Koei's PC free-to-play strategy game Uncharted Waters Online launched in Japan and other Asian territories several years ago, and the game is planned to make its debut in the U.S. in 2010.

Although the franchise may be unfamiliar to Western audiences, the MMO is based on Koei's classic RPG series Uncharted Waters, which began on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991. Uncharted Waters Online allows players to become adventurers, traders, or explorers, and engage in large scale ship-to-ship battles on the high seas.

The game, which is just in the process of a closed beta in an English-language version via CJ Internet's NetMarble portal, uses a free-to-play, micropayment-based model that allows players to purchase upgrades for their ship or character.

Producer Tomokazu Takeda recently sat down with Gamasutra, and told us the game aims to implement microtransactions that do not give players unfair advantages, but rather help those who have less time to play the game.

"It's about not purchasing power with money," says Takeda. "The kind of people who have time can play the game without spending money. If players don't have time, they may be able to purchase items to bridge the gap."

Takeda noted that Uncharted Waters needs to find its own space in the Western MMO market, and Koei does not look at the title as a competitor to major players like World of Warcraft or EVE Online."This game is different from a lot of other games," Takeda explains. "I don't think this game will compete with the other games; rather, this game will develop a unique position in the game industry.

Koei has said it's using Uncharted Waters to test Western reception to free-to-play MMOs. Takeda adds he's open to the possibility of bringing other Koei MMOs to the West, and says, "I will see how this one goes first."

The company's Uncharted Waters is planned to release on the PC later this year in North America, and Takeda explained that he hopes to update the game with new content "every one to one-and-a-half years," with regular updates coming on "a regular basis."

Game engine developer Trinigy has integrated Allegorithmic's Substance Air and Redux products into its Vision Engine 8, additions designed to offer online developers faster access to lightweight textures.

According to the company, Substance Air enables developers to create small but high-quality textures for MMO and browser-based titles, while Substance Redux is a compression tool intended to reduce the size of bitmap textures while minimizing quality and performance losses in-game.

Trinigy says that by integrating the runtimes of both products in Vision Engine 8, online and browser-based game developers can load Allegorithmic's texture formats directly within the Vision Engine tools pipeline (e.g. Vision Engine's scene editor VForge).

"Trinigy has always worked closely with its customers and partners to provide a solution that not only boosts game performance across platforms, but that increases workflow productivity in the game development process," says Trinigy's managing director Dag Frommhold.

He adds, "This new integration with Allegorithmic’s products achieves all of those goals. Not only was this integration highly requested by our growing MMO and browser game customer base; it speeds a developer’s access to textures that are perfectly suited for streaming game environments and tiny download needs."

London-based casual/social gaming start-up Zattikka announced its appointment of Jim McDonagh, who has worked at a variety of developers like NCSoft and Sega Europe, as external producer.

McDonagh most recently served as an external producer at Sega Europe, where he worked with The Creative Assembly to release BAFTA award-winning strategy title Empire: Total War. Before that, he helped NCSoft develop several of the company's MMO games. He's also spent three years apiece at Ubisoft and Eidos Interactive.

While at Zattikka, McDonagh is tasked with overseeing and shaping the studio's new talent and intellectual properties. The firm raised $5.5 million through its parent company Expedite last month, which it is investing in recruitment, research and development, and marketing to further expand its catalog of browser and mobile titles.

Since its opening last year, Zattikka has grown its library to more than 100 titles, putting out at least two new games each week. The company's releases attract a total of more than one monthly unique users.

The announcement of McDonagh's hiring follows a week after Zattikka revealed its hiring of Peter Jones, a Codemasters and Lionhead veteran who has worked in the games industry for 20 years, as its executive producer.

"I’m delighted we’ve hired Jim, with his wealth of games industry experience, demonstrating our ability to attract high quality people into our expanding team," says Zattikka Founder and CEO Tim Chaney. "He will be pivotal in acquiring and managing the development of high quality games for our rapidly developing portal business."

A day before the GDC Online early deadline, the major October 5th-8th Austin-based event has added track keynotes from Blizzard's Greg Canessa (on Battle.net), Playdom's Raph Koster (on social mechanics), and Bigpoint's Heiko Hubertz (on the rise of Europe in online gaming).

The Austin, Texas based GDC Online conference -- formerly known as GDC Austin -- is sharply focused on the development of online games, including free-to-play titles, social network games, and traditional MMOs, with a veteran online game industry advisory board evaluating and selecting the lectures.

There are now more than 120 panels, lectures and tutorials currently scheduled for the October 5th-8th event -- and following the announcement of a keynote from Civilization II designer and now Zynga chief game designer Brian Reynolds (FrontierVille), three track keynotes are debuting.

The brand-new track keynotes across the GDC Online Main Conference, which takes place from Wednesday October 6th to Friday October 8th, and for which majorly discounted passes are only available until Wednesday, are:

- In a production track keynote called 'Battle.net: A Postmortem', Blizzard's Battle.net project director Greg Canessa and technical director Matt Versluys will present an extremely rare lecture from the World Of Warcraft and Starcraft II creators, "sharing lessons learned from building and launching the new iteration of an online game service that connects and powers all Blizzard titles."

- Playdom's VP of creative design Raph Koster -- a stalwart of online game design from Ultima Online through Star Wars Galaxies to his current work in social games -- presents a design track keynote, 'Classic Social Mechanics: The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer'.

Continue reading "GDC Online Debuts Blizzard, Koster, Bigpoint Track Keynotes, Pre-Deadline" »

Organizers of the annual Browsergames Forum event in Offenbach, Germany, have issued a call for papers for this year's event, to be held at Offenbach's Capitol Theatre on November 5th and 6th.

The Browsergames Forum brings together developers, publishers, and investors in the web-based gaming space to discuss industry trends, business models, and advancements in technology. The second day of the event will feature a variety of educational workshops open to all attendees.

Last year's Browsergames Forum attracted over 450 trade visitors, and this year's event aims to broaden its reach.

"Boosted by last year's great success and international acceptance, this year's target is to strengthen the forum's international claim," said Robert Schmidt, Conference Manager of Browsergames Forum Ltd.

Browsergames Forum organizers are now accepting speech proposals covering the following topics:

- gameplay of next generation web-based games
- social games: lessons learned
- convergence / mobile devices
- fraud prevention (payment fraud, cheating, bots)
- metrics and monetization

Proposal papers must be submitted to info@bgf2010.com by September 6, 2010 to be considered for inclusion in this year's conference.

Client-based, free-to-play English language PC games will generate as much as $2 billion annually by 2015 due to a number of factors, according to a new report from market research firm DFC Intelligence.

The group says titles in that category brought in only $250 million in 2009, but it expects that the widespread adoption of high-speed internet connections, more consumers becoming acclimated to buying digital content, and improved payment options (e.g. prepaid retail cards) will help grow the market by 700 percent in the next five years.

"For many Korean companies, the market in North America has not taken off nearly as fast as they expected," admits DFC analyst Insun Yoon. "Much of this can be attributed to the immature infrastructure and a lack of established payment and service mechanisms."

Yoon adds, "The good news is that this is starting to change and consumers are starting to realize that the game play of top high-end [free-to-play] games can be quite sophisticated."

In its report, titled "The Market for English Language Client-Based Free-to-Play PC Games", the company argues that creative marketing, packaging, and distribution are key to generating increased revenues, as it says the most successful free-to-play games bundle products/subscriptions with bonuses like virtual currency or digital content.

DFC also expects that these games will have a combined total of 128 million registered users by the end of 2010. Though it says this number might seem much lower than the browser-based or social gaming audiences, the group points out that free-to-play titles have high conversion rates that can make up for their smaller userbases.

The research company says that one major challenge publishers in North America and Europe will face is the difficulty for consumers to successfully install large game clients. In a separate Online Game Delivery report, DFC notes that South Korea, Romania, Japan, and Sweden have significantly higher download speeds than the rest of the world.

Social game developer Playdom has entered a publishing deal with Eastern European distributor I-Jet Media, and the companies plan to bring Playdom's games to Eastern Europe while making efforts to combat piracy in the region.

The Disney-owned Playdom (Wild Ones, Social City) will publish four undisclosed titles in Russia and Eastern Europe via I-Jet Media, making it the first American company to publish social games in those markets.

In addition to the publishing deal, Playdom and I-Jet Media announced their commitment to combating piracy in Eastern Europe, with each company taking steps to prevent the illegal distribution of their games.

Playdom plans to identify illegally reproduced games in the region, while I-Jet Media will take complaints from developers harmed by piracy and promises "to impede distribution of such games even through other publishers in every possible way."

I-Jet Media general producer Alexey Kostarev anticipates that Playdom marks the first in a series of social game studios to enter the Eastern European market.

“Playdom entry in Russia is this year's key event for the domestic social games market. First and foremost, it means that leading developers are seeking after new markets, and that is why they consider Russia to be interesting for them. I am sure that Playdom will be followed by others: Zynga, Playfish, and so on,” said Kostarev.

As sister site Gamasutra reaches the milestone of one million unique monthly readers and nearly 450,000 registered users, the leading video game art and business site is announcing notable new contributors including Simon Parkin, Chris Morris and Kyle Orland.

Cementing its position as the largest, most-trafficked website in the game development and business space, internal Omniture traffic numbers for July 2010 revealed over 3.3 million page views from more than 1 million unique readers for Gamasutra.com alone -- with hundreds of thousands of others reading related sites such as GameCareerGuide.com and IndieGames.com.

In addition, following the departure of editor at large Chris Remo to become Community Manager at Irrational Games (BioShock Infinite), the site has added multiple new contributors to bolster its cutting-edge coverage of all facets of the video game business.

Joining existing core staff -- including news director Leigh Alexander, senior news editor Kris Graft and features director Christian Nutt -- will be Simon Parkin as the site's European editor, providing UK-timed news and original reporting for the site.

Continue reading "Gamasutra Hits 1 Million Monthly Readers, Adds Parkin, Morris, Orland To Editors" »

Less than a year after rival monetization company Live Gamer hired her, industry icon Stevana "Stevie" Case has joined in-game commerce network PlaySpan as vice president of sales.

While at PlaySpan, which provides monetization services for more than 1,000 online titles, social networks, and videos, Case is tasked with overseeing the firm's efforts to generate new business leads while also supporting the overall sales team on its existing business initiatives and partnerships.

She joined Live Gamer, another microtransaction solutions provider for online games and social networks, just last January, and served as senior director of business development for the company. Prior to that, she was VP of business development and sales at another in-game commerce firm, Fatfoogoo.

Case first caught the industry's attention as a female professional gamer after she beat John Romero in a Quake deathmatch, joining the Quake-designer's studio Ion Storm shortly afterward. She served as a tester and level designer there before partnering with Romero and Tom Stone to co-found Monkeystone Games, where she was CEO until 2003.

This news comes just just a few weeks after PlaySpan raised $18 million in a Series C round of funding, which it plans to put toward expanding its European and Asian expansion, as well as growing its publisher network and userbase.

"Stevie is a widely respected figure in the gaming industry and she has a combination of passion, professionalism, and knowledge that is unmatched," says PlaySpan CEO Karl Mehta. "We are very exciting to add her talents and business acumen to our work force, where we will be able to leverage her experience and contacts to expand our presence globally."