Richard Garriott, in a recent interview with IndustryGamers, offered both praise and a note of caution for Blizzard, the gaming giant behind World of Warcraft and the upcoming Diablo 3 (among many, many other well-known titles).

Blizzard will “always be one of the best” developers, but the company will be facing new challenges from the “Zyngas of the world,” industry veteran Richard Garriott tells us. Garriott considers himself and his company Portalarium to fit within that category. When IndustryGamers asked him if that means he’s a new challenger to Blizzard, he responded, “I hope that’s exactly right.”

While Portalarium has worked on casual casino style games, Garriott assures us that one of his upcoming projects will be right for the core gaming audience, and will provide an experience “much more like Ultima Online than people might expect.”

How could a free-to-play social title be a threat to Blizzard? It’s not… not yet, anyway. “Right now, where those worlds seem very distinct, and very separate, and very noncompetitive, they’re targeting completely different users – I think within a few years, you’ll see that’s not really the case. I think you’ll see that the quality level that comes up through the casual games will rival the quality of traditional massively multiplayer games and then, because it’s not something you have to subscribe to, because it’s something that virally spreads, and especially because, as people churn out of a big MMO they’ve got to go somewhere. And if you’re a company that does only one big MMO, odds are they’re churning out for somebody else,” Garriott asserted.

According to Garriott, the industry is going through a major upheaval now, similar to how single player RPGs evolved and companies formed to populate the MMORPG space. The same thing is happening in casual and social, as traditional companies like Blizzard failed to step in.

Here’s the money quote, though:

“The only reason Zynga exists is because people like EA, people like Blizzard, failed to step in. And so each of these major upheavals allows new, major corporations to come in and fill that space, which I think is to the great detriment, and then leaves the big companies of the previous iteration actually trying to catch up. And so I think that the challenge for Blizzard, when you are that good, when you’re making that much money, when you’re that much on top of your game, in the current era, it’s actually fairly difficult to spend money towards things that seem to not be as profitable, that people don’t understand as well and that you don’t imagine could possibly beat how well you’re doing at the top of your game in the current era. And so that I think is a risk for anyone, including Blizzard, that they will elect not to tackle that one, because they don’t see that it’s important and relevant.”

I’ve — we’ve — talked about social and mobile games a lot on the site here over the last few months, in no small part because of Lord British’s own efforts in those spaces, and because of various rumours coming out of BioWare Mythic which pertain to a hitherto unknown Ultima project. The spaces — mobile and social — are in many ways distinct, and yet are also in many ways similar and even overlapping. And it is these spaces in which much of the coming innovation in gaming (and much of the coming competition, as well) will take place.

It is in these spaces that gaming companies stand to make enormous profits, if they can step in with a competitive product that catches the attention of a wide audience.

The Ultima creator correctly notes that EA was late to the social and mobile parties…although they’ve done rather well for themselves since entering both spaces, and have produced several excellent games in both spaces. They’ve had a few duds as well, especially on the social side of things, which is one of the reasons why Zynga continues to dominate the social scene. But in general, they’re doing very well, and many of their games in both spaces are quite highly regarded and very popular. EA’s quarterly profit statements continuously show good returns on the mobile and social side of the business.

Blizzard — and their parent/partner company, Activision — have opted for a different (and, in Garriott’s opinion, wrong-headed) strategy, and have thus far stayed out of the mobile and social spaces. Granted, they’re sitting on a license to print money by the name of World of Warcraft, which probably diminishes the need they feel to branch out into the casual gaming market. In the short term, at least, this is a not-unreasonable strategy. But WoW would appear to have finally begun its decline (although they’re still seeing big profits coming in, for now at least). Jumping aboard the social and mobile bandwagons would be one option for Blizzard to create a new product that ensures that the company has a constant revenue stream as WoW continues to shrink…which will, at some point, cut in to their currently-impressive bottom line.

But Blizzard (and Activision) don’t seem to have the foresight necessary to see that path forward. That, or they’re secretly clairvoyant and have seen the coming collapse of the casual gaming scene. But somehow, I doubt that.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these, and my inbox is getting full of emails-to-self containing links to interesting stories. As such…open thread!

Need a little more wi-fi range? Have a beer!”

And then follow the directions at the link above to turn the can into a surprisingly effective DIY parabolic reflector.

The Good News: Syndicate is coming back!

The bad news: Starbreeze has reincarneted the franchise as a first-person shooter. Bah!

Is the PC re-emerging as a gaming platform?

A better question might be whether or not the PC ever vanished or died out as a gaming platform. But if the word of a World of Warcraft developer means anything to any of you, it is his opinion that the PC is coming back into its own from a gaming perspective.

This is the Blizzard, though, that makes a point of sidestepping being labeled a “PC developer”, however.

Do you feel that people try to take advantage of you?

It should surprise nobody that Canadians and Americans tend to be fairly trusting people who expect that others have the best of intentions:

The interesting result, I think, is India. It would seem that just under 2/3rds of the Indian population tend to be highly distrustful of others, while the remaining third tend to be highly trusting of same. There is basically no middle ground to be found; Indians (it seems) will either completely trust you, or completely distrust you, and that’s that.

Kind of cool: A web-based iPad 2 simulator.

Skyrim developers will keep the “fun bugs” in the game.

“We try to solve most of it, we’re sensitive to a lot of it,” said producer Todd Howard. “There is a subset of that where we say ‘Well, that’s what can happen.’ If there’s entertainment value in that, whatever it is, we’ll leave a lot of it. If it’s gonna break the game, or unbalance the game in some way, we do try to solve it.

“If the solution is gonna make the game less fun … well, hey, leave it in. It’s their game.”

This is hardly a precedent, of course — one thinks of the weird graphical effects of eating mushrooms in Ultima Underworld, which was actually a glitch that the programmers opted to deliberately trigger in a special in-game case — but it’s rather heartening to hear, I think.

Do read the whole article; Howard also comments on MMORPGs and how Bethesda knows when big “is big enough” for a game.

I don’t know how many of you are Unity3D developers…

…but I’ve been toying around with that particular middleware for the last month or two, and I found this feature piece from Gamasutra to be a fairly interesting read.

You can play as a vampire in Skyrim!

The catch is that you need to catch the vampirism malady first, however.

A handful of Mass Effect 3 screenshots from PAX.

The game looks great, and I am honestly impressed with how well BioWare has been keeping a lid on details. It’s a bizarre thing about me, but I’m actually impressed that I’m starting to lose just a bit of interest in the game. Oh, not a lot; I still very much want it to come out, very much want to play it, and very much want to play it again after that. But, well…I’m a spoiler junkie; I love leaked details, and I tend to find that those are what thrill me the most during the run-up to a game or movie release.

And…well…there just haven’t been that many leaks where ME3 is concerned. None, really, that I can think of, apart from what few details BioWare has handed out. Kudos to them for that, even if I am disappointed by it.

Skyrim looks awesome, of course.

No, as in: really, really awesome.

Okay, here…twenty-odd minutes of Skyrim action. Are you happy now?

Tonight’s post brought to you by what if?:

Risen 2 just keeps looking better and better.

I mean, it already had pirates. And Piranha Bytes (the guys who did the first Gothic games) are developing it. And it’s the sequel to Risen, one of the more promising — if underappreciated — RPGs in recent years. That is a fair bit of awesome right there.

But what if…just…what if those pirates were also wizards?

Another week, another awesome Skyrim media release!

This time showcasing elves, lizard men, cat men, and orcses!

More Mass Effect 3 media, too!

New screenshots (mostly showcasing combat scenarios and enemies), and a visually stunning new trailer.

On passwords…

…I trust by now that everyone has seen this XKCD comic?

Meet the online password generator it inspired!

Internet Explorer 9 leads the pack for malware blocking?

Apparently, yes.

I know…I was kind of surprised, too.

The Russian government has impounded the world’s first floating nuclear reactor.

I bet you didn’t even know that someone — a Russian corporation, now apparently bankrupt — was building a floating nuclear reactor.

I know I didn’t.

C++0x becomes a standard.

A long-awaited, much-needed update to the C++ programming language.

That’s one way to settle a legal dispute!

Notch, creator of Minecraft, has challenged Bethesda Softworks to a game of Quake 3 to settle their legal differences over Mojang’s upcoming new game, Scrolls:

“I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors,” Notch writes. “We select one level, your select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.”

“If we win, you drop the lawsuit. If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.”

“I am serious, by the way,” he adds.

In case you hadn’t heard, Bethesda is suing Mojang because, in their opinion, the name Scrolls infringes on Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls property.

Finally! World of Warcraft has lost a million subscribers this year.

The first signs that Blizzard’s MMORPG juggernaut is beginning to wane are finally — finally! — showing.

Private space travel firm given approval for ISS mission.

I don’t know whether Richard Garriott has any involvement with the SpaceX project, but I’m sure he’s pretty happy at the news regardless.

CryENGINE3 is now free…at least non-commercially.

The folks at Crytek have released the SDK for CryENGINE3 (the engine that powers Crysis 2), and it is free for non-commercial use (e.g. tinkering at home, use in schools, etc.). There is a licensing fee (which you need to contact them about) that comes into force if you want to release anything you make commercially.

HP exits the hardware game.

Taking a page out of IBM’s book, Hewlett-Packard has decided to spin off its PC-building business unit so as to focus primarily on enterprise services and solutions. Which, I guess, means that they’ll continue cranking out servers and networking gear, but not laptops or consumer desktops. Oh, and they’ll presumably continue to build printers, since they’re mostly known for that.

Oh…yeah. They’re also shuttering all further development of webOS devices, and are currently attempting to decide the fate of Palm’s mobile OS.

Tonight’s post brought to you by not getting it:

Deckard at UOJournal asks: so just how many players are there in UO?

Of course, the official (and maybe best) answer is that nobody outside of Electronic Arts really knows. Still, as Deckard points out, we were recently told by the head of EA Games that Ultima Online remains profitable; this suggests that a fair number of players are still active in the game, or at least are active enough to be bothered paying their ongoing subscription fees.

But how many?

Deckard’s findings are not exactly scienfitic, as the method of data gathering is rather imperfect:

There is a thread on Stratics about the status of MyUO, the utility that a lot of us use to look up characters, skills, guilds, etc. Itís a very useful tool. Towards the end of the thread, it was explained how the Japanese UO website still has the MyUO functionality, and ìNimuaqî gave a brief explanation of how to use it, as well as some interesting information:

I didnít share this before since there were a lot of speculation regarding the UO population and it would certainly be used for quite inaccurate population estimates, but hereís an interesting guild page:

The player characters that are not part of any guild is considered as a guild too. The guild id for the ìnoî guild is ì737c77c87e177a5dî. Inserting the shard id after this will give you all the player characters that were active in the last 30 days and are not member of any guild.

…

Iím missing a shard because some of the shard IDs were timing out, but I doubt the numbers are that much higher.

And his findings?

There are nearly 100,000 characters that are not in guilds and that have been logged in within the past 30 days. Thatís very interesting to me. Had you asked me to pick a number of characters that are not in guilds and that had logged in within the past 30 days, I would have picked lower than 100,000. In fact, I might have guessed that in total, there were around 100,000 active characters including guild and non-guild characters.

The problem is, of course, that we have no way of matching those to actual accounts, and that they do not represent many house-holding accounts that donít feel the need to login all that often. That and it does not show guild members of which there are many.

What to take away from this: Ultima Online still has a goodly number of players, likely quite far in excess of 100,000. Granted, that doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the 12 million (or somesuch) subscribers that World of Warcraft enjoys…but it’s not at all a bad number for as ancient an MMO as Ultima Online is.

Saudi Arabia will build nukes if Iran does.

That’s what you call “regional stability”, I guess.

MySpace sold…for $35 million.

That’s a pittance, in online terms. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. In related news, Justin Timberlake was evidently one of the partners in the group that purchased the ailing social network.

Did you know that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix lost $167 million?

Yeah, me neither. But thanks to the strange magic that is “Hollywood accounting”, even a billion-grossing film like the fifth Harry Potter movie can be made to look like a box-office loser.

HP might just have the right idea for its tablets.

Apple’s one great strength in the computing market — especially, perhaps, in the tablet market — is that they don’t just have a very sleek, functional operating system. They also impose very tight control over the hardware used in manufacturing their computers, and don’t tolerate much in the way of change to that hardware environment. If you’ve ever tried to “hackintosh” OS X onto a non-Apple computer, you will probably have come to realize that OS X only supports a very limited range of drivers for an equally limited range of hardware.

It’s nigh-impossible to heavily upgrade a Mac, but the OS is phenomenally stable as a result of it.

HP wants their revamp of Palm’s WebOS to succeed in the market. I, for one, think they’re making the right move by committing to exercising control over the hardware side of the platform, then; it will mean a more limited range of WebOS devices, but it will mean that those WebOS devices are always able to take full advantage of the mobile OS.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of Android. But Google’s OS, despite its large market share, is hampered by the fact that there are a lot of different manufacturers producing tablets intended to run Android, and Android is thus being expected to support a very wide range of hardware environments, not all of which it fully does. This also makes upgrading Android a pain in the ass on some devices.

Tribes: Ascend will be free to play.

If you’re like me, your first thought was: they’re still making Tribes games?

Was Mass Effect inspired by Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?

Well, there is a certain aesthetic connection, I suppose. The battle armour of the Deep Eyes does look rather like some of the battle armour available in the first Mass Effect game.

Capcom may have just come up with the ultimate game publishing “dick move”.

Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D will be playable…once. The save game cannot be wiped, evidently, meaning that the first owner can play it through once, and that anyone who buys the game used can only pick up and resume play from where the first owner left off.

Still think adult sites are the primary malware vector?

You may need to update your online safety knowledge.

“Free to play” continues to gain momentum.

EA Games’ president Frank Gibeau has come right out and stated that so-called free-to-play games can, in fact, be as profitable for a company as mainline console releases, and he affirmed that “F2P” titles are now a definite part of EA’s business strategy.

And frankly, I think that’s a good thing. Yes, actually playing such games for free means accepting certain limitations in one form or another (usually something which limits play duration), but I would argue that being limited to an hour of play a day by some sort of artificial “food” system is still vastly preferable to paying a subscription fee for a game that one might not have more than a few hours a week to play anyway. That’s my circumstance, at least.

In related news, World of Warcraft is now free until you hit level 20. Because whoever got hooked on crack from just one little hit?

Tonight’s post brought to you by Glastonbury:

Bonus: Royal Photoshop fail!

Over at Life on Aggramar, a World of Warcraft blog, author Delin Quent sings the praises of Ultima Online in a short blog post, praising the game for its originality and unique sandbox gameplay experience.

Pull quote:

Ultima Online was the first MMO that I played way back in 99. The world of Sosaria was a complete sandbox, you could tailor your character to what you wanted and change at anytime. You were not locked into any one ëtemplateí, mage, warrior or healer, you could do any or all at once, only being limited by skill points. The world allowed for player housing, pre-constructed at first and player customizable with later expansions, all one needed to do was find an open spot in the world and lay claim to it.

Do read the whole thing. At the end of the post, he includes what I think is a list of other games — MMORPGs, specifically — that inherited different elements of Ultima Online‘s design and gameplay experience. 

It’s not a particularly short list, either. But that should come as no surprise.

Ultima creator Richard Garriott gave a talk at the 2011 DICE Summit in which he lamented that modern MMORPGs have lost something that Ultima Online let people explore:

“What Ultima Online did very well, and what I think has never been recaptured, is allow you to become a citizen of that world in a very personal and relevant way that is unique to you and not like anyone else,” he told Ars. “As brilliant as World of WarCraft is — of course it’s an astonishingly well — done product?but everyone is pretty much a fighter. Your life is, you’re a fighter.”

It’s that lack of differentiation in experience and jobs that Garriott misses. “There aren’t really people that own a shop in town square and that’s what they do, and they have a friend who’s a fishermen, and that’s what he does,” he explained. “With Ultima Online, what was so cool about it is that there were people who were just fishermen, and who never fought monsters, who didn’t care to buy any armor or craft a sword?they were fishermen.”

And because we all want just one more teaser about what Portalarium has up its sleeve:

Garriott describes these characters going into the virtual pubs to drink beers and laughing at the fighters who go off and risk their lives. “That kind of diversity of life has still never been recaptured in any game since, and it’s something I hope to recapture in my next work,” he said.

Now that would be an interesting achievement; to realize in a social/casual game the same sort of sandbox-like play, interactivity, and emergent behaviour that characterized — and made rather unique — Ultima Online.

I love Failbook.

Last month, Turbine announced that their MMORPG, Lord of the Rings Online, was switching from a paid subscription payment model to a microtransaction-based free-to-play model instead.

The result? According to Kate Paiz, LotRO’s executive producer, Turbine saw the registration of a million new user accounts, and doubled their revenue as well.

It gets better, though:

…LotRO wasn’t in trouble, but rather that Turbine did the math and decided the switch would work. “We knew there was more out there for us,” she said.

Paiz also shared that 20% of LotRO’s former players have returned to the game since the switchover, and that the game has seen a 300% increase in peak concurrency, with three times the number of players online simultaneously, and a 400% increase in active players total. 53% of players have used the in-game microtransaction store (which sells everything from mounts and outfits to XP boosts and character slots), and as you can see above, extra storage slots are extremely popular in the store. And even paid subscriptions have increased. Turbine’s lesson seems to be that, as Paiz said during the panel, “when you tell people you no longer have to pay for it, they come in droves.”

And when you tell people that they only have to pay for the things they want/can choose to pay for…guess what? They tend to do just that.

MMOs that aren’t Activision-Blizzard’s oversubscribed World of Warcraft face two main challenges in the market today: WoW itself (it is very much like the Microsoft of MMOs), and plucky little community-focused online games (FarmVille, dammit) that have the same sort of free-to-play with microtransactions (also called “freemium”) payment model. It’s…difficult to make money in that sort of situation even if you happen to be the only other MMO option out there, but of course that’s not where the difficulties end. A game like EVE Online gets a bit of a break for being the premiere — and one of the only — science fiction-themed MMOs. On the fantasy side, though, there’s a plethora of choices, including WoW, EverQuest, LotRO, and BioWare Mythic’s three titles of note: Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer, and Ultima Online, and more besides.

Now, I gather that Ultima Online is doing just fine, revenue-wise, thank you very much. That said, rather like LotRO, it’s not a case of changing the payment model to stave off financial ruin; it’s a case of seeing what’s out there to be grabbed, and grabbing it. How many of you, who have previously abandoned UO, would consider picking it up again and playing it if it went to a “freemium” payment model? I know I would.