Matt Mihaly

I can't remember the first one I ever logged into, but the first one I played 'seriously' was Batmud, back in 1991.

Well, when you're running a company you have to react to what you think is coming rather than what is here now. It's also worth pointing out that 30% of staff cuts probably doesn't equal 30% reduction in payroll, given that the layoffs were heavy on community and QA, both of which are relatively low-paid jobs.

The best roleplay in any type of MMO-style game is in text MUDs, almost all of which are free-to-play. They're certainly not for everyone, but the level of roleplay available in some of these is an order of magnitude greater than in anything like LotRO, WoW, or free-to-play MMOs like FreeRealms and Mabinogi.

@Acelin: Yeah, I understand that, though considering that America is hardly innocent of human rights violations, the same logic would say that Americans have no right to criticize China for its human rights violations. I disagree with that logic, incidentally.

It's just not so simple though, and in any case mourning your dead countrymen really has nothing to do with human rights violations. Even the worst criminal can feel authentic, legitimate sadness when his sister dies, as a (bad) analogy.

--matt

@Acelin: I'm not dismissing their outrage. It does, however, seem odd to me to get outraged about something when the people who are actually affected by it don't appear to be offended (granted, that's anecdotally....I've talked to a couple dozen people out of over a billion in China). It'd be like a Chinese person getting outraged about bank holidays in the US when US citizens don't see it as a big deal.

There are a lot of things to be outraged about regarding China's government (and America's government). This just doesn't appear to be one of them any more than bank holidays are.

--matt

Hi all. I wanted to jump in here too. I'm the guy that's in Shanghai this week and sent Massively the news.

I don't really have an opinion one way or another but some of you are off-base with your rants, at least as far as regular Chinese people are. I've been meeting with Chinese companies this week, and have talked to quite a few Chinese MMO players and other Chinese people. I've asked a bunch of them, including people who operate MMOs here, what they think of the day of mourning and I haven't heard anyone have the reaction that some of you - none of whom are affected by this - had. You seem to be offended on behalf of people who don't really mind this, and in fact consider it a culturally appropriate response. It's hard for me to see how this is any different from government mandated bank holidays in the West (where banks are not permitted to be open).

There seems to be a sense among some of you that people in China live in fear of a fascist government and I'm sure some of you will say that people are just afraid to complain. That's certainly not true here, as I've had multiple open conversations in which Chinese citizens complained rather vociferously about various aspects of their government. Not being able to play an MMO or go to a karaoke bar for a single day just isn't something that they feel is a big sacrifice in the face of two thousand people dying in an earthquake recently. Your outrage is misplaced.

--matt

Actually, back in the old days you paid by the minute, sometimes running up bills of thousands of dollars a month.

That quality is being produced for one reason: to get players to continue to give them money.

You made me laugh out loud with that last line.

With all due respect to the author, this article was not well-researched. The author is pulling his data from the recent study of Playspan, which surveyed users who bought virtual items in games.

Gamasutra's take on it is much more accurate:
"Based on a survey of 2,425 of PlaySpan users who had bought digital goods from publishers within the last year, VGMarket found that 58 percent of users bought goods from within a free-to-play game -- the highest proportion -- while 34 percent of users made in-game purchases in MMOs and 23 percent made purchases from social games."

In other words, it's looking at where users who purchased digital goods purchased them, not looking at the pool of all users and whether they bought or not.

The real % of users who buy in a f2p game ranges from the low single digits to the low double digits.