting
• high-fidelity client
• high single-world user concurrency
• $15 a month subscription (low, low, low accessibility!)

what’s the difference between that and a freemium mmo?  totally depends.  had you asked 5 years ago, it’d be a huge difference.  these days?  it’s just whether it charges a subscription or not.  already, the eastern mmos have all converted to fremium.  and, with all the older western games like dungeons and dragons online and chronicles of spellborn refactoring to be free-to-play joining the ranks of all the new, built-from-the-ground-up games like atlantica and free realms, it says only one thing:

free-to-play massively multiplayer online games — or freemium mmos — are the future.  period.  end of story.

i know, i know.  you say “hold on, hyperbole boy!  you were all like ‘metaplace ftw’ a second ago!”

yup.  remember?  metaplace is not an mmo.  it’s a platform.  it’s a network of mmos.  so, we’d love, love, love for all the freemium mmos to take over the world.  in fact, i’m pretty sure that’s what this post is supposed to point out … uh.  sometime.

anyway, here’s how they get there:

while all this “free” love (heh.  i said “free love”.) is a great step for accessibility, it’s not the end-all-be-all.  they’re only half-way to accessibility.  and when i say half-way, i mean they’ve shed the biggest pain point of wide-scale adoption — a subscription.  for example, people think world of warcraft’s 10 million subs is awesome…  maplestory has 92 million.  now, compare even further with wow’s $11 monthly arpu that of maplestory’s estimated $5 monthly arpu.

what do you have?  the free game makes about 4x the cash that the largest (by a long, long, long, long, and very sad way) of the subscription mmos makes.

that being said, you can’t win on being free alone.  afterall, free is just a price.  it just shifts the battle from one kind of “value per scarcity” — value per subscription dollar — to another kind of “value per scarcity” — value per megabyte.

something i haven’t seen written about as a consequence yet of all these free games is client-side capacity.  and by client-side capacity, i’m really talking about two things:

1. physical file storage.
2. available bandwidth.

you’ve heard the old saying “there’s only so much time in the day” — well that applies to the freemium mmo market too.  well.  really any “free” market.  for web sites that offer free services, it’s more of an attention economy: “there’s only so much of people’s attention.”  in “you have to download a massive 6 gig client” freemium mmo land, “there’s only so much bandwidth and hard drive space.”

so while these freemium worlds have shed the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption — the subscription — there’s still the friction point of file size.  if you can only try one game a day, you want to make sure it’s really, really the one you want.  if you have to plan ahead because it takes 6 hours to download, you have to be exacting with your planned play time with your friends.  if you have to decide which game you need to uninstall because you don’t have room for yet another 6 gig client, you will need to figure out which game is thrown out, and because of its size, probably never to be downloaded again.

this means even as a freemium game developer, you still have the typical product constraints of needing to be a) more attractive initially from your packaging and b) stickier than any of your competitors to retain your space on the user’s hard drive.  free doesn’t help you in either of those because free is just a price.

just like $1 is a price.  just like $100 is a price.  and when prices are all equal, the best product for the price (in theory) always wins.  and, considering the growing landscape of freemium mmo gaming out there, you guys’ve got your work cut out for them.

oh, and just to add salt to the wound, guess what one of the biggest costs of running an mmo is?

yup.  bandwidth.

all those lookie-loo people who try your game?  they suck up 6 gigs of transfer from you, play your game for 30 minutes then uninstall it for the next mmo.  they’re costing you money — and lots and lots and lots of it.  where user bandwidth is fixed cost, your hosted mmo bandwidth is metered.  ouch.

so, for a free game, if you’re lucky enough to get attention, you’ve got to convince your users to download and install your 6-gig client and YOU effectively have to pay them to do so because of your bandwidth costs, it just doesn’t paint a rosy picture.  i hope your game is fun.

of course, on the bright side, just imagine you’re a subscription-based mmo trying to compete in the same market.  ha!  good luck!

however, there is a solution!  i’m predicting that in the next 18 months, freemium mmo devs are going to start all-out streaming their clients and content to users.

it’s a pretty obvious prediction, i know.  they really don’t have a choice.  not only does it solve their own bandwidth problem because they only pay for what users use instead of paying to have all that end-game content delivered to someone who’s never gonna make it past level 6, but it solves the user’s problem as well — they can get in there and root around in your game quickly and easily.  this reduces player pain and lowers the switching costs of playing your mmo.

and, of course, here’re the two main reasons why having a low switching cost in your mmo is good:

1. switching to your newer and much more betterer mmo is easy, thus enabling a wider trial audience.  painless and easy!  you’re a hero!
2. let’s face it, people will leave because you don’t launch with content they want.  wouldn’t it be nice to easily get them back once you have in-place the content they were looking for to begin with?

of course, enabling a wider audience is just the first step in moving from niche to mainstream.

oh, and yes, any service with only a couple hundred thousand users is niche.  for example: world of warcraft has 20x the subscriber base of warhammer online.  facebook has 20x the active users of world of warcraft.  so, next time you’re standing around at an auction house in warhammer online, just look around at the 15 other people there — if it were as popular as facebook, there’d be 6000 people standing there with you instead. as much as i hate to agree with mark jacobs, from a web perspective, your “massive” user-base is tiny, cute and niche.

but that’s what we’re tackling, right?  helping to move freemium games from a vertical niche to the horizontal mainstream.  so, as you can see, where metaplace is a bottom-up, horizontal service, freemium mmos are a top-down, vertical application — but, we’re meeting in the middle.

the convergence conclusion

so, basically, your typical freemium mmo has the fidelity and metaplace has the user reach.  we’re both moving towards that functional nirvana in the middle — high accessibility and reach coupled with a rich interface and high fidelity interactions.  that, my friends, is where those mainstream folks like to hang out.

and here’s the question you’re wanting to ask me:  if you know exactly what to do in order to move the mmo market to awesomeness and it’s the same awesomeness that metaplace is moving towards, why don’t you work at a “real” mmo?

that’s a really, really easy question to answer.  when we both get to this point of functional convergence, which group do you think will have the full weight of the network effect behind it?  and which company has the name service setup to just plug the other into said network?

mmmm hmmm.  metaplace ftw.

m3mnoch.

Being in the industry for so long has made me a little bit jaded at times. But, I have been working on a Google map project with the LOTRO fans on Facebook and it has reminded me why I love it so much. Because MMOs are the one place where people from all different places and all different backkgrounds can come together just to have a good time!

At least now in the middle of PVMP, Roleplaying and Lore “discussions” on the forums I will be able to look at our new map.

Massively has picked up an article from IncGamers that suggests Age of Conan might get a Free to Play option in the future. While this doesn’t appear to be something that will be put in too soon, there is a president for the company doing so with Anarchy Online.