More On Micropayment Games

I’m probably jumping into this with some assumed concepts about newspapers talking about micropayments moreso lately. Martin Langeveld’s article from the Nieman Lab and Clay Shirkey’s thoughts from 2000 are good background reading. (UPDATE: Journalism 101 – Accuracy – I had mistaken the identity of the author of the Nieman Lab article. It has since been corrected).

Motion-twin’s games quickly wore thin on me after I hit the wall of entertainment they’re willing to provide without me ponying up for better play. For example, my crabosaur in DinoRPG now has to rest 6 hours between every action. There are potions that eliminat this wait time, but they cost coins and the only serious way to get coins is to buy themwith real cash. About $6 gets you enough coins to take 30-some turns unhassled, which would work out to a few hours of entertainment probably. If I were younger, I definitely would have dropped some expendible income to find out what comes next.

I moved on to Civony last week as their ads showed up all over across game and news sites. After playing the game, their ad with the open-bodiced female is even more hilarious. The game couldn’t be more of a medieval strategy geek out. It’s one of those overly rule-oriented concoctions we have Northern Europeans to thank for.

With that said, I had way more fun building up my little village than I did training my dinosaur. Civony has a really good introduction in that it keeps giving you menial tasks early on and rewarding you for them. It follows the Sid Meier philosophy of “just one more turn.” You never quite quit when one thing completes, because you’ve set something in motion since that you want to see complete. By the time that completes, you have started other things in motion and the cycle perpetuates. Civony delivers this in spades. Early on, buildings are built in minutes, but eventually they take hours. By this time, however, the player will have a second city to take care of where building only take minutes again. Lots of things to start and lots of things to see completed.

If one is impatient, he can buy game items that speed things up or offer bonuses. This is where micropayments come into play. Beyond impatience, buying items for boosts eventually becomes important to hard-core competitors. The ultimate goal is pitting armies against other players and factions. This endless struggle creates a market for the invested gamers to throw a few bucks in here or there for that extra leg up.

Browser-based micropayment games aren’t new, but there seems to be a growing market judging by how many more ads are showing up lately (just started checking out The West). Civony itself went from a single server to three over the course of a week. Enough people showed up to cause massive slowdown. Whether those people stay and play isn’t for certain, but it’s not a bad start for reworking old BBS games into web models.

What does this mean for news? Not totally sure yet, but I believe familiarity with when people dole out change for fun will definitely have some crossover to when they’ll dole it out for news. I should have enough thoughts for a more organized list of concepts to borrow soon. For now, I’m thinking the main strengths are that I’m paying to do something rather than “consume” something and there’s an evolving narrative arc to my interaction.