ohai — this week Nick Saint of the Business Insider reports on a crazy new Facebook trend: “Games That Are Actually Good“. And look who’s included in the Business Insider’s three examples:
ohai, founded and headed up by angel investor, former VC, and serial entrepreneur Susan Wu, launched its first game, City of Eternals, a few months ago. The game combines some of the viral features and monetization strategies of traditional Facebook games with gameplay elements of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games.
Oh Nick Saint, you are a saint. We’re aiming to shape the future of social games, so we appreciate the shout-out. And we’re honored to be mentioned alongside Stewart Butterfield and Sid Meier, two dudes we totally admire. Now to keep earning that accolade with more kickass games, starting soon with (drum roll) Project Unicorn Parade!
ohai, this is excellent and humbling news: Chief ohai Susan Wu is the top selection in “The Gamers” category of Fast Company’s new cover story, “Most Influential Women in Technology 2010“! We ohais are gratified to get our efforts to shape the future of social gaming recognized by such a great site. Includes a good interview with Susan, who talks virtual goods and building massively social online games. As she puts it to Fast Company, “[T]here’s entire new generations of social games that are going to be coming to market that will transform how people think about playing with each other online.” Speaking of which, look for news on our next game very very very soon!
ohai, we just got gratifying coverage of City of Eternals, our first MMO, on ABC News’ TechBytes! Video embedded below — the CoE love starts 60 seconds in:
ABC’s review is by Games.com Editor-in-Chief Libe Goad, once named among the “50 Most Influential Games journalists” — but we want to nominate her Best Game Journalist EVAR. Because more than just liking City of Eternals, Libe really gets our vision of how games can foster more fulfilling social interactions and relationships. As she puts it:
“You can actually chat with people in [City of Eternals]… You see their little Facebook icon pop up and you can actually message them and get to know them. It’s taking social networking that we know on Facebook and taking it to the next level.”
Simply put, we are building games that are truly social. We at ohai believe that we’re still in the first generation of social games. Through more engaging stories, richer world environments, and deeper game play mechanics, we’re heralding an entirely new generation of social games. And, we’re just getting started. Our next game is going to rock.
ohai designer Franky went wacky on our whiteboard this wet Friday, and whipped up this cartoon portrait of team ohai! Which is a good thing, because it’s on the same whiteboard we usually shoot with suction cup Nerf(tm) bullets. Target practice!
ohai all — if you’re in Austin for South by Southwest, chief ohai Susan Wu is giving a talk Monday, March 15 at 5:00 PM, and we’d love to see you there. Here’s the description:
Social Games Level Up! What’s next for social games? What does it take to build an MMO that everyone will play? Can you teach Farmville fans how to play an MMO? Or get devoted World of Warcraft players passionate about a social network game? Susan Wu, CEO and co-founder of gaming industry pioneer, ohai!, shares 5 key lessons learned from launching the company’s first next-generation social MMO, City of Eternals.
Speaking of GDC, we’re having an office party to celebrate the beta release of our first MMO, City of Eternals, and give folks a sneek peek of our next game, Project Unicorn Parade. Here’s info on requesting an invite!
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.”
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 — this week Nick Saint of the Business Insider reports on a crazy new Facebook trend: “Games That Are Actually Good“. And look who’s included in the Business Insider’s three examples:
ohai, this is excellent and humbling news: Chief ohai Susan Wu is the top selection in “The Gamers” category of Fast Company’s new cover story, “
ohai, we just got gratifying coverage of 
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’.”
