Drawn Swords to Double Draw

>The crossover appeal of traditional card and board games for MMO players

“To give you an example of the effectiveness of cross promoting or getting an MMO player to a card game site, for example, at C Y Foundation we run a tournament called the International E-Sports Festival. We held one in December last year in China. Contestants from seven countries participated, and we used MMO-type games like [World of ] Warcraft and Counter Strike.

“When you make it a big event and put it on a giant screen with a lot of spectators, there are a lot of people present with a very MMO-type mindset. What we did is put electronic Texas Hold’em poker tables in the event. We had two of them and we ran 30-minute tournaments. They were packed the entire two days of the event. So just from such small-scale marketing activities, we see strong potential for taking MMO players and bringing them over to the card game side.

Other things we have learned included the appeal of ‘PK’. ‘Player kill’ sounds harsh when you say it aloud, but when [MMO] players hear ‘PK’, they don’t translate it literally—they just think ‘head-to-head action’. So ‘PK’ has become a ubiquitous term in the online game industry.

“We’ve also put rankings in our entertainment platform. Rankings are a big part of MMO games. There are rankings for who’s opened the most treasure chests, who’s got the most ‘PKs’, who’s got the most honour points. These rankings are very dynamic. They change on a daily basis. It motivates players to try and take strong action in the game and try to be a top five or top ten player. We have rankings on who’s had the most tournaments, who’s got the most points.

“C Y Foundation has MMO games on our entertainment platform. We see this adding a lot of traffic to our platform, and complementing games such as chess and flash-based games and Web-based games. We see MMO players as the casual games players of the future.”