On the last day of AGC, we sat down with the folks at GoPets. This interview would have been out a while ago if it weren't for some memory card issues. But they're resolved and here it is. We recorded it in the convention hall and it was entirely impromptu, with only a couple parts dropping out to background noise. Now, a lot of you are probably wondering what an interview with GoPets is doing on F13. Yes, it's a little different. But it's a peek into a sector of the industry that tends to be ignored by the serious folk. Also, because of its casual nature and being recorded at a table in the exhibition hall, the interview goes all over the place. So, as much as I could make out, you get. Also, I've played a bit of GoPets and talked to people who have played GoPets, and while it's not for me, it is entirely something worth checking out. One of those "different" things! My thanks go out to Chris, the VP of Operations, and Priya, the PR Manager, who withstood my endless barrage of questions they've probably answered a thousand times.
F13: You know what brought us over here? The booth is soooo cute.
GoPets: Yea and everyone went pretty bland on their booth this year. We did a good job of making ourselves stand out.
F13: No, really though, what you all said in “Life After Subscriptions” (a panel at AGC) brought us over here. It’s not just a lanyard (referring to the lanyards that were given out for the show from a company we knew nothing about).
GoPets: Two years ago when we started out, Eric, our CEO, had been in the business a long time and has built successful projects before. Many people told him that the Asian item sales model is great, but it won’t work in the US. “Well, I don’t believe you but OK, fine.” Now that we’ve done it, the US has taken off like crazy.
F13: What do the US numbers look like? Should we consider it an MMORPG?
GoPets: It’s not considered an MMOG in the sense that it’s not a shared, online persistent world. We consider ourselves a casual social networking service. As we continue to grow, we may start to look more like an MMO in some ways. But we’re always going to be casual. We’re not looking to be a WoW type of game. Ya know, our users are primarily people who don’t have time to play involved games. They can’t commit to many hours a day. They want something they can just come home and play. Chat with their friends, take care of their pets and play a mini-game or two. And then… relax.
F13: Number wise, for a lot of people, it’s still not casual though – right?
GoPets: It’s like any engaging thing you get wrapped up in. People hang out on the forums all day long. They just post and talk to other users. There’s always going to be that – that type of user. They’re the core of the community. They run their own fansites. Most of the marketing is viral. We love those users. Our forums are all moderated by volunteers and that’s where we find them – the most active ones there. We have a tech support forum where you can post problems and we almost never have to step in there. It all gets answered the instant it gets posted. I look at those and when I find someone who’s really good at helping people in the tech forum, I hire them and they do our customer support. Our entire US tech support crew is scattered across the country and didn’t have to get trained. We’ve got someone here in Austin, the east coast, LA.
F13: What made you all pick the DS over the PSP?
GoPets: Demographics. The DS is selling like crazy and it’s young girls buying them for Animal Crossing and games like that. It was kind of a no brainer and we had a relationship with Konami.
F13: Konami is why I asked. They make a load of PSP games. A big supporter with Metal Gear Solid and such.
GoPets: Talking with them it turned out to be the best thing to do.
F13: Talk a bit about the platform itself.
GoPets: We have this global user base and a localized payment system in territories around the world. We have a very vibrant virtual economy and users have these gold shells they spend on various things. You look at the casual gamespace, especially here in the West, it’s very focused on the shareware model. Even the most successful has a 1% conversion rate. We feel like using our network is a great way to solve that problem. The whole pay to play model, even if you charge 10 centers, is a whole new revenue stream and potentially much higher than that pay to download model.
F13: Speaking on demographics, between the DS, PC, and mobile – where do you see the big exposure? In Korea the DS isn’t huge. In Japan it’s massive. When you introduce parrots in America, they start wandering around Korea and Thailand. How does something like that pan out?
GoPets: We can’t do anything about Nintendo’s market share in Korea. We can do… something about it. But the DS was a really good fit and it’s not just going to be for marketing. It’s going to be a game for the DS.
Mobile is kinda the opposite. Mobile is going to be huge in Asia. Our Japanese, Taiwanese, and Thai partners are like “Comeon, finish that mobile version.” Lots more people in those territories play mobile games than they do PC Games.
F13: Is the mobile version going to be RMT also
GoPets: It will be some virtual item sales and mini-games – six of them.
F13: With that said, which market is the biggest for you all, right now?
GoPets: It’s pretty evenly split between the US, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Taiwan has been very active in the last three or four months and rapidly caught up. We started the open beta in May ’05 and we put up our first payment page in June (a month later). So in a way, we were commercial then. We did an extremely soft launch. We’re still in “beta” now, but we’ve always been commercial. We don’t bother with the term anymore. It’s the Google model – the perpetual beta. You’re never out of beta, you’re always live.
F13: That’s funny because a lot of companies here won’t admit to that.
GoPets: No, they won’t.
F13: What made you go with the design you came up with? As an aside, they told me the numbers last night, something like 75% women 24 and older?
GoPets: It’s pretty evenly split between women 24+ and under 18. The original idea was basically “It would be really cool if I had a little cat that could walk off my screen and walk onto your screen.” That was the entire concept. There was no social network. There was no revenue. It was just “that would be a cool thing to see.” So we had a programmer write a thing, and everyone went “oooooh, the cat came over to my computer.” And that was the germ of the idea. It got put in the background. Eric had moved to Korea to do an MMO project and the money wound up not coming through for him.
F13: Shocking.
GoPets: Yea. And then it became, “so what am I gonna do now?" Remember that, it was called Net Cat, let’s pull that out and start thinking about that.” Being in Korea and being exposed to the amazing online gamespace there and the virtual item model. It just formed the entire core of the idea.
F13: The design is… exclusively Korean.
GoPets: The initial designs were much more anime. We did some focus groups with users in Jap…see that?
/Man steps up and wants one of the stuff animals….for his kid. Right. I’m not afraid to admit the cat got me over to the booth/
… Japan, the US, and in Europe and we modified the pet design a bit to be more globally appealing in a way. It wasn’t purely anime looking.
F13: One of the other things I wanted to touch on is adult gamers with children.
GoPets: A lot of our users are as well.
F13: Right, so how do you handle that in the regular game and even more so in the DS title?
GoPets: Originally our focus was Asia, where it’s not even a concern at all. It doesn’t even enter into people’s minds. You don’t have to worry about it. As we started getting adoption in the US, we knew we had to address that issue. The initial thing we did for that was child safety mode, which we modeled after Toon Town. Even simpler though, we simply have no communications with other users. You strip out the social side and it’s a cat with emotes. They can play with a cat, buy it food and stuff – they just can’t chat. They can’t send messages, buy gifts or have gifts bought for them.
F13: Is that working out well?
GoPets: Yea… yea. No one has a perfect solution. There’s no guarantee of age verification and know that it’s an adult or child. And children can find a way around anything you can implement.
F13: It doesn’t seem like people come into this game to be vindictive though.
GoPets: Unlike a typical MMO with PKs and such, players don’t come in and say “I have to dominate.” Obviously there are a number of personality types and there are people who are competitive. Competition shows up in a lot of different ways. In GoPets, a lot of people try to be the “Most Friendly.”
F13:
GoPets: If I give the most gifts, I show up on the most generous list.
F13: Brilliant.
GoPets: People will compete in completely noncompetitive environments.
F13: I heard there was a rat with armor in the game.
GoPets: But! You play rock, scissors, paper with it. We wanted to see how users would accept those light MMO kind of things. Some of them liked it, some didn’t. We can see how many people interact with those and don’t.
F13: Mini-game wise, if you go back, you have Puzzle Pirates and that’s about it. Having not played it, how do you answer “What part of the game are the mini-games? How do they tie in?”
GoPets: The way we look at GoPets – it’s a three legged triangle – pets, people and games. We focus very heavily on the people and pets and have been doing so for the last year. The mini-games, not so much. We’re looking to build up that side of things. We have four mini-games. They’re terrible games. They’re like going to Chuck E. Cheese, you get tickets to spend money in a shop to get items you can only get there. You play to get the unique items, not to play the games, they’re very basic. We see users spending about 13% of their shells (currency) on mini-games.
F13: Do you have the percentages? Where does the average dollar go?
GoPets: The average dollar goes: 80% to items, 13% or so on games, the rest spills both ways.
F13: So the model seems to work?
GoPets: We based our entire financial model on users in the US paying, on average, five dollars a month and we’re seeing about triple that.
F13: So you’re seeing the same thing that MMOs make, without asking them to pay it.
GoPets: Without asking them to pay it. Right. We see users spending… Well, one thing we do is a premium membership. Did we talk about that?
F13: Touched on it.
GoPets: Ok, you can upgrade your subscription to premium. We don’t bill you, it’s not a subscription. It’s nine dollars for a month. Or forty nine for twelve months. That forty nine is very popular. Twelve months of premium service, 1300 gold shells which is about $120 worth. So you’re paying fifty for $120. For that twelve months you get a 25% discount on shells. You get access to the premium user shop, which can only be shopped in by premium users and they’re really cool items – like an airplane your pet can fly around in.
F13: So, wait, you can be a cat dressed as a panda flying an airplane?
GoPets: Exactly.
F13: Who wouldn’t want that?
GoPets: The main reason people go for the premium is the month collective item. Every month, an item is given to the premium users and never given again. We guarantee it will never appear again. We started last September and we had 800 users buy it. The item was an oasis. A pool of water with some palm trees your pet would drink from – instead of buying a bowl of water, you had an infinite bowl of water. 800 were given out. Now we have a lot more users, those items sell for $200…
F13: That’s what I was going to ask. Is there a full in game economy now due to those items?
GoPets: Yea. Those items are very… Ok, those users will get premium just to sell the item. They get a lot more gold shells that way and recoup the expense. Some users just want to collect. A lot of users realize that early adopters get items that will only appreciate in value.
A premium user can buy the item creation tool. It works on clothing. Any item you can customize and then sell. If you’re particularly gifted artistically, you can make a lot of gold money. We haven’t seen the Ebay or IGE thing yet, but we did show up on the Korean version – Itembay. To us, that’s a sign of things going very well.
F13: See, to you that’s a sign of things going well. To everyone else, mass chaos.
GoPets: They’ll tell you that publically, of course. It’s really not true. If no one was buying that gold, it would mean WoW was dying. That’s a bad sign.
F13: The economic barometer.
GoPets: It is, it means you have something that is in high demand. In the case of WoW or any of these other games, if you’re going to base anything on time – requiring a time commitment – there’s always going to be somebody in the world who’s time is less valuable than mine. That’s who I’m going to be willing to pay to do it for me. That’s just basic economics. It’s what you get told and I don’t work for Blizzard, and while I guarantee you their public statement is that gold farming is bad… They’re very happy about it.
It’s really a bit of theatre and public relations.
F13: In long term, how do you plan to keep kids as they grow up and others enter this market?
GoPets: Our biggest strategy for success is rapid development. We have and always have had a very aggressive development schedule. We continually bring out more features, more content, more things you can do with your pet… It’s so that anyone who tries to catch up with us will be a year behind. Sure, they could hire a whole bunch of Chinese programmers and just clone it. Anybody can do that, it’s very inexpensive to do. We’ve got two years of development for you to catch up on. Copying things that exist is easy. But by the time they do that, GoPets will have grown and they’ll have to play catch-up.
F13: Have you all made any changes during the game that made a bunch of the kids get angry while the adults completely understood?
GoPets: Sometimes. Kids tend to be the ones that say “Why do you have to buy gold shells? They should all be free.” The grownups come along and say “there’s a bunch of people in Korea who have homes and need to eat food and make this stuff for you.”
/recording cut out for a bit here/
GoPets: When we do a deal with our territory partners, part of the set is that you come out with food items and clothing items for that territory. What we’ve found is that when we put out stuff like Kimonos, the Japanese users bought them and loved them, but the US users bought them way more heavily. “Those are really pretty. It makes my pet look all exotic.” Same thing with all the Thai stuff. One of the big draws of GoPets is the whole virtual travel thing. You can be exposed to other cultures and communicate with people from around the world. What do tourists do when they travel? Buy stuff.
Each of our territory partners think their users are very unique. We run the global service and when a Japanese user likes or complains about some item, it’s because “Japanese users are like that. I don’t know about your Korean users or American users!” They’re all almost exactly the same. They like and dislike the same things.
F13: I can honestly say I didn’t expect that answer.
GoPets: When they’re using the item creation tool, they create similar items. A very popular item are just basic butterfly wings. And people have turned it into wings made of bone, one made them very blue and shimmery – and every user does this stuff. If you go look at other avatar based things, everyone wants to put wings on… “I have an avatar, I want to put wings on it.” Girls. Like. Wings. I don’t know why you don’t go down to Target and just see wings year round.
F13: Do you even view yourselves as having competitors right now? Is NeoPets even a concern?
GoPets: No. In NeoPets, the pets don’t do anything. They’re a 2D image of a pet.
F13: ... and somehow they have limited edition ones.
GoPets: Right. So you can collect more JPEGS. So, our distinction from NeoPets is obvious. The difference from MySpace or those other services is that we have something else. We have those pets, the items. We have competitors to parts of our service. We’re really the first that has put all of these things together.
F13: And somehow, this being a logical step, no one has taken it.
GoPets: A lot of that is because, especially in the West, they’re focused on the advertising revenue. NeoPets is all advertising, they don’t take money from users. MySpace doesn’t take money from users. They take money from advertisers. Our entire model is based on zero advertising money. We also find is the lack of advertising is a big reason why we have such loyal users. Especially in the West, people are sick of ads in their faces all the time. I know I hate ads. We are experimenting with product placement. We’ve had a really positive response from our users. It’s not as intrusive, people in the real world like walking around with branded items. Having your pet buying Levi jeans isn’t completely illogical.
F13: So, if people are going to start showing off. When are you going to have a large communal place for pets to get together?
GoPets: The feature we’re releasing very soon, on the public test server next month (I am not sure of the status of this now – Ed.), is shared spaces. Both pets will be in one place. I can give access for you to move stuff around or just view the space. A lot of people, right now, like having parties. They list a time on the forums and people send tons and tons of food and they put it all out for the pets. They’ll take screenshots and talk about it. With this shared space thing, it will be all of your pets together. But to start out, it’s just a two person thing. We’re taking little steps and rolling it out slowly.
F13: What about the graphical requirements now? I’ve been told you don’t even need a real graphics card at this point. How do you plan on ramping up as time goes by?
GoPets: Mainly it’s the US that drives that. Everyone in Korea has a super high speed internet and nobody is running Windows 98. We put a lot of effort into making this thing work on 98. Originally the whole thing was just on your desktop. There was no window. The pet would just walk around and play with your cursor and stuff. That was a very new and advanced DirectX technique. Didn’t work on 98 at all. What we found was as we moved away from that original concept and decided to sell items, and decorations and such… well, that paradigm doesn’t work very well. You’re covering up your whole screen anyway. So we dropped back to the windowed version. I checked a couple of weeks ago, and we’re only at about 8% Windows 98 users. We were getting a lot of pressure from our partner in the Philippines because people don’t own computers. People play at cafes. PC Cafés started getting very scared of Microsoft licensing plans and wanted to do all Windows 98 and just stay there. They also talked about going all Linux and how we’d have to make a Linux client so it could run in a PC Café…
F13: Wait, is it really that big a market that they can just say that?
GoPets: They have a Lot of Gamers. Take something like WoW though. Fifteen bucks a month for an American is very different from fifteen for a Thai user or Filipino user. If you want to price your service relatively the same, you have to make it five bucks a month for them. In Korea people are relatively wealthy, so they do own computers. In less developed countries, bandwidth and computers simply aren’t in homes. Like I said though, Windows 98 is dying off so maybe they’ve abandoned that.
F13: How does your pricing structure work across the territories?
GoPets: The price of items is fixed. Fifty gold shells is fifty gold shells. But the actual price of fifty gold shells is differently priced across the territories. Japanese users are fabulously wealthy though. They pay ridiculous amounts of money for everything and have a lot of money. In the Philippines it’s just not the same. The average Japanese user spends 20% more than a US user. This is in the number of gold shells. The premium users are about equal. Also, the price of a gold shell in Japan is the same as it is in the US…
..although we do have this one woman who lives in the Midwest and has spent almost $2500 since January. And that’s purely buying gifts for people. We let people buy Premium subscriptions as gifts for people at nine bucks. And that’s what she does. She’s just the most generous person on the face of the Earth.
F13: Don’t you feel obligated to bring her over for dinner or something?
GoPets: She paid for this booth, right? She’s also not active in the forums, doesn’t get on chats. She’s a shy user. She simply doesn’t want people to know that she’s this person. She has opted out of the Most Generous list. Those people get beggars. She doesn’t want the attention, doesn’t want to be a celebrity.
/sound cuts out, pieces of a discussion about a charity system can be heard/
Our next big plan is to allow users to choose a charity and assign a percentage of their store sales to it. So 25% of their store sales can go to such a thing. We think it’s a great way of giving back and using the power of the community.
F13: Has anything in-game been a bit of controversy? Something religious or such?
GoPets: Well, the swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol. Right? But Americans don’t see that. And there was this Japanese user from beta who had a robe with a swastika on the back of it. It did spark a lot of comments. There were a lot of people going “look at Wikipedia,” etc. We keep an eye on that stuff. But it’s also part of the beauty of being global.
F13: Right, and you have a player creation tool, so the opportunity to be offensive is readily available.
GoPets: Yes, and sometimes you do get a user who wants to be funny. But really, we get the most profanity out of Asians who don’t realize it’s a big deal. Korean kids love dropping the f-bomb and think, well, it’s just another language. The divide is amazing. We went with our kids into a Hello Kitty store once [in Korea] and there was hardcore gangster rap playing. If you don’t speak the language… You simply can’t approve every item coming in and things like that. The beauty of large numbers is that a lot of people catch this stuff very quickly.
F13: Ok, let’s talk about the one thing that we’ve somehow managed to miss. Talk about the actual gameplay. Day to day and such.
GoPets: It’s a little bit of a Sims/Nintendogs thing. If you just look at the pet, it’s something to take care of, feed, there’s levels.
F13: Ok, why?
GoPets: That’s interesting to ask. There weren’t levels originally. What we found was that users were getting too confused. If you have lots of functions in your game, whether it’s a fantasy MMO or anything else and you just put a person there and say here are all your options, they just sit there.
F13: Which is exactly why I asked. The structure of your game, seems inverse to the nature of levels. Typically sure, the first few are tutorial levels, but for the most part it’s something of a score. The way to unlock all of the content. Yes, you learn to be versatile in the long run but…
GoPets: The levels are structured the way they are to give you all the functions of your pet. You only get one “spell” at level one. If you were given all twenty, you’d just be confused. We had a focus group where we watched people through a window. They made an account and the pet came onto their screen and they’d sit there looking at it. They didn’t know what it was doing. We’d ask them…
“So, what’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know”
“Well, do you want to buy some food for your pet?”
“Yea, I’ll do that!”
But it’s too scary with all the choices. The leveling system is to start you out with limited functionality. Once you’ve fed your pet, now you can do this and now this, etc.
F13: Can you choose to opt out of it?
GoPets: No. But every time you level you get shells. It’s actually been very well received. We had to ask though, what do we do with existing users? If we set them to level one, they can’t use all of their stuff and they’ve spent money on it. That’s not good. So we said, they’re already playing – let’s just make them level thirty – the max. New people who come in just start at level one… Instantly we got a bunch of users complaining that they were missing out on leveling up, I want to be level one! So we had to go back and add a reset option. It was a one-time thing.
F13: This reset to level one business… It’s shock and awe.
GoPets: There are a lot of people, even in WoW that hit 60 and just start over. The leveling up and questing is their favorite part of the game. Not the raiding.
F13: My little community of gamers, well, let’s just say that resetting to level one is just obscene.
GoPets: We thought so also! Sometimes people surprise you.
F13: The social kind might surprise you. The competitive kind, not so much.
GoPets: Well, if you don’t give the competitive kind a way to win, they’ll come up with one. They’ll pick their definition of “win” and run with it.
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At this point the conversation pretty much cuts out. We talked about fansites a bit and their user-base a bit more. Also touched on the gameplay, which is something you can find more about at the main website for GoPets. Take the plunge. It's not Toon Town and it's not World of Warcraft. It's something pretty unique, which is where I say...Discuss. And once again, thanks to Priya and Chris Bradfield for making as much time as they did for us.
[discuss]
GoPets: Yea and everyone went pretty bland on their booth this year. We did a good job of making ourselves stand out.
F13: No, really though, what you all said in “Life After Subscriptions” (a panel at AGC) brought us over here. It’s not just a lanyard (referring to the lanyards that were given out for the show from a company we knew nothing about).
GoPets: Two years ago when we started out, Eric, our CEO, had been in the business a long time and has built successful projects before. Many people told him that the Asian item sales model is great, but it won’t work in the US. “Well, I don’t believe you but OK, fine.” Now that we’ve done it, the US has taken off like crazy.
F13: What do the US numbers look like? Should we consider it an MMORPG?
GoPets: It’s not considered an MMOG in the sense that it’s not a shared, online persistent world. We consider ourselves a casual social networking service. As we continue to grow, we may start to look more like an MMO in some ways. But we’re always going to be casual. We’re not looking to be a WoW type of game. Ya know, our users are primarily people who don’t have time to play involved games. They can’t commit to many hours a day. They want something they can just come home and play. Chat with their friends, take care of their pets and play a mini-game or two. And then… relax.
F13: Number wise, for a lot of people, it’s still not casual though – right?
GoPets: It’s like any engaging thing you get wrapped up in. People hang out on the forums all day long. They just post and talk to other users. There’s always going to be that – that type of user. They’re the core of the community. They run their own fansites. Most of the marketing is viral. We love those users. Our forums are all moderated by volunteers and that’s where we find them – the most active ones there. We have a tech support forum where you can post problems and we almost never have to step in there. It all gets answered the instant it gets posted. I look at those and when I find someone who’s really good at helping people in the tech forum, I hire them and they do our customer support. Our entire US tech support crew is scattered across the country and didn’t have to get trained. We’ve got someone here in Austin, the east coast, LA.
F13: What made you all pick the DS over the PSP?
GoPets: Demographics. The DS is selling like crazy and it’s young girls buying them for Animal Crossing and games like that. It was kind of a no brainer and we had a relationship with Konami.
F13: Konami is why I asked. They make a load of PSP games. A big supporter with Metal Gear Solid and such.
GoPets: Talking with them it turned out to be the best thing to do.
F13: Talk a bit about the platform itself.
GoPets: We have this global user base and a localized payment system in territories around the world. We have a very vibrant virtual economy and users have these gold shells they spend on various things. You look at the casual gamespace, especially here in the West, it’s very focused on the shareware model. Even the most successful has a 1% conversion rate. We feel like using our network is a great way to solve that problem. The whole pay to play model, even if you charge 10 centers, is a whole new revenue stream and potentially much higher than that pay to download model.
F13: Speaking on demographics, between the DS, PC, and mobile – where do you see the big exposure? In Korea the DS isn’t huge. In Japan it’s massive. When you introduce parrots in America, they start wandering around Korea and Thailand. How does something like that pan out?
GoPets: We can’t do anything about Nintendo’s market share in Korea. We can do… something about it. But the DS was a really good fit and it’s not just going to be for marketing. It’s going to be a game for the DS.
Mobile is kinda the opposite. Mobile is going to be huge in Asia. Our Japanese, Taiwanese, and Thai partners are like “Comeon, finish that mobile version.” Lots more people in those territories play mobile games than they do PC Games.
F13: Is the mobile version going to be RMT also
GoPets: It will be some virtual item sales and mini-games – six of them.
F13: With that said, which market is the biggest for you all, right now?
GoPets: It’s pretty evenly split between the US, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Taiwan has been very active in the last three or four months and rapidly caught up. We started the open beta in May ’05 and we put up our first payment page in June (a month later). So in a way, we were commercial then. We did an extremely soft launch. We’re still in “beta” now, but we’ve always been commercial. We don’t bother with the term anymore. It’s the Google model – the perpetual beta. You’re never out of beta, you’re always live.
F13: That’s funny because a lot of companies here won’t admit to that.
GoPets: No, they won’t.
F13: What made you go with the design you came up with? As an aside, they told me the numbers last night, something like 75% women 24 and older?
GoPets: It’s pretty evenly split between women 24+ and under 18. The original idea was basically “It would be really cool if I had a little cat that could walk off my screen and walk onto your screen.” That was the entire concept. There was no social network. There was no revenue. It was just “that would be a cool thing to see.” So we had a programmer write a thing, and everyone went “oooooh, the cat came over to my computer.” And that was the germ of the idea. It got put in the background. Eric had moved to Korea to do an MMO project and the money wound up not coming through for him.
F13: Shocking.
GoPets: Yea. And then it became, “so what am I gonna do now?" Remember that, it was called Net Cat, let’s pull that out and start thinking about that.” Being in Korea and being exposed to the amazing online gamespace there and the virtual item model. It just formed the entire core of the idea.
F13: The design is… exclusively Korean.
GoPets: The initial designs were much more anime. We did some focus groups with users in Jap…see that?
/Man steps up and wants one of the stuff animals….for his kid. Right. I’m not afraid to admit the cat got me over to the booth/
… Japan, the US, and in Europe and we modified the pet design a bit to be more globally appealing in a way. It wasn’t purely anime looking.
F13: One of the other things I wanted to touch on is adult gamers with children.
GoPets: A lot of our users are as well.
F13: Right, so how do you handle that in the regular game and even more so in the DS title?
GoPets: Originally our focus was Asia, where it’s not even a concern at all. It doesn’t even enter into people’s minds. You don’t have to worry about it. As we started getting adoption in the US, we knew we had to address that issue. The initial thing we did for that was child safety mode, which we modeled after Toon Town. Even simpler though, we simply have no communications with other users. You strip out the social side and it’s a cat with emotes. They can play with a cat, buy it food and stuff – they just can’t chat. They can’t send messages, buy gifts or have gifts bought for them.
F13: Is that working out well?
GoPets: Yea… yea. No one has a perfect solution. There’s no guarantee of age verification and know that it’s an adult or child. And children can find a way around anything you can implement.
F13: It doesn’t seem like people come into this game to be vindictive though.
GoPets: Unlike a typical MMO with PKs and such, players don’t come in and say “I have to dominate.” Obviously there are a number of personality types and there are people who are competitive. Competition shows up in a lot of different ways. In GoPets, a lot of people try to be the “Most Friendly.”
F13:
GoPets: If I give the most gifts, I show up on the most generous list.
F13: Brilliant.
GoPets: People will compete in completely noncompetitive environments.
F13: I heard there was a rat with armor in the game.
GoPets: But! You play rock, scissors, paper with it. We wanted to see how users would accept those light MMO kind of things. Some of them liked it, some didn’t. We can see how many people interact with those and don’t.
F13: Mini-game wise, if you go back, you have Puzzle Pirates and that’s about it. Having not played it, how do you answer “What part of the game are the mini-games? How do they tie in?”
GoPets: The way we look at GoPets – it’s a three legged triangle – pets, people and games. We focus very heavily on the people and pets and have been doing so for the last year. The mini-games, not so much. We’re looking to build up that side of things. We have four mini-games. They’re terrible games. They’re like going to Chuck E. Cheese, you get tickets to spend money in a shop to get items you can only get there. You play to get the unique items, not to play the games, they’re very basic. We see users spending about 13% of their shells (currency) on mini-games.
F13: Do you have the percentages? Where does the average dollar go?
GoPets: The average dollar goes: 80% to items, 13% or so on games, the rest spills both ways.
F13: So the model seems to work?
GoPets: We based our entire financial model on users in the US paying, on average, five dollars a month and we’re seeing about triple that.
F13: So you’re seeing the same thing that MMOs make, without asking them to pay it.
GoPets: Without asking them to pay it. Right. We see users spending… Well, one thing we do is a premium membership. Did we talk about that?
F13: Touched on it.
GoPets: Ok, you can upgrade your subscription to premium. We don’t bill you, it’s not a subscription. It’s nine dollars for a month. Or forty nine for twelve months. That forty nine is very popular. Twelve months of premium service, 1300 gold shells which is about $120 worth. So you’re paying fifty for $120. For that twelve months you get a 25% discount on shells. You get access to the premium user shop, which can only be shopped in by premium users and they’re really cool items – like an airplane your pet can fly around in.
F13: So, wait, you can be a cat dressed as a panda flying an airplane?
GoPets: Exactly.
F13: Who wouldn’t want that?
GoPets: The main reason people go for the premium is the month collective item. Every month, an item is given to the premium users and never given again. We guarantee it will never appear again. We started last September and we had 800 users buy it. The item was an oasis. A pool of water with some palm trees your pet would drink from – instead of buying a bowl of water, you had an infinite bowl of water. 800 were given out. Now we have a lot more users, those items sell for $200…
F13: That’s what I was going to ask. Is there a full in game economy now due to those items?
GoPets: Yea. Those items are very… Ok, those users will get premium just to sell the item. They get a lot more gold shells that way and recoup the expense. Some users just want to collect. A lot of users realize that early adopters get items that will only appreciate in value.
A premium user can buy the item creation tool. It works on clothing. Any item you can customize and then sell. If you’re particularly gifted artistically, you can make a lot of gold money. We haven’t seen the Ebay or IGE thing yet, but we did show up on the Korean version – Itembay. To us, that’s a sign of things going very well.
F13: See, to you that’s a sign of things going well. To everyone else, mass chaos.
GoPets: They’ll tell you that publically, of course. It’s really not true. If no one was buying that gold, it would mean WoW was dying. That’s a bad sign.
F13: The economic barometer.
GoPets: It is, it means you have something that is in high demand. In the case of WoW or any of these other games, if you’re going to base anything on time – requiring a time commitment – there’s always going to be somebody in the world who’s time is less valuable than mine. That’s who I’m going to be willing to pay to do it for me. That’s just basic economics. It’s what you get told and I don’t work for Blizzard, and while I guarantee you their public statement is that gold farming is bad… They’re very happy about it.
It’s really a bit of theatre and public relations.
F13: In long term, how do you plan to keep kids as they grow up and others enter this market?
GoPets: Our biggest strategy for success is rapid development. We have and always have had a very aggressive development schedule. We continually bring out more features, more content, more things you can do with your pet… It’s so that anyone who tries to catch up with us will be a year behind. Sure, they could hire a whole bunch of Chinese programmers and just clone it. Anybody can do that, it’s very inexpensive to do. We’ve got two years of development for you to catch up on. Copying things that exist is easy. But by the time they do that, GoPets will have grown and they’ll have to play catch-up.
F13: Have you all made any changes during the game that made a bunch of the kids get angry while the adults completely understood?
GoPets: Sometimes. Kids tend to be the ones that say “Why do you have to buy gold shells? They should all be free.” The grownups come along and say “there’s a bunch of people in Korea who have homes and need to eat food and make this stuff for you.”
/recording cut out for a bit here/
GoPets: When we do a deal with our territory partners, part of the set is that you come out with food items and clothing items for that territory. What we’ve found is that when we put out stuff like Kimonos, the Japanese users bought them and loved them, but the US users bought them way more heavily. “Those are really pretty. It makes my pet look all exotic.” Same thing with all the Thai stuff. One of the big draws of GoPets is the whole virtual travel thing. You can be exposed to other cultures and communicate with people from around the world. What do tourists do when they travel? Buy stuff.
Each of our territory partners think their users are very unique. We run the global service and when a Japanese user likes or complains about some item, it’s because “Japanese users are like that. I don’t know about your Korean users or American users!” They’re all almost exactly the same. They like and dislike the same things.
F13: I can honestly say I didn’t expect that answer.
GoPets: When they’re using the item creation tool, they create similar items. A very popular item are just basic butterfly wings. And people have turned it into wings made of bone, one made them very blue and shimmery – and every user does this stuff. If you go look at other avatar based things, everyone wants to put wings on… “I have an avatar, I want to put wings on it.” Girls. Like. Wings. I don’t know why you don’t go down to Target and just see wings year round.
F13: Do you even view yourselves as having competitors right now? Is NeoPets even a concern?
GoPets: No. In NeoPets, the pets don’t do anything. They’re a 2D image of a pet.
F13: ... and somehow they have limited edition ones.
GoPets: Right. So you can collect more JPEGS. So, our distinction from NeoPets is obvious. The difference from MySpace or those other services is that we have something else. We have those pets, the items. We have competitors to parts of our service. We’re really the first that has put all of these things together.
F13: And somehow, this being a logical step, no one has taken it.
GoPets: A lot of that is because, especially in the West, they’re focused on the advertising revenue. NeoPets is all advertising, they don’t take money from users. MySpace doesn’t take money from users. They take money from advertisers. Our entire model is based on zero advertising money. We also find is the lack of advertising is a big reason why we have such loyal users. Especially in the West, people are sick of ads in their faces all the time. I know I hate ads. We are experimenting with product placement. We’ve had a really positive response from our users. It’s not as intrusive, people in the real world like walking around with branded items. Having your pet buying Levi jeans isn’t completely illogical.
F13: So, if people are going to start showing off. When are you going to have a large communal place for pets to get together?
GoPets: The feature we’re releasing very soon, on the public test server next month (I am not sure of the status of this now – Ed.), is shared spaces. Both pets will be in one place. I can give access for you to move stuff around or just view the space. A lot of people, right now, like having parties. They list a time on the forums and people send tons and tons of food and they put it all out for the pets. They’ll take screenshots and talk about it. With this shared space thing, it will be all of your pets together. But to start out, it’s just a two person thing. We’re taking little steps and rolling it out slowly.
F13: What about the graphical requirements now? I’ve been told you don’t even need a real graphics card at this point. How do you plan on ramping up as time goes by?
GoPets: Mainly it’s the US that drives that. Everyone in Korea has a super high speed internet and nobody is running Windows 98. We put a lot of effort into making this thing work on 98. Originally the whole thing was just on your desktop. There was no window. The pet would just walk around and play with your cursor and stuff. That was a very new and advanced DirectX technique. Didn’t work on 98 at all. What we found was as we moved away from that original concept and decided to sell items, and decorations and such… well, that paradigm doesn’t work very well. You’re covering up your whole screen anyway. So we dropped back to the windowed version. I checked a couple of weeks ago, and we’re only at about 8% Windows 98 users. We were getting a lot of pressure from our partner in the Philippines because people don’t own computers. People play at cafes. PC Cafés started getting very scared of Microsoft licensing plans and wanted to do all Windows 98 and just stay there. They also talked about going all Linux and how we’d have to make a Linux client so it could run in a PC Café…
F13: Wait, is it really that big a market that they can just say that?
GoPets: They have a Lot of Gamers. Take something like WoW though. Fifteen bucks a month for an American is very different from fifteen for a Thai user or Filipino user. If you want to price your service relatively the same, you have to make it five bucks a month for them. In Korea people are relatively wealthy, so they do own computers. In less developed countries, bandwidth and computers simply aren’t in homes. Like I said though, Windows 98 is dying off so maybe they’ve abandoned that.
F13: How does your pricing structure work across the territories?
GoPets: The price of items is fixed. Fifty gold shells is fifty gold shells. But the actual price of fifty gold shells is differently priced across the territories. Japanese users are fabulously wealthy though. They pay ridiculous amounts of money for everything and have a lot of money. In the Philippines it’s just not the same. The average Japanese user spends 20% more than a US user. This is in the number of gold shells. The premium users are about equal. Also, the price of a gold shell in Japan is the same as it is in the US…
..although we do have this one woman who lives in the Midwest and has spent almost $2500 since January. And that’s purely buying gifts for people. We let people buy Premium subscriptions as gifts for people at nine bucks. And that’s what she does. She’s just the most generous person on the face of the Earth.
F13: Don’t you feel obligated to bring her over for dinner or something?
GoPets: She paid for this booth, right?
/sound cuts out, pieces of a discussion about a charity system can be heard/
Our next big plan is to allow users to choose a charity and assign a percentage of their store sales to it. So 25% of their store sales can go to such a thing. We think it’s a great way of giving back and using the power of the community.
F13: Has anything in-game been a bit of controversy? Something religious or such?
GoPets: Well, the swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol. Right? But Americans don’t see that. And there was this Japanese user from beta who had a robe with a swastika on the back of it. It did spark a lot of comments. There were a lot of people going “look at Wikipedia,” etc. We keep an eye on that stuff. But it’s also part of the beauty of being global.
F13: Right, and you have a player creation tool, so the opportunity to be offensive is readily available.
GoPets: Yes, and sometimes you do get a user who wants to be funny. But really, we get the most profanity out of Asians who don’t realize it’s a big deal. Korean kids love dropping the f-bomb and think, well, it’s just another language. The divide is amazing. We went with our kids into a Hello Kitty store once [in Korea] and there was hardcore gangster rap playing. If you don’t speak the language… You simply can’t approve every item coming in and things like that. The beauty of large numbers is that a lot of people catch this stuff very quickly.
F13: Ok, let’s talk about the one thing that we’ve somehow managed to miss. Talk about the actual gameplay. Day to day and such.
GoPets: It’s a little bit of a Sims/Nintendogs thing. If you just look at the pet, it’s something to take care of, feed, there’s levels.
F13: Ok, why?
GoPets: That’s interesting to ask. There weren’t levels originally. What we found was that users were getting too confused. If you have lots of functions in your game, whether it’s a fantasy MMO or anything else and you just put a person there and say here are all your options, they just sit there.
F13: Which is exactly why I asked. The structure of your game, seems inverse to the nature of levels. Typically sure, the first few are tutorial levels, but for the most part it’s something of a score. The way to unlock all of the content. Yes, you learn to be versatile in the long run but…
GoPets: The levels are structured the way they are to give you all the functions of your pet. You only get one “spell” at level one. If you were given all twenty, you’d just be confused. We had a focus group where we watched people through a window. They made an account and the pet came onto their screen and they’d sit there looking at it. They didn’t know what it was doing. We’d ask them…
“So, what’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know”
“Well, do you want to buy some food for your pet?”
“Yea, I’ll do that!”
But it’s too scary with all the choices. The leveling system is to start you out with limited functionality. Once you’ve fed your pet, now you can do this and now this, etc.
F13: Can you choose to opt out of it?
GoPets: No. But every time you level you get shells. It’s actually been very well received. We had to ask though, what do we do with existing users? If we set them to level one, they can’t use all of their stuff and they’ve spent money on it. That’s not good. So we said, they’re already playing – let’s just make them level thirty – the max. New people who come in just start at level one… Instantly we got a bunch of users complaining that they were missing out on leveling up, I want to be level one! So we had to go back and add a reset option. It was a one-time thing.
F13: This reset to level one business… It’s shock and awe.
GoPets: There are a lot of people, even in WoW that hit 60 and just start over. The leveling up and questing is their favorite part of the game. Not the raiding.
F13: My little community of gamers, well, let’s just say that resetting to level one is just obscene.
GoPets: We thought so also! Sometimes people surprise you.
F13: The social kind might surprise you. The competitive kind, not so much.
GoPets: Well, if you don’t give the competitive kind a way to win, they’ll come up with one. They’ll pick their definition of “win” and run with it.
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At this point the conversation pretty much cuts out. We talked about fansites a bit and their user-base a bit more. Also touched on the gameplay, which is something you can find more about at the main website for GoPets. Take the plunge. It's not Toon Town and it's not World of Warcraft. It's something pretty unique, which is where I say...Discuss. And once again, thanks to Priya and Chris Bradfield for making as much time as they did for us.
[discuss]