Web-based MMOs on Facebook versus standalone websites: chief ohai Susan Wu analyzes the tradeoffs

Our first MMO, City of Eternals, can be played within Facebook, and on its main site, CityofEternals. The game experience is significantly different, depending on the platform you play, but they both have advantages for the developer. On her personal blog, chief ohai Susan has very interesting player data on this point. For example:

When people play embedded through Facebook, their usage pattern looks something like this: 5-6 minute sessions about 8-10 times a day. So they are round tripping in and out of the game world many times a day. When people play directly at the City of Eternals site, they’ll play for 20+ minute sessions 2-3 times a day.

So people playing City of Eternals on Facebook play the game more often but in shorter periods, while players hitting the City of Eternals site play for longer periods, but in less total daily sessions. Notably, the average daily play length comes out roughly the same: 40-60 minutes on Facebook, or 40-60 minutes on CityofEternals.com. However, the time spread is significantly different, and that suggests very different tradeoffs to both platforms. For the standalone site, Susan notes, “you have more control over the user experience” — but because it’s not embedded within a social network users are accustomed to visited many times a day, “you have to deal with a conversion rate hit of the first ‘try’.”

Much more here, including thoughts on turning users from “tourists” into “citizens”. That is, “Someone who is invested in the health, stability and future of the service they’re using.”

ohai — we’re in Forbes talking virtual goods!

Forbes has an article on virtual goods featuring chief ohai Susan, who explains why they’re a valuable commodity people are willing to pay for: They help us symbolically express how we feel about each other, and show off our own place in the world. Or as she puts it there: “It’s about relationship building, and things like rank and status.” Also, big ups to City of Eternals player and CoE Wikia fansite editor Greg, who tells Forbes about our community’s passion for buying items to pimp up their vampire cribs.

What does it mean to be in an open beta, anyways? (or “how do you build MMOs as a web service?”)

Last week our first MMO went into open Beta, and maybe you’re wondering what means.

Most traditional games, even online ones, have discrete development cycles and ‘formal launches.’ These development cycles are usually marked by a fixed point in time when the game is “live” and “launched.” We’re not like that.

We’re building our MMOs as you would a web service. We’re always evolving them based on actual player behaviors (we’re paying attention!) and what we think you might enjoy. As with all of your favorite web services, our MMOs are constantly evolving. We’re testing new areas, new features, new levels, new user interface elements on an ongoing basis.

We look at it this way: You wouldn’t want to read a news site that wasn’t updating its headlines constantly or use a wiki that people weren’t contributing to or participate in a social network that didn’t have real time feeds and ever changing content based on your social context — why should the online games you play be any different?

We’re building organic, live web services. Every time you come to City of Eternals, we hope you notice new content, new improvements to the user experience, and new fixes to issues players have been reporting. We’re changing the game every day, every week.

If you’re expecting an old school MMO where you have to periodically download a giant patch, or go to the store to buy another expansion, that’s not us.

With ohai’s handcrafted MMOs, we want you to experience additions and improvements as fast as hitting your browser’s Refresh button. We’re able to do this because we built a significant amount of technology & tools that allows us to iterate at web speed. As our writer Wagner James Au puts it “I love how we can add missions to our MMO about as quickly as adding a blog post in Wordpress.”

It’s this same technology that enabled us to get our first MMO (yes, there are more coming!), City of Eternals, to an alpha launch in 9 months with 3 core engineers.

So what open beta means for us is that the game is now stable enough to allow new users to begin to enter our game world. We’re not nearly done making huge improvements to the user experience and to the gameplay, but we’ve made significant strides since our private alpha.

The open beta period will be accompanied by constant improvements. The game in 30 days will be dramatically better than the game you see today. At some point in the near future, we’ll be ‘fully live and launched’ but all that means is that the game is pretty stable and performing well, and our core set of initial features has been completed.

Even after we’re fully launched & live, we’ll be making ongoing edits and improvements every week. But that’s a blog post for another time.

Hope you guys are having fun out there,
Susan

p.s. Btw, here’s a photo of my sweet, sweet pad in City of Eternals.
Have you ever wondered to yourself, “What would I do with my own vampire lair?” Well, wonder no more! Click on this awesome link to begin customizing your own. (no, I don’t know why I have a Cryo Tank in my kitchen. Do you?)

ohai — we’re in Ars Technica!

ohai, this is full of coolness: Michael Thompson of uber tech site Ars Technica features ohai in an article on up-and-coming social games attracting the interest of major game publishers. Sample:

Ohai’s vampire-themed MMO—which is admittedly a great deal of fun—allows players to engage in a fast-paced action story involving a civil war amidst a number of undead houses. For those of us who see no appeal in strategy games like Farmville of Mafia Wars, it’s a welcome alternative that plays like a cross between Diablo and World of Warcraft.

Much more here, including insights from chief ohai Susan.