[arg_discuss] [meta] Stats on ARGs

[Sande Chen]

Has a White Paper on ARGs ever been written?

S.

> >
> Christy wrote:
>  > Hello All,
>  >
>  > I've recently posted an article about stats on ARGs. It is a lengthy
>  > expansion of my previous short and somewhat confusing post. I think
this
>  > data, plus Adrian's stats, provides some helpful information about
ARGs.
>
> Love the idea, and I think it has the potential to be as valuable as
> MMOGChart. But ARGs are not MMOG's ;). And they seem to be a LOT harder
> to quantify :(.
>
> So...the first question is: what are we trying to achieve here?
>
> When SirBruce started the MMOG chart (which now even has its own website
> - mmogchart.com), it was looking at a very homogeneous genre/revenue
> model where the number of bona fide subscribers could be directly
> equated to several things: popularity, reach, commercial success (all
> cash came from subscriptions back then).
>
> One thing it's been particularly valuable for is quantifying the number
> of people who play MMOG's and the extent to which the subscription model
> is sustainable in the long-term. It has provided a running commentary on
> the issue "do new games create new lifelong subscribers, or do they
> steal them from existing games?".
>
> (the answer has been tending more and more powerfully towards "yes they
> create new MMOG-players", in case you were wondering)
>
> Sadly, given the many directions ARG's have expanded in simultaneously,
> it seems it just ain't that easy for us :(...
>
> Personally, I like the emergence of ARG-to-ARG comparisons because I
> hope they'll soon fulfill several uses:
>
>   - comparing what works and what doesn't as measured in footfall
> (rather than, say, how raving the reviews were on Unfiction)
>   - comparing the pareto penetration of ARG's into disparate markets
> (e.g. do Audi buyers flock to forums but shun playing the actual game,
> where Unfiction players flock to the game but shun non-unfiction forums?)
>   - providing investors and business partners with cold, hard, facts on
> the successes of previous ARG's, in undisputable figures (they're
> accustomed to being given technically correct but grossly misleading
> figures, and tend to reject anything you don't/can't substantiate)
>   - a metric to measure your performance against others in the market -
> both to satisfy commercial partners and just for personal gratification
>
> Perhaps the basic need here is to measure the reach of an ARG in each of
> the main media in which it operates, and even within each media to have
> a breakdown by several measurements (pareto comparison), as Adrian
> suggests, (http://www.mssv.net/archives/000705.shtml), e.g. for web:
>
>   - traffic ranking (approximately verifiable through alexa)
>   - google hits ("gives a good indication of buzz", as Adrian put it)
>   - number of sites (verifiable through domain lists from player sites)
>   - unique visitors overall (verifiable by trusted partners only,
> through httplogs and decent log-analyzer software)
>   - unique visitors per day, avg (verifiable through httplogs to trusted
> partners)
>   - unique visitors per day, peak (verifiable through httplogs to
> trusted partners)
>
> No, I don't think those are great measures. But the first three can be
> done publically *for any site*, with or without the PM's involvement,
> and are better than nothing. (the last three I added as wishlist items -
> if I were evaluating someone else's ARG on behalf of a potential
> business partner, those are the first three I'd ask for, under NDA ;))
>
> I think verification is particularly important with these measures. The
> MMOGChart initially was just taken from press releases from exuberant
> marketing depts - who for various legal reasons I believe were not
> allowed to lie, representing as they were large assets of public
> companies? - but could be approximately checked by any subscriber, using
> empirical data from the game servers that, in almost every game,
> broadcast the number of current players.
>
> They needed to know the ratio of players online to actual subscribers,
> but figures for this were regularly thrown about by different developers
> and tended to be similar across all games (Lineage being the only
> notable exception IIRC).
>
> >
> > Perhaps this information can be developed by the members of this list
for
> > the ARG SIG site? Also, please note, my intention with the list is to
propel
>
>
> So, I've been wondering whether the best way forwards is a matrix of
> measurements, one set for each core medium the game plays out through.
>
> For instance, referencing several different ARGs liberally here ;), you
> might have columns for each of:
>   - web traffic
>   - radio-play listeners
>   - online-game registered players
>   - live-event participants
>   - live-event spectators
>   - forum unique posters (sum of unfiction + in-game forum - on the
> assumption most people will post to one but can't be bothered to
> simultaneously run the same conversations in the other!)
>   - ...etc
>
> > ARGs, not cause any offence to PMs. I hope I have not done the later.
>
> A touchy subject, fraught with other difficulties too - such as: how do
> you compare something like ILB (strict time limit, coinciding with major
> international product launch) with something like PXC (onrunning game,
> picks up more players every month)?
>
> e.g. the number-of-players figure for PXC has jumped another 20% since
> you furst looked :), and every time you post, the figure will be
> invalidated sooner or later :(.
>
> For MMOG's it was easy - they were all aiming to be everlasting games,
> so it made sense to plot their figures on a graph of
> time-vs-subscribers; would similar charts make sense for ARGs? Could we
> even get month-by-month data?
>
> (for some things, like approximate traffic, yes, thankfully. But that's
> one of the rougher measures in the first place :( ).
>
> Adam