Shanti’s Blog

Whirled Goes Open Beta

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:11:02 -0700

After a year-long closed beta, my company’s latest shiny new toy is now open to the public! It is called Whirled and is an online games community supported by a browser-based virtual world, multi-player games, remixable user-generated content, and a virtual item sales business model.

I recommend trying out this game to start and then poking around a bit - enjoy!

EA Validates Free To Play Model

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:52:30 -0800

EA announced today that they are dipping a toe into the Free To Play business model waters by releasing a casual version of Battlefield called Battlefield Heroes which will be supported by ads and in-game microtransactions. While the mega-publisher has licensed out some of their franchises in the past and let others give them the F2P treatment (FIFA, NBA Street), this marks the first time that an EA studio will put out one of these on their own for a non-Asian market. While only a first step, this in conjunction with the company’s recently announced Korean development studio underline the seriousness with which EA now regards Free To Play.

For those of us working in this space, this should serve as both validation and wake up call. Not only has one of the largest publishers in the business just put their seal of approval on our model, they’ve simultaneously placed a target on all our backs.

My own company, Three Rings, has been doing Free To Play for around five years. I’m hopeful that EA’s entry will help educate players and the channel as to the benefits of our model. But, we’ll also be looking several steps ahead...as mice must when dancing with elephants :)

tags: free to play, MMO, casual game

* image credit: Games for Windows magazine

Reflections On Marketing

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:22:50 -0800

I’ve been spending some time recently ruminating on the evolving nature of marketing. Not that I’m any kind of marketing guru or anything but, given the shift that is happening thanks to the explosion of information and self-publishing ability on ye olde InterWebbe, it feels to me like the hallmarks of successful marketing are changing rather dramatically.

Thanks to Google, the average person can now get unvarnished customer opinions and 1st person reviews of almost every product and service you can think of. So Mr. Business, I hope you’re not screwing your customers. You are? Uh oh. Chances are your prospects know all about it. Interestingly, any marketing attempting to build on top of this betrayed promise likely just serves to piss folks off more and steel them in their jaded view of your product/company/brand. As Seth Godin points out, companies now have to be “on” all the time in order to succeed. You can’t advertise or spin past this. Or at least not for long. My Econ101 professor called this “perfect information” and it means that Jeff Bezos was right on target with his focus on customer satisfaction:

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.
- Jeff Bezos, January 2005

-J

After getting pummeled by the street for years over the costs associated with good service, it appears that Jeff is seeing some vindication now that the results of his strategy are coming into view and are head and shoulders above that of his peers.

If fact, customers everywhere should rejoice that the pendulum may be beginning to swing the other way. There is even a “customer service is the new marketing” movement afoot among the WebTwoOh crowd. While I think there is a very large grain of truth in this, we’re not at a point where customer service can be your entire marketing strategy. Unless you’re an established company with a large customer base, you must remain concerned with both providing an excellent product/service and promoting it. The real and dramatic change is, as Jeff says above, the inversion of those two priorities.

IMHO, startups have a real advantage in approaching this new priority set correctly. Big companies with established department structures, knowledge bases, and external relationships built on the old way of doing things will almost certainly be excruciating slow to come around to what it really means to grok this truth deeply and behave accordingly.

* image credit: Creating Passionate Users Blog