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.

Firstly I think it’s amazing that this research is being done at all. The sheer amount of data that has to be processed to reach any conclusions is huge: 60TB for 4 years worth of gaming. Secondly I think it’s great that Sony let them have access to this data; many wouldn’t have.

However this post isn’t about the technical challenges they faced. While reading I picked up on a few points in the piece that I think are much more significant than they first appear and decided to elaborate on them.

“The average age of players turned out to be 31. “These aren’t just pasty white teenage boys in a basement—to be sure, they’re there, but they’re not typical,” he said. The older players tended to play more than the kids and, although the total hours played seem large, he said that the time mostly displaced either TV watching or movie going. And the surveys showed that those who viewed TV news in the first place continued to do so, suggesting that gamers really slotted EQ2 into their entertainment time.”

Emphasis mine.

While developing your game it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you aren’t just competing with World of Warcraft for your players subscriptions. You’re actually competing against everything else they could be doing instead of playing your game.

This isn’t something you have to worry about in the singleplayer games market normally as you aren’t reliant on players returning to your game night after night for your revenue. If you buy Gears of War then Epics bottom line isn’t going to be affected by you deciding to watch the football instead.

However this is something that has really been evident to those playing the games. Real world events impact how many people log in to your game. During the World Cup there was noticeably less people online than normal and even the release of a Single Player game in a genre entirely unrelated to your game can affect your subscriber numbers.

In the wake of a period like last November where there was a big title being released each week for 4 weeks how many people will have felt compelled to return to their MMO after spending that long away from it playing something else?

During the recent (and still ongoing) Planetside Blog-o-War between Rock Paper Shotgun, Boing Boing and The Escapist the Dawn of War 2 beta was released. That very night I logged into the game to discover that over half of the outfit that would normally be on at that time were playing the DoW2 demo rather than Planetside. Probably only half of those people actually returned to Planetside after the demos appeal had worn off.

This brings me to the topic of churn…

“…Srivastava described how he could explore the phenomenon of customer churn, something that’s significant for any sort of subscription-based service, like cell phones or cable TV. With the full dataset, the team can now track how individual customers dropping out of the game influenced others who they typically played or interacted with. Using this data, the spreading rate and influence factor could then be calculated, providing hard measures to work with.”

Anybody who has been a member of a social group of any kind (real or virtual) understands that sometimes when people leave the group that group will start to fall apart.

This is a completely natural phenomena and one that once begun will tend to run it’s course. This is well understood by the large guilds and clans who know that if your group stays too small or doesn’t have a frequent turnover of new members then the group will become too familiar and if a popular member of the group leaves it can cause a spiral that brings the entire group down.

This is often why the largest guilds sometimes feel the least personal. If the relationships between the members gets too strong then if one of them leaves the entire structure is weakened (a little similar to a tantrum spiral in Dwarf Fortress).

What developers should be taking away from this though is that keeping individual players happy is incredibly important. Their community managers should be identifying who the “leaders” among the community are and trying to ensure that these people keep playing the game.

A well known member of the community bad-mouthing your game because of game imbalance (for example) can affect the morale of the entire community causing players to stop playing (maybe just temporarily) and dropping out of the social network they formed in your game. This can lead to other players who never visit the forums but know somebody who does stopping their play because the people they play with aren’t playing anymore. Repeat this enough times and you start to lose subscriptions.

WoW and Eve (which in my book are the most successful MMOs of recent years albeit on different scales) have clearly understood this. Churn is inevitable as many reasons why players stop playing are completely beyond the control of Developers however it’s important to identify the causes that are under your control and address them quickly (rarely quick enough).

Additionally like the large guilds maintaining a constant stream of new players is important in preventing the community stagnating and refreshing the bonds between established members. WoW and Eve have never stopped marketing themselves, always pushing to get people who have never played (or used to play but have lapsed) into the game. The number of MMO launches each year is always increasing but very rarely do you actually hear anything about them after their launch.