September 20, 2009 by Joe

Korea is the future. They are five years ahead of us and where Korea goes, the rest of the world will follow. (I have been hearing this for at least five years. ) Free to play with micro transactions is the one true business model. Client downloads are death. We must look beyond the core gamer audience and embrace more casual players. Women are 50% of the audience. Don’t trust the client, it is in the hands of the enemy. You game is a service. MMOs are hard. No, they’re really really hard. Seriously. You can’t possibly imagine how hard they are. Runescape is the second biggest MMO and is the one you should really watch. Club Penguin is huge and is the one you should really watch. Lineage is huge in Asia and is the one you should really watch. (These days it’s actually more likely to be ZT Online or some other game in China.) Flash is the best platform to build your MMO on. Web games are cheesy and no core gamer will ever play them. Rudy’s has the best BBQ in Austin. No, County Line is better. Are you kidding me? It’s obviously The Salt Lick. The game industry is bigger than Hollywood. Triple-A MMOs are a dead end. WoW is impossible to compete with. Game X is going to take the top spot from WoW. Games cost so much to make now that the industry is about to collapse under its own weight. MMOs are just like MUDs and you should all learn the lessons MUDs learned X years ago. (To be fair, I don’t think I’ve actually heard this one in a few years.) All of these things happened in UO. Why won’t you people learn from UO? The community around your game is incredibly important and you should take care of them. Your players have no idea what they want. Don’t believe anything they say. Forums are very important. Don’t believe anything you read on forums. Launch is just the beginning. The real work comes after launch. Metrics, metrics, metrics. Record everything! Don’t record too much with your metrics. Too much data is just as useless as too little data. Some people spend CRAZY amounts of money via micro-transactions MMOs on consoles are the Next Big Thing. Casual games are going to save the PC market MMOs are going to save the PC market My background in economics tells me… WoW is a wonderful thing for the industry because of the way they expanded the market. WoW has set expectations so high that you can’t make an MMO for less than X million dollars. (Where X>=30) Person X is a jerk. Let me tell you this funny story about… Company Y is so clueless that they will never put out a successful game Fantasy is where it’s at! MMOs just don’t work as well in other genres. Fantasy has been done. Players want us to move on to other genres. There’s so much money to be made in Asia! Just make sure you internationalize your game first. Gamers in Asia demand click to move so they can smoke while they play. Players are going to trade stuff for real money no matter what you do. You might as well embrace it. RMT causes huge amounts of fraud. Gold spam is impossible to stop. Our startup is the next big thing in MMOs. Just look at this giant pile of money we raised! Game development is all about iteration. Waterfall doesn’t work. There’s this guy named Richard Bartle who proposed dividing players into four types… You can’t use scripting languages in games. They’re way too slow. Writing all your code in C++ is stupid. Launch early, launch often. You only get to launch once.

This year it was obvious to me that I’ve hit the Austin GDC level cap. Fortunately that means I have moved on to the conference elder game and learn far more interesting things speaking and engaging in deep hallway conversations.

What about you? What things are you sick of hearing in conference presentations?

~Joe

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