GamerDNA
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GamerDNA: A brief look at free to play games
by GamerDNA 
Jun 10th 2009 (8 months ago)
By Sanya Weathers for GamerDNAWhen you're the market leader in MMO games, you can afford to do a little innovating – though not so much as to disturb or ruffle the customers you've already acquired. When you're making a top drawer MMO with thirty million dollars of other people's money, you can't afford to innovate. Refinements, sure. But no big risks.
So where's the innovation? These days, you see it in the free to play genre, and its close cousin, the "freemium" game. Both of these games make their money from microtransactions. In order to get a customer to fork over a microtransaction, these games require customers that are vested into the world.
But free to play means the player has invested nothing but the time spent downloading the product. And there's a perception among some industry professionals that "easy come, easy go."
Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs [part 2]
by GamerDNA May 5th 2009 (9 months ago)
Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs
by GamerDNA May 5th 2009 (9 months ago)
Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya looks into the numbers and just what the breakdown for MMO players means.When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it's easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft's market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard's success, and copied/are copying WoW features – without copying WoW's reasoning, methodology, or execution. The results are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WoW's market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WoW's (even if WoW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.
Still, when you just look at the data, it's hard to avoid the desire to copy WoW. As we saw last week, WoW players log in more often, and play for longer sessions.
How much do guilds matter?
by GamerDNA Mar 25th 2009 (10 months ago)
A long time ago, in a fantasy world far far away, I wrangled guilds as part of my job. At first, I wrangled them because it was terribly efficient for one person struggling with a beta. Why deal with thousands of individuals when I could deal with fifty, and put them in charge of their own groups? Guild leaders will always be more informed, more tuned in, and better suited to herding their own cats than a studio representative could ever be.
But what started as expediency turned in to more.
As a community weenie, I had my dearly beloved "frequent flyers" – people who sent in feedback, usually through email no matter how many systems I built for them to use, with a regularity previously reserved for clocks, robots, and dripping faucets. If it was 3 PM on a Thursday, it was time to get mail from him, him, her, and what I was pretty sure was a him but hadn't ever asked.
GamerDNA and Massively offer up Death Knight data goodness
by GamerDNA Jan 14th 2009 (1 year ago)
WoW
By Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA
Back in October, we ran a couple of articles that gave you a snapshot of the kind of person who played the various classes in World of Warcraft. Now that the Death Knight class has been out for nearly three whole months, we figure the flavor of the month kids have had their turn at bat, and the real fans of the new class are settled in.
The sample for today's column is a little more than 500 people, all of whom were active WOW players before the launch, and now continue to actively play their Death Knight. "Actively" as measured by playing sessions – just having one of the new class in the character list isn't enough to count here. Read on to see how the Arthas' legions stack up!
GamerDNA's Year in review pt. 2
by GamerDNA Dec 29th 2008 (1 year ago)
GamerDNA and Massively look back at the MMO year in review
by GamerDNA Dec 29th 2008 (1 year ago)
What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that's been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs. Come along with us as we look over half of 2008
Today's column features data from July through December. GamerDNA being a startup, our data collection in the first half of the year was not consistent enough to use for anything but wild guessing and drinking games.
Listen, a start up tech company can make ANYTHING into a drinking game.
