March 31, 2010 – MMO Fallout

Evony-breasts-advert — Any game that advertises like this must be legit.

As its players have pointed out to me in the past, there is really not much difference between Evony and other video games. It’s a game, for starters, it is played with a keyboard and mouse, and is played entirely through a browser. It is owned by a Chinese gold farming company, and did I mention that most companies use scantily clad women (or just shots of breasts, as seen above) to sell their games? Don’t forget, you can play it free forever.

Here is a question for the budding internet lawyers in the room: How does a Chinese company pretending to be American justify suing a British blogger in Australia? The whole thing sounds like either a poorly put together joke, or the kind of litigation taught in the same university that Jack Thompson received his degree at (Vanderbilt Law School, for those keeping track). Needless to say, this is exactly what happened when UMGE, I mean Evony LLC, decided to sue UK blogger Bruce Everiss, veteran games industry marketer.

The charge was libel, the evidence? Claims by Everiss that Evony was run by a Chinese company, and that company was linked to a goldfarming operation. The lawsuit has been pretty quiet for a while now (these court cases take a long time to get going), until the unveiling that Evony LLC has dropped the case only two days into proceedings. The official reason for the dropped case, according to Evony’s legal division, was feedback and criticism from their player base.

Evony will be required to pay the A$114,000 in addition to a second fee of A$80,000 or else the court proceedings will reconvene. According to The Guardian, the cost of their legal strategy alone could run Evony more than double the hundred grand they will be forced to pay for Everiss’ legal fees. In Australia, only companies with fewer than 10 employees can sue for libel, this likely being one of the factors that ultimately killed the lawsuit.

The intrigue doesn’t stop there! In his thank you post, Bruce Everiss gave a special show of gratitude to Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard, whose “testimony to the court helped enormously.” Everiss did not go into detail on exactly what the testimony was, but I think it’s safe to say that Mark Gerhard has made his way into the good grace of plenty of gamers.

Between aiding the potentially suicidal, stopping theft, and fighting crime, it seems more and more MMO developers are striving to prove that the customer-business relationship doesn’t have to be so distant. Maybe if UMGE sues me for this article, Mark Gerhard will come to my rescue.

A monetary barrier to a game can often be the deciding factor for a prospective player. Because of the daunting realization that a company will have to sell not only the client (unless you are Warhammer Online) but a subscription on top of that, it becomes almost mandatory in the MMO genre to have some form of trial, with some titles (Warhammer Online) going as far as releasing entire sections of the game for free, forever, so players don’t feel boxed in by a “15 day” trial.

Free to play and freemium games have it easy, because their business model already works on offering something for free with certain incentives for paying. A cash shop game brings in players with the idea that they can play the game for free, forever, but get some perks by buying items from the cash shop. If the player becomes addicted, the mantra of “I will never pay for anything” becomes “well, I’ll pay for a couple items” and so on. Freemium titles hope to get the player hooked on the free content, and then over time coax them into paying for the membership. Even in the free play realm, however, do you find barriers of entry. Runescape, for example, has a lower barrier of entry than Cabal, because of the lack of a client to download.

Jagex must have decided that even this barrier was too high, and players were being turned away from the free game for the sole reason that they did not want to create an account, and thus the Instant Demo was born. Logging into Runescape, I came upon this:

Even more strange was the quote from Mod Nexus on the official forums:

“”The demo mode does exist (no I’ve not been hijacked by Mod Emilee) it just wont appear for the majority of users, no matter your cookies/and free or members account(s) you have.”
-Mod Nexus, Jagex

According to the login screen, the “Instant Demo” mode contains 9 quests, 10 hours of gameplay, and requires no registration. Owing to Runescape’s registration being rather quick (two minutes, tops), it raises the question: Is creating an account really that high of a barrier? If so, Alganon should drop its client price, because it isn’t the cost of the client that raises a barrier, apparently the simple act of requiring people to register accounts does just as fine of a job.