Darniaq has seen the future of MMOs
(Visited 12487 times) Game talk
Mar 082006
According to him, anyway. Worth reading. I think I agree with most everything he says.
Besides, who can quarrel with this?
The future of MMOGs does not reside in different death penalties and faster leveling speeds in my opinion.
It resides in penguins.
I’ve been on the penguin bandwagon for a while now, after all.
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Change that title to a future of MMO’s, and I’d agree.
I’m not saying that this is a possible future; I do believe we will see many more games of this type within the next few years, both casual and diverse, although not as obviously done, of course. Acclaim is importing a few from Asia, and Lycos has their own gem, titled ‘Albatross18’ (a casual golf ‘MMO’, I’ll have a review up this weekend, if anyone is curious about it). It’s a wave of the future, but it won’t be dominating the genre, only broadening it.
It’s too soon to be crying death to diku. At the very least, the high fantasy metaphor (esp those targeted to the 18+ year olds) will be around for a long time to come. Even if the underlying design changes (and that, I agree, has to and will be changing as well). So I suppose you could say diku will die, but it will not be replaced in a fit of casual and varied games.
Oh, and ‘Club Penguin’ did not at first pass conjure the image to mind of a group of penguins hanging out and being cool. Maybe I am a product of this violent videogame generation after all.
I think he has this right.
One thing that consistently amazes me is that when I go back to MMOs I used to play daily in the past, they’re mind-bogglingly difficult to play, after just a year away.
I logged back into Shadowbane during their free welcome-back period, and couldn’t even figure out how to get out of the town I was in. When I finally accomplished this enormous task, I was promptly ganked.
I logged back into DAOC during their free welcome-back period, and spent so much time battling with my interface that I failed to get out and battle any monsters. Worse, I was terribly afraid that my level 50 character would go out and die horribly to some itty bitty monster, because I couldn’t remember how to do anything. I certainly wasn’t ready to go back out and RvR, because I was fairly certain I’d be killed faster than I could say, “Oh, I had the wrong hotkey panel up.”
Some of these games are like learning a new music instrument. Most folks really don’t have time for that.
Actually, I’m wrong. I can remember how to play my bass clarinet much better than I can remember how to play DAOC. š
Penguin comment is awesome. I wish I could say more, but I’m diverting attention from group project crunch time. =P
Tess wrote:
Some of these games are like learning a new music instrument. Most folks really donāt have time for that.
Of course, that’s the double-whammy developers have to deal with. If you don’t add anything, the game gets stale for your current subscribers. If you add stuff, the game gets more complicated for people coming back. On the other hand, other types of changes work the opposite way: ripping out a clunky UI and adding in a new one is going to potentially alienate your existing audience. M59 put in rebindable keys, and the hardcore complained endlessly about how it would ruin the game. We put in an option to allow people to play with the old keybindings with one checkmark just to keep them from open revolt.
So, the question becomes: will we get enough new players to make up for the people we alienate? Most of the time it’s not certain, so you you see the conservatism that we have all come to know and loathe.
You are right š It’s funny too, but when folks were dissecting Raph’s “A Theory of Fun”, I repeatedly had to remind them that it wasn’t called “*The* Theory of fun”. You’d think I’d have remembered that š
The full “vision” is really two parts:
1. Where I think more players will go.
2. Where I think more money will go.
There will always be a place in the world for fantasy-themed Diku-inspired games. However, I also don’t personally feel this is where the majority of future growth for the genre will come from.
In a sense, I liken things to the board games vs Video Games industry. There’ll always be a place for both types of games. But it’s the latter, and all of its permutations across what’s becoming a platform-independent entertainment industry, where the money is going, and therefore where the opportunities for future Garriots, Kosters and Carmacks may be.
This is very true. One of the problems is that these games are being made by hardcore gamers, presumably for hardcore gamers. Simplifying things as well as being aware that newer gamers don’t understand the terms of modern day games, or maybe even of computers in general, would go a long ways. For instance, on movement, wouldn’t it be alot better if every time you loogged in there was a screen that could be instantly dropped, that gave the basic instructions to what your character could do, movement, handling items in the game, equipping items, using items? Wouln’t it be better to not assume a player knows what “remapping keys” means? The intimidation factor should not be missed.
As far as the topic in general, I agree with it, but also have some reservations as far as MMORPGs go. There has to be a cohesiveness if a game is going to make it as a RPG world. Just about every complaint, outside of technical ones, is related to the lack of cohesion in the world.
Grinding, where’s the rest of the game world?
Leveled zones, and the splitting up of guilds because of this.
PvP, and the limits placed on it to protect players.
Levelled trade skills, “I’m useless now”.
Items, “why can’t I use that?” “Why can’t I even pick that up?”
“The world is pretty, but it’s just a backdrop.”
“I can tame a dragon, why can’t I tame an (X)?”
“Does cooking do anything?”
What Raph has been doing here lately ties right into this. If a game about healing can be interesting, if a game about cooking can be interesting, wouldn’t an MMORPG be much better if it included this stuff in with the basic hack and slash?
So many meta-game ideas can enhance a MMORPG in so many ways, but my point is the cohesiveness here. I don’t want to see the industry lose sight of the “living world” desired by so many gamers.
Always I go back to UO, since this was the game that ,as far as I know, included many little meta-games in such a cohesive fashion that their world was so much more interesting than anything since. Even in their developement stage, posters were asking for meta-games. Chess, dice, fishing, and so many commonly asked for things. I want to point out that writting books is a big one. (Hey, I love what in-game books can do for a game world.) And so was the rare items collecting, and trading.
So much more can be added, from enhancing the meta-games such as Raph has been proposing, to adding new ones.
It was these meta-games that saved UO’s arse. First from rampant PKing and now from the “game for all players” (protecting game play for reds and forcing others to participate or pay dearly) but mostly from the inflationary power of items system they’ve gone with.
One of WoWs attractions, I believe, is it’s own meta games. This might have also been true for SWG, but other problems have really hurt that game (and yes, it’s a levelling game and hurt because of it). But in WoW, they have effectively tied resource gathering, fishing, etc. in a cohesive fashion, with the rest of their game. Unfortunately, they forgot the levelling thing, and what it does to cohesion for players.
(Just a note, it’s not really the fact of levelling, it’s the extremes of power differential. But we all know this. However, class based games that sprout the levelling system have their own issues in limiting players in what they can do in game, with the character they are playing. Even that doesn’t have to be that way.)
My whole point is the cohesiveness. Meta-games can feel like a natural part of the game world, or they can feel like feature sets that have nothing else to do with the game world. If it’s the later, the game is missing out on that “living world” feel.
So I suddenly had this somewhat disturbing thought pop into my mind. Will hardcore gamers be the best designers for the games of the future? If audience and capital move to more casual, less niche market games, will hardcore gamers have a hard time designing for people with a casual gaming mindset? Technology is making it easier and easier for someone with little understanding of software design to make games. GameMaker 6 is a good example of this. I love it, myself, because I don’t like dealing with programming.
Or will it be that we will only be the creators of the virtual universes these “mini-games” exist in? And the casual players will use the tools we have given them through these universes to design the really fun part? Heck, do most studios now even really develop “games?”
“Hardcore Gamers” aren’t nessecerily people who should be designing games anyways. Just because you understand one game dynamic that you like doesn’t mean you can handle the task of creating an entire game, even of the dynamic they enjoy. And can they design for casual gamers? Maybe but most gamers, no matter how strong their opinions are probably not qualified to design any games, particularly ones they can’t understand.
Technology empowers people to do things more easily, yes. GENERALLY the easier and more all encompassing the tool set, the less power it has in terms of creating new and original content. It makes it easier to slug parts together to make a re-hashed wrapper for some creative content, definitely… but does it empower the aspiring designer to create a new masterpiece? I feel that’s a big ‘no’. Learning niche tools without learning the foundation technology and theory upon which they are built doesn’t help you improve or broaden your skills, it encourages enforcing existing paradigms that there may be room for… but probably won’t turn any heads as it can be devoid of anything interesting.
Secondlife + Club Penguine/Animal Crossing/The Sims is a good dynamic for a game. It’s definitely broader in terms of whom it could appeal to in terms of an audience… We’ve kind of neglected to mention Puzzle Pirates though. Now, for some reason Puzzle Pirates really appears to older housewives… they just dig it. What does puzzle pirates offer? Minigames and customization wrapped up in a community/commerce wrapper. Mmmm… mmm… profits. While nowhere near as sucessful as say WoW or really any major MMO game, it’s filling enough peoples needs to sustain themselves, which is impressive and heartening. Danc over at Lost Garden wrote an excellent article about learning from the ‘Touring Band’ business model and mentions this in detail.
It MIGHT just be the ultimate wrapper in terms of appeal… customization of one’s avatar and “personal space” with a high volume of activities that reward players and allows for user designed content is something that if packaged and marketed correctly could dwarf WoW in terms of volume of players. It would be a fairly difficult thing to tackle, but it’s definitely within the realm of posibility and at the point when a significant quantity of people over 45 have experience playing and understanding the dynamics of 3D content… that will be an intersting time as everyone will have the *BASIC* skills required to play such a game… that is a pretty long way off… and will likely see many a MMO come and go by that time… maybe even see some reach some sort of uber-dominance. But if nothing else, it definitely goes to show us all that games have alot more growing pains to experience before they get to that plateau. I’m excited for it.
Good point about Puzzle Pirates!
I agree with this. One thing I found compelling about Club Penguin though was this factor. It provided a number of disparate mini-game activities that were truly different while tying it all together with traditional socioeconomic conditions like common “persistent” (zone-based) world, a central currency, and most often having these activities feature cooperation and competition with other people. That those activities didn’t involve sociopathic behavior I found rather refreshing. More importantly though, each activity was unique.
UO seemed to have started this way, with dart and chess boards in taverns and the player-directed content and economy. I guess I missed that era though because when I started (with the launch of Renaissance), the mini-game activities just weren’t used much.
I’ve often felt that was because they had no relevance to the core experience of UO. In Club Penguin though, they do (as money faucets and group points).
(as an aside, I’m not talking up Club Penguin as a panacea, since I think it’s a title I’ll be hard-pressed to remember a year from now š I just think what it shows is a compelling model for emulation).
There’s a definite split between people who design games for themselves to play and those who design games for others to play. Maybe it’s the hobbiest-goes-pro thing versus the book-learned academic. Regardless, I think think it just requires that developers take into account more than their own personal preferences. This happens already to a fair degree, but it’s hit or miss in my opinion.
Re: The hardcore gamer thing.
I think that as long as ‘hardcore’ games aren’t the only kinds of games the designer likes, they’ll be fine. For instance, Pokemon, Zuma, Bejeweled, etc. These are all games that aren’t really my ‘thing’, I don’t play them regularly. But I’ve played them before, and I’ve definately had fun and been able to identify the ‘why’ of fun (in my own mind) while doing so. So I think there’s two pitfalls. The first one is thinking that your favorite type of game is the type that should be made (the hardcore gamer problem you bring up), and the second one being the risk that you think a game is fun just because it has good design, but you yourself don’t find it fun (or can’t indentify the fun). With how iterative the whole development process is, I can’t imagine that sort of game being a success.
(Out of random curiosity, does anyone know of any AAA title where as part of a post-mortem the lead developer(s) have stated that they don’t find the game fun? I imagine not, since the PR in doing so wouldn’t be so great, but I wonder if it’s been done).
So basically I feel that yes, the developers need to think their product is fun. But I think that as long as they keep an open mind, it isn’t that hard to see the fun that exists. Basically, ‘fun’ is abstract, but skilled developers can identify it in a wide cross-section of games (and I’d go as far as to say the really good ones can identify it well enough that they can communicate it to others).
A bit off topic here but I was just too happy to read this on “the Internet”. Whatever the topic, most of the disagreements on anything comes frome things like “the” and “a”.
Ah… If only I had the time to write a book about this. A book that nobody would read because of the “wrong title” of course…
Yeah and no. Are MMORPG’s as they exist niche? Naw. A genre really. Is “core” gaming niche versus casual gaming? Not really. Also, while casual gaming is growing quickly there’s still a lot more money being made on “core” gaming.
Also, games/clubs like Penguin Club have to compete with games.yahoo.com, The Zone and Pogo. I think the world-like aspects of the latter are already more than enough for a lot of the more casual players. Ladders, chatting and some game rooms is really all they need and they won’t see a draw to more worldy stuff like a common currency or an in-game economy. Eventually things might move more that way but today’s casual audience is pretty happy just playing Spades in a game room with some friends.
I definitely think that MMORPG’s will get more polished up for the mainstream although “mainstream” will still mean a gamer “crowd” in a lot/most cases. To me this means an empahsis on simple, accessible gameplay with very regular rewards. I expect to see a continued emphasis on levels and grinds. I expect lots of “alone together” play. I don’t expect to see complex combat systems, skill systems, narratives or any sort of player created content as this will only confuse a more mainstream audience. Players might have houses, sure, but their houses will have as simple a UI as possible — finish a quest and trophy will magically appear on your shelf. Such worlds will thrive on chatting and achievement. I doubt I’ll actually play many if any of these worlds.
The important question is: is this good for us, the hardcore (we’re all hardcore compared to your average casual gamer)? I obviously don’t think so.
While MMOGs are my favorite genre by far, I do consider them rather niche when compared to the online games market in general. Without going too much into it, the casual online game space (full of diversionary titles, as opposed to the immersive ones of core) generates more money than a good percentage of the entire MMOG genre in the U.S.
Titles like Puzzle Pirates attempt to span that, bringing diversional games into a large MMO-like experience. The one thing that bothered me about the title though is that the metaphor of the minigames didn’t really match the objectives. For example, a lite-Bejeweled game that even looked like Bejeweled doesn’t come off as a good metaphor for bilging š
Club Penguins offers those casual online games in a more neatly wrapped package.
To me, a great opportunity may be for a company that can wrap minigames with a self-consistent metaphor, creating minigames that more directly relate to their activities. They would also have a direct outcome on the experience, as Puzzle Pirates does.
Maybe it’s like that old adventure/puzzler 7th Guest. While that was pretty intense, the placement of the puzzles in the larger environment made a twisted sort of sense š
Estimates I have read indicate that the casual games industry has a revenue of somewhere between $80-$400 million per year (it’s very hard to get good numbers — I’d put it at probably around $200 million). One million NA WoW accounts alone account for about $180 million/year (not to mention ~$500 million just for selling boxes). Every WoW account makes about the same money as one casual game sells for and the money recurs monthly. You have to keep in mind that conversion rates for casual titles are around 1%. That means that for every 100 people that download a game like Bejeweled, only 1 actually buys it. The non-MMORPG, non-casual portal, PC gaming market is declining but has been estimated at $600 million/year.
That’s not even getting into consoles generate the majority of revenue from the “hardcore” market. Generally speaking I don’t think that the casual market is yet close to competing with hardcore games in terms of revenue. The casual games industry is and has been growing. How much longer it will continue to do so is anyone’s guess, but for the time being casual game revenue is only a small part of the entire game industry. The casual market certainly isn’t any less “niche” than MMORPG’s at least in terms of revenue.
…
Generally I agree that there are opportunities for puzzle-based MMORPG’s. But Puzzle Pirates already does exist and while its successful it’s also not making nearly the money that WoW is.
I think it’s being optimistic to think that most current casual players actually want more worldy metaphors. Mostly I think that what they want is already fairly well supplied by the sites I mentioned: Pogo, The Zone, Yahoo! Games, etc. My mother plays an hour or two of hearts a night, online. She knows almost all the players she plays with and chats a fair amount with them. However the notion of giving her some currency to collect or something would just seem bizarre to her. She’s there to socialize and play a game. She doesn’t need a 3d environment for that or worldy dependencies which take time away from playing Hearts. I think she’s pretty typical for that audience. Mostly they just want a very simple game room where they can play with some friends and anything more than that is just confusing and not really needed.
Actually, the PC market without casual portal games or MMORPG’s is estimated at $956 million. I read the chart I was looking at wrong.
I was going to clarify, but ya posted your followup, so I think we’re on the same page š
To your point, I agree the numbers on a monthly basis heavily favor MMOGs. But there’s a few things to consider:
– The factors to delivering a single MMOG exclude a lot of companies. Costs, dev team, live team, live costs. Meanwhile, casual games are more traditional “fire and forget”, solid-state experiences designed for fun with a Pause switch, stuff far more companies can easily get into. And the margins collected by the developer are far higher because live support by those who made the game is, well, effectively nil.
– The average console owner may own as many as 4 titles for that system. Ever. GTA is for Consoles what The Sims series is for PC: glowing exceptions to a general rule of far less volume. This is one reason so many are interested in the explosive growth of Xbox Live Arcade (and a main reason why the Xbox 360 is not metallic black with other guy-targeted overtones š ). It’s why GameTap and Viiv are bringing long-tailed games to the living room. Everyone wants a piece of the casual game market. Because:
– By some reports, there are 50 million online gamers in the U.S. Meanwhile, the total number of subscriptions in MMOGs in the U.S. is estimated to be, with WoW, maybe 5% of that. The amount of people interested in those games, which are way cheaper and orders of magnitude less complex, far and away exceeds those interested in these ultra complex time-intensive beasts. While the money favors MMOGs, the people is a much larger incentive, given all factors.
In my opinion, of course š
Yea, I’d never really say that personally. I’m thinking more along the lines of the hybrid player, the one that may exist between the pure Pogo player and the casual WoW one (not those nightly Battleground nuts š ). They could lean one way or the other.
Side 1- A game browser like some already use but set in a world where the games are placed throughout in some categorical fashion that makes sense.
Side 2- A game in which activities are completely different but metaphorically self-consistent with the world at large. ATITD may be a good example here, amp’d up a bit.
Maybe š
That a curious group to target. So it seems like you’re talking about non-hardcore gamers that are also not currently playing MMO’s in a casual capacity, but also excluding gamers who are playing portal/casual games. If this is a correct analysis, do you envision that these people are already gamers, if so, what sort of gamer are they?
The market I would envision would be a combination of the MMO players who are in fact sick of the diku and ‘hardcore’ dominated MMO’s, and want a place to play that is their own (ie. the ‘casual MMO’er). There doesn’t currently exist a good game for this kind of player, if they want to be able to play and consume all the content without being second string to a group of players who can play more than they can (and with more drive).
The thing is, with the amount of diverse gameplay you’re suggesting, I don’t actually see you getting away with a product that costs less to produce than the current offerings. I could see a large number of small innovative and easy to access titles doing some good business (ie. Urban Dead, Kingdom of Loathing, etc), only with better game design. However if you want an offering like ATITD amp’d up, or something like Club Penguin (that title still makes me chuckle a bit) for the masses, it’s going to take some funding. I would put my money on a game that is casual accessible, but that also appeals to the current batch of casual gamers. It will be something that they can tell their friends about, and has a low barrier for entry.
I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing the first NA foray in to the sub-genre we’re discussing with SoE’s next offering (the one with the alternative business model, not the DC one), and if that assumption is correct, I’m looking forward to seeing how it is received.
I’d like to believe SOE’s next innovative business offering is going to include new game innovations too. But it’s been hard to be hopeful because so far all the talk has been about the business end.
I pretty much agree with this:
What I’m looking at though is a decoupling of “casual” and “hardcore” from just being positions on a power curve. I find that the be the most alienating aspect of the Diku-inspired titles. People don’t need constant reminders that they’ll never get to certain levels without changing their entire life station š
I agree such a game would require some heavy funding though. It’s a shame in some ways though. I feel like the scores of millions that WoW reportedly cost could have gone into making a game with more appreciable breadth. Instead, they made and tested-forever a content complete game we were all playing back in 2000. That is the price of success I guess. It’s hard to get that much money unless you can guarantee returns, and the way to do that before sales begin is by pointing to, and then tweaking/emulating, prior successes.
Long ago I hoped the NWN quilt worlds would do this though. I thought it was possible. As a game design tool, NWN 1 is fairly robust. Yet the D&D overtones seem to limit the true breadth of creative possibility. It doesn’t [i]need[/i] to be D&D. Meanwhile, SL is about as impressive a collaberative programmable CAD environment as is currently possible, but even that space is heavily populated by emulation of life rather than new creative outlets. It’s a great game design tool, and there’s a lot more possible than just Tringo knockoffs.
Since then, I’ve been thinking it’s not really about the money itself, but the talent that money can attract. Truly good game designers deserve the cash for it, and like Free Agents, they are capable of chasing it. Yet that money, as noted above, comes with strings that sometimes stifle the very creativity and existentialist thinking that made them good talents in the first place.
Ah the paradoxes š
I don’t think things really need to have that much relevance to the core of a game. In UO, chess and darts fit into the game nicely. But monopoly wouldn’t. You’re right though, these mini-games weren’t used a whole lot, and they never were really, comparatively speaking. But they were used alot more than when you started. The PKers had driven many of the gamers who enjoyed the more casual play like this out. But that was indirectly. In a more direct fashion, griefers would always try to ruin events of this nature or any other. Damn, what I wouldn’t give for a game like this where player cities could empower player guards to protect players from grief by abusing mechanics.
Hmm. There’s a rather large distance between those two ideas. You can’t appeal to a presumed 50 million member audience and then start talking about what is actually a very small subset of those players — those who are less casual than the majority of the casual market but more casual than the majority of the MMORPG market and also willing to spend money on a game. Not even getting in to how many of those 50 million have only ever played a couple of games (how many of those only play online poker, for example?), the ~1% conversion rates on a lot of casual titles show that only a very small fraction of those players are actually willing to give money for games right now. Overall revenue is the best way to tell us what parts of the market are actually willing to spend money on the games they play. Money is very important as it is what funds innovation and development of these worlds. Casual games are cheap to build but they’re also very small in scope compared to an MMORPG. I’m willing to bet Pogo put several million into their online service. Adding and developing a robust server environment, creating and commissioning art for some sort of immersive world, obtaining and balancing together 5-10 casual games (along with art for all of those games) — you’re budget has increased significantly beyond a simple Bejeweled clone.
Why isn’t Puzzle Pirates the next WoW? It’s a quite solid puzzle-based casual MMORPG as far as what I’ve seen from playing it and yet it seems to be the niche product, not WoW (mmorpgcharts.com has it at 12,600 players as of last year at this time, 1/80th of WoW). Part of that is just advertising, granted, but advertising takes money and right now it seems that there’s a lot more revenue coming from the “core” market. I have seen ads for Puzzle Pirates while surfing a number of sites and they did do a boxed version — for a casual style game that’s pretty exceptional. Certainly a game can go more casual than Puzzle Pirates, but I’m not sure there is more and not less market that way (you’re now running into gamers for whom Pogo is as much as they want).
I do think that there are some opportunities in this arena to do more than Puzzle Pirates. I agree with the general sentimate that we are likely to see increasingly accessible games and that eventually such online casual online worlds will be more viable (the first step will be making a larger share of the market comfortable spending disposable income on games and using their credit card online). I’m certainly not convinced, however, that “core” MMORPG’s will account for anything less than a solid majority of the market revenue anytime soon (in the next decade) and thus I don’t think the “niche” moniker is going to have much standing for the time being.
[…] March 10, 2006Blogged Out: Fishing for the FutureWelcome to ‘Blogged Out’, the news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week we talk about the future, the present, the giant robot games, and then the future again. The Wrong Tail: MMO blogger Darniaq gets stuck into a favourite topic of the online bloggers: what is the future of the MMO? It’s not, he argues, a continuation of the themes set out by World Of Warcraft. There’s been a few people saying that, and they might even be right. Darniaq sees the WoW model as rather stagnant, which is a fair analysis, given that other games were playing the same riff nearly ten years ago. Change, rolling improvements and remixes, are the only way to go. As Darniaq explains, each new MMO needs something unique to keep it fresh if it is to be worth paying at all. This suggests that any new MMO needs to keep itself /constantly/ refreshed: “What’s the next step? Make a world and populate it with mini-games. Effectively wrap a public chat and commerce space around hundreds of truly different activities (raiding instances in WoW is not playing different games. Molten Core and Zul’Gurrub are shades of the same experience). Allow people to come together with their winnings to do other things like buy and decorate houses while continually feeding the economy with new experiences and new overall features. Have so many activities that players decide to solo or group based on that activity, and [not -ed.] some arbitrary rule designed years before launch.” So where’s Animal Crossing Online, then? Sounds like a fair enough demand to me… Additionally, there are also some fine comments made on Raph Koster’s thread about the words of Darniaq. The Koster community comments thread is extensive and covers a lot of familiar terrain. Some of that terrain is perhaps a little too familiar. ‘Amaranthar’ observes: “Always I go back to UO, since this was the game that, as far as I know, included many little meta-games in such a cohesive fashion that their world was so much more interesting than anything since. Even in their development stage, posters were asking for meta-games. Chess, dice, fishing, and so many commonly asked for things. I want to point out that writing books is a big one. (Hey, I love what in-game books can do for a game world.) And so was the rare items collecting, and trading.” So does that mean we’re just chasing our tail? Is the future of MMOs actually Ultima Online? […]
Well now, what but the Superbowl can actually appeal to 50 million people at once? š I was mostly talking about a more non-defined hybrid-like gray area between the rather niche immersion seekers and the very broad and flighty diversion seeking ones. The money trail is one avenue to follow of course, but again, WoW is not the sort of example most companies can use as something that would guide their own success. They’d be thinking more modestly, like most MMOG developers, having to define their position more from uniqueness than attempting to capitalize through derivation.
Even if WoW is beaten by some company that comes along and does yet another Diku but gets 12 million subscriptions as a result, that just raises the bar beyond the stratosphere and into the upper troposhere. Heck, I’d really wonder how many developer/publishers could even hit what EQ1 had at its height in this age where gamers don’t accept unplayably buggy conditions as much as we used to. It’s good to try, but so few can, their forced by the market itself into lateral thinking.
That’s where I got my vision really. Not Club Penguin or Habbo or VMK or Puzzle Pirates as experiences per se, but rather, their differences at a holistic level from the standard AAA model. Like I said, I could see it being hard to remember the name Club Penguin in six months, being a forgettable title. At the same time though, I also think the average gamer, whether online or offline, is not looking for a singular experience they play perpetually anyway. I can’t remember who said it over at Terra Nova, but someone pointed to a general perception that the average length of an MMO account was about six months, and that’s declining in inverse proportion to the growth of the genre. And, that’s six months in a genre where games are going on their sixth year.
Radically changed though they may be, how many brand new players are even bothering to look at such titles as UO or EQ these days? I gotta imagine they are veteran havens, which is good of course. But that’s an ever declining amount, given the options that have come, and basic life stage changes.
It seems MMOGers jump games more often than they stick with them, by a fair margin. The cost for keeping a game live is one thing. But one needs to add the costs for keeping the game relevant to that as well. EQ1’s ten expansions is an impressive feat really, fairly unique. But, I gotta wonder for how much longer companies will even try to make a perpetual world. This seems to be a phenom some are reporting as happening in Japan, short-run mega-hyped MMOGs that lose most of their players to new mega-hyped ones quarterly. Makes me wonder if that’ll happen here.
I could be way wrong š I just think to be competitive in this space, one can no longer rely on the same old formula, and that the distances away from that formula are evidenced in a lot more offerings than just CD-installed mega-patched single-experience PSWs.
[…] First of all, there’s the casuals. These people are happily plugging away at Bejeweled and Zuma. Right now there is no real MMO space for them, a fact I’m sure they could care less about. There’s a few good discussions going on already with regards to casual MMO space, so I’m going to go ahead and disregard them for the purpose of this discussion (links: Darniaq and Raph). […]