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Here are a couple flash games from Ultimate Soccer Boss (USB), an MMO soccer/football manager game that I manage. Ultimate Soccer Boss is the first free-to-play soccer/football manager browser game that evolves your team players with Digenetics’ Evolution Computing technology.

The flash games presented here are a sample of the “training games” available in Ultimate Soccer Boss. When played from within USB, you will be helping to increase the training and evolution of one of your players. This will help your club compete against other clubs in instant training matches, league matches and cup tournaments.

Feel free to try the games out here, though playing them outside of USB will not affect your soccer players. If you want to embed these games and others from USB, the embed code is available from within USB.

Ultimate Soccer Boss Ball Control

Ultimate Soccer Boss Attack

A constant challenge with MMORPG games is the question of immersion. Immersion is a critical part of MMO games, particularly MMORPGs, leading them to use the latest graphics engines, sound engines, etc. The player wants to become part of the game world and escape the real world during their game sessions. If the user has difficulty with the interface (i.e. the key commands, mouse movements, etc. required to operate the game), game world immersion becomes very difficult or impossible, regardless of the video and sound capabilities.

The best way to achieve an interface that allows the best immersion is to make it highly customizable. Different games use different keyboard commands or mouse movements to achieve basic movements. For example, many older Asian games such as Deco Online and Dungeon Runners only allow the use of the mouse to move your character. It is not possible to use arrow-keys or WASD to move your character. American and European games generally don’t support the use of the mouse to move, favoring exclusive use of they keyboard.

In more recent times, Asian games have become more flexible. For example, Perfect World, Jade Dynasty,  and others have added basic keyboard commands to movement and other UI interaction in addition to the mouse.

Runes of Magic is a very good example of not preventing the user interaction from interfering with immersion. It allows you to use the mouse to move around while allowing you to use they keyboard for the same thing, which goes the further step that American and European games tend to go. The user can highly customize the key mappings for nearly every command to whatever the user wants. Aion: Tower of Eternity is another excellent example of a game using this idea.

This level of UI customizability lets the player use the muscle memory they have previously developed in other games without having to fumble around the keyboard and mouse in the heat of battle.

Casual players won’t want to bother with customizing their UI, so it is important to also keep in mind what other games are using for their basic commands. Most games allow both WASD and arrow-keys, for example.

Some may wonder about the additional cost associated with adding this customizability. Compared to the cost of developing the rest of a game, it is a very minor cost. The cost is in providing an interface for the player to do the customizing. The actual implementation expenses of adding customized key commands is nearly non-existent if it is planned in properly at the beginning of the project. It is simply a matter of using a variable for each key and mouse command, instead of hard-coding them.

As competition in the games industry heats up, I expect more games to follow Aion’s lead in giving players the option to highly customize their interface for the way they like to play. The game can be easily adjusted to fit the player’s style, instead of the other way around. This will lead to greater immersion and the player can better focus on the gameplay. Gameplay and the virtual worlds envelop the player when the interface used to deliver and interact with the game are “forgotten” in muscle memory and the background of the mind.

Over the years that the web has been mainstream (from about 1995 to the present) Internet companies have been fascinated with large audience numbers instead of traditional revenue figures. They believed that if lots of people came, then lots of people would pay (or advertisers would pay for them). The problem, as we learned in 2000, is that companies can’t pay office rent with eyeballs.

Unfortunately, I see game companies doing this as well. For example, a recent article on the rise of online games over console games discussed only the rising audience numbers with online games. Though I don’t argue against the premise that online games are rising in popularity compared to console games, the article seemed to ignore the big question of revenue. Console games have proven revenue, since the user needs to pay for the game to play it. Most Free-to-Play online games are not that way.

With the advertising industry collapsing wholesale and consumer spending down in most sectors, more online games (both F2P and subscription) are finding themselves struggling for air. Microtransactions are still in a relative infancy and larger percentages of players are holding off on buying more Gold, Points, Rewards, etc. Most of the F2P games are monetized by advertising with a minor (though growing) microtransaction component using either real money or CPA ads.

A lot of F2P game companies are now learning what the rest of the web industry learned in 2000 (and subsequently forgot). Eyeballs do not equal revenue. The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is the critical component to viability and success. In the past, the rule of thumb was 10% of users become paying users. Now I think that number is dropping significantly. I wouldn’t be surprised if more games are doing 5% or even less paying users. Unfortunately, such numbers are super-secret to each company.

As the economy recesses further, many companies that relied on eyeballs, registrations, audience size, etc. will be finding themselves without a revenue base to pay the bills and payroll with. This will cause an even greater shake-up in the industry than we have seen thus far.

This does not mean the end for gaming is coming, just as the dot.bomb crash did not kill the web. It means that our industry needs to focus on how to provide value to players that they are willing to pay for, instead of hoping that someday they will pay. Bubbles are founded on the hopes of future revenue, hopes for future ARPU. True growth is based on a foundation of current profit and incremental future growth.

Niche games based on a common platform are the future. A number of companies have worked on developing a platform that can be used for many different games. Make a niche game that pulls in 2k-3k paying users with a solid ARPPU (Average Revenue per Paying User) and a profit can be made provided development costs are kept in line. This would mean 20k – 30k active users, if we wanted to assume a 10% paying user rate which is common. The masses want everything for free. The costs involved with getting 1M active users (100k paying users) is becoming more difficult to cover.

Don’t try to make a blockbuster for the masses. Make a tight, focused game that can be developed to a beta stage in 2-3 months, released after a month testing, market within the designed niche and start making revenue. Use cheap pre-release marketing and buzz to gauge interest and market viability so that if the game has a low chance of success it can be canceled before all development and testing costs are incurred.

Once a base game is released, use the initial revenue to expand the game if justified. If the game flops (as Pareto’s Law of 80/20 says will), kill it and move on to another game. Only a maximum of 3-4 months of expenses are lost (instead of years with blockbusters). That leaves the company with enough capital to live another day with another game.

Remember the lessons of the dot.bomb. Active users alone do not make payroll. Only paying users pay the bills and the hosting costs. Find niche markets who are focused enough to be willing to pay for the game. When online game companies focus on that, the industry will recover.

Microtransactions have been discussed for many years as a way to monetize content. Unfortunately, the reality has not lived up to the hype and promise. Until recently, that is. Games have been slowly replacing porn as the innovators of the Internet. One area they have made great innovations is in the promised land of microtransactions.

The idea of microtransactions was originally to pay very small amounts ($0.05 or so) to read an article or some piece of content. This would be done on credit card. The trouble which has plagued that model is the transaction and processing fees assessed by the credit card companies. For such a small transaction, the processing fee is more than the transaction amount.

MMO Games (and later, other online games) have developed a great way to do this, without the problems of processing fees eating up all revenue. Virtual currency. For example, a player buys $10 or $20 of virtual currency with their credit card and then uses units of that virtual currency to buy items for small amounts like $0.05 or any other amount.

A significant benefit of using virtual currencies for microtransactions is that users don’t necessarily need to pay with cash to buy the desired content. CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising is doing well in the games industry as a supplement to cash transactions. CPA ads allow people to complete actions, like surveys, subscription sign-ups, or buying another product or service from the advertiser, to earn virtual currency. The user’s game account is credited with a stated amount of virtual currency after the action is completed and verified. The advertiser pays the game publisher only for the completed action.

This model of advertising works very well and is replacing old banner and interstitial ads in gaming sites and ad-supported Free-to-Play games. Advertisers like it because they only pay for conversion results. Game publishers like it because the resulting payout is much higher because of the increased value of the ad display.

It took over 10 years for microtransactions to really develop into a working revenue model outside of isolated sites. Now virtual currencies have grown into a real force, large enough that the Chinese government recently passed new laws restricting their use. They are concerned about virtual currencies being used to trade in real-world goods and services or gambling, all avoiding the reach of tax collectors. I’m sure this type of legislative change will be seen in other countries too, as their tax revenues decrease due to the economy and virtual currencies rise in prominence.

The microtransaction and virtual currency model has become such a success, fueling the fast-growing Free-to-Play game industry. As this industry develops further, probably replacing the old subscription model in most games, I see the virtual currency model appearing in many other industries. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, shareware, and any other type of digital content can be paid for with virtual currencies.

It will be exciting to see the new innovations that will revolutionize the digital goods industries and bring the virtual currency model to a new level, realizing the promises originally advertised with microtransactions.