Worlds in Motion - “MMO Goal Structures as a Panacea”

Erik Bethke, CEO of GoPets, Ltd. is tearing it up here at Worlds in Motion. Here’s my live blog entry from his session.

Great virtual worlds are MMORPGs. Great MMORPGs are virtual worlds.

Another title for this presentation could be “How to apply MMORPG Structures to anything and win big money.”

Most of the virtual world industry does not like World of Warcraft. Killing monsters and taking their shit is not their thing. I can’t even count how many UI elements on the screen. Yet ten million people are paying subscription fees to play it. Is it mass market?

I think these “mass market” questions (from MoU) are not correct. Virtual worlds are missing little guys with exclamation points above their head (a WoW reference for interacting with NPCs that have something for a player).

Even LinkedIn has quests. “I couldn’t solo LinkedIn,” because I had to go get recommendations from others, essentially a group quest.

I get frustrated with UI. We built our registration process as multiple pages. Professionals came to us and told us we should consolidate it to one page. We found after we did a test with both styles, the multiple page registration outperformed the single page registration.

“I don’t care what people think. Just measure it.”

We added a pay button. Our ARPU was over $20 a month in North America. No one likes to talk about registrations down to paying customers. And I’m not going to go there either. But lets just say we were happy with the results.

It’s so much easier fixing UI than fixing the core elements of your game. We launched with Microsoft Passport, we put in a ton of development on updating the UI, and the conversion rates did not improve.

We did tons of analysis. Over half of our revenue was coming from people that bought fruit trees from us for a few weeks in November 2006. It surprised us. If you waited for 16 minutes you could look at your tree and a piece of fruit would drop. We had no idea it would be interested.

It turned out that the fruit tree people were more 44 times more interesting to us. The same group was 65 times more likely to use custom creation tools.
Measure what the people are doing. Know your hardcore user base. For us, its people mining fruit trees and creating content. If you are missing hardcore users, you are missing deep fun. Your world isn’t fun if they are only there for two minutes, that’s bullshit time. Your hardcore users are your evangelists and they make extreme investments.

Game structure creates transactions and goals. Don’t change a known working structure unless you are certain you have something better. We took the apple tree people and allowed them to begin cooking with them. Our revenue TRIPLED when they could make apple pie, apple juice, etc.

Don’t sit around your conference room throwing things at each other. You can work a lot less if you work to understand your users.
I think of a leaf when I think of these things. Virtual worlds without structures suck. Worlds that don’t have structures force users to make their own.

We need a new word. Goal interface trumps user interface. Goals are measurable, comparable, accessible, meaningful, scale in challenge as user progresses. User interface should exist to support goal interface.

Why transactions? A transaction is a twittle in the BD. It’s picking up an item, dropping an item, creating an item, it’s selling/buying/trading. It’s concrete, its measurable… and its pleasurable.

Thesis:

- Good online games are engaging past-times

- Great online games have robust market economies with people spending a significant amount of time, capital and intellectual creative inside these spaces living lives.

- All great online games are virtual worlds

Powerpoint will be posted at erikbethke @ livejournal