Linden Lab pointed out in its early stages that it was developing a world, not a game. Blizzard made no such distinction with World of Warcraft, and it still spread like wildfire. However, as most critics have pointed out, it's not the gameplay that makes it a huge success. It's the community With social networking sites attaching themselves to massively multiplayer online games, World of Warcraft is beginning to sound a bit more like Second Life.
John Karlen, a principle at IDG Ventures Boston, said, "From a high level, what you're seeing across the board is that people are seeing that the success of MMOs is in the human interaction. Whenever you see a huge phenomenon like World of Warcraft, you have to step back and say 'Some vein was tapped here, but what was it?' I think most people believe that's the vein that's been tapped."
IDG just invested in GuildCafe, a company that's trying to enrich that vein. GuildCafe provides a community-driven portal for online gaming. Because while human interaction may be the big draw behind MMORPGs, most of them are fairly bad at providing it.
Instead companies like GuildCafe and Curse.com, which just obtained $5 million in funding from AGF Private Equity, are trying to build social networks, among other things, into and across the games that already draw users.
As Jon Radoff, President and CEO of Guild Cafe, said, "People who play World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, or other MMOs often find that when they switch between servers and worlds and guilds, they still have a connection with the people they've played with. The big idea of GuildCafe is to provide continuity between all those games."
Big Results
It's an approach that seems to be working. Curse.com's founder and CEO Hubert Thieblot describes his platform as "a full MMORPG portal. Before us you had many, many sites with only one feature, a social network or video sharing or news site. What we want with Curse is to make one big portal with all of these features in one destination."
He says Curse draws 3.5 million uniques and 85 million page views.
GuildCafe, which is still in beta has about 17,000 users. And, anecdotally at least, Radoff thinks they skew a little away from the average MMO player.
"At this point because most users are attracted to us because it's beta and they have a chance to shape the community," he said. "One thing that I've maybe picked up on is that while MMOS are predominantly a male activity, while we still have more males than females on the site, we have more females than proportionally may exist in the MMORPG. It might be closer to the real world breakdown."
Regardless of skew, both platforms provide an attractive audience base for advertisers. According to Radoff, people in the gaming market no longer watch television, especially in the 18-34 bracket. While the average US television watcher catches about 34 hours a week, gamers play about 30 or 31 hours a week with just a few hours of television. As Radoff said of this lucrative demographic, "If you're not reaching them through gaming, you're probably not reaching them at all."
Karlen points out that the demographic is only getting more attractive. "MMOG players are often intense users," he said. "They're also thought leaders, and as the online game demographic broadens, people would be shocked to learn that the average age is 26 and three-quarters are full-time employed, and more are women than you'd think. As the world gets flatter and the experience gets better through a browser, the demographic is going to broaden even greater."
Curse GM Wilson Kriegel sees a similar breakdown. "IGN [a major Internet gaming news site] and other editorial sites are scattered with demographics," he said. "It's hard for them to pinpoint a specific demographic. Curse is about 90 percent male with an IT background and full of early adopters and consumer technology fanatics. We do have a very unique demographic for the advertising space." He says it attracts entertainment, media, and electronics brands among others.
