The Escapist - Boutique MMOGs & The Industrialisation of Play

The latest edition of The Escapist has two articles that may be of interest to our readers.

Boutique MMOGs by Allen Varney

Imagine, for discussion's sake, that you don't have $50 million, so you can't build and market a full-scale World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) clone. Suppose, too, you don't have rock superstar Bono on speed-dial, and unlike BioWare/Pandemic Studios, you can't finance your new MMOG through his $300 million Elevation Partners holding company. To get still more outlandish, let's say you cannot easily lay your hands on a paltry $3 million - no, really, work with me here - so you couldn't even produce a smaller-scale "casual MMOG" like Puzzle Pirates or Gaia Online or Dofus. Assume, hypothetically, you - just you, together with maybe two or three other indigent programmers - have six months of savings and a budget in the low four figures. How would you create and market a full-featured MMOG?

The Industrialisation of Play by Shannon Drake

To the real world, Julian Dibbell is a contributing editor for Wired, with other work appearing in New York magazine, Feed and Topic. To the hardcore MMOG player, though, Julian is one of Them: a gold farmer, someone who plays an online game for hours upon hours only to sell the loot he picks up for real-world money. He documented his farming experiences on his website, and then wrote a book about it called Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job And Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. I sat down with Dibbell to get an idea of what the MMOG industry's Devil would say about his book, farming and the industry in general, given an open mic.