[...] Soo … for some unknowable reason, I’ve been invited to participate in a chat over at XFire. You know, the gaming service with the stats Raph likes? [...]

It is vulnerable to ‘gaming the system’ though… If I were to make a push with the EQII players, I could get more of them to install and faithfully use Xfire to bolster the numbers of my game… corrupting that self-selecting pool of gamers who use Xfire because they like it. For the record, I like Xfire. A lot.

Perhaps person-hours will be a better measurement of an MMOs success than the slippery # of subscribers.

That depends on your perspective and, in turn, your definition of success. Success could mean that the people who play your game spend a lot of time doing so, regardless of how many of them there are.

Success could also mean that a lot of people like your game well enough to continue paying for it, regardless of how much time they spend actually playing.

What makes an online game a “casual MMOG”…

What way to better signal that you are going to be the NEXT BIG THING than to say you are creating a casual MMOG. Everyone from big media, to venture capital, to former supply-chain logistics project managers seem to be trying to get into the world of …

Mr. Koster