VirtualWorldsNews Feature: MMOG, Social Network, or Virtual World?

Linden Lab pointed out in its early stages that it was developing a world, not a game. Blizzard made no such distinction with World of Warcraft, and it still spread like wildfire. However, as most critics have pointed out, it's not the gameplay that makes it a huge success. It's the community With social networking sites attaching themselves to massively multiplayer online games,  World of Warcraft is beginning to sound a bit more like Second Life.

John Karlen, a principle at IDG Ventures Boston, said, "From a high level, what you're seeing across the board is that people are seeing that the success of MMOs is in the human interaction. Whenever you see a huge phenomenon like World of Warcraft, you have to step back and say 'Some vein was tapped here, but what was it?' I think most people believe that's the vein that's been tapped."

IDG just invested in GuildCafe, a company that's trying to enrich that vein. GuildCafe provides a community-driven portal for online gaming. Because while human interaction may be the big draw behind MMORPGs, most of them are fairly bad at providing it.

Instead companies like GuildCafe and Curse.com, which just obtained $5 million in funding from AGF Private Equity, are trying to build social networks, among other things, into and across the games that already draw users.

As Jon Radoff, President and CEO of Guild Cafe, said, "People who play World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, or other MMOs often find that when they switch between servers and worlds and guilds, they still have a connection with the people they've played with. The big idea of GuildCafe is to provide continuity between all those games."

Big Results

It's an approach that seems to be working. Curse.com's founder and CEO Hubert Thieblot describes his platform as "a full MMORPG portal. Before us you had many, many sites with only one feature, a social network or video sharing or news site. What we want with Curse is to make one big portal with all of these features in one destination."

He says Curse draws 3.5 million uniques and 85 million page views.

GuildCafe, which is still in beta has about 17,000 users. And, anecdotally at least, Radoff thinks they skew a little away from the average MMO player.

"At this point because most users are attracted to us because it's beta and they have a chance to shape the community," he said. "One thing that I've maybe picked up on is that while MMOS are predominantly a male activity, while we still have more males than females on the site, we have more females than proportionally may exist in the MMORPG. It might be closer to the real world breakdown."

Regardless of skew, both platforms provide an attractive audience base for advertisers. According to Radoff, people in the gaming market no longer watch television, especially in the 18-34 bracket. While the average US  television watcher catches about 34 hours a week, gamers play about 30 or 31 hours a week with just a few hours of television. As Radoff said of this lucrative demographic, "If you're not reaching them through gaming, you're probably not reaching them at all." 

Karlen points out that the demographic is only getting more attractive. "MMOG players are often intense users," he said. "They're also thought leaders, and as the online game demographic broadens, people would be shocked to learn that the average age is 26 and three-quarters are full-time employed, and more are women than you'd think. As the world gets flatter and the experience gets better through a browser, the demographic is going to broaden even greater."

Curse GM Wilson Kriegel sees a similar breakdown. "IGN [a major Internet gaming news site] and other editorial sites are scattered with demographics," he said. "It's hard for them to pinpoint a specific demographic. Curse is about 90 percent male with an IT background and full of early adopters and consumer technology fanatics. We do have a very unique demographic for the advertising space." He says it attracts entertainment, media, and electronics brands among others.

Finally, A Chance to Play Together

The question, then, is why are we only seeing sites like this flourish now. Sites like Allakhazam have been around for a while, providing extra information to MMOG players, but their social networking aspects have been limited. 

Radoff says the space finally hit the right population mark. While Myspace and Facebook went after endlessly large groups like teenagers and people with friends, gaming is more niche. 

"Gaming is a growing market, but it's huge," Radoff said. "It's now big enough to support an ecosystem of Web technologies. If you went back a couple years, the 9 million subscribers of World of Warcraft becomes a couple millions. That long tail of games beyond Warcraft was almost nonexistent. Today you've got Warcraft at the top followed by a couple of games that are serious contenders in their market and then 20 serious second-tier players and then a long tail." 

Wilson compares the current time to the launch of Xbox Live. Once the platform went live and developers saw the attraction for that sort of interactivity, more games made use of it. 

"There are a lot of fun games coming out now all about the user's interactivity with the IP and touch points you can have with others," he said. "There wasn't as much of an emphasis in the past. Now that the developers and publishers in that industry are chasing it, people are showing them what they want." 

Turning Games into Social Networks 

Karlen predicts the trend will continue to even greater openness, integrating in- and out-of-game content. Just as Myspace and Facebook have opened to third-party developers, he believes future MMOGS will have to as well. 

"It might not be World of Warcraft, but games of the future will have to have that open feature," he said. "There will always be examples of games that do well with a closed environment, and Warcraft has a critical mass, but gamers of the future will look to see which games are open. It's provocative, but I do see plenty of people trending that way. Looking at the Web-based online games, that's just another indicator of the trend that the world is getting open and flat. There are fewer and fewer barriers." 

Radoff is a little more hesitant to make those predictions. 

"I certainly know of a couple companies that want to build 3D environments closely linked to social networks," he said. "The difference is that games are driven not just by the network, but by gameplay. And I think there's going to be far too much technological innovation and competition between game companies to settle on one platform. And when I think about adding a 3D network on top of social networks, I have trouble seeing one platform." 

With online distributor Steam's addition of community features, A World of My Own offering distribution and a 3D environment, and Sony's Home including third-party goods sales, mobile tie-ins, and traditional virtual world aspects with gameplay, virtual world-style community features are rapidly growing in games. 

Or Turning Social Networks into Games 

On the other side of the fence is Zombies, a Facebook application that lets users bite their friends and turn them into zombies, creating an undead army. Built on the popular social network, the game had 2,417,418 as of this morning. When you look at install bases for some of the second-tier MMOGs out there, that's not half bad. 

Blake Commagere, one of the developers on the project, says that the game play element is just a new form of interaction. 

"Facebook serves different purposes for different people," he said. "For some people, it's a business contact site. They probably don't want zombies on their pages, but a large number are looking for something to do. They're looking for ways to interact. They use it to message their friends and organize parties. This is just one more way to interact with friends." 

In a random sampling of the users, Commagere found that the app draws slightly more women than men, mostly between 18 and 30. That's a slightly younger and more female-biased demographic than Second Life or many of the other MMOGs. 

In May the average visit time for a user to Facebook was just about 13 minutes, though they visit frequently. So Zombies works as a sort of casual MMO built on the social network. Commagere credits the app's success to being simple, fun, and tied to a sense of community. 

"You can build something for people on social networks," he said, "but if you don't leverage the social aspect, it's just not as interesting. Then you're 'Oh, here I am with a widget on my page, all by myself.' If you can see it on other people's pages, that's when users get into it. One of the things that's compelling in the games we're making is that you can see 'Oh, here's my friend John, and he's got more points than me.'" 

With similar features in GuildCafe and Curse, the approach seems to differ in direction instead of style. Social networks are beginning to look a lot more like online game, and games are beginning to look a lot more like social networks.