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4:23pm on Thursday, 27th September, 2012:

Free to Play versus Pay to Win

Anecdote

I went to Cambridge today, to give a seminar at Jagex. This is a UK behemoth of a developer, with around 450 employees, but it's hidden away in an unmarked building on account of how one in 100,000 people are psychopaths and they have 1,000,000 people playing Runescape. If you want to visit them, you'll have to drive around Cambridge until you see this piece of conspicuous consumption, then you'll know you're there:


My talk had the title Free to Play versus Play to Win, and was essentially talking about whether game developers (such as Jagex) should go with the flow and start developing products that are less game and more world (that is, gain socialiers but lose achievers) or more game and less world (that is, gain achievers but lose socialisers). It's dry stuff, but that's what they wanted me to talk about. It starts off with my view that there's been sufficient a paradigm shift in MMO design and development, brought on by free-to-play, that we're starting a new age of MMOs (the sixth, if you're counting).

Anyway, because they didn't pay me to talk, I've put my slides on my web site so you can see them too. See what I mean? Dry stuff...




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Copyright © 2012 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).