[...] The Lifecycles of a Player The More Things Change…and if you haven’t read it before, Players Who Suit MUDs. The first two are articles by Raph Koster, who was a lead designer on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. The last one is by Richard Bartle, who created the first MUD.Personally, I agree with most of what these articles say, at least in my experience. I’ll probably comment more on these later, but that’s a fair amount of information to digest. [...]

Everyone er loves(?) a good data miner

“You are selling a solution to a problem that your customer may not even know they had”

Spot on, actually that whole article is pretty amazing……

Guy Kawasaki

— What can an e-commerce startup learn from your experiences selling sex toys online?

Dr. Sandor Gardos

— Find a niche that is currently under-served in the way you want to serve them. Then, continue to mine the data, listen to your customers, and keep creating ever more experiences that are amazing for them. Also, stop thinking that you are selling a product — that puts you into commoditization and the only thing you can compete on is price. You are selling a solution to a problem that your customer may not even know they had. Finally, forget about all the latest trends and gee-whiz technology; if it doesn’t really help the majority of your customers, it is worthless or worse.

Historically, extremely successful products were initially niche offerings. The reflective advice Dr. Gardos provided in the interview with Guy Kawasaki is not unique to his particular situation. You’ll find the same advice in every business journal, every business magazine, and from every business advisor (e.g., SCORE.) That’s what entrepreneurs, especially serial entrepreneurs, learn from their experiences: serving underserved markets builds a foundation for business and market growth.

Note the concern and desire for minigames within the gamespace that encompasses the city. Also if you note the forum userbase here youll see a good cross section of players from fanatasy (WOW, EQ, DAOC) to futuristic genres (SWG, EVE, etc) waiting to play what some on this thread might term a “niche” game about ship v ship combat set in a historical setting, with NO avatar combat on release and only ship v ship RVR.

Is this going to turn some people off? Surely, and avatar combat might be thier path to long term player retention of the casual gamers from the “fantasy genre”. Actually I think it’ll be required in the long term…too many now used to the WOW model.

Is this going to reach the (as Raph said)”Ok now Im waiting for something new” crowd? Definately

I smell a slam dunk for flyinglabs, at least initially. I hope they control for very high download demand, and server populations…..

I’m not challenging your statement, I am wondering where that 1% figure comes from?

A lot of casual indie developers discuss and post figures like this on the forums at indiegamer.com. 1% is generally accepted to be a typical conversion rate for an average casual title. I remember reading a discussion a while back about Weird Worlds, a very niche title (and a great game), that was getting a very high conversion rate (~10%, I don’t really remember exactly) but obviously had a much lower download rate. Similarly I know the developer for the game Democracy reports much higher conversion rates but for much lower download rates.

[...] Citation: Tu aura toujours un contre-exemple précis, mais je te redirige sur le site de Raph Koster qui explique très bien que ce sont, quel que soit le systême, toujours les mêmes 20% de joueurs qui remportent 80% des combats. J’ai pas l’url sous la min mais sur Google ca doit se trouver facilement. oui j’est dit a la fin de mon précédent message que globalement j’etait dacord. Sinon tu parles de ce site ? http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/1…hange/#more-541 [...]

Anyhow I think this % can only increase over time as the distributable DL systems get better developed and more optimized. And as overall use of high speed connections becomes more prevalent.

Also what about the case of DnL, a prepurchase DL for 60$ that allowed the buyer to get into a “pre-game” if I remember right they sold around 10k or 50k preorders. (All sold out in less than 2 hours if I remember correctly)However this may be the only game that had less people playing on release than in thier “pre-game” and “beta” if thier community sites are any indication. Im unsure of thier current numbers though.

I was more referring to the

Thus it has a small playerbase relative to more generalized MMOs,

statement.

where is the cutoff we set for big/average/small games now?

Sounds like you need more warlock friends