New World Gaming: John Romero's Social Game Ravenwood Fair Now More Popular Than John Romero's Doom

Ravenwood Fair, an adorable social game designed in large part by John Romero, now has over 10 million monthly active players. That's quite fast growth, considering the game only launched late last October. That means John Romero's Ravenwood Fair is more popular than John Romero's groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom, which according to Wikipedia, took 2 years to amass 10 million players. It's a telling illustration of just how much the game industry and the market for games has changed in the 18 or so years since Doom launched, and another example of how Facebook integration can grow a game's userbase.

For me personally, it's a chance to be surprised: When I first started writing about games, I was sharply critical of Romero and Doom's influence on gaming. (A topic I even discussed with new Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble -- see below.) While Romero's former partner John Carmack continues basically remaking Doom multiple times on new platforms, and their lead competitor Cliff Blezinski keeps remaking variations of Unreal and Unreal Tournament (latest profound iteration: "a video game where you can blow out another man's ***-hole"), it's Romero who's innovating with new genres and expanding the audience for gaming. I never would have guessed that.

Oh yeah, Humble and I on Doom's influence on 3D gaming after the break:

Before my recent interview with Rod Humble, I noted that we have a mutual acquaintance in Doug Church, lead developer of early groundbreaking 3D games like Thief: The Dark Project and Ultima Underworld. (The latter influenced Philip Rosedale's early thoughts on what eventually became Second Life. When I was Linden Lab, I helped return that favor by hiring Doug to judge an early Second Life game design contest.) Humble and I chatted about Doug's influence on 3D gaming, and he referenced an article about how it was Ultima Underworld, not Romero/Carmack's Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, that was really the first true 3D game for the PC. [See Update below] Which is, as it happens, an article I wrote. Which means, of course, Rod Humble is the most brilliant observer ever.

Update, 11:35PM: I was just put in touch with John Romero, who pointed out that Catacomb 3-D, by Romero and Carmack and team, was released in November 1991, about six months before Ultima Underworld, and came with texture mapping and EGA graphics. However, he affirmed, Underworld was the first texture mapped game with full 3D including vertical axis movement. So which qualifies as the "first true 3D game" depends on your definition.

Comments

[ColeMarie Soleil]

Doom was the first game we had on our PC and now Ravenwood is the first game on FB I actually keep playing every day... hmmmm I wonder O,o XD

[Anon]

>Romero who's innovating with new genres and expanding the audience for gaming

Nothing in that sentence meant anything. Keep pushing the "I'm so smart about 'social' games thing", but there's no substance to it. Nintendo gave this "expanding the audience" speech (meaning "dumbing it down for old people") to its shareholders, you're just riding their coattails, perpetually.

[Robin]

This is a fairly meaningless observation (and a laughably misleading, click-baiting headline, of course).

The 10m MAU figure for Ravenwood Fair is a metric of the number of people (in an ecosystem of 500m users) *who have ever even clicked on an ad once* for a *free to play* game in a rolling 30 day period. Not installed, not played, but navigated to the facebook app landing page.

It's an impressive milestone (although without knowing how much has been spent on marketing the game in that four month period it's difficult to compare to other FB games), and lets us make some fairly safe bets on the game's ongoing viability, but this metric sets an extremely low bar for gauging 'popularity'.

When DOOM was launched (in 1993), it was distributed via shareware (on retail/mail order floppy discs and dialup BBSes) to a relatively tiny community of people with access to relatively high-end ($1k+) PCs. The 10m figure here is meaningless (and sourceless). With no way of 'phoning home', it's impossible to accurately gauge how many shareware, registered, pirated and ported (and the game was eventually ported to a LOT of other platforms) units of Doom were in the wild at any time after launch.

There are myriad examples you could have picked to illustrate how the landscape has changed since Doom came out two decades ago. The fact you can give something away faster and wider in the wake of broadband, social networking and PCs becoming ubiquitous is a weak one, to say the least.

[Hamlet Au]

"This is a fairly meaningless observation... It's an impressive milestone"

Interesting if perplexing juxtaposition of statements, Robin. Your other points are noted but I think ultimately pedantic. The Doom figure also refers to installs, not necessarily people actually playing the game:

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom

I'm a perfect example: I installed Doom on my first PC, only to discover it could barely run with my low level of RAM, so I reluctantly deleted it. Doubtless many in that 10 million were in a similar boat. However, since I'm not going to split hairs on that side, I'm not going to split hairs on the Ravenwood Fair figure either. Especially at the rate it's been growing. If it had *peaked* at 10 million you'd have a more valid point, but at current rates (it added about 250K MAU in the last week alone) it should have 15-20M MAU in the next few months. At which point it'd be hard to deny at least 10M are actually playing the game.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

I played Doom in one of Michigan Tech's labs in 1994. I kept thinking (while getting wasted by other players) "okay, make this about more than shooting people and we'll have something like the 3D environments Gibson keeps writing about."

I'm still waiting!

[Robin]

"Interesting if perplexing juxtaposition of statements, Robin."

The first refers to comparing the two stats (meaningless), the second to Ravenwood hitting 10m, which is notable in so far as many FB games top out lower.

The 10m installs figure for Doom is still a wild stab in the dark.

"At which point it'd be hard to deny at least 10M are actually playing the game." (etc.)

Well, a couple of fallacies at play here. Assuming that anything will continue to grow indefinitely at its current rate is wrong ("ice cream sales from Jan->Jun have increased 10x, so they'll have increased another 10x Jul->Dec") - there is a finite pool of users that most FB games appeal to.

Trying to figure out how many people are sticking around and playing after installing is tricky. The game has 1m+ DAUs which suggests a lot are. But hang on, didn't we just say we're *not* making any assumptions about the quality of the hits on the Doom side?

This is starting to seem a lot like mashing together two numbers that aren't directly comparable or even very concrete, purely to come up with a nice soundbite.

[Annon]

Yeah, this seems off to me. Doom was released in 1993 and required a semi-high end PC. This is also ignoring the fact that two million is about the minimum for a big name videogame to turn a profit these days. I'm pretty sure Call of Duty and Pokemon regularly pull those sorts of figures.

[Annon]

I should have checked my facts first. Call of Duty Black Ops didn't pull 2 million in the first month.

It pulled seven million in 24 hours.