Another great round of talks today. I spent a good deal of the day in meetings, but attended two fantastic sessions. One was from the company that bought the failed APB game.
APB monetization challenges
- hailand rising
- APB reloaded
- fallen earth
- UGC – assisted publishing
- reloaded games
- platform@reloadedinc.com
- sword of new world
- freetoplay they own trademark!
- they set M title
- music editor in game!
- unreal mgmt server system
- amazing custom character
merging ok with losing
- bad missions
- skill ratings system sucks
- curve matching Bayesian matching
- if win first match 30% to spend $
- rewarding bad behavior
- encouraged cheating/tools
- went to double threat = bad
map inflexibility
- too large, no noob zone, too procedural, no manual map building.
had to build NEW all by hand
no signposts
removing tutorial = 20% bump in retention, learned ease/accessible
?tutorial: why not make it better?
- scammers/cheaters/dos attacks/game optimization
- gear, guns, cars, clothing
- time-savings
premium accounts
-shorten time
weapons added trials
gear-cosmetics is lowest revenue
-monetization it was NOT important
end of match push buy premium
1000 days to find f2p peak
plan for peak revenue
140k
.5 players
shooting for $30 arpu
Technical Art of Diablo 3
The second talk was from Blizzards Lead technical artist regarding how their technical art team evolved over the course of Diablo 3 production.
Takeaways:
- turned into imagineers
- by allowing for rapid iteration with tools able to become designers