So if you ever do any blogging, the end of the year always presents an interesting challenge.  That challenge is.. do I do a “year in review” post, or a “predictions for the upcoming year” post.  If you’re especially prolific, which I’m not, you do both.  The “year in review” posts can be fun because it’s always interesting to look back, see what was launched, which trends took hold that we didn’t expect, and to see how things panned out.  But they also require work, as you actually have to spend time going back through articles, checking dates, cross-referencing performance numbers against your claims (it’s all well and good to say that Champions Online tanked, but did it really?  I’d have to check my numbers.  Honestly I don’t think it did.  It just felt like it did), and in general do research.  Prediction posts, on the other hand, are much easier, We get to simply talk out of our butts about whatever we think is going to happen, and there’s almost no work involved at all, save putting our prophetic statements to paper.  Lazy blogger that I am.. you can guess which kind of post this is. 

Now, MMO whore that I am, you might expect me to talk about what I think is going to happen with our favorite MMO’s in 2010, and our most anticipated ones to come.  However, several other bloggers have already made those predictions, and by far and large I find them to be in agreement with my own.  If you would like to know the future of your favorite MMO, I suggest you start with Petter’s excellent prediction post at Don’t Fear the Mutant.  Not only is he making his own predictions, but he in turn links several of the other more notable ones.  Nicely done Petter!  As for me, I will save you the trouble of reading yet another post that says Cataclysm will launch and it will be a huge success.

But I spend a lot of time looking at the industry as a whole, and in 2009, I spent a lot of time watching and paying attention to the melding of two industries – social media and virtual worlds.   So instead of talking just about MMO’s, I’m going to go out on a limb and talk about some industry shifts that I think will come to pass in 2010.  And of course, as I often am in these sorts of things, will most likely be completely wrong.  Nevertheless, let’s press on!

Twitter Misses its Heyday

I started using Twitter almost exactly one year ago.  And I think we can all say, without a doubt, that 2009 was the year that Twitter exploded onto the mass consumption scene.  I remember being amused as television shows such as E.T. reported on the celebrity goings ons of Ashton and Mrs. Kutcher, and showing videos I had seen 9 hours before because I followed them on Twitter.  From following live tweets from the inauguration, to listening to people that were on the ferries that loaded passengers up from the crashed plane in the Hudson, you cannot overstate the profound impact twitter has had on the way news is discovered, reported on, and disseminated.  But there is already mounting evidence of a decline in twitter use.  I fully expect this trend to continue, as twitter becomes more commercialized in its use.  As marketers start paying celebrities for their tweets, as news aggregator sites continue to flood the tweet streams with RSS feed blasts, as twitter increasingly becomes the domain of people paid to be there, the value to the common man grows less and less, until they (you and I) just stop using it.  I think twitter had the power to change the world, and in many ways it already has.  But in 2010 it will become solely the purview of paid advertisers and marketers, and thus will completely lose the value it had for the millions of us that used it to communicate with people we otherwise would never be able to communicate with.  That’s not to say it will go away, but it will become a completely different beast, and for many of us, one that isn’t nearly as useful.

Facebook Games Pop

Without a doubt, 2009 saw the explosion of casual gaming through Facebook, and a corresponding explosion of the virtual goods market. Now I don’t think Facebook gaming is going away in 2010, but I do see it evolving, and becoming something less than what it is now.  Right now, Facebook is already groaning under the weight of game generated spam.  And while there are millions of people playing, there are also millions that aren’t, and those people are tired of wading through that experience.  Facebook first tried to clean this up a bit by restructuring their interface to split your stream up between “News Feed’ and “Life feed”, to at least get the spam to a different page.  But Facebook continues to publish changes to it’s API, and while the press spin from developers on this is initially positive, these changes make the viral nature of these games, upon which they thrive on to succeed, even more difficult to accomplish.  Zynga has already launched Farmville.com, a standalone portal for their popular game Farmville.  I think companies like Zynga and Playdom would like nothing more than to take their 350 million players and put them under their own umbrella, while using the Facebook Connect API to continue to farm Facebook users for their own sites.  In the meantime, I’d be very surprised if Facebook didn’t kill the golden goose utterly by doing something like creating a virtual currency in which all games must participate in, making it even harder to monopolize virtual dollars, and losing a percentage to facebook.  Casual games and virtual goods are certainly here to stay, but if you plan on jumping on the Facebook gravy train for game development this year, think very carefully.  Next year games under Facebook will be significantly different, and the gravy train just might be drying up if you’re not already there.

“MMO” Becomes Even Harder to Define

One thing you will see in 2010, is the melding of social media and virtual worlds to an even greater extent.  In 2009 we saw a real blurring of the lines as people talked about Facebook apps as “MMOs”, while MMO pundits decried them as silly kiddy games that weren’t “really” MMO’s.  In the meantime, Susan Wu and Ohai are making *real* MMO’s playable under Facebook, so now where do you draw the line!  In 2010 your traditional 3D virtual world MMO’s will become much more social media like in their implementation (Facebook & iPhone apps to access the auction house, Fanbook pages for guilds, etc), and your social media games will become much more MMO’like in their delivery.  And RPG is finally dropped out of the nomenclature for good, as increasingly fewer and fewer massively multiplayer games have anything to do with role playing or character development, and just become about getting together and killing things. 

Every MMO Game You Play will Incorporate Virtual Goods in Some Way

Make no mistake.  Virtual goods and microtransaction are here to stay.  Some games will use them almost exclusively for their billing model, but most will combine a “velvet rope subscription model” backed up by virtual goods to provide the revenue for their endeavors.  Wizard 101 got it right coming out of the gate, and Free Realms saw the light halfway through the year by changing it’s billing model to one of “start playing for free, pay if you want to continue”.  But all of these games also offer a way to buy items in game for real money, and they aren’t just vanity items either.  Even your most beloved, hard core games will incorporate virtual goods in one way or another, and if you’re building what we used to call MMO’s in 2010, you’d best make sure you do too.

And there you go, already way over word budget, so I should stop here and start making my own plans for 2010.  There’s a few predictions for how things will go in 2010, and as the old saying goes – only time will tell.  In the meantime, feel free to post up and tell me just how crazy I am!