|
|
 |
 |  | | | | |  | |||
 | ||||||
          |  |  | ||||
|
The Sims Online Evolution: A Case Study Although The Sims Online (TSO) box hit the shelves in mid-December 2002, the content design and target audience was first put to the test during beta. As our team discovered, it's best to look at this time period with massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) as a rite of passage. The launch of an MMOG is a transition stage for the game's content, the market, the community and the product as a whole. Where the product goes after its launch is an evolutionary process. This article describes how The Sims Online continues to grow after its launch. I've been on the production team for two years (minus a seven-week stint on The Sims PS2) and I've been "in the trenches" the whole time. I saw the product and team change from pre-beta to launch to post-launch, and beyond. For the last ten months our team has focused on realizing and implementing the potential of TSO in order to grow our market and do new things with the game. To figure how to evolve the game, we have been researching our current audience as well as targeting new audiences. Armed with that information, we've been devising new content that satisfies both groups, including leveraging the market of single-player Sims fans and creating content to draw them in. It has been a tremendous experience, and I hope you will benefit from the lessons we've learned and the strategies we're pursuing to make a new and improved game out of TSO. Analyzing the Product When trying to determine how to evolve your MMOG, you need to know where your game currently stands. You need to have a firm grasp on what it is today, before you can start thinking about where you want to take it. And you need to know what your players and retailers think about it, too. That said, this is what we did with TSO. Design. Four years ago, the TSO designers began conceptualizing a game for a particular kind of player, with a particular kind of gameplay in mind. In general, their goal was to develop an open-ended game in the familiar and successful Sims world. The game would include creative tools (e.g., objects to set up mini-games for contests, businesses, and so on) that would empower players to make it their game. Marketing. It's no secret that The Sims franchise, in general, is skewed female -- 52% of its players are female. That hasn't changed with TSO. We are very proud of this fact, since it is not a common attribute of today's games. When we first marketed this product, teenage girls who knew about The Sims were our number one fans. It was assumed that we would have a large teenage audience for TSO, and indeed most of our initial players (through beta and into public launch) were girls and women under age 25. To collect data about our audience the marketing team sent out free trial offers and surveys to people on The Sims email lists. Audience.
When we launched, we successfully sold boxes and subscriptions to the
fanatical Sims player that we had intentionally designed for and
marketed for. However, the unfortunate consequence of targeting this niche
group is that it turned out to be a smaller audience than we anticipated.
Ongoing research, combined with our churn rate, indicated that this age
group of The Sims fans does not hold a strong interest in an online
environment. That was not good news for a game based on subscription business
model. We also discovered that the teens we targeted did not have purchasing
power; in other words, requiring teenagers to pay for the subscription
with a credit card was a significant marketing challenge for us. One example of how feedback directly influenced the TSO strategy concerned the game's price. The price of TSO at launch was $49.99, but about eight weeks later the price was reduced to $29.99. Part of the reason for this price drop was that players and potential players told us that they didn't understand the game's value. (That isn't exactly what they said, but that is how we interpreted it.) People were used to seeing Sims products on the shelf for $29.99 to $39.99, without an added monthly fee, so when the apple green TSO box appeared with a $49.99 sticker on it (plus subscription) players probably reached for one of the less expensive Sims expansion packs instead. This was the situation we faced a couple of months after the launch of TSO. To increase the number of the game's subscribers and broaden its market, we knew we had to change the gameplay dynamic, reach new players, maintain our existing community, and change the box price. We knew it wouldn't be an easy task, nor risk-free. But it is what TSO required to grow. Identifying Where to Grow Using a combination of survey results, community feedback, and demographic studies about players of the Sims games, the development team leads (from the production, design, engineering, and QA) brainstormed a series of goals for the game. We agreed that it would be good to add very specific elements to TSO that were recognizable from The Sims. These ideas have become the team's new content goals. I should also point out that there are multiple parties involved in achieving these goals, and each of these groups has their own agenda for improving the game. All of these views must be reconciled in the overall game plan. For example, certain goals for some of our engineer groups are based on optimizing existing TSO systems. The designers want to add features that expand the player experience beyond just simple new objects. This means coding a new, richer player experience, and sometimes it's more time consuming to design than implement. Our production and marketing teams need new content regularly to keep the buzz alive with our subscribers and retailers. To manage all of these different agendas, there is an overall schedule to synchronize the efforts of the different groups. After all, if subscriptions begin to rapidly decline and retailers begin taking the game off the shelves, who will be around to notice that we are reticulating splines faster than before? Members of marketing, sales, and production got together to look at the aforementioned player feedback data and analyze the makeup of the current audience TSO. They also considered who the game, perhaps with some design changes, was best positioned to attract. Once we realized that we should make TSO more recognizable to The Sims players, it was not difficult to decide which demographics to go after. We identified three new subsets of the overall Sims audience we hadn't previously targeted. We also discovered that the average age of a TSO player was about 27, not the teenager we had previously pictured. So our new demographic target is players in the 24-35 age range, who play The Sims, claim to be social or somewhat-social people, and are accustomed to using a credit card on the Internet. It's been challenging to decide how to change TSO's content. We are very lucky to have the immediately recognizable assets (art, objects, sounds, and so on) from The Sims brand available to us. But simply porting over a bunch of skins and objects from existing Sims expansion packs is not the complete solution. On the other end of the spectrum, imbuing the game with the ultimate AI wouldn't fit into our production schedule. While on this point, it is important to note that the content in TSO creates a different experience than the exact same content in The Sims offline products. Primarily this is because TSO is a shared experience with other "real" players. Unlike the single-player Sims games, you witness the reactions of other TSO players to the game's content. This lets TSO leverage existing content while adding a fresh "online value."
There were some design considerations we had to take into account as we began evolving the game. First, there was the fact that TSO players are different than most online gamers. Most are new to playing games online, they're not hardcore gamers, and they consistently express the desire for us to stick to the gameplay from The Sims offline game. For example, some basic design feedback indicated our players didn't want the degree of "open-endedness" that they perceived in the game. In The Sims, there are elements of indirect control and predictable gameplay. By adding traditional Sims "dollhouse" gameplay to TSO, the thinking is the game becomes more familiar, structured and easier to play.
Adding job properties and mini-games was one result of this realization. In The Sims, characters are whisked off to work and time passes very quickly without any "workplace" gameplay. In an effort to add some more mini-game activities for players, soon in TSO players will be responsible for getting their sim off to work and responsible for the actual work they do. These jobs will serve multiple purposes, but most obviously they will give players "something to do" without having to create their own forms of entertainment. Players can be taken by car to a job property that is Maxis (system) owned, versus player owned, and can participate in an eight sim-hour work shift with other TSO players. There will be a specific goal to every shift besides making money. For example, one may have to construct a robot in a factory or keep restaurant NPC patrons in a good mood. Very specific job tasks have to be completed in sequence and within a set timeframe to be successful. These "rules" are set and checked by the game (not another player), leaving players in an environment of being entertained versus having to entertain others. We learned that in-game activities that worked in The Sims didn't always translate well into TSO, because they actually decreased the player interactions that went on in the game. Like in The Sims, motives (the eight basic needs for a player's character -- hunger, comfort, room, energy, fun, hygiene, and social) are a very important part of TSO. But in TSO, the quest for money seemed to be an even bigger motivation, and that had a negative impact on the overall player experience. Players began to interact with skill-building objects (like having a character play chess to increase his logic skills, or interacting with the exercise machine to build body skills) and then go AFK -- away from keyboard -- for long periods at a time. One could literally be on a property filled with other players and never be inclined to say one word to anyone else. As a result, a player could wander onto a property that looked incredibly full of life and begin to think they were in a property possessed by mute and blind skill-building zombies. That's not a fun, compelling game experience. Enhancing the social aspects of the game has become a major goal for the game's evolution. Real-time chatting, one of the big differentiators between TSO and The Sims, is an existing game component and has always been rated highly. Some of the demographics of The Sims audience we targeted are self-proclaimed "social game" players. So we thought, "Hey! Chatting is social, right? If 1) TSO is a great place to chat and 2) there are some offline Sims players that like to be social and haven't tried TSO, let's hook these two factors together in some of our designs!" We felt that players would respond positively if we evolved the game in ways that would make it easier for people to socialize.
The third aspect to evolving TSO involved our current community of players. In one survey that marketing took, we found that roughly 70% of current TSO players own The Sims. Given this huge overlap between the online and offline games, we felt that the addition of new content from The Sims like the pets features would help draw even more of the offline players into the online version. The thinking here is that since 70% of our players own the other Sims products, they are likely to be involved in The Sims community. If these particular players begin to speak up about their positive TSO experiences with owning a dog, fans of The Sims Unleashed might be more likely to try TSO. Essentially, we examined who is currently playing our game and discovered a way to spread a word-of-mouth buzz around the evolution of the product. As
we make these various changes to TSO, we're actively taking steps
to retain our current player base. It is from them that we learned how
important some features are to develop, like pets. However, there is always
a risk that though we see the coming changes as a win-win situation, the
community will not. This is a risk we are willing to take based on the
potential number of new players to be acquired by our new, larger target
audience.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Introduction
Resource
Guide 
