We first wrote about Flash MMOG startup Ohai back in January. There wasn’t anything to look at, but the company had raised $6 million in funding and had assembled a small but impressive group of gaming technology executives.
Now they’re ready to launch their first game, City Of Eternals. The timing is perfect – the vampire themed game will attract the Twilight-crazy crowd of teenage girls and the boys that follow them around.
Move aside, Vampire Wars. City of Eternals is a real game.
This is a game that’s easy to begin playing. You log in via Facebook Connect or Twitter and you’re playing. No account creation. No need to even tell you you’re male or female – it already knows.
And since every player is logging in via Facebook or Twitter, there is also a real human being to look at behind the avatar. You can click on the player icon and see a picture and the first name of the player, and message them if their privacy rules allow it.
That will let users build real friendships, says founder and CEO Susan Wu. And those friendships are one thing that Ohai hopes will keep people playing over the long term. They want their users to engage with the game like World Of Warcraft aficionados do – every day for years and years.
So far it’s working. 10,000 private beta testers have been playing for two months now, and are averaging ten logins and 65 minutes of playing per day. “People are in love with the game,” said Wu.
Game play is a hybrid between familiar client-based MMOGs and more recent social games on facebook like Vampire Wars and FarmVille. Players perform missions and fight to gain experience and other assets, and they can buy virtual goods to make the game more fun. This is a strictly cash economy, says Wu. No ScamVille offers will be put in front of users.
Another feature of the game is that it’s embeddable anywhere since it’s built on Flash. You can play it on the City of Eternals website, or the soon to launch Facebook app page, or we could embed it here on TechCrunch. When you play you’ll have the same experience. And you’re friends will be right there with you.
They even have an iPhone version that they are testing internally, says VP Engineering Don Neufeld. It won’t be exactly the same experience as the Flash version, but people will be able to play the game and interact with friends.
The game is built on a backend platform that the company will reuse for future titles. They use their own API to move data to the front end user interface, so developers could theoretically build versions of the game for Silverlight, Android, etc.
Up next we’ll have a video and 500 invitation to give away so you can start playing immediately. In the meantime, here are some screenshots:
Update: video and invitations to the service.
honestly the screenshots fail to impress, game looks pretty boring, i’ll stick with vampire wars kthx
Ironic quote of the year:
“Looks pretty boring, i’ll stick with vampire wars”
The click-click-collect-invite games are going to burn out. I can’t see people being sheep enough to stay with that nonsense forever.
Mafia Wars has moved on to making people collect things like Tiger-themed ice cream vans…
Maybe there will be two kinds of gamers in the future: those who seek a challenge to overcome and those who really have nothing better to do than log-in, click for 5 minutes, then wait 4 hours to click another 5 minutes.
I do believe that this is the beginning of a new wave of social gaming. Stuff that goes beyond what we’ve seen from Zynga, Playfish and Playdom so far and moving into true MMOG type stuff. When you combine that with the social aspects that you can inject via Facebook platform and Facebook connect, you potentially have explosive growth and long term players.
WOW only has 10-12 million players worldwide. Farmville has 63 million, largely due to ease of play and viral spread. Games like COE have the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people in the forseeable future, and ARPU may oustrip the Zynga games by a big margin if they are good enough to keep people interested.
Just think of a FB Connect version of World of Worldcraft…
is it free? then it is not WoW.
I think you’re right, given more time and the right execution. FB games have been successful at reaching critical mass largely because there is very little learning curve (social aside). Especially for users who’ve really had no exposure to online games prior. MMOGs as they currently stand I think are far too complicated to be a FarmVille – although these games are certainly acting as a bridge for the non-traditional gamer.
I guess you guys didn’t sense the sarcasm. The problem is this is still only a marginal improvement over vampire wars. Fine, it’s in flash. That gives you the processing browser of a 1996 pentium I, or a 1986 apple if you are running in firefox with all the memory leaks. Have you ever tried to play a game like this in flash? It’s painful. Zynga has experimented with this stuff before and even with their expertise manipulating the viral channels they were never able to get anything off the ground besides the dumb games they already have.
You think all 63 million people playing farmville would play WOW? No chance in hell. People are incredibly dumb, and WOW is way too complicated for casual gamers. Yes, most people would rather click for 5 minutes, then come back 4 hours later and click again, especially since they’re probably at work while playing. It’s not my type of game, but it is for most people on facebook. Bottom line: I can see my mom playing farmville, and I can see my college roommate playing WoW, but I see neither of them playing these hybrid bicurious flash-meets-mmo type games.
There ARE truly great games out there, but it’s somewhat as you say – the focus can’t be on graphical power… The key is to achieve a retail-megagame engaging storyline, and combine it with a free cross-browser play-anywhere platform. I think we’re starting to see interesting foundations being built for the bridges to come – not just with farmville/COE, but things like foursquare. A game that could pull off meaningful in-game consequences/rewards for real life actions would be veeeeery interesting. And then monetization could expand to mission-sponsorships – fictional secret agent must attend real event at bar X (sponsored by Kahlua), and kill enemy agent Y, or exchange secret docs, etc. All sorts of interesting things could happen once the truly social/mediated reality stuff starts to work its way in.
WOW is complicated and boring. It will suck the life out of you.
that’s one of those futures I would really, really like to never see happen.
Mike, there is an important distinction between WOW and Farmville players. You have to pay for the original WOW game, every expansion pack and also pay monthly to continue playing. In contrast Farmville is free.
Comparing the two is like comparing the number of people who read The NY Times vs. the paying subscribers of the WSJ.
you’re also assuming that zynga won’t have completely scammed every user on facebook by then and still leave some players willing to keep playing games on facebook.
Jill looks hot, she a real chick in SF ?
and comments like this are why some of us cringe at the idea of ’social gaming’
Agree with Mike, and I’m totally looking forward to it. Click-click MMOs just won’t do for me and I had to quit WoW because it’s just too time intensive for a working adult. And having an iPhone version is simply FTW!
gamplay > graphics
Hopefully this is another step towards having a universal virtual presence.
I play Second Life. I’ve been looking into the various OpenSIM projects and the concept of universal avatars, basically a “you” who looks the same in every virtual environment (with maybe clothes changes to fit)
Tying the game into a facebook account is definitely a step into this direction, as is the universal access into the world via multiple device types.
I might actually have to get a facebook account now *sigh*
I still think Ohai stole their name from icanhascheezburger speak.
Kevin points out the success of this model: most users on Facebook. WoW is not that complicated but I’ve got no time for it. Things like Vampire Wars and Spymaster are tedious, boring wastes of time and ammount to spam for everyone you know. I try to block as many spymaster players on Twitter as I can. The teen, and specifically teen girl market is the biggest growth area for niche games that combine more social elements with gameplay.
Games can be fun to relax too and get away from programming and business. The game looks fun.
Flash games are cool, but the graphics need to come a bit further to be more than a way to waste time at work.
THIS IS A TEST. SORRY.
I don’t play any Facebook games, largely because I’ve almost dropped family members as friends because they spam my wall with stupid Mafia Wars invites and gifts and help requests.
Does this game do the same thing? Either way, when I see a friend post a Mafia War or Farmville post on their status, I just think it’s annoying a bit pathetic.
Thank you for your question. Ohai has a policy of giving users control over their experiences. So we will allow you to decide when you want to post notifications or send invites to your friends. We won’t be sending out automated messages to your friends without your consent.
You can just hide it. Why so hard?
“The timing is perfect – the vampire themed game will attract the Twilight-crazy crowd of teenage girls and the boys that follow them around.”
Wow, way to not understand that market at all.
At least half the draw of the Twilight movies and books are the gorgeous visuals, both human and atmospheric. Any game with art this ugly is more likely to turn off Twilight fans who are used to looking at carefully chosen color palettes and Rob Pattinson’s pretty face. Twilight fans are about as likely to play this as they are to run out and start reading Blade comics. They won’t buy into it just because it has vampires. It’s missing the romance and the pretty.
Blech. No thanks. I don’t like vampires.
I’d be willing to try a game that has something to offer besides just quests that kill things. I suspect some social-engineering agenda on this game, big-time, and that’s a buzz-kill but I’d still look at it to see what’s up.
I’m puzzled by what you are up to here, Michael, because I see you doing two things that just seem like there is something behind them:
1) One week, aggressively attacking Zynga and other casual social gaming sites and protesting their tacky spam ads which amount even to scam ads — something that’s hard to disagree with, but which has a troubling component to it in that it undermines the whole world of UGC in MORPGs and the ability of companies to advertise with them
2) The next week, promoting another game as an alternative to these games you don’t like, and this one that has a very big difference compared to other MMORPGS: *lack of anonymity*.
Is that the agenda here?
One thing that Paul Karr and Andrew Keen and other “thought leaders” who disagree among themselves so have in common is their hatred of anonymity on the Internet. They want to force people to use their identities because they have the belief that if they can just out their identities, they can stop them from writing sharp criticism — they think they will be too intimidated or will somehow be “shamed” by “their outing”.
So what I’m looking for here is the reason, either financial or political, that you are suddenly, out of all the things you do, dumping on social games of one sort and pumping a social game of another sort — you don’t do games, Michael, you do tech.
So what’s up with all this?
Looks terrific, congrats to all the team!!!