metagame

This has to be a devi­ous plot, right?

Since Duels of the Planeswalk­ers launched a week ago, I’ve donated a few bucks and more than a few hours to Wiz­ards of the Coast and Microsoft. Good friends and I joined in to play this lat­est dig­i­tal incar­na­tion of Magic: the Gath­er­ing. It’s not often that I take the chance to play CCGs any­more, despite the occa­sional work league or draft night. And just like I don’t have the focus to play an MMO like I once did, I lack the com­mit­ment to play enough card games or research the cur­rent metagame. Both steps would be required to become even an aver­age player on Magic Online. (Inter­est­ing idea there: how much do Magic and MMOs, along with their com­mu­ni­ties, have in com­mon? We’ve already seen the cross-overs.)

Any­way this “Magic-lite” is up my alley. It’s easy fun. But enough bla­tant adver­tis­ing for my friend Worth Wollpert. I have a the­ory about Duels. First, let’s con­sider what this prod­uct isn’t:

• Despite the quotes in that arti­cle, I don’t believe that this prod­uct is tar­geted at new play­ers. For one, m:tg is too damn com­plex and con­fus­ing for most of us to learn with­out some­one to teach it. The tuto­r­ial for Duels is mediocre at best. The men­tor fea­ture seems a good idea that’s unlikely to see any use. And the com­pli­cated game board has to be off-putting to any Joe or Jane shop­ping for some­thing just a lit­tle dif­fer­ent on XBL. A few peo­ple will pick up Duels and learn the game straight up, but my bet is that we’re talk­ing about a small audience.
• I also don’t believe the game is aimed at cur­rent play­ers. Why would Wiz­ards cre­ate com­pe­ti­tion for its prof­itable lineup? Duels will never have all the cards or com­plex­ity of the com­plete game. Con­sider the coun­ter­point of Magic Online, a game which by neces­sity mim­ics the incre­men­tal pur­chase busi­ness model of the card game. Duels may milk a lit­tle extra money, but it can’t rival what cur­rent play­ers spend on either the phys­i­cal card game or its dig­i­tal re-creation.
• Duels isn’t a big cash-grab. At least, not in itself. Even if Duels does well, say two hun­dred thou­sand down­loads, WotC’s cut of that would be pretty small once you fac­tor in the cut for Microsoft and the soft­ware devel­oper. Prob­a­bly less than a mil­lion dol­lars drop­ping to the bot­tom line, all told.

So Duels isn’t a big mon­ey­maker, and it isn’t tar­geted at new play­ers or cur­rent play­ers. What con­clu­sion have I led you to? My take is that Wiz­ards intended Duels to be a playable adver­tise­ment — a demo, if you will — aimed at lapsed play­ers. Give these lost souls a taste of this Magic-lite game, and remind them of the fun they have play­ing the game. Some of them will want some­thing more. Some­thing deeper. More deck con­struc­tion, more cus­tomiza­tion. And Wiz­ards will wel­come these peo­ple back with open arms.

Feel free to attribute this to my para­noid sub­jec­tive bias.