[...] Korean Online Dance Game Audition Hits 400,000 concurrent users, 50 Million Registered Users A Korean casual online dance game, Audition, has hit an impressive 400,000 concurrent users with 50 Million total registered users in China. It is an excellent example of the growing category of “virtual asset games” that are free to play, but you pay for “stuff”. This category is particularly popular in Asia, but has not really been explored in the US. The game is mostly “skill-based” – basically, a player enters a series of L, R, U, D arrow keys based on a pattern sent by the server (discovered and described at Raph Koster’s web site). This game seems a perfect target for cheating – after all, the “buttons” can easily be read automatically and the timing element is also a great candidate for attack. [Shameless Plug] I do like the concept and have been fiddling with some ways to protect against attack online as well as support peer-to-peer virtual assets. [End Shameless Plug] It does open an interesting game genre that might do well in the West. Continue reading “Korean Online Dance Game Audition Hits 400,000 concurrent users, 50 Million Registered Users” Posted by SecurePlay in Game Security, Game Industry, Game Demographics, Game Design at 12:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) [...]

[...] Remember when I wrote about the dance game Audition? Word is that it has hit 50 million registered users in China, with peak concurrency of 400,000. [...]

Audition is really a “minimally” multiplayer game, given its lobby-and-room structure. It performs fine on my machine, which is rather low-spec. It’s unfortunately very easy to get fixated upon jamming in arrows as quickly as possible, thereby losing a lot of the potential visual joy of watching other players.

It is a nice example of the kind of things that online games can do if they’re not reliant on subscription fees, though. Audition falls into the ‘occasional fun’ category, I think. As such, I also wish that it didn’t require a lengthy download.

To Tess’ point about rapture: Music performance is a particularly good way to enter Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” state. In theory, games should foster flow, but it’s hard to achieve.

I bet people would pay extra money just to have a rare hairstyle. I am not joking.

You don’t need to be joking — it’s already happened. Heck, Furcadia has sustained itself since 1997 or so solely off of the sales of character customization — specifically, stuff like wings for the furry avatars at $50 a pop.

Don’t restrict yourself to think that stats = gameplay = business model, or you’ll forever limit your business model to only those who care about stats.

Heck, I bet people would pay extra money just to have a rare hairstyle. I am not joking.

Whats the difference between a WoW player paying through the nose for one of the first Fiery Dragon Whelps available on their server and paying five minutes of wages for, I don’t know, a new hat for your character? Don’t restrict yourself to think that stats = gameplay = business model, or you’ll forever limit your business model to only those who care about stats. Some people actually like playing with dolls and have a lot of disposable income. Others like status markers. And there are a lot of games where you can micro-pay for services which are relevant to “the gameplay”, such as paying $3.50 to get double XP for a week. (The implications of this almost scare me as someone used to the US subscription model, as it suggests that the base grind is twice as painful as it needs to be, but if it works in funding games which otherwise wouldn’t exist more power to them.)

The only game that I excused this in was Katamari Damacy (since that’s basically the whole POINT of the game). I don’t know … I just never “got” the concept of winning a pink hairbrush for successfully beheading an opponent with a finishing move.

Korea, I do believe.

I guess I’m a bit sensitive about my passport, since it is effectively my “papers,” in every old-movie-wintery-checkpoint-dogs-and-soldiers-in long-coats sense of the word. It is evidence of my right to return to the nation of my birth. My right to live and work in Australia lies within. It is the only legal ID I have here.

The passport confiscation scene in “The Constant Gardener,” had me squirming in my seat. “Noooo! No!” said the voice inside my head. “Don’t give up your passport! It’s the most valuable thing you own!”

On the matter of the game, I would loooooove to see more music-oriented online games out there, but the latency problem, as you know, is the killer. The one-bar-at-a-time solution is an interesting one. It hearkens back to thoughts of mine that you could get away, to a degree, with following the rules of traditional latency masking in a music game — that it wouldn’t matter if one player were experiencing a completely different time in the music from what another player was experiencing — as long as their performances were in-synch when observed (by a third-party observer, or in playback). It is only the points of intersection and interaction that matter.

But, it would be like dancing with blinders on, or like playing in a band while wearing earplugs. You would be experiencing your own performance as a solo performance, and could in no way emotionally or artistically respond to the performance of your partner(s) in the now, as real performers might. There is no real-time interplay. That, in a sense, is saddening — and to me, takes away some of the joy of collaborative performance, in the first place.

Being a musician, yourself, you can probably remember a time when you and other musicians hit that place in a performance (or even just a jam session in someone’s basement) where you were suddenly soaring a hundred miles above the earth. Everything just fell into place, and it was pure, golden, rapturous magic. People who have put aside their instruments always remember those times with wistful nostalgia — longing, and pained to realize how far their skills have faded. It can be a lonely ache to not know that you will have that moment again.

Oh, but if only we could capture that sort of feeling in a game. It wouldn’t even have to be music. Perhaps we do it, already? Can the same feeling be achieved through superb martial operations?

No, but there is something about music, isn’t there? That chord resolution that makes the hair stand on the back of your neck — there’s something to it that grabs us in an entirely different way.