A Surge of nDreams: Aurora 1.5 and More
Information courtesy of Patrick O’Luanaigh, nDreams CEO; commentary provided by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
Let’s play a little word association.
If I throw out various words — “Cutthroats,” “Hellfire,” “Red Bull” and so forth — you can probably come up with some clever word associations. The faster you can come up with one, the better the subject in question has been in defining its brand identity.
Automotive manufacturers are genius at this. They distill the essence of a car’s ethos and brand down to very short mental snippets, and people choose accordingly. A Ferrari is a passionate car. A Mercedes is a luxurious car. A BMW is a driver’s car. A Porsche is a clockwork car. An Aston is a gentleman’s car. A Citroën is a blancmange’s car. And so forth.
With Home developers, it’s much the same. The best ones have established a brand identity, not just an assortment of cool products. LOOT, for instance, is like an Apple store: everything in there is just impossibly hip and cool and shiny and there are trendy young people from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog who talk about Darfur and The Colbert Report while listening to the Dave Matthews Band. When you buy a LOOT commodity, you are buying something so ridiculously high-tech — but in a fun, innocuous way — that you don’t mind that you don’t understand more than ten percent of how it works because you are stupid. You just want the bragging rights. Owning LOOT stuff is the secret handshake that gets you into the Cool Kids Club. The LOOT Active Camera? Yeah, I’ve got one of those. Yeah, I’m shooting some stuff right now. Nah, it’s in editing. You know how that is. It’ll be out soon.
And Lockwood? Lockwood’s the developer you go to when you don’t want to look like a chav any longer. Lockwood’s pulled off the amazing trick of being just a little bit better at everything. Better at clothes, better at games, better at estates. Owning Lockwood commodities sends a specific message: I care enough about being in Home that I’ve actually spent a few bucks. And Lockwood also has a remarkable gift for introducing stuff that’s always slightly ahead of the curve; rather than chasing trends from nine months ago, they’re creating stuff that we knew we wanted but didn’t think of yet to ask for.
nDreams, however, has pulled off something no other developer in Home can lay claim to, at least with me: they can be summed up in exactly one word.
Surreal.
Think about it. Think of everydamnthing you’ve ever seen or bought from nDreams. It’s surreal. I’m fairly certain that if Magritte were alive today, he’d be a concept artist for nDreams. Because he’d fit right in.
Come on. This is the company that gave you Thing In A Box as a personal companion. This is the company that gave you tentacles as a furniture item. This is the company that gave you Musicality and Ansada Fone as personal apartments.
This is the company that gave you Xi.
Everything about nDreams is surreal. And that’s what makes them so much fun: in virtual reality, where the normal rules of the universe can be rewritten, it seems like nDreams is really the only development house in Home that wants to take your concept of what you think “normal” is and mash it up with a healthy dollop of Lewis Carroll and Terry Gilliam.
Which brings us to Aurora.
A lot of the major third-party developers in Home have their own public showcases. Lockwood has the Showcase and the Sodium Hub. LOOT has the Space Station. Hellfire Games has Novus Prime. And nDreams has Aurora.
It’s pretty hard to top the Aurora formula. It’s a beautiful setting, with a backstory, mini-games, prizes to win and more. It does pretty much everything a public space in Home should do. Most importantly, it has that certain subtle something — an intangible effect upon people that makes them want to stick around. And considering more than 900,000 unique players have gone through Aurora so far, I’d say I’m not alone in that assessment.
One thing that Aurora periodically receives are updates — and these are quite important. If there’s one thing that keeps bringing people back to your attraction — be it a game, a space or something else — it’s investing in it after it’s released to keep it updated and introducing new content.
So let’s see the latest for Aurora:
From Patrick O’Luanaigh, nDreams CEO: “Players can now level up in Orbrunner faster with the new Auroralite Contraption which is available to purchase, helping you collect the many rewards available from the Orbrunner game. Visitors can now also win free items with the OMG Trap-O-Matic – set it whenever you’re in Aurora, and see if it has caught something next time you visit (rewards include a unique companion and a custom apartment). If you have patience and you set the trap each time you enter Aurora, you’ll eventually win all the items, but if you’re impatient, you can get the beautiful Five Leaf Clover Seat to make you even luckier! Plus check out a brand new Teller of Tales story. And what on Earth is being built behind the huge tent?”
This is absolutely ingenious. A while back, we asked whether or not developers need to include rewards to get Home citizens to explore and return to a space. While there are exceptions to this — Cutthroats, for instance, would be just insanely fun even without any rewards — the general answer seems to be that rewards work. They keep your key metrics up: by getting more avatars returning to your space, you’ve got more eyeballs on your wares, which leads to higher aggregate sales. And in a social game where only a relatively small percentage of the userbase actually spends any money, this is important.
Which brings us to the next cool announcement from Mr. O’Luanaigh: “We’ve just started our biggest ever sale in Home which will run until 25th April in both SCEE and SCEA (there are sales happening in Japan/Asia separately). The reductions range from 30% to 50% off, and include five of our most successful apartments, clothing bundles and party packs.”
Sales and value packs work. They just do. In macroeconomics, it’s referred to as a discount rate; a discount rate of zero means you’ll never get to it, whereas a discount rate of one means you’re on it immediately. And the way the species is wired, the discount rate drops very, very quickly from one to zero. Hence why sales are such a useful tool for creating urgency: they move the mental discount rate much closer to one than zero.
The big question, of course, is whether or not nDreams commodities will show up on Sony’s top-ten list for the month of April. Since those lists are compiled by number of units sold (instead of total sales volume), it will be interesting to see if the sale, coupled with a new Aurora update, produces the desired and targeted numbers nDreams is undoubtedly looking for.
I can say this, though: you’ll definitely find me at Aurora, checking it all out. And with so many attractions in Home vying for the consumer’s attention these days, just getting the user to your space is half the battle won right there.
It’s time to step through the looking glass once more. Time to return to Aurora.
April 3rd, 2012 by NorseGamer | 2 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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Yes, Surrealistic is definitely a good word to describe the aurora world. Every time i enter that space there are a few artists that pop into mind. The first time I browsed through their stores and saw the clock virtual item for the orb boost i thought of Dali. 1.4 brought us the long limbed elephants in the background, and if the clocks didn’t bring Dali to mind, the elephants should have slapped you with the reference. I can certainly see Magrite, but the balloons and the tree houses, the bright colors and the whimsy of the place also bring a contemporary to mind -- Daniel Merriam (it’s impossible to not love his work)You’d have to be blind to not see Frank Baum there as well, I almost expected the path to be made of yellow bricks. The steampunk always brings to mind Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, and the creepy vibe is even a little Tim Burton and Mark Ryden. The floating islands is something we have been beaten over the head with in Hayao Miyazaki’s work and yet Aurora brings it all together in a cohesive way that makes it iconic of nDreams. Updating their rewards and leveling system has been the reason i keep going back. When I am able to log on regularly I make it a point to visit that area daily. I am very excited about this update and I know ill be purchasing at least that Auroralite contraption.
I haven’t been a super active user of Aurora myself. I went there today to see what the whole new thing was about and did the orb run to add a few points to my score of the day. Aurora adds new content on a regular basis to keep their clients base buying and interested in coming back. This new idea of a trap is very smart. It allows you to set your trap once every 24 hours which makes you come back to see what if anything you have caught. This will bring back those who have maxed out their orb earning potential. Smart marketing used to make customers return on a regular basis. You go NDreams!