Already discovered elsewhere, but I have new information to share that they don't know about. Here's a link to the Job Listings page that has already been posted by other blogs.

Ubisoft Quebec worked on several Ubisoft Dance titles, Assassin's Creed titles, and most recently PowerUp Heroes this past fall.

Before leaving Ubisoft, Sebastien Samson was working on an Online MMORPG for Kids (prototype stage.) He left Ubisoft to go work for Frima Studios, who were developing Activision Blizzard's Spyro Universe MMO.

Ricardo Ayasta was also working at Ubisoft during this same time, and was an animator on PowerUp Heroes. He also left Ubisoft for Activision Blizzard's Spyro MMO too. :)

Makes sense that Ubisoft is working on a MMORPG for kids though. I'm fully expecting it to be a cross-platform title that will compete with Activision's Spyro Universe.. so expect a pet / Pokemon "Gotta Collect 'Em All" type game.

* UPDATE:

Confirmed. Derek Fortin is the Senior Level Designer for an undisclosed AAA game (XboX 360, PS3, PC) at Ubisoft. They started work on the MMORPG in December 2010.

So, it appears to be a cross-platform AAA MMORPG for kids and they have been working on it since December 2010.

Here's a video that more people need to watch, especially game publishers and developers.

It's a conversation with Jared Psigoda, a leader in the RMT industry. He's also the individual who informed Markeedragon about the new PayPal & Blizzard relationship that's still making the rounds on the net.



He says that Blizzard has certain trends in their ban-waves. Typically, they occur before an expansion pack launches (as a clean sweep) or when they experience poor quarterly financials. He confirms that Blizzard gets a "huge revenue influx" when a ban-wave occurs, due to the sheer number of accounts requiring reactivation (Note: Monthly fees also double-up meaning twice as many "Active Subscriptions"). These accounts make up a huge portion of revenue for Blizzard as there are hundreds of thousands working in the industry.

Does any of this sound familiar? =]

It's certainly nice to have this officially confirmed by another industry professional.

He also talks about a couple other interesting topics, like which games they avoid (since there's no profit to be made) and how most "hackers" gain access to your online gaming account.

Consider first, though, the amount of money developers spend on managing the aftermath of Gold Sellers and Hacked Accounts:

- Investigation teams need training, benefits, and salaries.
- The amount of time spent investigating accounts and confirming that they are gold buyers/sellers. Or confirming cheating, hacking, etc.
- Money spent on hiring and training large quantities of Customer Support personnel (high turn-over environment)
- More Customer Support staff needed for the amount of farming, cheating, hacking, recovery, etc.
- Blizzard even had to change their own Recovery Process, which goes to show how difficult and unmanageable the situation was becoming.
- The more staff you employ, the higher the risk and/or costs of mistakes (e.g. disgruntled employees, injury liability, employee theft.)
- Stolen and hacked accounts lead to massive customer service issues. Not only is it taxing on the customer service departments, but it is also taxing on their customer retention rates.
- You also have to pay the salaries of the managers who manage these teams, and financial services (HR, Facilities, IT, etc) who serve these managers and employees.

A massive money-eating monster has been created that just addresses "clean-up operations" or the chain-reaction and consequences of something that could have been prevented in the first place. There's a word for that: negligence.

All of those issues can be fixed with very simple solutions.

How To Stop Gold Farmers

- RMT (aka secondary sales) thrives on subscription based games, not games that are heavily micro-transaction based.
- RMT is almost exclusively World of Warcraft. Gold farmers and hacked accounts would suffer greatly if WoW were to change it's model.
- If the game is Free to Play or the developer sells items/gold themselves, RMT companies cannot compete with these developers who can print their own money.
- If people stop buying gold, there's nothing for farmers to sell. So, make gold worthless like how it was done in Diablo 2. (Or find a balance.)
- The more easily you can obtain gold in-game, the more it loses it's value and drives down the profit margin of gold farmers. Eventually there's a point where the value isn't "worth enough" to farm.
- Or leave gold very valuable in-game, but simply make it "soulbound". It can't be traded, but it can be used to purchase expensive services or crafts (that take a long time to develop and collect soulbound materials for) from other players. Prices for these services/goods would be fixed as well. Or the gold can be used to buy valuable items/gear, but from NPCs instead of real players.
- Make all items Bind On Pickup, so that epic items cannot be traded.

The best solution, however, is just for developers to sell the gold themselves. It's a quick way to shutdown the virtual trading industry.

This probably won't happen with World of Warcraft, considering the verbal commitments already made to their customers - but it's a viable solution for their next-generation MMO (considering the gameplay approach and plans on increasing "real world" interaction).

How To Stop Power-Leveling Services

One of the problems that RMT has been facing (for power-leveling services and hackers alike) is IP-based account locking. When an IP suddenly changes, the account is locked, and the owner of the account needs to call Blizzard to unlock it.

Unfortunately, Blizzard has also taken it upon themselves to take additional proactive (provocative?) measures, like cancelling credit cards of innocent players overseas and screwing them over.

Nevertheless, IP based account locking is a very effective process. It's geography based at the moment, but what if they made it for location specific? For example, limiting it to a specific ISP (in case the user has a dynamic IP address) but allowing them a maximum of 2-3 different IP address "registrations" in the same geography. The other option is MAC Address locking, but maybe allow a maximum or 2 PCs and additional ones require online approval and an "identity check".

It's one option that shouldn't be a nuisance for most players anyways. =]

How To Stop Gaming Account Hackers

This might surprise many of you. According to Jared, account hacking due to key-loggers isn't as significant as account hacking due to your gaming websites.

The problem is, most players use the same email address from World of Warcraft and they register it on other websites, forums, or gaming communities. They typically use the same password as well. That's how most WoW (and other) accounts are hacked.

Chinese hackers primarily target gaming websites and forums and steal user database information. Some of the gaming news sites (forums, communities, etc) are aware of the breach, however they don't tell their customers. Others might not be aware of the breach, and Chinese hackers may frequently revisit the database due to it's ease of access.

I don't own an Authenticator, but I have multiple WoW accounts. The reason I've never been hacked in 7 years is because I use a unique email address for each WoW account, and I have never re-used the same email account for anything else online. I have over a dozen different email addresses that I use for different purposes, and about 40 other "online identities" that have no interconnectivity. Passwords are never the same either.

If you want to substantially increase the protection of your WoW account right now, register a new GMAIL address right away, create a unique password, and change your WoW email address/login ID to the new GMAIL account. Your WoW account password should also be changed to something unique. And, of course, make sure to scan your PC for key-loggers before starting all of this. 20 minutes of work now will save you days of potential aggravation in the future.

Since most players don't know this, Blizzard needs to force a change in their customer behavior in order to reduce account hacking. After all, it will benefit their customers as well as themselves (in a huge way.)

Here is Jared's solution that can prevent 90% of hacked accounts (from a developer perspective): FORCE PLAYERS TO CHANGE THEIR PASSWORD EVERY MONTH.

Alternatively, Blizzard could "educate" players at the login screen to change their password. Or make it very easy at the login screen to change their password, but gently remind players to change it every 60 days for example. If they were to force players to change all of their passwords right now, they would see a HUGE and immediate impact to the number of hacked accounts.

More people need to get this knowledge across to Blizzard. If there are enough people demanding the change, the more positive impact it will have for at-risk players (and only serves to help Blizzard.) Unless, of course, there's more revenue to be made from simply selling authenticators.

By now you've seen all of the news announcement's regarding Paradox Interactive's new "Salem" (working title) MMORPG.

You know, the "OMG! A permanent death MMORPG! Inconceivable!" stuff.

It sounds very cool and I'm looking forwards to trying it out. But, what these news articles currently lack are what the people really want: SCREENSHOTS AND GAMEPLAY VIDEOS! =]

So, I'll try to help out as best as possible.

Here's a screenshot of the current work in progress:


Here's a gameplay video of Salem Alpha in action:



There was just that one screenshot available for now, but if you wanted more insight into what the game will be about, look no further than the game Haven & Hearth. Salem has been quietly worked on by the The Seatribe development team for the past 4 months, so you can imagine that Salem will be taking a lot of inspiration (concepts, skill names, gameplay, etc) from their existing H&H game.

Here's a gameplay video from their current Haven & Hearth MMORPG:



If you're intrigued by Salem, check out Seatribe's latest post regarding the Paradox announcement on their forums. (That's where I snagged the Salem screenshot.) Screenshots of Haven & Hearth can be found here too.

The President of Sony Online Entertainment (John Smedley) has just announced that DCUO users will be getting content updates every month.

President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley said that if you decide to play DC Universe Online, you won't have to worry about any additional costs besides your regular monthly fee. Smedley told Eurogamer that they will be offering free monthly upgrades of additional content and weekly patches if things need to be fixed right away, instead of big DLC packages you have to purchase additionally. The new content for PC and PS3 will launch within a day or two of each other, even though it takes longer for updates to be approved on the PS3 platform. (They'll hold all the PC upgrades until the equivalent one is ready.)

"But the plans are about a month out you can start expecting major pieces of content and major new features to come in," he said. "We'll be adding all kinds of cool stuff. We're not quite ready to reveal what our after-launch plans are yet. Needless to say we have a lot of content we're in QA on that players haven't seen yet."

This echoes what DCUO Game Director Chris Cao's told Techland about seeing tons more feats and other weapons in the near future. Smedley said that the monthly fee made the company feel obligated to provide free constant upgrades and new features.

There will be "major pieces of content" and "major new features" (in addition to standard patches/fixes) implemented every month apparently.

EVERY MONTH? Where have we heard THAT before? Oh right.. Blizzard Entertainment said the same thing about World of Warcraft (except add "major content updates", "new weapons" and "new quests".)

Sony mentioned that they already have a "lot of content" currently in QA (considering the current state of the game, I fully expect so), which is all well and good.. but do they have enough content to last the next "five, ten years" that they want to run the game? Doubtful.

There's no way they'll be able to keep up with the game's demands. This is just another example of a company getting really excited about something.. but they never properly planned ahead and simply lack the foresight. Well, the management team anyways - I suspect that they didn't consult the development team before making this announcement. =]

Once Blizzard realized their mistake back in 2004-2005, they quietly removed all instances of the "major content updates every month" statement from their webpage and forums. That was actually one of the big selling points for me at the time too. Shortly after though (when they ran out of content), the updates came once every 3 months, then every 6 months, and then they became paid Expansion Packs. How very disappointing.. =[

I can see the same problem happening with DCUO.

The other problem is that once the novelty of the game wears off, Sony will be reducing their support staff which in turn effects development time of said content. They haven't released any sales figures yet (which is interesting in itself), but I'm not really interested in that anyways - what does interest me is retention rate. And based on what I've seen (it's not a very deep MMO), retention rate will probably be around 1-3 months on average.

(Note: Back in 2008 before DC Universe Online was announced, John Smedley believed that this PS3 MMO game would be the WoW killer.)

* UPDATE (01/21/11):

Worldwide sales figures estimates have been released courtesy of vgchartz.com.

During the first week: PS3 sold 150,764 copies and the PC version sold 45,267 copies.

No wonder Sony didn't release their sales figures! SOE President John Smedley stated that "The game is sold out in a lot of stores." Well, yeah.. the stores that only carried 3 copies.

They did, however, take a good piece of advice from the Blizzard Bible: "We're adding more servers to keep up with the growth." Even though there was no growth or need for extra servers.

By comparison, first week sales of Age of Conan were more than 500,000 units, AION sold somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 copies during their first week, and Warhammer Online sold more than 500,000 units. It seems that 500k is the magic number for newly hyped MMORPG's.

* UPDATE (01/25/11):

Another confirmation that significant content will be released every month. Sony is also defending their high subscription fee.

Apparently, this "monthly content paid service" is really being pushed hard. The rest of the article didn't sound very good though.. it's only been a week, and Sony is already trying to defend the game.

We understand we're asking a lot and the equation I always give to people is that it's similar to DLC - if you were getting DLC from Red Dead Redemption every month, I'd probably sign up for that because I buy every piece of DLC they throw at me.

We haven't had an opportunity to prove ourselves to the players on that content delivery.

There was also mention that F2P is very unlikely.

* UPDATE (02/03/11):

FYI - if you're interested in latest maintenance announcements, server restarts and patch notes, they can all be found HERE.

No word on when the next content patch will hit, so far it's just been maintenance and bug fixes. But Sony promised once a month, so there _should_ be new stuff (dungeons, quests, gear) by the end of February. "Should" being the operative word.

* UPDATE (02/19/11):

Sony has set the first benchmark for their promised monthly content updates. Here's what they've implemented, and you should be expecting the same level of content each and every month:

New Batcave Raid – 8 players will have the opportunity to infiltrate and retake Batman's Inner Sanctum, which has been overrun by OMAC and the Dark Knight's own corrupted technology. Fight along side Batman against Brother Eye!
New Appearance Items – Earn a Harlequin Clown suit or a Cherub disguise through a variety of holiday activities.
Goddess of Love Alert – Join up with three others to decide the epic battle between Devotion and Scorn once and for all.
New Races – Can you catch Catwoman as she leaps across buildings in Gotham City?
New Collections - All new collection sets will allow players to continue finding these hidden items.
New Themed Missions – Enjoy various missions that will challenge the player in combat, jumping, and much more.
A New Bane Duo – Another Duo has been added for your enjoyment! Pair up with another player and take on Bane for a chance at great loot.
New PvP Ring Event – Available on both PvP and PvE servers, Heroes and villains race to either save or steal valuable bags of diamonds from armored vans.
An Auction House - Players may now buy and sell tradeable items on a Broker in The Watchtower and Hall of Doom.
New Armor – Make your way to the Gotham Museum and help Catwoman to receive pieces of brand new Mayan armor!

So basically: new raids, new races, new collections, new missions, new events, and new items/gear/appearances... every month. We'll see.

In an older post, I stressed that Blizzard was not required by any law to notify users of internal data breaches. Many misinformed players, Blizzard employees and fans used this false information as the logical reasoning and proof as to why Blizzard's internal databases "have never been broken into" or account information stolen.

To be clear: Blizzard (nor any other gaming company) is not required by law to notify anyone of anything.

Here's a little excerpt I wrote at the time:

Now, if something very bad were to happen, then yes - a large announcement would be made.

Well, it just happened with Runes of Magic. =]

Here's a link to the news article.

Basically, a hacker obtained login/personal data from their account database and is now holding the information "hostage" until Frogster/RoM Team changes the "forum communication practices and technical aspects of Runes of Magic operation".

The only reason that the company is releasing this information NOW is because it's been made public and they're being "held hostage." The data breach actually occurred back in 2007 by the way. They sat on this data breach information for 4 years before telling anyone and probably would have continued to do so until the hostage situation was made public.

Still think this hasn't happened anywhere else? It's actually more common then you think, and I'm not just talking video games.

Champion's Online has finally announced their F2P launch date, which is the near the end of this month (January 25, 2011).

I think it's really cool that they're going "F2P" and I hope that more games do the same.. but I wish that game developers would take a different approach to their revenue generating methodologies (and change their definition of "Free-to-Play").

Say, for example, you download a new stand-alone game. You can play it for the first few levels, but the rest of the content (or should I say the majority of the content) is locked down for paying customers only. Paid customers also have access to more features, can unlock extra account slots (or alternatively, they have the "Save" feature enabled), can unlock new character classes, have access to larger inventory bags, better gear, and better character stats. Non-paying customers may also frequently get bombarded with "Buy Now!" or "Upgrade Now!" ads. That's called a limited demo.. just like the old DOS shareware days.

Most F2P MMO's follow the same pattern: sell big features and game altering items online. The more money a player spends - the more powerful they are over other players. We humans just want to be better than everyone else.

There must be a way for a F2P game to really be Free-to-Play where nothing is locked down, non-paying customers have full access to the entire game, and yet the business still earns a substantial recurring profit. (Even though Guild Wars has already demonstrated that you can make quite a bit of revenue by just selling Expansion Packs.)

Examples that generate revenue and yet also allow full content might include:

- Ad-targeting (which is always an option) if you can get the right relationships with other companies. Advertising also depends on the type of game (consider a virtual world where you can purchase real-world products.)
- Vanity pets, items, or character abilities (eg, dances) work well as demonstrated by Blizzard. Especially if some of the proceeds are donated to charity.
- Special (non-game breaking) features like physical appearance changes (very cool effects like bright glowing eyes or character voices) and paid services such as character renaming, pet renaming, customized spell effects, class/race/build changes, server transfers, etc.
- Selling real estate for real world currency (prime examples include Second Life and Entropia).
- Merchandising (if game lore can build up a strong following) or novels/fiction (publishing deals for fan fiction).
- Donations (risky)
- A guild system where guilds are initially limited but they can be unlocked (inexpensive monthly fee - say $3.99) to access additional services and special Guild Perks. What's nice about this model is that all members of the guild can donate pennies each to maintain the guild.
- Collecting demographic information, selling useful survey and polling data for marketing purposes or scientific research. If you have a constant supply of over 1 million people from around the world, you can collect quite a bit of useful (non-personal) information from them.
- Turn in-game minigames into a crowd sourcing application similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. There's a lot of unexplored potential here.

Or how about this: instead of targeting our need to be better than everyone else (we all want to be God after all), how about targeting human laziness instead?

- Leave the game fully open (no locked down content), but meet the Free vs Paid customers somewhere in the middle.
- Everything is available to all players, however make it easier for paid customers to level or receive special drops.
- Paid customers can purchase a special "lucky buff" that increases the chances of extremely rare items dropping for example. Free players can still obtain the same item, however it takes longer and is much more difficult.
- Paid customers can purchase an "experience buff" to level faster. (Technically, Blizzard already did this.) =]
- It's "fair" in that the same content and items are available to everyone, but lazy players can purchase services to reach goals faster whereas free-players need to work harder to receive the same rewards.
- Other options include Auctions, Player Trades/Selling, and Gold/Item Trading/Selling
- "Make Your Own Spells" paid service where players can create "new" spells combining existing spell mechanics and old/new spell visual effects.

Those are just some of the ideas off the top of my head. If I think of anything else, I'll update the post.

In other news, RIFT will be coming out soon too. I never really followed the game too much until just recently (a friend is in the beta, and I checked it out). Initially, I had assumed that it was going to be F2P or at least really inexpensive considering the competition - but apparently it isn't. They're following the "standard monthly fee" of $14.99. Ugh. That might have worked for WoW since they launched before the recession after all, but that $14.99 price tag looks more-and-more expensive every day. =]

I think it would be neat for a MMORPG publisher to do a little experimentation in this field. Make a great game, plan for a game to be F2P, but release the game with a $4.99 per month subscription fee instead and just see what happens. If things don't work out, simply switch back to Plan A. It will give them some great insight into customer mentality, and they can use that data for determining the cost of their next big game (that might have been planned all along). There's some data that you just can't get reliably from random focus groups, surveys and polls.

Anyways.. back to RIFT. After playing the game, I'm getting a really bad feeling from it. It's the same vibe I got from Darkspore.. you know that feeling where there's a lot of hype about something, you watch/play it, you're left disappointed, and you just know it's just not going to do well? It's the same feeling I got from watching THE CAPE yesterday too. (Even though I could already tell by the title that it was going to bomb, the first episode confirmed that it's going to flop badly.) Unless there are some significant changes made, you know it's going to fail. So, with that in mind, I really hope that Trion Worlds listens to their customers and implements recommended changes.. it can still be saved. If things don't go well, they may just reduce the monthly fee or change it to the standard F2P model.

Whenever any game moves from standard payment models to F2P - even partial F2P like the first 10-40 levels are "free to play", it's typically a very bad sign.. a death knell if you will. =] I'm positive that World of Warcraft will one day change to this model (e.g. a partial F2P) and then start reducing it's monthly fees a year or two after that.

(Note: RIFT reminded me a lot of Allods Online actually, except that Allods is already a F2P game. It's a standard clone, but you might want to give it a shot if you're bored.)

Other than that, I haven't had a chance to play DC Universe Online yet, but based on the gameplay I've seen, I'm getting the same bad feeling that they'll be merging servers sometime soon (the "death cry" of massive subscriber losses), lowering prices, and that it might need to become another F2P candidate. =]