Animal Farm
We finally have some reliable figures for the commercial value of “minipet” micro-transactions in the game, World of Warcraft. Specifically, the sales of just 1 item: In November and December 2009, at least $2.2 million worth of Pandaren Monk pets were sold. 220,000 at $10 each. We know this because “50% of the purchasing price” was donated to charity, and “more than $1.1 million” was donated (via WoW.com).
Over 220,000 sales to a market of about 4-5 million potential customers (only active WoW players can use the minipet, and the pet does not appear to have been sold in China or Taiwan). Roughly 5% of potential customers spent $10 on an ostensibly useless vanity item: A small pet that follows you around, looking cute.
Like most virtual goods, the cost of making and selling this pet is marginal: Primarily some additional art and marketing time, all built on the back of existing systems (store, staff, world). The first 2 months of Pandaren Monk sales will have made contributions to Blizzard’s profits of about $1 million. That’s only around 1% of the business’s turnover in that 2-month period. But that 1% is “free money”. Blizzard (-Activision) would be doing a dis-service to its investors if it did anything other than continue to milk this virtual cash cow.
Apply a healthy bit of European cynicism, and it is easy to conclude a scam. Tobold’s:
“Send me $10, and I promise to send $5 of it to charity.”
Of course, Europeans fundamentally don’t understand US philanthropic culture: The idea that it’s fine to exploit your fellow human and make outrageous amounts of money, so long as you give some of it away in the end. Some philanthropy is able to take a somewhat rational, balanced view of what is good for the world. But there is a tendency to support visually appealing issues, such as charities servicing the needs of children.
The purpose of this article is not to argue that a European, government-centric re-distribution of wealth is preferable to an approach lead by personal responsibility. (I’m not sure it is.) The problem emerging here is more fundamental: That virtual goods are replacing trade-able value with non-trade-able value. Non-trade-able value that, by definition, can not offset inequality in (game) society. Donating part of the price of sales to charity is pure irony. In true Orwellian style, we’re sleep-walking into a potentially broken social structure with the best of intentions.
This article started as a box during my Adventures in the Invisible Tent, but has been expanded here in much greater detail. This article describes what a minipet is, highlights the role of money to balance inequality in society, and explains the problem with virtual goods. Read more of this article »
Nation of Adoration
World of Warcraft’s seasonal holiday events temporarily reduce player interest in fishing. It’s always been the case, but the decline in fishing seems to be becoming more extreme over time:
The graph’s y-axis is the percentage decline in page views at El’s Extreme Anglin’ from the 7 days before each event, to the first 7 days of the event. Pageviews are a good proxy for overall angler interest. El generates hundreds of thousands of page views each week, so even small changes are significant. The x-axis orders events by date, from January 2008. The axis isn’t scaled correctly to show time, but holidays are fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. Events are shown by green dots, with a shortened date (month and year) and the name of the event.
The data is expressed as a percentage of the previous week, because while interest in fishing “waxes and wains” from year-to-year, changes week-to-week are normally minor.
All the events included last at least 7 days. Where one holiday runs concurrently with another event (for example, the “Lunar Festival” and “Love is in the Air” often clash), only the first event in the sequence is included. Interest in fishing also changes dramatically in the month new content is added, so events that clash with major fishing patches have been excluded (Noblegarden 2008 with patch 2.4, Hallow’s End 2008 with patch 3.0.2, and Noblegarden/Children’s Week 2009 with patch 3.1). Winter Veil is also excluded: The period leading to Christmas is particularly unusual – first students stop studying and have a lot of time to play, and then many players stop playing to spend time with family. This causes large changes in activity from week-to-week, which makes it hard to isolate Winter Veil in the data.
Only 12 separate sets of data can be compared. There is one out-lier – Midsummer 2008 – perhaps the early stages of Wrath of the Lich King testing may have caused a small traffic spike in the week before? The pattern shown on the graph is not certain. But I’m growing confident that events are increasingly impacting on fishing activity.
But why? Read more of this article »
Adventures in the Invisible Tent
Here’s a tent.
It’s invisible. But it is. There. Walk forward into the space it occupies, you find yourself within the tent.
The tent only exists when one is within it. When outside, we see the world without the tent.
This article explores the implication of this uncanny art form on how we build and use virtual environments. It first explains why this invisible tent is considered to be a software bug. The article explores how our ability to accept the uncanny varies from person to person. It then suggests that the spatial, built, environment is far less important than the social structures that exist within them. This topic contains a lot of images. Read more of this article »
Elevator Adverts
Elevator adverts are a way of displaying advertisements on web pages. Not for elevators in buildings. The name refers to the way the advert moves up and down the margin of the page, as the reader scrolls up and down. A standard “skyscrapper” advertising block is always visible, right next to where the user is reading.
Advertising networks are keen for adverts to be displayed “above the fold” – in the area of the screen first visible when the page loads. However, if the page is content-rich, the best locations are not at the top of the page: In the past, I have run advertising using 2 skyscrappers, one on top of the other. As the reader scrolls down the page, the second advert eventually becomes visible. The best return (from affiliate advertising) was from the bottom advert, not the top. The reason is simple: Reading down the page, the lower advert tends to be next to the important text being read. In contrast, the upper advert tends to sit next to the list of page contents, so is often skipped over.
Instead of stacking adverts, why not just move the advert down the page as the reader scrolls?
The webpage needs an “elevator shaft” down the left margin. For example, apply the CSS “margin-left: 175px” to the division (“div” block) containing the page’s content, to create the elevator shaft. More complex designs may require more work. It is important that the elevator shaft runs close to edge of the text, to continually catch the eye of the reader.
Simply applying a “position: fixed” to style the division containing the advert, would always show the advert in the top-left corner, hanging down the elevator shaft. Unfortunately, the top part of the page normally contains a title block, so the elevator shaft should not travel the full height of the page. Older browsers (notably Internet Explorer 6) do not support “position: fixed”, but we still need to make sure the advert “fails gracefully”, by displaying in a sensible position.
My solution’s code is below. Read more of this article »
