As I covered recently the most important thing to recognise is that your players will leave you. There are too many things competing for your customers attention to rely on a hardcore of long-term subscribers for revenue. These players make up a tiny fraction of your earnings compared to the casual players who may only subscribe for 2-3 months (obviously if your game is awesome you’re more likely to convert casuals into Hardcores but that’s a different blog post).

So knowing that your players will leave you it’s important that you replace them. Constantly.

How do you replace these players? Advertising. Marketting. Special Offers. Anything. You need to keep your game constantly at the front of the media.

Lets look at some graphs from Google Trends:

The above is a chart showing World of Warcraft and Runescape. Two of the most successful MMO’s in the west right now. Note how both lines stay relatively level with fairly regular spikes.

This chart shows that both WoW and Runescape have managed to keep themselves at the forefront of the internets attention. Both games advertise heavily year round as well as having a strong element of word of mouth.

This chart shows Age of Conan and GTA4. Note the similarity in the curves. A small ramp up with a very distinct spike around their launch/release followed by a sharp decline. This is a completely traditional shape for a regular boxed videogame (try putting any recent console game into Google Trends and you’ll get a similar shape, I chose GTA4 because of their proximity on the graph).

GTA4 has actually managed to regain some mindshare with the PC release and the new DLC.

Age of Conan however has languished in complete obscurity since it was released.

On a hunch I decided to look up the following chart:

Warhammer Online has been following a similar pattern to Age of Conan. There was a huge amount of publicity around it’s launch (the pre-order numbers grabbed alot of headlines) but then that momentum completely dropped off once the game was running.

Now we discover that those 1.5million pre-orders have translated into maybe 300k paying subscribers and the game has been forced to merge servers due to a dropping average population.

Looking at these charts it’s very easy to draw the conclusion that using traditional videogames marketting techniques just doesn’t work well for a subscription based business model.

In order to maintain consistent subscriber numbers (nevermind growing them year on year like Runescape or Eve Online) you must market your product outside of your existing customer base every day from the moment you launch without taking a break.

However I think Twitter is destined for much greater things than it is currently being used for.

Right now Twitter is largely a device for spreading memes around the Internet. It’s larger scale than IM and more immediate than email. It is the perfect platform for viral marketing.

However I was thinking about how Twitter is going to fit into other forms of media. This mostly relates to how Twitter is going to completely revolutionise the ARG (if it isn’t already) and potentially change the face of Television.

ARGs have been fairly slow moving things in the past. Where updates are carefully staged (often according to coincide with specific marketing pushes) and planned out months in advance. I imagine a future (and it may already be here) where instead of elaborate puzzles to be solved over several days or weeks we’re dealing with rapidly unfolding story-lines with many virtual actors facilitated by services like Twitter.

Updates to the story-line can happen in real-time. The sensation of being involved in something as it happens will be far greater and be capable of generating a sense of urgency in what has typically been a fairly sedate form of media.

Members of the public could be dragged into the story as well. If run well enough genuine actors could be hired to follow up on Tweets like “Am going to Starbucks, I need a coffee while I get my head around what just happened.” If the general location of the character is known to those following the story people nearby might actually be able to spot the character at a Starbucks and engage with them, take photos of them and Tweet about it themselves perpetuating the story even more.

Granted this assumes a lot on the part of the participants, that they are capable of Role-playing sufficiently that they don’t break the universe of the game (I remember the ARG surrounding the Transformers movie where you could read the inbox of one of the characters and everybody on the Internet had spammed it into oblivion with “Zomg Optimus Primelol” ).

Television can also use Twitter to grow beyond it’s episodic boundaries. Characters from TV shows are already getting Facebook pages but these are often fan pages and not genuine attempts at creating a virtual persona for the characters in a TV show that actually appears to be living in that world.

My current favourite show is The Big Bang Theory (wonder why…) and it is incredibly easy to imagine the characters of that show adopting a service like Twitter as part of their everyday lives (references to Facebook are common in the show already). Extending these characters lives beyond the weekly episodes on to the Internet through social networking services should really be a no-brainer. There are thousands of people out there who would want to be privy to the Tweets of characters like Sheldon Cooper so long as those Tweets were entirely in character (so no references to the existence of the show).

However I actually believe that if this happens it will be more likely to occur for kids shows like Hannah Montana as the goal for these shows is to create characters that kids will want to relate to and be friends with (and lets not get into the reasons for this here) and that the audience is far less cynical and more likely to believe that the person writing messages on Twitter is actually the character in the show (and not some intern on minimum wage).

Other things that might happen in Twitter:

Role-playing Games played over the Internet in public (the short message length will impact the rules used in such games in a way that I think could be very interesting and help keep momentum going).

Tweet Aggregators becoming more common place. We’re already seeing these in Cursebird which is a fairly base use of the service but it will make commentary on events (sports matches, current affairs etc) interesting. You will be able to follow the opinion of the Internet by filtering tweets based on a few keywords in real-time.

So as I said at the start: I think we’re only just scratching the surface of Twitter. This service is going to head in directions that will surprise us all (both for good and bad I suspect). I’m reminded of the War of the Worlds radio play which convinced listeners that it was a news report. I look forwards to the day when mistrust of the media is our base state due to our perceptions of reality being completely eroded.