[arg_discuss] [meta] Stats on ARGs

[Ivan Askwith]

Odd that you should ask -- I'm actually in the process of working on one,
and was going to write in within the next few days to see if anyone
participating in this mailing list would be interested in serving as an
advisor for the final paper.

> 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
> 
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