GameDevMike

The third and final session I attended on Day One of the conference (Nov 9) was a presentation by Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, titled, “Bringing the Item-Based Model to the Western World.” Out of all of the sessions over the two days, this is the one I was most interested in. First, it was the only topic directly related to something I want to do with my business. Second, I’m a big fan of Three Rings — their games are very well done, appealing to a broad audience, and make use of Java on both the server and the client. While I don’t play their games (too casual for me), I do respect what they’ve accomplished.

All of business-related sessions were oriented toward taking Korean games and ideas and putting them in the Western market. Although I’m not Korean and have no plans to develop for the Korean market at all, I still found Ed Zobrist’s keynote and James Gwertzman’s session highly informative and useful. Unfortunately, Daniel’s presentation wasn’t quite what I had expected.

The session started off with some interesting info about Puzzle Pirates. Throughout the presentation, though, there was very little said about the item-based micro-transaction model. Some of the talk presentation overlapped with Gwertzman’s session, which had wrapped up a half-hour earlier in the same room and had, mostly, the same audience. That’s no fault of Daniel’s, just an unfortunate coincidence. But I would have liked to have seen less about the casual market in general and more about the item-based model specifically.

Daniel did have some interesting opinions about the market, though. He strongly suggested that casual game developers avoid executables completely. Installation files are bad. Ideally, casual games should be playable in the browser. He also said that the current try-before-you-buy model is going to die. This is something he blogged about a few months ago, as well.

A good chunk of the session was spent talking about games that have tried the micro-transaction model in the West, breaking them down into different categories (such as pay-for-item and pay-for-avatar). Some of those games were from Korean developers. While I found some of the data interesting, it wasn’t what I had attended the session for. I can’t say that it was a bad presentation, for it wasn’t. I was just expecting more technical details on how the item-based model has worked for Three Rings, or what Daniel thought would work and wouldn’t work for the market overall, or the level of enthusiasm players exhibit for item-based transactions vs. virtual currency (i.e. paying $$$ for game items vs paying $$$ for game money), or other details about the item-based model.

At the end of the session, I couldn’t resist asking him a question about Java. In one of the first slides regarding Puzzle Pirate, there was a line that said the game was now playable as a Java Applet. When I tried the game last year, it was a downloadable installation file with a bundled JRE. So I asked him if Java had been a problem for them at all in the casual games market. There are a lot of indies who understand that “Java is slow” is a myth, but who still won’t risk Java on the client side in the casual market because of JRE penetration. In his answer, Daniel told me that they bundle the JRE so that part hasn’t been so much of a problem (which really countered the slide info that prompted the question in the first place). However, in terms of his “no executable” tip from earlier, it seems they have had some issues with distributing an install package. As such, he said he wouldn’t recommend Java as a development platform for casual games and, this was a shocker, his company’s next game is being developed with Flash.

Three Rings has been one of the poster children for Java games, receiving heavy promotion at Java.com, and is often brought up as a counter for anti-Java flamefests at GameDev.net. I was a bit surprised by the answer. Anyway, I’m not going after the same Soccer Mom and Grandpa Jones market segment, so I’m not too put off by it.

I deliberately glossed over much of the session in this overview. Daniel James kindly made his slides available from his personal website. You can get them at http://djames.org/gstar.ppt.

Technorati Tags: KGC2006, Korea Games Conference, Three Rings, Puzzle Pirates, Java