Project & Story

Companies currently monetize their MMOs and chats either through monthly subscription fees, offering virtual goods or a mixture of both.
Now, we don’t want to rain on everybody else’s parade – companies need to earn their fair share; but price structures for most services and goods seem to be out of all proportions to their avail or the service rendered. Just changing your name at imvu.com will debit your account with around $7 for example. Habbo Hotel charges a monthly fee of $6 or so for its Habbo Club (enabling more exclusive content). Their Furnis are more affordable, as long as it’s not a rare item (prices for rares can be in the ballpark of $5 again).
Lending yourself a real name in Second Life comes at a hefty $100, plus an annual fee of $50. For a Second Life premium account you need to pay around 10 bucks, enabling landownership. But building up a bigger share of land can easily amount to several thousands of dollars.

Worlds in Motion has a very interesting piece on how much stuff you can buy at Habbo Hotel with 10 bucks. Read it here.

Relying on sponsorships and in-game advertisement, Coobico will essentially offer every goodie and minigame for free. Users pay with ingame-money which can be earned by successfully finished quests. ‘Course, Coobico will enable players to buy ingame-money, too. But we’d like to stress that no member will be pushed to pay for any inventory-item. 

Qubus’ Island is hardly found on any nautical chart. It is shrouded in legends about lost mariners and merchants, missing in the island’s uncharted waters, or seized by its nameless monstrous inhabitants. Only a few pilots and seafarers, familiar with the island, describe it as a weathered, almost cube-shaped formation. Close to the rectangular rock, allegedly all compasses and controls are going crazy.





The island was named after the illustrious Dr. Qubus, who set out to fathom its secrets. The ingenious scientist’s prior discoveries included major findings on why woodpeckers don’t get headaches, for example. Qubus also had studied the alteration of brainwaves while consuming Cheddar-cheese, proclaimed one of the most significant researches of the decade by the Luxuriant Flowing Beards Club.
Accompanied by his assistant Erasmus and his butler Albert, Dr. Qubus found the island after following the footsteps of his missing colleague Professor Lina Rotwang. Qubus discovered some startling clues when he found and contuined Rotwangs abandoned research on the island.

More on Qubus’ Island and Dr. Qubus’ disappearance in a spectacularly failed experiment to follow in part two…

Today, Mashable, probably teh world’s largest blog on social networks, features Coobico’s development:

“Although every MMO is, in fact, some sort of social network, many companies are trying to find that special niche where gaming and social networking meet. Coobico is, as the founders say, a mix of casual MMO (casual, in the realm of MMOs, usually means that you don’t have to leave your family, quit your job and spend the rest of your wretched life living in a tiny apartment, permanently hooked to the screen, to be successful in the game) and a social network. It’s Flash based, it’s free, it’s part strategy, part RPG, and it’s coming out in the first quarter of 2008.“

Read the full article after the jump.

During the game you will inevitable come to a point of growing bored with playing your townie, getting some appetite for destruction of your opponents’ neighbourhood. Don’t worry, there is a game-mechanism in place for this: Curses. A curse is basically a quest turning you into a fiend for a short time of sheer rampage and monster madness. Go ahead and tear down buildings as you see fit, your competitors will probably do the same to your neighbourhood if they get cursed once in a while.
Curses come in different shapes; besides being turned into monster, you may also receive a request to build a new hazard-spot, like a Den-of-Thieves, or an entrance to a subterranean dungeon. Such places will have a negative impact on their surrounding neighbourhood.

Curse-quests can eventually be found in eerie places like the House on Haunted Hill or the Foggy Forest. A curse gets broken automatically after a while or after being busted as a monster.

Newly released MMO-Blog Worlds in Motion, part of CMP Media, recently wrote an article about Coobico: Getting Casual with Coobico. This week we sat down with editor Leigh Alexander to talk about the peculiarities of creating a casual MMO for a non-teen audience:

“‘More’ is the typical game-industry’s approach to everything: more levels, more graphic power, more customization and even moreso, intertwining features. Here is a lesson that the game-industry can learn from the Web 2.0-world—less is more, really,“ Winter opined. “Less is what a casual audience of above-30-year-olds are looking for. They don’t want to waste their time and money on upgrading graphic-hardware just to play Crysis in all its beauty. They are looking for some thirty minutes of ease and challenge besides their working-life, their family and hobbies, instead of spending endless hours of grinding in an online-game.“

Communities are the key to online worlds, Winter says—and the current community within MMOs currently reflects, he notes, the industry’s “max-out principle,“ where the learning curve to fully engage in the virtual society is steep. “This doesn’t mix well socially with the casual market,“ Winter says. “Such social discrepancies—almost like culture shock—are among the biggest shortcomings of recent multiplayer-products.“

Read more at Worlds in Motion: Linking People’s Lutz Winter Talks Casual Adult MMO

City-building is Coobico’s main theme, somewhat comparable to games like The Settlers or MySims. But it’s city-building inside out: you can establish your own settlement on Qubus’ Island (or join another player’s estate), while managing your avatar’s life and his or her wellbeing, belongings and pets in a roleplaying-ish fashion.
When exploring the surroundings with your avatar, you will eventually discover other settlers and their villages—other players with whom you can compete or collaborate to become the most influential citizen.

To build a new structure, you’ll need to gather construction-materials and fulfil quests first, which in turn will raise your avatar’s experience and his or her Achievement-Level. As a true multiplayer-game you can convince your friends and neighbours to invest in your construction-site, to speed up building. Likewise, competing players can use their resources to delay or stop a completion of a new structure.

Worlds in Motion blogs about Coobico’s development:

“It’ll be isometric 2D, to boot—looks like a lot of companies are realizing that high-powered graphics aren’t always necessary, especially when appealing to a casual audience… they’re not targeting the ‘sweet spot’ tweens-and-teens—rather, Linking People’s gunning for the market pegged as the ‘core’ of casual gaming and the broader market, those aged 30 to 44.“

Spieletipps, a large german gaming-portal covers Coobico and its development (in german only):

“Knuddels, Habbo Hotel oder ChatCity - die Auswahl an Chats und virtuellen Welten ist in den vergangenen Jahren enorm gewachsen. Allerdings richten sich die meisten an Jugendliche und junge Erwachsene. Genau diese Marktlücke will das Unternehmen Linking People Ltd. nun schließen. Mit Coobico erscheint Anfang 2008 ein kostenloses Flash-basiertes Multiplayer-Strategiespiel, das besonders Gelegenheitsspieler im Alter von 30 bis 44 ansprechen soll.“

The full article is here.

Developmag, the leading UK trade news and community site for all professionals working in the video games development sector, covers Linking People and Coobico:

“The Hong Kong-based company, established last year by three veteran web designers, is focused on creating Web 2.0 communities and shared gaming experiences aimed at players aged 30 to 44, a demographic which according to a recent study constitutes 79 per cent of the game market.“

Read the full article after the jump.

Admittedly, this piece is already a bit older, but still worth reading: Neil Sorens (Dancing Robot Studios) pins down the problems of most current MMOs in this feature at Gamasutra.
We highly agree, most serious multiplayer-games include too much grinding, challenges take too long, just like group-forming:

The biggest reason is that a large portion of the market is unwilling or unable to dedicate a lot of their time to your game. Former PEG players who have had to quit because of time constraints, uncooperative spouses, jobs, graduation from college, etc., might be willing to play a PEG that provided equal enjoyment for a smaller time commitment. People who game at lunch, on breaks, at the office after work, or even during work could be buying and playing your game if it provided enough enjoyment within their limited time frame. Why should they be wasting their company’s money playing Solitaire when they could be wasting it playing your game?

This pretty much sums up the frustrating premise on which we started designing Coobico’s mechanics: a multiplayer strategy-game, more immersive than a match-3-puzzle, but less time- and money-consuming than your typical hardcore-MMO.