NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RyanD" data-source="post: 153231" data-attributes="member: 3312">There are just over 1,600 registered (i.e., paying) Living City players as of this date.  We continue to generate about 10 a day.  In 2000 (the best year we have data for), there were about 6,000 different people who played at least once in the year.  So that's my short term goal; get 6,000 people signed up by the end of the year.The fact that we've got those 1,600 people is astonishing.  They are not paying for products (scenarios are free to download).  They are not paying for a collectable (the scenarios are PDF files and can be freely distributed).  They are paying simply for the privilege of playing; in other words, they're willing to believe that by giving us (about) a dollar every time the play, they can get an experience that is at least worth that price on average.  That's a breakthrough of immense proportions.The interesting thing I've found in operating the business of a "Living" campaign is that the biggest constraint is Judges (DMs in LC speak).  There just aren't enough of them.  About 100 people judge 80% of all LC scenarios run annually; that's just way too few people Judging for the number of active players.  If we can't solve the Judge problem, a MMTRPG ("T" for Tabletop) probably can't work.  Ideally, I'd like to see a ratio of about 20% active Judges.The objective of OP as a company is to deliver a system for game publishers that will let them support their player networks the way WotC supports its own.  That means effective fan clubs, event scheduling and scoring, and ratings and feedback.  Its a tremendous challenge.  One of the things most consumers don't understand is how bloody expensive it is for a pubilsher to run an effective support program.  The only way to make it work in hobby gaming is for the players themselves to shoulder the costs; either in the form of memberships or via micropayments links to activities.  The publishers just don't have the money to pay out of pocket for the kind of support systems required.  (Other than WotC, Games Workshop, Decipher, and possibly White Wolf).Living City is our "test tube"; it's a controlled experiment that we can use to demonstrate the capabilities OP is developing, and show off our technology while generating revenue to offset our operating costs.The idea of a self-supporting MMTRPG really excites me, because it blows up the whole RPG business model.  If we could evolve a community of players who were willing to pay $5 a month to play their favorite RPG, we will have a whole new kind of game - one with the kind of revenue necessary to support a lot of high-end features that traditional paper-based product publishing just can't manage.  As the lifetime value of a customer goes up, the business that customer supports becomes a lot bigger and more capable.  There's a lot of talk on the 'net about PDF publishing, and I think it's somewhat ironic that the long term success of the PDF model for content distribution may be completely decoupled from the revenue side of the business.I think that so few people have played either LC or LG that the canvas is still mostly blank.  We recognize that most people who have tried the campaigns have probably quit due to a number of factors related to the experience and the environment.  What we hope is that we can correct those problems and present players in the future with a much better experience.  We're learning a tremendous amount about how to operate a MMTRPG using Living City as a basis, but I have my doubts about whether either existing "Living" campaign could be stretched to accomodate several hundred thousand active monthly players.  We're still just in the very beginning of this concept (even though Living City has been active for almost 10 years).  It was ignored by so long by TSR and then by WotC (to say nothing of the rest of the industry), and only in the past three or four years has the idea of a "Living" campaign been recognized for the potential value that it really possesses.The challenge for OP is to make enough money to cover our operating expenses while we build out our systems.  Right now, we're starting the race a long way behind what WotC has today in terms of technology and know-how.  I believe that we'll slowly catch up over the course of this year, and by 2003, we'll be able to deliver a feature-for-feature match for just about anything they can bring to the table.  Getting from here to there is going to be incredibly hard, but if we make it, we'll have changed the industry from the ground up.I can envision a time when the RPG business consists of three kinds of publisher:1)  Core book publishers, who make most of their money selling basic games to an acquisition-driven audience.2)  Supplement publishers, who make most of their money by selling products to the market created by the Type 1 publshers, mostly by selectively targeting niches within the larger market.3)  Service-based companies who support the market created by Type 1 and 2 companies, mostly by supporting "Living" type campaigns either as stand-alone businesses or coupled tightly to a product line managed by a Type 1 or 2 company.To cycle all the way 'round to the beginning - the challenge in reaching that kind of a future involves Judges.  Without people willing to run games, the whole market suffers.  No publisher has ever mounted a successful campaign to recruit, train, and develop GMs, and that's what's needed for a service-based sector to emerge.  Only time will tell if it can be done.</blockquote>

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