The Flogging Will Continue…

Greetings, mates! A quick update from the Captain’s Desk:

* Tomorrow Thursday October 2nd I am going to Startonomics which looks really good.

* Penny Arcade were daft enough to ask me to write a piece on DRM, which I titled ‘Put down the pipe.’. As Tycho points out“… the conversation is wholly the domain of psychotics, dead-enders, revolutionaries, and sophists.” Your vote please as to which bucket I fall into. For the record, I am merely a part-owner of Three Rings, which has many shareholders including our employees and investors, I just have a big mouth and my colleagues extend me unusual freedom to exercise it.

* This is a great post on the role of the CTO on Eric Reis’ blog.

* I was in Austin for the Austin GDC and on a funding panel with Saar Gur, Susan Wu and David King of (lil) Green Patch I waffled something about how a strong CTO should be a member of the founding team. I was on another panel regarding open source and at the Worlds in Motion summit Nabeel Hyatt and I had a rocking session on user-generated content with special guests Merci Grace PMOG, Curt Bereton of Playcrafter and Nicole Lazzaro of Xeo Design. These are all awesome rabbit-holey sites of awesome, visit them. It was a fun session and we didn’t even have to serve drinks. Thanks to those bloggers present for not blogging my (too big-mouthed) presentation!

* I spoke at Siggraph (note to conference operators, please make individual links to talks, so we can uh link to them) on Jason Della Rocca’s panel on user-generated content in games. It was weird; a huge hall with maybe a hundred brave souls after the first hour(!) but I think we said a lot of clever things, aided by ‘user created’ sketches and a guest audience-member from Microsoft flight sim. Siggraph felt kind of sad, rattling around in the giant LA convention center.

* I spoke on virtual worlds on the web at the Virtual Worlds Expo. A lot of folks are betting on corporate applications for VW’s and maybe the time is finally right. Certainly if fuel prices continue to rise flying will become unfashionable. I’m not a huge fan of hurtling through the sky in a tin can, but it will be sad to see less of distant friends and family.

* As a teenager in the ‘duck and cover’ early 80’s I was an avid reader of John Wyndham, and I have a weakness for apocalyptic contemplation. This is an excellent analysis of the credit crisis by Douglas Rushkoff and I like his conclusions; move close to your friends and family (or move them to you, nudge nudge). See also other links from Marc Hurst’s awesome newsletter. It remains to be seen what the effect of the economy throwing a wobbly will be on our business and the small group of generous players who make our games possible. Thanks, and may the force be with us.

* In other portents of the end of the world, the Nautilus was attacked by a motley band of hideous pirates known as the Instructables. After some consideration, the appropriate fiendish rites and a short spell underhill to molder, we performed our Corpse-Craftian Zombie attack on Instructables. Be sure to watch the second half. On the way back I led a small deputation of undead to maraud Eunice and co. at Hello Lucky.

* Hot Facebook news this week as Eunice and I updated our profiles to say ‘Engaged’ and received a slew a congratulations. I actually popped the question back on August 10th, at sundown at the top of Buena Vista Park. We’d been throwing a muddy, drooly ball for Indie and Eunice’s hands were mucky, but she gamely popped on the ring. Hurrah!

* Back to Penny Arcade, Tycho writes that Corpse Craft is “… fucking banging, and may even bang off the hook.” Timothy Conkling and Jon Demos did an fantastic job with this game and are working on an expansion.

* Whirled is really picking up. Something good is happening when every time I login there’s new cool stuffs and when I browse ‘the graph’ (groan) I find pockets of new high-level peoples. More on this in due course, not least when Andrew Chen and I talk about ‘Metrics for Virtual Goods’ at the Virtual Goods Summit on Oct 10th. Apparently he is bringing the brains and I am bringing the data. Mmm, brains.

Having not even begun to catch you up on the last few months, I am afraid that that will be all for this evening. I will endeavour to return soon with more linkage on farming, sewing, bee-keeping and the best spots to establish post-apocalyptic enclaves of right-thinking folk, free of DRM and marauding zombies. Fair winds!

Greetings loyal reader. Thank you for keeping my in your feeder! I failed in my promise to blog more often, but better late than never.

Some Three Rings news:

Whirled is going very well, but of course has been taking longer than we hoped to reach beta. We have been very much in ‘last 80%’ territory — polishing our multi-player games, fussing with our user interface, and making all the myriad of changes that a few loyal players illustrate the need for. We are optimistic about the prospects for a more public debut early(ish!) in the New Year. Before we do that, though, we will send invites to everyone who’s signed up already.

Puzzle Pirates continues to thrive, with the addition of Atlantean Sea Monsters this autumn and some very exciting things coming up that I’m not allowed to talk about.

The Nautilus continues to amaze; last week I was interviewed for a piece on NPR about Steampunk! I’ll post when I know the air date. I had fun talking through the office and shaking tentacles for the microphone. Those who’ve been for a visit to the office will know that my desk has been in front part of the office: ‘Terra Mundana’ (or ‘Business up front’ as opposed to the ‘Party in the back’ in our mullet school of design). In 2008 I’ll be moving back to Nautilus, to be close to my secret room and the bar, which many of you will know is quite exciting for me.

We’ve had a great year, and I’m very thankful — particularly for the new folks who’ve joined the team and the hard work everyone’s put in. We also have some fabulous new partners that I’ll post about separately in due course.

Some things that I’ve been up to:

As mentioned last time, I went to Ye Olde Burning Man and had a jolly good time pushing my gold box around. Eunice came out to for the weekend and I pushed the box around with her riding on top, like some deranged Pirate Queen riding her treasure chest. Unfortunately getting home turned into a bit of a fiasco, when our rental van was killed by a botched jump-start (tip from the pros: don’t agree to give jump-starts to crazed dusty people with crappy giant RVs when you don’t understand anything about how your vehicle works and a false move might convince the on-board computer to shut it down completely). Queue a two-day wait in white-out conditions for a tow truck to rescue us. It was surreal watching the city dissolve around us, when we could see anything. Fortunately we got home just in time for me to take a bath and roll back out to Austin for the Austin Game Conference. Once again I made to our session on start-up lessons with not a lot of time to spare. I don’t remember much else about Austin but I think it was fun! I believe next year they’re having the show a little later in September, which will be nice.

I went to Hawaii for David Hornik’s conference: The Lobby (I know, linking to Valleywag, but there’s no official public conference website afiak). It was really good fun, very interesting and nice people — some I knew, others were new. Lots of folks had family and SO’s out there, which gave the event a different feel. A big shout-out to Raj Kapoor for pulling of ‘I wanna be sedated’ with a crowd of pogo-ing entrepreneurs and VCs.

I was photographed for a fashion blog at the Alameda Flea Market, wearing the suit I found for The Lobby, where I’d met Evan Williams and his wife, and we’d talked about Mai who took the photo, of me wearing the suit…

Some industray action:

Since blogging last time that Thinglefin got funded, like a juicy minnow they were snapped up Big Fish Games. I can see a lot of sense in that — Peter Thelen (now Chairman) has been looking to get into the casual MMO business for a while, and certainly Thingelfin’s efforts will benefit from Big Fish’s awesome distribution. We’ve struggled a lot with that side of things at Three Rings, as I’ve ranted about here in the past, so I see this as an encouraging sign. Congratulations to all.

IAC acquired a majority stake in Garage Games with a plan to build out InstantAction a destination for rich, 3D in-browser games. I believe they’re going to do this via the Torque plugin. It’s my belief that getting the target audience, presumably folks who play on Miniclip, AddictingGames, etc. to install anything is very challenging, but I wish them luck.

FlowPlay had a brief Beta, which was neat — taking standard Flash casual games into a Flash (lots of Flex, I feel for their engineers!) virtual world. Welcome to the 80%-land I mentioned above, Derrick! Meez also has some of this game action going on.

LiveGamer announced with an enormous pile of VC and some impressive initial contracts to provide publisher-authorized secondary markets. As usual, I agree with Raph that this is so much of an inevitability that it should be uncontroversial. However, what LiveGamer is most definitely NOT is “eBay for virtual world goods”. As I understand it, LiveGamer is a technology provider to publishers allowing them to easily put up co-branded, walled garden marketplaces. It is not trying to facilitate any kind of cross-game marketplace. If it was, I think people like SOE and GoPets would have a lot more problem signing a contract with them — why send your most profitable players to a cross-publisher market? This would seem to only encourage the worst possible behaviour from a publisher’s point of view — liquidating your assets in one game to surf on over to another. I’ve been pitched such ‘opportunities’ and my response was a resounding ‘Bzzt’. The pitcher’s response was to say that I was taking an AOL-esque ‘walled garden’ view, to which my reply was ‘Flawed analogy, but sure, until there is an eBay with critical mass where I might reasonably thing I would attract users rather than lose them, I’ll stick with my nice walled garden’. Anyway, you’re not going to see a Puzzle Pirates LiveGamer marketplace soon… frankly I’m not quite sure what’s complicated about the technology — compared to building an actual MMO it seems pretty straightforward. Didn’t Sony do this themselves with the Station Exchange? Maybe they know something I don’t.

MetaPlace announced. Raph and I had a fun conversation around a year and a half ago where we revealed a few cards to each other about our ‘next thing’. We shared the same ‘flop’ but had different cards in the ‘hole’. I agree with a lot of Damion’s thoughts and the comments thereof, in particular I think creating a world is really hard, non-professionals creating one that works on the web and a phone, or in 2D and 3D, seems improbable. Our bet is more on the ’social network with games’ than the ‘your own world’. I look forward to seeing us both out there in 2008 and kicking ass.

No sooner do I predict a wobble in the Second Life economy for the Virtual Worlds News 2008 Forecast PDF (well worth a read, post forthcoming on 2008 predictions in general) then Second Life releases metrics showing flat user growth. This could be just fine, but it’s my suspicion that momentum in key parts of SL’s economy, particularly real estate, rely on continued new entrants into the economy and existing property-holders retaining rather than liquidating their assets. I still lub Second Life though.

Some blog action:

Damion on repeatability — as some posters point out, this was exactly the problem I was trying to solve with Puzzle Pirates.

Jeremy Liew on well, pretty much everything. If you’re interested in making games and the funding thereof, this is a must-read.

Andrew Chen is awesomely smart and cracking some codes.

Janus Anderson has a new minty-fresh blog that starts with a guide to, well, making a blog. My version of first few steps: use Dreamhost, click butan to install Wordpress. Also one might use wordpress.com which seems to work well enough for Jeremy and relieves one of responsibility for the potential security worries of running server software.

Brad feld on the 19% of users who matter is worth a read, back to the Pareto 80/20 rule.

Only in China would wealthy WoW players be able to ‘make it real’. The bad movie club at work just watched a Steven Seagal movie based on this plot premise (minus the MMORPG bit).

And now to the silly section:

This Zero Punctuation review of Tabula Rasa cracked me up… ‘all a bunch of pointless timesinks for socially maladjusted freaks with self-diagnosed Aspergers syndrome’ indeed.

Timely with all this secondary market stuff, but ancient and already blogged to bits Excel the MMO.

Likewise, if by chance you don’t read TechMash or whatnot, this Richter Scales ‘Here Comes Another Bubble’ is hilarious. Note: I am firmly on the side of ‘if your photo is on the web you should be happy someone used it’, but I guess considering what we’re making with Whirled, that is no surprise.

I heard this catchy tune on the radio and looked it up on YouTube. Turns out the talented and pretty (and, nsfw warning, rather underclothed) singer Natasja died in a car crash. This is sad. Wait, I thought this was the silly section? Anyway, hopefully being listened to (and possibly ogled) on YouTube is a legacy of sorts. Woop woop!

Awesome Puzzle Pirates Fake Movie Posters, if you scroll down/page through enough you really get to the embarrassing bit.

That’s all folks for today! I don’t blog often, but when I do a giant bubble of saved up blogliness bursts all at once, so thanks for making it this far. Once more I’ll try to post more frequently ‘going forward’ into 2008.

Merry Solstice! Take a moment to ask the sun nicely to return today.

Arrrgh! I feel like I’ve sailed around the whirled, through stormy seas and cliffs of liquored doom, and returned. This year’s GDC was a busy old time. Everything went much according to plan, here are some random thoughts and memories;

Indie Games Summit: I was deeply negative, I think. Too negative. I rained on publishers which frankly for many indies contemplating an MMO is not helpful — you need some backing. It’s not like we’ve done that spectacularly without publishing muscle for marketing and distribution, either. A few people praised my talk later, saying that I was ‘realistic’ but I think I could have been more up-beat.

Casual Games Summit: The casual games business is still screwed. I tried to get Charles Merrin (Real) to do a deal with me before the session, but he wanted ‘everything for $50, and your hat’. The hat was of course a deal-breaker. So I had to put the ole hammer down on the difficulties of doing anything innovative, or indeed multiplayer at all, in the casual ‘ecosystem’ (more like a monosystem). These two sessions were actually a lot of fun with some good banter, but I remain down on downloadables. That said, I think if I were a hard-up indie with the chops, I would engage one of the casual portals (or rather, attempt to be engaged by them, ‘cos they’d have to pay) making bespoke ad-heavy multi-player games, hopefully with some back-end. There’s definitely the demand on the portal side, they are just slovenly with the execution on enabling technologies like user and billing APIs. Apparently ‘good stuff’ is coming soon. I am already blue in the face from waiting.

Future, past and present of MMOs: This session was good fun. The panelists were generally in agreement. Talk of big media getting involved, along with predictably predictions of people losing their shirts in droves. I was last up for future predictions and pulled out old chestnuts of ‘Eating television alive’ (second time quote for A.C. Clarke at GDC), web-based casual networks and the bank problem — will MMO operators end up becoming defacto banks? Should we look at off-shoring now? Will we get screwed by legislation? Watch this space.

Burning Man: We had a very strong panel, better than the last one at Austin, I felt. We each gave position statements on our thoughts about the event. Lorne Lanning gave an excellent talk about the importance of psychedelics in forming culture. I repeated my ‘War for the Future’ waffle (but made sure that nobody apart from a poor couple of folks had heard it before). Some of us got quite emotional. The crowd was smallish but seemed to really appreciate the session and had interesting questions.

Virtual Currency roundtables: These went very well indeed. We had big rooms full of people, but everyone behaved well and took turns talking. Some of the big players in this space (I will refrain from mentioning names incase they get into trouble) were very forthcoming with numbers and thoughts. Most people listened attentively. There’s certainly a lot going to be happening in virtual currency in the next few years. My biggest takeaway was the value in enabling speculation and a secondary market for digital goods.

MetaSoy: We started with some general corporate data, then Michael took us on a tour of a plethora of data on Bang! Howdy’s initial roll-out. Graph-arama, as is the usual style. Then we did a little talk about the background for Whirled — the new name for MetaSoy — and a quick demo. The demo went surprisingly well, although the engineers broke the Popular Places key navigation shortly beforehand… heh, something has to break! There were a few good questions and it was done.

Alice did a much better write-up of the Whirled part than I could have done.

Thursday night we had our big MetaScience party to celebrate. It was awesome. We invited too many people — or more likely, the folks we invited invited too many people, and had to stop letting people in for a while with a big line. The place was super-packed with the bartenders working like crazy to fulfill the elixir requirements of a multitude of thirsty scientists. Check out the Photoboof Pictures. Party Ben and The Evolution Control Committee played awesome sets and people rocked out on the dancefloor. We may not be able to have such a crazy party at the office again, but I’m glad we did. The place looked incredible thanks to tonnes of frantic work from Jillian and Toast. All-in-all, a great night.

Congratulations to the Bang! Howdy team on the IGF Technical Excellence award. Another for Michael’s desk! Congratulations to Aquaria; I loved their acceptance speeches. Without wishing to be a grouch, though, I would like to make a case for IGF entrants being released in playable form by the time of the awards. It’s frustrating to me that we lost the Grand Prize to a game that I can’t check out.

That’s about it, apart from various other parties, many of them fun (thanks Bessemer, Linden, IGDA Online SIG, etc.) and bunches of meetings. I wish I had had time to go to more sessions. Next year! Yep, next year.

p.s. Check out Nabeel’s summary and not just because of my goofy quotes.

Capn needs to watch his mouth when he is around journalists. This is something of a public apology to the Lindens for the quote from me in this Red Herring article on ‘The War to Build the Next Warcraft’; ‘Using Second Life is like having teeth pulled’ is not entirely fair. It’s a lot more fun than that (unless they give you the really good drugs at the dentist).

Linden continues to do really cool things. They open-sourced the client (Susan’s take) and just released some really great, detailed numbers (Raph’s analysis is useful). On the latter, my estimates of their revenue were higher than Raph (I probably booched the math) but given our relative concurrency user numbers (impressively they are up to ~4-5x us, vs ~2x in the summer), Puzzle Pirates and Second Life seem to have similar ballpark average revenue per user. The recent growth is fantastic; go Linden!

Back to the Red Herring arrrticle, I am also bemused by the authors implication that we have had ‘much more luck’ than Runescape. Our 30,000 paying customers (it’s actually a fair bit more than that, but it depends on how you slice it up over time; PP has had over 80,000 paying customers over its lifetime) by no means indicate more ‘luck’ than Runescape’s 900,000. I’d like a slice of their ‘luck’, myself.

I find myself a little baffled by the business plan of ‘Trion World Network’. It’s still in stealth, but what they do say is something like ‘top quality online games for broadband’. I am of course very much on-board with there being a big distinction between an online service oriented company and a packaged goods publisher, and I can forsee that Electronic Arts (the CEO’s former employer) may continue to acquire companies that succeed in this paradigm. However, EA aren’t all that bad at online stuff; after the EA.com debacle passed they’ve done a good job managing Pogo, and now they now have Mythic. They just bought SingShot, too; Sims Karaoke, anyone? I’m not sure what the big difference in experience (not distribution, which is important certainly) for a player is between a pure download game and the box-purchase with regular patches. I’m very skeptical of streaming solutions, as they mostly seem to produce a patchy (ha ha) experience that gamers won’t stand for. It’ll be interesting to see how Trion and competitors Multiverse, shape up in the field of battle.

Naturally the Capn remains aghast at the budget requirements of (presumably) Trion and Red5. Excuse the play on the name, but to an investor, to me it looks like this; if you’re okay with putting down $10M (out of, say, $40M) on red 5 then waiting four years or so to see if the roulette wheel comes up, great! You might win big (especially if you can do that scream thing like in Run Lola Run, ~6.40 mins in)… but this seems like a odd kind of bet for a venture investor to make. As Gus Tai says in the article, VCs have historically shied away from such content bets because they realise that they are not publishers and do not have the skillset to make judgements about what might succeed in the marketplace — let alone the marketplace four years away. Anyway, I’ve blogged about the insane competition in the MMORPG market before. We’ll see who is left on the battlefield… in a few years.

Finally, they end the article with a quote from me about a ‘ten year battle’. I believe that in this case I was referring to specifically the player-created content ‘virtual world’ space, not entertainment. I hope that entertainment worlds are not a winner-takes-all business. I think that would be a shame, although it certainly looks a bit like that right now with WoW. However, open-platform virtual worlds are likely to have some kind of network effect properties that lead one to dominate the landscape. I think that it will be a long and bloody conflict before a world emerges the winner, and I strongly believe that it will only a deeply open platform that succeeds. I think Linden agrees with me, which gives them a whole lot of legs in the struggle.

One of my favourite meetings ever was in Silicon Valley with a very famous and successful entrepreneur who was interested in buying Three Rings. He quoted Sun Tzu to me, something about taking the high ground and forcing your enemy into the swampy lowlands. I hope Three Rings can keep to the higher ground, if I can keep my feet out of my mouth we might just make it up the hill.

A little 2007 update; I took some time off over the holidays, like any civilised organisation Three Rings shuts from Christmas eve through to Jan 2nd. Mostly I loafed around at home, though I took a trip to Orr Hot Springs with friends for a pleasing couple of days soaking in sulphurous tubs and marveling at incredibly tall trees.

New Year’s eve was (of course) a bit of a fiasco. I had four friends staying with me (from LA and NYC). We spent Midnight at Tom’ and Margaret’s house, up on the roof surrounded by downtown for the fireworks and so forth. It was a lot of fun, not least thanks to the French guys’ party in the loft next door. Foolishly we decided to set forth on foot at a late hour for a Spank Rock party — five big and very drunken SOMA blocks later we arrived as the party was shutting down. Chalk that one up to bad party planning. Here is a great Spank Rock video as consolation prize: Rick Rubin.

A few more linking nuggets for you; my friends know that I have an obsession with Giant Giant Phones (via Boing Boing).

I found myself agreeing a lot with the views of Justin Kitch, the CEO of Homestead. As players of Puzzle Pirates know, we fire (ban) undesirable customers all the time.

I was surprised to discover this hilarious Ali Love ‘K Hole’ song via Fred Wilson, a notable blogging VC.

I thought that this was strangely great; photographs of Little People in scenes around London.

This weekend I saw Children of Men. I enjoyed it, but found myself shellshocked for a couple of days afterwards, perhaps in part because I was in the third row back from the giant giant screen. I also went to Kontrol, a techno night. I’m not usually a fan of music that goes ‘duf-duf-duf-duf’ (house, trance, techno, etc.), as opposed to the ‘boom boom cack’ (breaks, hiphop, funk, etc.) but I really enjoyed myself.

More in my usual line, I got a txt on my way out of work and went to see Lady Sovereign who I’d heard but not heard of, if you see what I mean. She was alright, but she had an altercation with an MC dressed as a Jellied Donut (class line ‘You got beat by a dessert.’). Apparently something to do with this guy who raised $10k to take Lady Sov on a date. Go San Francisco (or ‘San Fran’ as she kept shouting… I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone but visiting Brits say that…)

I have become a fan of Violent Acres. I thought this post about speaking your mind was good.

I will endeavour to work up some controversial topic forthwith. In the mean time, peas.