Adam Searle » Blog

I was asked recently what the latest stats were on Ninjaman, and had to respond that honestly we haven’t checked in a long time. Thought it would be a fun thing to do! The game continues to receive a fairly steady flow of plays - the hype dropoff is long over, and if anything recently the number of plays has been increasing.

Here’s the summary since we launched it:
-Ninjaman plays: 24.36 million plays
-Samurai sam plays: 10 million recorded at Miniclip.com until their tracking system went down (long time ago). We estimate a further 10 million plays
-Ninjaman has been recorded to have virally spread to 4353 websites. Hot damn!

I’ve always been thrilled with the success we received with Ninjaman online, but at least now I can update the ‘how many plays figure’ to 34 million known, 44 million estimated! I must thank MochiBot for providing a tremendous flash tracking system for this, that we picked up from day 1.

Makes me wonder what it would have been like had we launched with MochiAds (if that was available back in Jan 2006) - which inserts ads into the preloading phase of the game, similar to AdSense. It’s too late to integrate that into the game now and reach many of the websites that are hosting the game, as the viral distribution to web hosts is largely over (or at last we think).

I always enjoyed the work we did on Ninjaman, and have been proud of how its done and the reception it gets when I show it around. I think it largely eclipses the work I’ve been doing since then (freelance web dev contracting and some other gaming stuff), on several points: the sheer audience it received, my enjoyment in making it, perfectionism in what we strove for, and the non-commercial drive behind it. Not to say that I haven’t enjoyed what I’ve done since; not at all; but its seeing stats like this and remembering back to then that really motivates me to do another fun online game, that isn’t so commercially driven as my recent work.

It is, after all, the year of soul!

I just received a call from a nice Telstra rep ‘informing’ me that because my home line is provided by Optus Cable (along with broadband), we can only use that line for Optus ADSL2 products, and miss out on Telstras ADSL2 offerings.

Cry me a river.

The offer was to “upgrade” me to a Telstra landline, which would open up the door to Telstra ADSL products now that my area has been ADSL2 enabled. Incidentally this would open the door to far better value-for-money providers than Telstra for ADSL2 products, but I guess that wasn’t on his script to tell me.

I have a long memory of the broadband struggle this country has endured because of Telstra. I remember seeing a preview of Telstra cable before its retail launch, and yes being amazed at the speed. The offer then was $95/month for 100mb. I remember thinking if only I had that.. Fastforward to the launch of a rival in the broadband space with Optus in 2000 and things became great. Optus embraced a system called “netstat” which calculated the average users download usage (netstat 1.0), and allowed you to do 10 times that (netstat 10.0 - beyond this you were given the boot). The beauty of this system was that as our collective usage online grew, the average usage grew, and hence our ‘download limit’ grew. It was a system of beauty. At the time, this enabled ~20gb/month of transfer. Around the same time, broadband ‘pioneer’ Telstra slapped their users with a 3gb cap. Great value for money.

When Telstra introduced ADSL on their landlines, they finally enabled wide broadband competition. Except with a handicap, in that the line fees ISPs had to pay telstra were so exhorbant other ISPs had to sell plans at a loss in order to compete with offerings from ‘Telstra retail’. When Telstra introduced a $30 ADSL plan with a microscopic data allowance (and insane excess fees), other providers couldn’t even get a line for that price, let alone their own costs added to that.

Really, they have not changed. Telstra recently proposed a FTTN (fibre to the node) plan which would involve Telstra laying fibre between its exchanges, and offering a product roughly similar to ADSL2 (over copper lines, anyhow) to the end user. Catch was, they would only implement it if no one else could use their lines. This highlights Australias number one challenge with broadband - we cannot have Telstra holding both the infrastructure card AND selling a retail product while answering to shareholders. There is no win win in this situation. Either Telstra wholesale charge a fortune to other ISPs for line access, driving up the value of Telstra retails plans and hence delivering a better earnings report for investors, or Telstra wholesale does a good thing for the country and makes the broadband space more competitive, most likely driving down sales at Telstra retail, and hence disappointing investors. The two simply dont work together.

The government needs to split Telstra in half - one side that can answer to shareholders with retail products, and the other that can push our countrys’ broadband infrastructure forward. Sell off the retail side as an independant company and watch it sink when it has to pay full rates for line access. We are so far behind in the broadband race globally its a sham, perpetuated by none other than Telstra. If we get a new government, I really hope they do something about this. Something has to untie the infrastructure lock and start investing in it, so that we can start moving forward.

Club Penguin, the wildly popular kids-orientated virtual community recently sold to Disney for a whopping US$350 million. What a success story for virtual communities!

A bit of background. A little while back I did some research into club penguin for my work at Subversive Games. It is what is known as a virtual community - a place people go to, create an account, and walk around and play games with other users. The game is entirely penguin themed, complete with their little waddle as they move across the snow. Club Penguin is free to join and play in, however they sell upgraded accounts that let you do more in the world (you wear special clothes that identifies you as a paying member too) for a small monthly fee. I personally know a couple of kids who are into the world of club Penguin, and its pretty big with them.

Why is this all interesting? Well, people have being saying that virtual communities will be the ‘next big thing’, the sort of next step from mass multiplayer online games (MMO’s) - your warcrafts, etc. Virtual communities really take the facebook/myspace world and meld it into an interactive, walk-around-with-my-avatar experience. The community is huge too - 700,000 users. I have a feeling that a few years from now, rather than being contracted to design websites and games for the web, we’ll be looking at media portals and games for existence *inside* the virtual community programs.

Club Penguin is particularly interesting to me for two reasons. One, its front end is built in flash. For flash it’s pretty ‘big’ in terms of users and technically what it provides. Being made in flash, it runs in the browser, which means no extra programs have to be installed - great for kids, and for logging in anywhere you go. Also means its platform agnostic; being a mac advocate, I hate being cut out of the loop with windows only products. Secondly, its built on the backend Smartfox server, which is something I happen to be researching soon. Smartfox provides all the heavy lifting with a multiuser framework. Looking forward to getting into that down the track.

Just a few little things to get through first…

In the latest edition of the CoFA Magazine there is a half page write up of me. Having only graduated a year and a half ago, it puts things into perspective. I’m still very much involved around my old campus - teaching in multimedia, and working on the CoFA Annual project as their advisor/technical director. I still feel like a part of me belongs there.

Thanks to Naomi for the write up! To share with everyone, I scanned the article.. hit the thumbnail below to see in its full glory.