SubscribeThe Station Exchange White Paper
February 7, 2007 12:08 pm
After a year of the Station Exchange, Sony released a white paper to tell everyone how much money they made. Here’s the actual .doc. (Warning: really awful 3D charts!)
There’s a brief section on differences in play patterns between Exchange servers and regular servers. Characters on the Exchange servers tend to have more money.
One result of the easy availability of money on The Bazaar is that players own more in general. The broker board on The Bazaar shows double the number of sales for house items and triple the number of sales for house pets. Perhaps players on The Bazaar have more cash, but nothing much to spend it on.
Huh.
The author also discusses race and class distribution in sales, but doesn’t say if they adhere to actual play distribution. The designers should be keeping an eye on play distribution, looking for balance issues; I wonder if Exchange data is more helpful. When the author says “warriors, summoners, rogues, druids, clerics and brawlers are among the classes sold just once,” I, as a designer, would be thinking there’s a problem. (I’m just talking; I’m not familiar with EQ2’s class balance issues.)
Sony collects a flat listing fee of $10 for characters, and when the character sells, they collect an additional 10% of the final price. The author is proud to point out that characters are worth a lot of money. “Of the top 20 auctions of characters, none was for less than $1,000. The top four character auctions were worth $2,000 each.”
One of the author’s final conclusions:
Station Exchange is not an extension of game play. It is a utility. It offers a fundamentally different approach to play: a means of skipping the boring parts.
That’s the most interesting part of the whole paper. He’s admitting that they have a financial incentive to create a boring game, and that’s horrifying.
Broken Toys :: SOE: RMT Has Been Veddy Veddy Good To Us wrote:
[…] SOE issues a white paper on the Station Exchange one year out. Gamasutra has a copy and interviews John Smedley about it. Sara Jensen has commentary. (As will I when I get a chance to, you know, read it.) […]
Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 1:06 pm | Permalink
Cael wrote:
Trouble is, the game is no different to any other. The games have boring bits and they admit it. That’s the true horror.
Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 3:37 pm | Permalink
Psychochild wrote:
I, as a designer, would be thinking there’s a problem.
Ah, you have to be careful in interpreting the data. I play a Necromancer in EQ2 (a summoner type, so I have some insight. Summoners are easy to solo, so why would someone want to buy one of those? Brawlers are pretty powerful to solo as well. Warriors, Rogues, and healers (clerics, druids, etc) require some significant player skill to play at higher (raid) levels. Buying a top level character doesn’t equal instant power for these character types.
Now, take a look at what’s left. Direct damage mages (nukers), the enchanter types, buffer-healers (the shamans), and crusaders (Paladin and Shadowknight). Each of these are pretty powerful at the top end, but you have to go through a lot of pain to build them up. Makes sense that people would want to skip the “boring” parts for these characters to get the higher level and more powerful versions.
He’s admitting that they have a financial incentive to create a boring game, and that’s horrifying.
I think people tend to read too much into statements like the one made. The simple fact is that not everyone will find every part of every game fun. I know a few friends that never got to high levels in WoW; they found the low-level content to be the most fun and kept rolling new alts instead of focusing on just one character. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can point to like RMT in this situation to claim that WoW “failed” with its high level design.
I think the issue you bring up is self-correcting. If the lower levels are boring, people are going to be less inclined to stick with the game. In the early days EQ2 had a very painful newbie process; instead of buying high level characters, most people just quit and went to play other games. I suspect that most of the people buying characters find some parts “boring” because they’ve already been through that. Going through the same content again is boring for most people. Eventually even the people that rolled a ton of alts got to the “Oh, hell, not quests in Westfall again!” stage.
It would be interesting to see how Station Exchange sales are going since they recently released a bunch of new content for the lower levels with Echoes of Faydwer. My guess is that character sales are down significantly as people are working up new characters in the new low-level zones and enjoying the new content.
My thoughts. BTW, when are you going to add me to the blogroll list? ;P I added you a while ago. Love your blog, Sara.
Keep up the insightful work.
Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 3:56 pm | Permalink
Sara Jensen wrote:
“Buying a top level character doesn’t equal instant power for these character types.”
Huh, I hadn’t thought about that. There’s probably a correlation between character value and ease of leveling. It stands to reason that a class that’s hard to level would have greater value — high demand, low supply.
It would be cool to see a chart of advancement rates per class along with price.
Thank you for the insightful comment, as usual.
Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 4:22 pm | Permalink
Jeff Freeman wrote:
Not so! They have a financial incentive to create a game with boring parts.
Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 5:21 pm | Permalink
Rich Weil wrote:
I’d be curious to know how the Exchange market influences play on those servers. Are there more farmers? Less? Are the players farming all the time? Is there a lot of competition and disruption of “normal” play? Or none at all?
Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 8:21 pm | Permalink
Zen of Design»Blog Archive » The Station Exchange White Paper wrote:
[…] Sara and Raph both have good commentary. My own thoughts: I’m surprised the revenue earned was so low. Less than $300K in revenue earned in a year is a significant amount of cash if you’re a small company, but it risks being mistaken for a financial error in an organization with the revenue streams of Sony (and SOE in particular). After all, a game that has 100K subscribers and charges 10 bucks a month brings in a million bucks a month in revenue, and both EQ and EQ2 are higher on both counts. […]
Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 12:34 am | Permalink
MMODump.com » SOE: RMT Has Been Veddy Veddy Good To Us wrote:
[…] RMT Has Been Veddy Veddy Good To Us SOE: RMT Has Been Veddy Veddy Good To Us: “SOE issues a white paper on the Station Exchange one year out. Gamasutra has a copy andinterviews John Smedley about it. Sara Jensen has commentary. (As will I when I get a chance to, you know, read it.) […]
Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 1:36 am | Permalink
MMODump.com » The Station Exchange White Paper wrote:
[…] Sara and Raph both have good commentary. My own thoughts: I’m surprised the revenue earned was so low. Less than $300K in revenue earned in a year is a significant amount of cash if you’re a small company, but it risks being mistaken for a financial error in an organization with the revenue streams of Sony (and SOE in particular). After all, a game that has 100K subscribers and charges 10 bucks a month brings in a million bucks a month in revenue, and both EQ and EQ2 are higher on both counts. […]
Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 1:50 am | Permalink
Sara Jensen wrote:
I’d be curious to know how the Exchange market influences play on those servers. Are there more farmers? Less? Are the players farming all the time? Is there a lot of competition and disruption of “normal” play? Or none at all?
Yeah, the section on play differences didn’t really go into design and community concerns. I wonder if they keep tabs on it internally.
Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
Psychochild's Blog wrote:
Drawing the wrong conclusions…
Talk about the Station Exchange whitepaper (http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/07/soe-whitepaper-on-station-exchange/) is making the rounds on the blogosphere. It’s actually quite nice to see SOE open up the kimono a bit and show us some numbers that …
Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
crazy-games.net wrote:
[…] So what? Well, the success of IGE and the Station Exchange will mean big changes for Massive games in the future. Like it or not RMT is so phenomenally profitable that increasingly, companies will be unable to ignore it as a component in their game design. Whether this results in designers intentionally making games dull or relying on RMT to make games grippy, things are going to have to change. Today I’ll be mulling over the data from the Station Exchange white paper and theorizing on some ways the monetizing of play will change the next generation of Massive games. […]
Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 6:58 pm | Permalink
xaldin wrote:
“Not so! They have a financial incentive to create a game with boring parts.”
Actually even that isn’t entirely true. They just don’t have incentive to change the current systems. The current game development has basic things:
1) Some form of levels (skills) that increase from use (be it creating stuff or wacking moles).
2) Some form of resource limitation that is overcome by spending time gathering (ore, gold, etc).
3) Some form of resource drains to take those gathered resources out of circulation (ore becomes armor, gold buys mounts etc).
Just with those three I promise you’ll never want for finding people who want to bypass at least one of them if not several of them in order to get at the other parts of a game. Be it WoW/EQ2/DAOC/EQ/AC/AC2/Planetside (CR ranks especially)/Etc. They all have something in at least one of those catagories and if the game has all the catagories its like having 3x the odds of finding something a person will buy off.
Posted on 10-Feb-07 at 10:40 am | Permalink
Jeff Freeman wrote:
Well played, xaldin. You are right, I was being snarky.
Posted on 11-Feb-07 at 3:58 am | Permalink
Jeff Freeman wrote:
Incidentally, I disbelieve this:
Blogs, forums, flickr screenshot galleries, mailing lists, guild boards, ventrilo/teamspeak servers, dev scandals, faked deaths, faked lifes, and even other games guild members play between sessions are all extensions of gameplay. All part of what an MMO is, why people play them (even those who prefer to solo, to answer that question again).
Posted on 11-Feb-07 at 4:03 am | Permalink
Sancus wrote:
TBH, I’m really not seeing what’s so horrifying about the financial incentive to create a game with boring parts.
Isn’t significant, time-consuming boring parts a prerequisite for your game to be called an MMO?
It certainly seems to be a prerequisite to be successful in the first place.
Posted on 11-Feb-07 at 4:22 am | Permalink
gadgetz.org » Blog Archive » MMOG Nation: Why Ebay Is Small Potatoes and Money Ruins Everything wrote:
[…] So what? Well, the success of IGE and the Station Exchange will mean big changes for Massive games in the future. Like it or not RMT is so phenomenally profitable that increasingly, companies will be unable to ignore it as a component in their game design. Whether this results in designers intentionally making games dull or relying on RMT to make games grippy, things are going to have to change. Today I’ll be mulling over the data from the Station Exchange white paper and theorizing on some ways the monetizing of play will change the next generation of Massive games. […]
Posted on 11-Feb-07 at 2:48 pm | Permalink
icegrx wrote:
hey jeff i have a question about the game with boaring parts comment. you do know you were to one who created the BOARING PARTS, WHAT WAS NGE SOMTING FUN ?? I THINK NOT IT RUINED THE GAME HMM MABY YOU COULD CALL IT A BOARING UPDATE . you failed to communicate with thousands of people they all said no to nge what did you do? went along with it you pressured people to do it . it will be fun huh? well thanks for making swg BOARING! thousands of people threatened to quit swg if you made nge guess what 63% of the swg community QUIT because of you
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Well the Sony Station Exchange is a good utility. I’m a gamer so I like when things are efficient and fast.
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