Last year went so well I figured I’d give it another shot.  Here’s what I think will happen in online games in 2009.

1. This will not be a big year for MMO launches. In 2008 we had a WoW expansion pack, two games with a ton of buzz, and one pirate game that wasn’t quite as big as those other two. This year will include Champions Online and Free Realms, but none of the huge releases of previous years. Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic have no announced dates yet, but they won’t be in 2009. *
2. Champions Online, the first next-gen console MMO will launch this year. It will ignite a new interest in MMOs on console despite having more than a few console-related issues. I absolutely loved City of Heroes, so I’m likely to play this one a lot.
3. This will be a big year for announcing MMOs. We will likely see big announcements from Carbine, Red 5, 38 Studios, and Trion. We might even see that Fallout Online announcement from Zenimax everyone is expecting. None of these games will launch in 2009.
4. Somebody will buy Turbine.  I bet it’s a big media company of some sort, and not a game publisher. 
5. Just as the “hey everybody, let’s make an MMO” gravy train ended a few years ago, the “I know! MMOs for kids!” trend is also about to end.  A bunch of kids MMOs will come out in 2009 and none of them will approach Club Penguin’s numbers. It will be much harder to get this kind of game funded as a result.
6. The console manufacturers are going to start talking about the next generation of consoles in a very preliminary way. Nobody will get dev kits in 2009, but some details will start to come out about what’s going to be in the new consoles.  (Answer: More cores - probably around 20, and big hard drives. Digital distribution of non-game media will be a big part of the next gen game consoles.)
7. The economy will bottom out and start to rebound. We aren’t quite at the bottom yet, but the low point will come in 2009.
8. Not much is going to happen on the Augmented Reality front in 2009. We might see a few simple apps using smart phone camera and screens, but that will be about it, at least publically.
9. Microsoft will start making another MMO. They will cancel this MMO in 2010 when they discover it takes 5 years and tens of millions to make an MMO these days.
10. One of the XNA community games will hit the big time. It will be a top-ten downloadable for a while. Its name will be said at the following GDC at least a billion times.
11. A whole lot of web startups are going to fail in 2009. There have been a couple this fall, with quite a few more will go down in flames next year.  I’m not talking about the “90%” of companies that always fail; I’m talking about companies you might have actually heard of. Everybody had enough runway to get through the holidays… the real test comes in the spring when they can’t fund their next round.
12. The fallout from Sony Online moving under the rest of Sony’s gaming businesses will hit in 2009. This probably means significant management changes and cancelled projects. I suspect that either DC Universe or The Agency will get the axe. It could just as easily be some unannounced project we’ve never heard of, though. 
13. Warhammer Online will merge some servers together.  They are already offering free transfers. This will make some people at FLS laugh out loud (see the second from the last paragraph). The reason will be the same as the reason PotBS merged servers: it’s hard to predict exactly how many subscribers you will have Server merges are not the beginning of the end, it’s just a matter of starting with too many servers. FWIW, the hundreds of unofficial WAR forums are full of people asking for merges.

* Obviously Star Trek Online thinks it will ship in 2009. They set their game in 2409, after all.  I think the game is going to slip into 2010.

This is what I thought would happen a year ago.  Let’s see how I did.

[This is my second time writing this post.  For some reason Wordpress or Firefox or somebody ate what I wrote on Thursday and was planning to publish today. *sigh*]

1.  Pirates did, in fact, launch. We launched in the US and Europe in January, then in Australia in February, and finally in Russia in September. What I didn’t predict a year ago was that I wouldn’t be at FLS anymore.
2. Warhammer slipped and then launched in the fall just as I (and everyone else) predicted. I was a bit off about the numbers, though. They seem to be doing well, but are definitely below the magic million. Lich King almost certainly put a dent in their numbers, though.  Personally, I enjoy Warhammer Online quite a bit and hope it keeps going well for them.
3. Age of Conan shipped in the spring, and while the first 20 levels were quite good, everything else fell flat. Quite a few people who left PotBS to play AoC came back a month or two later. Apparently boobs and gore aren’t enough to carry an MMO all by themselves.
4. NCsoft basically gutted their Austin studio, pushed out the Garriots, and moved power over everything outside Asia to the ArenaNet folks. That’s great news for Seattle, but not so great for all the people I know who were laid off. Wish I’d been wrong about this one.
5. Maybe it’s just me, but it actually seems like game journalism is getting better. Maybe that’s because we’re mainstream enough for real reporters to cover game stories?  It’s arguably still in the “suck” category, but I don’t think I’ll be making this prediction for next year.
6. At GDC08, Microsoft announced that community games would be available to people who weren’t members of the Creator’s Club. In July they announced more details. They also did it without requiring certification for every XNA game. Way to go, Microsoft!
7. Bioware announced Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few people noticed, including the few remaining Star Wars: Galaxies players.
   1. Red 5 hasn’t announced anything.
   2. NC Orange County changed its name to Carbine (or maybe was always Carbine and I was clueless), but hasn’t announced anything.
   3. Space-Time was cut loose in the first round of cuts at NCsoft, announced themselves, spent 6 months looking for a publisher, then laid everybody off and started hiring Flash developers. 
   4. King’s Isle announced, beta’d, and launched Wizard 101. I hear it’s pretty good.
   5. The thing that Sean and Scott are working on at NC Austin was killed and never announced. Fortunately they both seem to have landed on their feet.
   6. 38 Studios hasn’t announced anything.
8. Although lots of games have become fairly popular on Facebook and other social networks, none of they have blown the doors off. They’re still more about grabbing eyeballs than revenue. As ad rates continue to plumet thanks to the Economopalypse and funding becomes harder to secure, that may not bode well for the social game world in 2009.
9. Metaplace hasn’t launched exactly, but they’re in a beta where anybody can invite more testers. They have come pretty far during the year. Areae also renamed itself to the people-know-how-to-pronounce-and-spell-it Metaplace.
10. World of Warcraft actually hit 11 million subscribers a couple months ago. Wrath of the Lich King will probably give them a boost this winter too. Is this the peak?  We won’t know for quite a while; Blizzard is never going to announce a number under 11 million. [Update: Blizzard just announced 11.5M as the post Lich King number.]
11. It seems that Cheyenne Mountain is this year’s example. They reportedly raised their money from angels rather than venture capitalists, but the problem is still the same.  Trying to build more than one game at the same time with a brand new company is stupid.
12. I was right! Valve didn’t tell anyone they were working on an MMO in 2008!  Whether they actually are or not is more of a mystery.  They were recruiting at Austing GDC for what it’s worth.
13. I don’t have a fully automated nanotech powered flying car, do you?
14. (from the comments) Whirled launched. It got the Penny Arcade bump for Corpse Craft, and has quite a few people on there playing games. We’ll have to wait until Daniel shows us all the numbers at GDC to know how it’s really doing, but it seems pretty good from the outside.

That makes ten (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14) correct predictions, two (8, 9) incorrect predictions, and two that are impossible to determine (10, 12). I’m pretty happy with those results. Maybe next time I’ll put in fewer gimmes (1, 5, 11, 13).

The big MMO event from 2008 that I missed completely is Atari acquiring Cryptic. It makes a lot of sense for publishers other than EA to want to get into the MMO space, and acquiring an experienced developer (like Cryptic or Mythic) is the best way to go about it.  I wonder if we’ll see similar news next year from Turbine.

About nine months ago I developed this intense fascination with Augmented Reality. I even wrote about it at one point. Well that fascination is still with me, so I thought I’d describe about what I’ve discovered in that time.

The first thing I found is that many AR advocates and researchers are pursuing things that seem a little pointless to me. For instance, this ad for the mini lets you see a 3D mini model by waving a magazine around in front of your webcam. It would be much easier to use if they just put a flash app on their site with a slider that let you spin the car. Then there are the games that you can only see through a cell phone. It’s like a regular 3D game only with unreliable flickering graphics and bad UI. The ad is at least commercially viable for the ad agency, if not for Mini. Nobody is going to buy the cell phone invisible train game.

“But that’s not the point!” you might be thinking.  To me commercial viability is exactly the point. The best way to be able to keep working on thing X is to make it worth buying. You sell v1.0 so you can use the money to make v2.0. If v1.0 is worthless even to early adopters, and you can’t trick some VC into giving you millions of dollars for no reason, you don’t get to make v2.0. I’m a fan of having a business model and I’m not afraid to admit it.

The second thing I’ve learned about AR is how close we are to having all the pieces while still remaining frustratingly far away. Computing power is cheap enough to fit a wearable in a relatively small bag. GPS receivers are less than $30, and that’s not in quantity. Cameras that are good enough to do basic feature tracking from are under a hundred bucks. Between WiMAX and 3G phone networks, mobile internet connections are widely available. That is most of the pieces of a real first person AR system available right now for under a couple hundred bucks. These guys are demonstrating a solution to many of the hard problems running in real time on a laptop.

Aside from integration, the biggest remaining hurdle for first person AR is displays. The two display vendors I’m keeping my eye on are Lumus and Microvision. Lumus was at CES in January showing off their glasses, but they are still not available for purchase. Up until August or so their website said “Fall 2008″, but that’s since switched to “Mid 2009″. Do they really have an impending product launch, or is it vaporware that will fall prey to the Econopolypse? Who knows, but I’m going to see if they’ll sell me a pair of glasses in 6 months. Microvision is working with the military on some wearable display stuff, and are looking for partners for their consumer products.

The third thing I’ve learned about the state of Augmented Reality is how little of the work is going into applications. It’s like the PC in the 1970s. Everybody working on AR starts by grabbing a computer vision library (of which there are about a dozen) and then putting together their own motion tracking or fiducial detection system. After a couple of years they get things working pretty well and then finish grad school and move on to something else. There is no standardized AR API to write against and no one has even started working on whatever the killer app for AR will be.

This last challenge is where I’ve been focusing my attention. Unfortunately the first step there is to get a motion tracking and scene mapping system of my own working. So I’ve been reading a lot about computer vision and boning up on linear algebra so I can actually understand what I’m reading. This is a part time personal project for me, so it’s not incredibly fast, but I am making progress. At this point I have no idea if this will lead me to start an open source project, found a company, or even throw up my hands and give up.  It’s been a very interesting learning experience so far though and I’m still very excited. I feel like I’m watching the early stages of a huge new industry. Hopefully I’ll have some worthwhile progress of my own to share before long.

Anyway, I’ll now return you to your very occasional reading about the game industry.

The LOGIN 2009 conference has opened its call for speakers. I’m posting about it months before the deadline, so no excuses this time.

This is easily the best conference I’ve been to each of the past few years. The sessions are top notch and because it’s a smaller conference it’s much easier to get to know your fellow attendees.

I am leading the technical track this year, and looking for talks on all of the following:

Live game operations:

• Collecting crash reports and log files
• Deployment procedures
• Cluster Management
• Providing data APIs to third parties
• Data-mining

Large-Scale server architecture:

• Low-level scaling tips on Linux and Windows
• AI techniques for MMOs
• Memory Management for long-running servers
• Design Patterns for scalability
• Chat filtering for spam and content
• Embedding the latest scripting languages
• Area of Interest tracking and bandwidth optimization

Client Technologies

• Developing cross-platform clients
• Client memory management issues
• Challenges of browser-based clients
• Keeping download sizes small and patch times short

Next-generation technology

• Dynamic environments and their impact on bandwidth and AIs
• XML or Object databases as an alternative to relational DBs
• The impact of many-core processors on server and client architectures

I would love to see talks submitted on every topic above, but if you have a fantastic technical lecture burning a hole in your pocket, feel free to submit it even if it’s not on the list. There are similar lists of topics in the Design, Legal, Business/Globalization, and Community tracks. We’re looking for all the best sessions in those areas too.

If you are going to submit a session, the sooner you do it the better. Almost everybody waits for the last minute so we get a flood of submissions right before the deadline (and even some right after the deadline.)  Submitting early gives us a chance to look at your session when it’s one of a few submitted. If you wait for the end your session will compete for attention with the hundreds of other people who waited for the last minute.

It’s called Corsairs Online over there. Everything I hear out of FLS tells me that Akella is doing a great job with the beta and launch.Congratulations FLSers! 

The 2009 Evergreen Events game conference as been announced. It will take place from May 11 to May 14, 2009 in the same hotel ION was in last year. Session proposals will be accepted starting on November 21st.This conference (previously called OGDC and ION) has been the best one I’ve been to over the past couple years.  I highly recommend it for next year. 

Advancing your career is your responsibility. Maybe this is obvious to everyone, but it’s something I’ve really only started paying any attention to over the past few years. In the game industry this is even more important.  Game companies disappear on a regular basis and you can be looking for work very suddenly.

Not everything related to your career development is in your control. Chances are you don’t get to pick what projects your company green lights. You also rarely get to choose when you are laid off. Fortunately there are several things you can control, so if you focus on these items you will be better off than someone who just goes where the wind takes them.

Credits Matter

As an industry, we care a lot about what games you’ve shipped. It is difficult for many people to get a job in the industry if they haven’t shipped anything, which is why so much energy is spent on telling people how to “break in.” Once you are in you should ship as many titles as possible. Working on a game that doesn’t ship is better than nothing, but is not nearly as significant.

This is one area where MMO developers get screwed. It takes at least three and possibly as long as six years to build an MMO. In that same amount of time a console game developer could ship 2-4 titles. Expansion packs can help on the MMO side, so if you are at a company that puts out expansion packs, make sure you’re listing those on your resume. Regular free content updates (like the monthly patches on Pirates) should count, but that might be harder to convince people of. I suspect this is one reason for the mass turnover that happens whenever an MMO launches. People want to get started on their next title as soon as possible.

You can improve your title count by picking what projects you work on carefully. All other factors being equal, you should prefer the project that is closer to shipping. Be sure to make your own assessment of this. People inside a game team rarely have an objective view of how far they are from done. Another thing to consider when choosing a project is how likely the game is to actually ship.  Games get canceled all the time, and you don’t want that to happen to your game after you’ve spent three years on it.

In my ten years in the industry I’ve had two projects cancelled (Middle-Earth Online and Delta Green), shipped one PC CD-ROM game, and shipped one MMO.  I suspect six to eight titles is more typical for that amount of time in the industry.

Success Matters

While the sheer number of titles on your resume is important, the success level of those titles is also very important. If you have an opportunity to work on a mega hit (like GTA, Rock Band, Bioshock, Halo, Half-Life, etc.) you should take it. Getting one of these on your resume is worth at least 5 other titles. Everybody thinks that the success of the mega hit will rub off on whatever the people from that team works on next.

Ending up on a title like this requires a lot of luck. By the time it’s obvious that a game is going to be a hit the team is probably fully staffed. What you need to do is end up on the team that nobody knows will be huge, and I can’t really help you with that.

Advancement Matters

You should have a goal for where you want your career to be several years down the road. That doesn’t always mean management; becoming a hard-core specialist in some area is also perfectly valid. It’s important that every job or project change you make take you a step down this road. “Taking a step” means an increase in compensation, responsibility, or visibility. Usually those steps are accompanied by a loftier job title.

This is something programmers have trouble with. In other disciplines the draw of a decent salary pulls people naturally toward positions that pay better. Programmers usually make good money even if they aren’t leads, so they have to be more explicit about servicing this need.   Insist on regular salary increases even if you don’t need them. Putting the extra money in savings will help you out the next time you are between jobs and maybe even enable you to start your own thing if that’s one of your goals.

The key to advancement in your career is to make sure the people above you in the hierarchy know where you want to go.  Usually they’ll ask you, but if they don’t, make a point of telling them anyway. That way they have you in mind when they are thinking about the future needs of the company.

Visibility Matters

Gaining visibility is a good thing. There are three kinds of visibility I’m talking about here: visiblity to partners, visibility to customers, and visibility to peers. Visibility to partners means that your position involves regular interactions with your company’s business partners. That could mean the publisher, the IP holder, or outside vendors. Visibility to customers means contact with fans and press that is targeted at fans. Visibility to peers means that you have regular contact with other people across the industry. All three of these are important to have.

With respect to your career, being visible to partners is important because it allows people outside of your company to learn what it’s like to work with you. Most of the partners your company has also work with other game companies, so this sort of contact will allow your reputation to spread. These contacts are also likely to be valuable at your next job, so make sure that you keep in touch with the people you work with at your company’s partners.

Depending on the kind of games you make, visibility to customers may be easy to accomplish. Many MMO companies allow staff to talk directly to fans (or customers if the game is launched), which can build a reputation for that staff member within the community surrounding that game. Unless you are very well known across a broad set of potential customers, customer visibility isn’t likely that this kind of exposure will do much for your career. On the other hand, knowing your customers is often good for helping you do your job better.

The visibility that is most likely to help your career is visibility to your peers in the industry. The three best ways I’ve found to get this kind of exposure are to speak at conferences, maintain a blog, and network. These are things that your company is not really going to be able to help you with, so expect to pursue peer visiblity on your own. Peer visibility is incredibly helpful when it comes to finding another job.  Many jobs are never listed publicly so you will only hear about them if you know somebody. You are also far more likely to get an interview if the person reading your resume has read something on your blog or seen your name on the speaker list for the last conference he was at.

Reputation Matters

We work in a very small industry with high turnover. Chances are good that someone you work with today will end up at a company you’re applying to. Chances are even better that someone you work with today will be looking for work while you’re on a team with an opening.  You should do everything you can to make sure that other person wants to work with you again. Don’t be the jerk that nobody likes.

Your Happiness Matters

If all the advice above seems rather self-serving, that’s because it is. Nobody cares as much about your career as you do. Your manager is trying to keep his team productive while juggling the needs of his own career. The top brass at your company is trying to keep the company in the black, which often means keeping expenses under control. Both of these groups have to balance your personal career needs with those of a larger group of people and those of the company itself. That’s why it’s so important that you are taking care of your own career.

On the other hand, blind ambition is not the key to happiness. Enjoying what you’re working on is very important. That’s what gets most of us up in the morning. Happy people are also far more productive and less likely to burn out than merely ambitious people.

Your personal quality of life issues are important to balance against ambition. For you it could be where you live, what kind of games you work on, how much time you have for family and friends, what your work environment is like, or the length of your commute. You are the only one who can set the balance between career advancement and what makes you happy. All I suggest is that you make deliberate decisions instead of putting up with whatever happens by chance.

Jeremy Liew passed along a report from Neilson Mobile that says teens text 7.5 times as often as they make voice calls. The report says that across the entire population approximately 1.75 text messages are sent for every voice call.

Why is it that text is winning out over voice on a device that was designed specifically for voice chat in the first place?  Is it just that circumstances often permit text chat, but not a voice call? 

A couple of weeks ago, Jeff Atwood and crew launched the public beta of Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow lets programmers ask questions and other programmers answer them. That’s it.  They just did it with a lot less suck than all the other programming community help sites: The ads are unobtrusive, there is no login requirement just to see an answer, answers are listed from best to worst instead of first to last, and anyone can edit a question or answer to make it better.

For instance, look at this question I asked about boost shared pointers. I have work-arounds for the problem in my code, but figured that there had to be a better way. Turns out that the boost experts on Stack Overflow knew exactly what I needed, and answered within a few hours.  Then some other people read the question, picked the best answer, and by voting it up made that answer appear prominently.  By the time I got back to check to see if my question had been answered, there was a clear winner. To make it even more prominent, I marked that answer as “accepted” and now it’s highlighted.

If you’re a programmer, I suggest you check it out. Next time you’re looking for the answer to a programming question, see if it’s been asked on Stack Overflow. If not, ask your question. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

(Back in July I joined a company called Divide by Zero.  Now I’m singing the praises of a site called Stack Overflow.  Next thing you know I’ll be renaming my blog “Access violation”. )

Everybody knows that building an MMO involves a lot of people, takes a lot of time,  and costs a lot of money. Fewer people know how much money, how many people, and what all those people are doing for all that time.  I thought I would share a bit of my experience on Pirates and give you some idea what those big MMO budgets are spent on.  All of the data behind this post is up on Zoho Sheet; feel free to do whatever you want with it. (Also, Zoho is much cooler than the Google Docs spreadsheet.)

There are a few things I should mention up front: These are not the numbers from Pirates.  We had a gradual ramp up of people and project scope over the course of five years and that’s definitely not the right way to do it. I also rearranged people to compensate for some of the staffing shortages we had on Pirates.

This “budget” also doesn’t include anything but people’s salaries. Most costs scale up with staff, including desktop hardware, office space, software, office server capacity, taxes, benefits, etc. You would need to add 40-50% to the dollar figures to take that into account.  I mostly care about the percentages, so I didn’t bother trying to include any of those items. The budget also doesn’t include any server, hosting, or bandwidth costs. Those can be pretty significant in the beta and live phases.

Most of the salaries were drawn from the 2007 Game Developer magazine salary survey. Those are:

Programmer	$83,383
Artist	$66,594
Designer	$63,649
Producer	$78,716
Tester	$39,062

There were three functions I didn’t have any salary surveys to draw from, so I just made up some numbers. I assumed Community people make about the same as Designers and that Operations people make about the same as Programmers. I put Customer Service people down at $30k on average, which is much more than front-line CSRs and forum moderators, but less than supervisors and managers.

Community	$63,649
Customer Service	$30,000
Operations	$83,383

I broke the project down into four phases: Pre-production, Production, Beta, and Post-Launch. Pre-production is a period where tools are being built and the game is being designed, but work has not yet started on much (if any) final content. Production is the Big Expensive Part when tons of content people crank out all the final assets for the entire game. Beta is the period at the end of production where your game is exposed to external players in a significant way, and includes closed and open beta. Post-Launch is obviously the period after the game has launched.I also divided the effort into three major areas: World, Systems, and Infrastructure. World is the construction of the game world, quests, dungeons, etc.  Systems is the development of character classes or skills, character customization assets, UI, and game systems.  Infrastructure is the less-glamorous stuff behind the scenes like core server code, operations tools, scheduling, and IT. I broke it down this way for the benefit of a future post that currently exists only in my head.

Pre-production

The purpose of the pre-production phase is to figure out the answers to a bunch of questions before the team grows to its full size and things get really expensive. There is an emphasis on programmers and system designers in this phase, because they have the most questions to answer. As expected, the programmers take up the biggest chunk in pre-production. They are both numerous and expensive. System development is also a big focus in Pre-production.

Production

This is where most of the money on the project will be spent, and most of that is spend on building the world:



Beta

During the beta phase other significant costs (such as operations and customer service) start to come in, but the content team is still going full bore on building out and bug fixing the world, so it doesn’t affect the numbers too much.

Post-Launch

The Post-Launch phase of the project is represented in this graph primarily because it takes a while to get money out of your players and through the various intermediaries involved, and into your bank account.  Even if you have 100k players on launch day you won’t see revenue from those players for a while.  If the game isn’t at least self-sufficient beyond that, then you’re in trouble.  The Live phase has a smaller number of world artists since you are not building the main world anymore at this point. Depending on the (paid or unpaid) expansion pack strategy of the game, this will vary.

Totals

Here are some graphs to break down the total amounts spent. See how world is the biggest chunk?  That’s why everyone is talking about user-generated content.

How closely to these numbers reflect the budgets on MMOs you’ve seen? I’d love to hear your thoughts.