Darkfall : 2.0 Update + TEDx Speech

Aventurine updated their Darkfall blog on the development process of Darkfall 2.0 and also released a video with Tasos Flambouras, co-founder and Vice President of Aventurine SA, talking about how hard it is to create an MMORPG with such a small team, limited budget and close to zero experience.

The following quotes are the most important parts of the update :

We are in full development of 2.0 on all levels. Much of the critical development is concluded, we’re already testing a playable version. Videos we could show right now use many placeholders from the current version and the front-end of the GUI has yet to be completed, but we’ll keep showing you what we have each time. As far as ETA goes, early access beta is planned for Q2 2012, right after closed beta.

A smaller new feature which was just completed are Resource Monoliths: Resource monoliths are control points scattered across the land. Their purpose is to provide a land based PvP centered objective, available at all times.  Their purpose is to serve as a PvP hot spot as well as a more interesting and fun, albeit risky way, to harvest crafting resources.

Any player is able to capture a monolith. If the monolith is not already captured by someone else, the player is marked by visual effects as the holder, and resources are generated in his backpack as well as bank box at certain intervals.

A player can lose the monolith mark if he logs off, moves outside of the monolith control area or if he is killed. If the owner of a monolith is killed, the ownership mark is returned to the monolith and is immediately up for grabs.

 

The TEDx speech video is in Greek, but there is a rough translation in English, right below the video if you are interested.

Rough video translation :

In 2003, me and 7 friends started the creation of Darkfall which was the realization of our craziest dream. Darkfall is an mmo game, one of the most difficult projects to make in computer science. It is extremely difficult to create such a project. Plenty of you must have heard of world of warcraft. Darkfall falls in the same game category. It is an online community, a virtual world where thousands users from all over the world coexist.

In order to describe you the difficulty of this project, I will tell you what kind of companies create such games. They are usually huge companies, multinational, which have big experience in video games and not only of this kind. Around 200 to 300 developers are needed to work exclusively for one game, with the support of distributors, publishers, major investors and they usually are located in innovation ecosystems like Silicon Valley.

The budget is approximately 30 to 100 million dollars and the same amount for marketing purposes. As far as we are concerned, we are a small company, Aventurine, without any experience, not only in such games, but in every kind of games. We were 11 developers, so we were missing a few hundreds people. We were also self publishing, self distributing and self funding our game.

In our ecosystem which is Greece, with everything that this is including, people thought that we were making fruits (the casino game). It was the time when triantafilopoulos (a well known journalist) was after these illegal casino games and everyone was thinking that were making something similar. We didn’t have a high budget for making the game. Same goes for marketing.

Like all these weren’t enough, we wanted to make something different. We wanted to make a bigger, faster game with hundreds of innovations for whom we had to create special technologies in order to achieve them. This was simply adding more pressure to the whole project. This needed 6 years, without any hope of a possible capital inflow in the company, therefore much patience was required.

With all the things I have already told you, you can understand that no one was taking us seriously. We had huge problems. We were being accused of lying to the people, that we will never accomplish the things we wanted to. People from our industry were mocking us too. When we read this statement : “Darkfall promises TOO much! Even if Darkfall delivers half of what it promises, I personally won’t be playing anything else”, which was made from a respectable colleague, we were really shocked and demotivated because we started disputing our capabilities of accomplishing the project.

We weren’t crazy though, we managed to complete the project. Game was finished, it has been published since 2009, it is doing well in 190 countries. I didn’t come here to celebrate about this. I will talk about only one integral piece of our success, which helped us achieve our goal despite all the harsh conditions I just described. We weren’t alone in this endeavor. For these 6 years we had a big group of people behind us who had nothing to do with the company, neither with our product. In 2003 we created a forum where we started talking about the game, about what we were about to start doing. There we met a lot of people who were mocking-disapproving of our project but there were also some people who told us that this is really interesting and we want to learn more.

So we created a forum, where we initially had 500 members and 9000 posts were made about a game which was in our imagination and we had just started to creating it. These people, while we were struggling to make an innovative product , they had started talking about it in such a degree that they created a culture around it and while we were creating darkfall they created the forumfall. When you wait 6 years for a game to come out, you also make the game.

There were endless conversations in the forum which resulted in the creation of different meanings about forumfall. If you search about forumfall you will find a lot of explanations. It has even become a verb, for example “to forumfall” is equal to an action. Till 2011, more than 1 million members have participated in this community. We count only the active members so the number isn’t precise.

Also more than 10 million forum posts have been made which is a huge number if you think we are talking about a game which started in Greece and only a few people knew about it. Which is the value that this online community gave us? Firstly if you are crazy and you are starting to make such an effort, you need to know that you are not the only one. You need to know that there are more people who will acknowledge your efforts and say that they like and they are interested in our project. This gives you the strength to keep going. They became our evangelists. They were surfing around the internet and discussing, disputing about our game and trying to convince people that the game is truly worthy and not only it will be completed but it will succeed, while everyone was questioning us.

Media didn’t give us publicity but suddenly, when they realized that there is interest for the game they started covering our effort. This was really important for us because we caught the attention of bigger audiences. Whatever we wanted to include in the game, we were discussing about it with the community. Community was giving us feedback, it was the soundboard.

People were telling us what they like/dislike, what our competitors have done and we should also consider which helped us very much. All these forum posts we mentioned before, you can understand that this was a communication with us and we were taking these suggestions really seriously. People encouraged us to stay loyal to our path. While we wanted to make a lot of compromises in the course of 6 years, they didn’t allow us to do so because we were always worried about what the community will tell us.

We had stress about them, because they were the people who liked what we were doing and we didn’t want to betray them. So we struggled to stay loyal in our path. Through world of mouth, we became more well known as people were talking about our game around the internet and were telling their friends. As a result of this activity only the community was gathered. They created fantastic things, around 100.000 videos in the youtube talking about the game, some were funny, some parodies, others with ingame content.

They created whole stories about the game, comics and whenever there were competitions which demanded people to vote in order to win, there was such a stream of people mobilized that we were high in the voting or even winning it. This was for our size something we couldn’t even imagine. All these people, even if this wasn’t our initial goal, became our customers, they bought our game. When it was released, they were all waiting to buy it. Also, something the marketing people will value is that the conversion rate was 40%. The demand was so high that we couldn’t cover it. This is an issue for another discussion.

To realize what bonus an online community can give you, you can notice that darkfall is ranked 5th. This is the biggest site about online games (he is talking about mmorpg.com if I am not wrong). World of warcarft is number 1 but you can see that despite having 20 million subscribers and us not having even 1/100 of them we have less than half of its hits difference and we are among popular mmos like lord of the rings and star wars.

This is really impressive and it is based mostly in the activity of our community which gave us this position and made us noticeable. These amazing guys asked us to give them darkfall t shirts and they were going to take photos next to every pretty girl they would find and upload the images to internet. We sent them and as you can see there are 6000 pictures with different girl each of these guys. They obviously did this to make our brand recognition higher.

Finally, if you insist you will get rewarded. Paris hilton became the official darkfall girl until she made the sex video and alternation was made. Now I will talk abaout the zen of building online communities. The thing you are promoting must have a value , it can’t be of no value. If it is you will learn it very fast through an online community and you also may learn how to make it acquire value. It must also be your passion, it must be seen as a passion project. We must really get involved with the comunity, all the stakeholders must know what the community says, read the forums, see what people prefer in order to have this relationship.

Organically, we mustn’t hurry, these relationships of friendship among people take really long to be created and one member caring for each other is something really important. We can’t use tricks. For example, you can’t give an ipad each day and ask people to like your facebook page because in the end the only common thing among these people would be that they want a free ipad and nothing else. Honesty is really important too. Internet has a really good memory and if you start tricking your users you will feel the consequences later.

Support, you must give what the users want and the management must protect the community from external influences. The community isn’t there to adore you but to ask you things which you have to apply. If you do that people will be very loyal. The game stopped being “our” game, it became the game of the community and we were the people who mistreated it. We received various messages which and images, where they told us to work harder, while we told people we will give them somethig next week they demanded now, a flu isn’t an excuse for delay.

Plenty of times we were moved by their concern about how things in Greece are going, we had taken a lot of support messages. In ending, it is amazing to watch your passing being translated in an online community which has millions of people. What I am trying to do is to inspire you make your own passion, dream come true. I believe the power of human communities can achieve everything, from the smallest thing, to promote a product or acknowledge an effort to the biggest one, to change mentalities, fight the crisis , even change the world. Thank you very much!