Given the new Sci-Fi Channel TV show Who Wants To Be A Superhero?, I think that some sort of bar has finally been crossed.
I hereby propose the “who wants to be an MMO developer” reality TV show. Watch hilarious auditions as people try to code a base object class or get an angry customer to stop flaming on a message board! Observe the challenges as the contestants propose themes, build maps, and run holiday events in a special themed episode! Watch them struggle as they are forced to adapt unsuitable licenses! Vote for which worlds stay alive and which ones go away, as contestants get “written off.” All leading towards the big prize of a a viable commercially running world with the potential for cross-media exploitation!
Oh wait, this is what we already have.
52 Responses to “New reality show”
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gravitational center of the MMOG pundit universe yesterday. It’ll be interesting to see how the bloginati respond to the show and the attempt at making a MMO, as the story unfolds. The comments thus far are a mixture of best wishes and concern. Certainly, as an unproven
Yes, sometimes when you’re watching for the sidelines, the whole thing does take on its own aura of entertainment. Much like the Hollywood industry today, the spectacle of what happens to the people making the movies is equally as important as the movies themselves. What’s that Raph Koster guy doing now? Why did that Matt Firor guy really leave? Did you hear that John Romero guy is back?
That being said, I do really feel bad for the Auto Assault team. They had an innovative idea and seemed to put sufficient money behind it, but failed to actually get the design to gel together at the end of the process. I also feel bad for anyone in NC Austin or NetDevil who lost their jobs. But in the end, most of the failed MMOGs have been noble failures. Their creators don’t deserve derision or ridicule, but praise for making the effort and encouragement to try again with, perhaps, newly acquired wisdom.
FWIW, there’s already a series that’s live abouttrying to build and publish an MMO. It even features commentary from “Legendary Games Developer” John Romero. Seriously.
Raph, you need a better agent. Seriously.
Yikes, I had never seen that before. My advice to Damon is to go spend time with his kid. Seriously.
Adam – is there a link to that site where you can load the video in the background? It started trying to play and was all choppy for me. I’m on high speed, but not that fast!
Raph – do you liken forums where people talk about the games like that as more of an entertainment than anything else (for all involved)? I’m curious because I often wonder about the motives of the different people who end up in such places. Some are there because they love games and want to know every niggling detail; others want to make games and pontificate from the sidelines because it’s cheaper and less risky; others have some crazy agenda against companies and take every opportunity to stab at them; others try to be writers and use the forums to research and develop thoughts… and then there are guys like you who use them to sell books 😉
Oh wait, this is what we already have.
Without the editing to make the show actually worth watching. 😉
I’d pay real money just for a show about game forums. Not the meta-sites like F13 or GO, but rather, the WoW forums or SOE forums. The true entertainment, to me, is with the Conch-shell debate systems dominated by hardcore members who dominate the postcounts by hitting Refresh and harassing every new post that doesn’t confirm to their fascist worldview.
That I consider such places as more damaging to a game than not is an aside 🙂
Otherwise, I feel bad for those guys in that video, but that’s the labor-of-love thing. Maybe they won’t ever launch a game, but what they learned by trying is invaluable (path > goal sometimes). I just hope the one guy who lost all of his family thinks it was worth it years from now. At the very least they should be able to leverage their experience for gainful employ later.
Gah! Stupid Grimwell posting before I was done. 😛
Personally, I think that the various forums became entertainment about the time Lum’s site was read by more than a dozen or so people. Do you really think CorpNews or the old Waterthread were really about coming together to enjoy a fine discussion on the finer points of game development? Not really.
Now, there are some sites that do try to provide good information. Yours does a pretty good job. But, I think for the most part people joined the forum communities to get the latest gossip and complain about the latest “stupid developer”, knowing that said developer couldn’t do much to defend themselves or risk another Milo type snafu.
Not to say the forums are useless. But, there is a reason I spend less time reading them and more time reading other developer blogs, personally.
Wow, I had not even heard of that game. Nor have I heard of Games.net, for that matter. And while I have nothing against John (whom I sent a nice email the other day), they need a MMOG expert commenting on Kaos War, not John Romero. The guy totally comes off as a gamer who wanted to make a game, without having any concept of what he’s getting into. He’s accusing Aion of being a ripoff of his game, even though Aion has been in development for years. This looks like it has all the hallmarks of a disaster in the making.
By the way, where do these non-funded startups find artists to do all that great concept art for free? I know plenty of starving artists who can’t afford to just whip up a bunch of high-quality commissions unless they get paid.
Well it turns out there are more than just 2 episodes — they just released #5. It seems someone talked some sense into Damon; in later episodes he seems to be getting serious about getting funding and taking the time to do the game in a professional manner. Good luck to him. 🙂 John Romero also says that “85% of all MMOGs have broke even”, which is a statistic I’m sure is partially based on analysis of my own subscriber data. Another investment firm I know who looked at the same numebrs said it’s 75%. I’m not certain, because I don’t know exactly the development costs and operating costs for every MMOG out there, but it is true that the break-even rate is pretty good, much more so than a regular PC title, because even a “failed” MMOG gets a substantial monthly revenue stream that can eventually repay development costs and keep your studio operating to look for funding for your next project. You just don’t get that reliably with box sales. One thing that overlooks is the Boneyard — games like UXO, Wish, and Mythica that spent millions on development and then never came out — but any way you slice it, MMOGs are less risky from a business standpoint.
I agree with you Psychochild — forums are becoming things of the past as far as sources of instant information and whatnot. Blogs with RSS are serving that function for even more voices (forums were open to a point, blogs are open to all) and the comments direct to articles helps the group conversation just as much as forum links.
Thats a good question, Ive been looking for a decent web developer for a month now with no luck….and Im not even asking for any flash done either just regular xhtml/xml/html…
Im going to have to go with the “he needs to spend time with his family” (kid) sentiment. You just cant get those years back….
Bruce-
Is there a count of games that have spent over a threshold amount (say 2 to 5 million) but failed to launch? I would think some enterprising young grad student would have picked up on that as a thesis…..Game Development: “Lessons from the Boneyard?”
Psycho-
You forgot the last type: people who read forums/blogs/web sites to figure out wtf is going on…..:)
@Darniaq: “Conch-shell debate systems” Wunnerful. Dude, you earned your steak knives for that one.
Allen,
It’s hard to say because for some MMOGs, I don’t know how much was spent. But here’s a partial list of MMOGs that I’m sure got beyond the initial concept stage and probably spent $1 – $20 million yet failed to launch:
Battletech 3025
Ultima Online 2 (aka UWO: Origin)
Ultima X: Odyssey
True Fantasy Live Online
Wish
Mythic
Imperator
Dragon Empires
Sovereign
Might & Magic Online
Warhammer Online (Climax version)
Middle Earth Online (Sierra/Vivendi version)
Dungeons & Dragons Online (Infogrammes version)
Uru Live (but it’s coming back?)
Privateer Online (but how much was spent?)
Harry Potter Online (but how much was spent?)
Dune: Generations
Ultimate Baseball Online
Lost Continents
Fighting Legends
Midgard
Fallen Age
Higlander Online
Dark Zion
Kharduum
Neospace
Paradox Online
Shay Am
Dawn and Rune Conquest also failed to launch, but they seem more like hoaxes than serious attempts to make a MMOG. Games that were cancelled after release: 10six, Majestic, Motor City Online, Earth & Beyond, Asheron’s Call 2, Mimesis Online, and many other Asian titles.
Awesome, its good to have the instituional knowledge around here, easy to find current stuff, hard to find older data sometimes.
TYVM
Whoops, should have said Mythica, not Mythic. People are free to add any projects I’ve missed; I know there are others.
If we need to punch things up a bit more than just getting people “written off”, I propse using Woody Hearn of GU Comics’s Bug Zapper as the fate of the poor teams unable to hack it…
http://www.gucomics.com/archives/search.php (Search for The Zapper!)
Blogs- Good for reference
Forums- Good for discussion
Blogs are a one-way medium. This is in large part due to the inconsistency of the blog owners splitting off emerging conversations from the topics at hand (ie, Raph spawning a new entry just to talk about a point raised in this one).
RSS feeds are great if you just want to hear what someone has to say, to “keep up” as it were with the news from notable sources. But to talk about that stuff, and more specificaly, to talk about abstract concepts that transcend the topic of the hour, forums are still a superior medium in my opinion.
I split off the topic because otherwise, the vast majority of the blog’s readers would never see it, and I thought it was noteworthy. I don’t think most of them visit the comments, honestly.
Something that goes out in a post gets a minimum of 600 folks reading it, via feeds (well, getting it, anyway). A comment — well, the page where this thread is has only been visited 157 times. 🙂
Oh, and I agree forums are better for discussing something. I just don’t have a lot to discuss lately. 🙂
I never could figure out why half (or more) of all MMORPGs are even started, but after watching the video, I understand: “Leap before you look.”
Therefore, in the minds of most startups, the steps to making a MMORPG are:
1) Get an artist to create some cool concept artwork.
2) Create a web site using the concept art and lots of promises.
3) Hack the landscape and trees module into working. Add some screenshots to your web page so it looks like you’re making progress.
4) Hack a single character running around the world (through the landscape and trees, without collision detection). More screenshots.
5) Hack in a few monsters. Even more sceenshots.
6) Run out of money sometime between steps 3 and 6, never realizing that there are 50-100 steps left uncompleted. If you do manage to complete all 50-100 steps, all you have is a pale clone of EQ/WoW, not a superior product. You need another 50-100 steps to create something unique and salable.
Understood Raph 🙂 Ironically, I prefer conversations in comments on Blogs sometimes because they’re just more approachable than the registration-required forums (even knowing why that registration is critical).
Heh, I agree with all points. It seems to be a legacy of how things started, with a bunch of tinkerers taking their knowledge into a more interactive realm. Newbie developers just want to get in and start coding, like a young aspiring carpenter who thinks all projects start with the hammering of a nail.
I had trouble staying with this one. I dunno, the monkeys, the busy and confusing page, the Wild West ho-hum theme, something…I couldn’t sit still. I wished those young fellas well, but, hmm…
You know movies about other entertainment genres usually start to come out when that entertainment genre is failing, no?
I mean, just if you think about it, movies about vaudeville and producing Broadway shows began to come out in the 1930s and 1940s when vaudeville and Broadway was already on its way to being killed precisely because of Hollywood. There were all those poignant movies with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
And later, movies about novelists and writers, and let’s say, students doing the paper chase in law school came out after those fields began to wane, killed by TV, killed by kids getting MBAs instead.
The movies about people trying to have dance careers and make discos began to come out when that genre of music was already surpassed, when the clubs were closed already and their founders sent off to jail on coke charges and when people began to stay home and watch pron on the Internet and play video games.
So the movies about video games are too premature. Because video-making as an entertainment mode hasn’t peaked yet.
Oh.
Wait…
Yeah, sorry bout that but video games peaked in 1999 😉
(there are people who say it’s about to crash these days with the new console war, etc.)
The forum version of this already occurred, circa 2003’s “Waterthread Survivor”, and I was the first forum poster “voted off” (banned) from the MMO forums.
Ahh good times.
An MMOG rant show (whether reality based “Suvivor” like or “World’s biggest cat-ass”) would be shows I’d be interested in. I just hope G4 TV lets me host them, or at least compete to be first cast off again, or to wear that World’s best crown.
😉
I think someone should do it “Hell’s Kitchen” style… Raph, you up for mocking every creative thought and browbeating every poor soul on a set of teams? You would get such a chance to vent for every stupid management decision you’ve had handed down you you.
Hmm, about the “Creating Kaos” series, if you stick with it in episode 5 you can see part of the buisness plan, which involves spending 6 million dollars, so they do have some idea of what’s involved. Episode 6 looks like it’s hitting people up for cash and being told “no” a lot. At least of the Kaoswar website is telling the story, namely “Official Statement. We will so take care packages.” from a forum tread. Anyone live in San Francisco? Can you drop these guys off some warm soup maybe? 🙂
So, backtracking on the idea that they (he?) have some idea what the score is, there is an interview at Game Force. Two quotes from there:
Which just makes you stop to wonder if he’s ever stopped to wonder why Warcraft (his target to beat) doesn’t have these things? I’m not saying there isn’t another way, I’d love to see twitch in an MMO. But it all sounds like the start of some brainstorming ideas, not game design or virtual world design. Oh, a
Probably the best advice you’ve ever given. And Raph, you definitely would have made for a better guest host than Romero.
But more seriously, if “skill as a designer of MMORPG’s” was defined as having released 2 or more reasonable volume MMORPG’s … how many designers or companies could claim to be skilled?
For companies, I can think of two. NCSoft (Lineage I & II, perhaps Guildwars, City of Heroes / Villains). SOE for EQ I & II (imo, SWG wasn’t a success, but I guess that’s arguable). In both cases, a sequel is part of that success. Are there others that fit that definition?
I don’t know much about the people of the industry, but it seems to me that many of the great MMORPG’s of their day (at least North American MMORPG’s) were done by first time MMORPG teams / companies. UO, Everquest, WoW.
Absolutely, Damon and Kaos need funding to make it. But based on the industry’s batting average, it seems as likely that Kaos might provide good return on investment as any established company.
Perhaps it’s an indication of the early state of the industry. Or perhaps it’s an indication that MMORPG making is as much art and luck as making movies.
As luck would have it, Moorgard posted on this topic: http://www.moorgard.com/?p=69
>Yeah, sorry bout that but video games peaked in 1999
Grimwell, I’m not an expert on this, but what do you call the 6 million in WoW then, a dead cat bounce?
Hypothetically I call it 6 million possible subscribers, as opposed to players (recurring subscribers), controlling for thier measurement criteria lets assume 4.5 actuals, perhaps 2.0 of which are outside US, leaving 2.5 million conservativly, about 40% of which are waiting for something else to play. (1 million). I call 1 million potential players a decent size market share. The question is who will get them first…..
Once migration takes hold, a larger shift in players should occur, but thats total conjecture (even though you can see this trend in some published material). Whats not conjecture is that factually WOW does not HAVE 6 million recurring subscribers playing. Have they HAD 6 million customers? Yes by some measure, which to my knowledge isnt published
Will WOW have a 2 million sub base (primarily due to consumer growth) in 2 years? Likely. Will it still be THE game to play? Unlikely.
Can these kids capture some market share? I hope so, I like that they are trying, and everything is a learning process….
Now do MMO players like twitch based combat? Hmmm this question is the crux of the issue on determining market share for Kaos Wars…
How much of the “Luck” cited above is based on market timing for release? I think thats a more interesting question. A deeper understanding of game migration patterns and “churn” would elicit some metrics related to opprotune times to release a new title no?
Just some random thoughts…
Any MMOG *might* provide a good return on investment. The thing is, I know of several other projects that have a better chance than Kaos War that aren’t getting attention from investors. Is it because they don’t have their own reality series? Sheesh.
I’d be interested in hearing about those other projects and the metric you use to determine that these other projects have a better chance of success.
Among those I chat with, I know of no-one that is able to predict what will and what won’t be a success (not saying that you can’t, just that no one I know can).
Who knew Eve would do well? The fanboi of DNL had no idea it would flop (the beta testers might have). AO launched with a fresh concept, great graphics and music (for the day) and was destroyed by launch day problems. AC1 had it’s devoted following and AC2 lived a very short life. SWG, a game that many thought (rightly or wrongly) had the “Best IP EVAR” failed to reach what many believed was its potential. Ditto DDO.
Maybe someone should open a betting pool or futures market for MMORPG’s.
I don’t want to suggest that I believe Kaos will be a success. Their recipe of skill + twitch + graphics will make for a rather bland stew, for my tastes. That stew needs some veggies and meat and spice.
That said, they’ve got heart.
Hey, I get paid to consult to give you those metrics. I can’t give away all my knowledge for free. 🙂
But it’s probably the sorts of things you’d think of as obvious. Team experience, graphics, system requirements, target market (hardcore vs. casual), unique appeal, direct competition, any strong IP, etc. Of course, none of these are guarantees of success, and even a game without all of these things has a chance of doing well. It’s simply a matter of playing the probabilities. Any MMOG analyst worth their salt could have told you DnL was going to be a diaster.
A futures market for MMORPGs is a very good idea…
Yes its possible. Actually you can predictivly model trends and utilization of…well pretty much anything, to a point! What you cant control for is that pesky human propensity for random behavior (these are why Marketers and Consultants exist)…:) And here im not just talking consumers but businesses (meaning how they are run). Examples of each: Gas Prices, Viagra, M&M’s, Health Care Insurance, Well financed MMO’s!!!
The examples you gave were either a failure to understand the market, a failure to understand the consumer, or a failure to execute (on opprotunities) to appeal to users (unless I read wrong I think Raph covers this last in his book under “Fun” as it relates to game design).
Thus: Market, + Consumer, + Appeal = Success
I think Morgan or Bruce are better qualified to comment on the video game marketing mechanism specifically, because I’m a nublar and really only a data base geek. And people who operate in the Marketing space focus on controlling and understanding appeal/human behaviors (hopefully with data good data)
Ultimate Baseball Online failed to launch? What’s this, then? That’s not a rhetorical question, either.
Oh, I guess it DID finally launch. Does anyone play it? I know it was in development for years and years.
DnL was an easy one (any contact with a beta tester would have told you so). How about DDO? Or EVE. Or better still, let’s get some predictions for the future for posterity and future comparison. 😉
Sorry, but I’m still a doubter in anyone’s ability to predict the success of books, movies and MO’s.
No one can predict the success of stocks very well, either, and yet billions of dollars are made every year by people who try to do just that. Very few MMOGs actually come out, and the market is constantly changing, so it’s very hard to say if one person can predict better than the other when there are so many externalities. Another problem is that a great game on paper can still be screwed up in the final six months of development, even if the game had everything else going for it.
But you can doubt it all you want. The bottom line is there’s some investor being asked to invest millions of dollars in a MMOG. Chances are they know little about them. They feel much better getting the advice of a MMOG gamer who actually knows something about the market than, say, your grandmother. Even if statistically the grandmother may be right almost as often.
If you wait until beta to assess viability/ marketability of an MMOG, you’re too far into it.
Who’s to say Eve is a failure? Each company measures success to a different degree. Did WoW prove how attractive a certain style of MMOGing is for players? Yea! But then, Blizzard has a bunch of tools of sufficient type to guarantee a hit. Their parent company, their prior successes, that they generate foot traffic on conversation alone, their autonomy to test and test and test again and, of course, that they are good experience designers who know how to tweak convention to attract more people.
Who else has all of these? None spring to mind, though other companies share some or most traits. But by having these traits at all, particularly the business ones, these companies, like Blizzard/VUG, require larger numbers to fulfill their larger spend.
CCP does not. Linden Labs does not. Companies on this list may not. Would they turn away 6.6mil accounts? No way. Could their games support that though? Probably not. There’s massive expense to developing an infrastructure to handle those amounts, and we’ve bore witness to Blizzard’s own struggles there.
Would be interesting, but how do you take into consideration the many different needs of the companies, the decided slant towards one style of play and theme and the still-evolving business models behind the games?
>If you wait until beta to assess viability/ marketability of an MMOG,
>you’re too far into it.
Depends on who you are and what you hope to assess. I agree that anyone making a MMOG needs to try to answer these questions from the start, but beta is a good time to decide just HOW viable the product you’ve actually created is relative to your original goals. You can see how well developers have actually executed to date, how much money has been spent, and how the market has changed during development. One certainly has a better chance of predicting a product’s actual success during beta than when it’s still a design document.
>Would be interesting, but how do you take into consideration the many
>different needs of the companies, the decided slant towards one style of
>play and theme and the still-evolving business models behind the games?
Doesn’t matter. Whether your revenues are small or large, what matters is the relative increase (or decrease) in the perceived value of your company or product. Yes, not every company needs WoW-like numbers to turn a profit. Then again, Blizzard didn’t need them, either.
@SirBruce
I have no doubt that many investors seek the sage advice of outside consultants before handing over their wealth. I also have little doubt that experienced individuals are more likely to be funded.
My argument was only that, it seems that prior experience is not a clear indicator of future success. Several good MMOG’s have come from unknown entities. There are only a couple companies I can think of that have repeat successes.
I also have a sense that the real predictors of success might not be apparent from the outset of a project. (As you say, project problems in the last 6 months can end a game).
If real predictors cannot be known at the outset, there might be little point to selecting an experienced team to invest in. Perhaps an unknown group might be less likely to become grounded (as in, a ship on a rock) in what already is.
Is it just my limited awareness of the industry? Is it an artefact of having so little real to review in a young industry? Or is there some truth to it?
Aside: When I suggested a future’s market, I wasn’t thinking an actual market … more of a meta-game for MMOG watchers. Something akin to Blogshares, for example.
I think it’s just a matter of how much weight you want to give to each factor. I agree with you that people with little experience can still make great games; I’ve said as much to potential investors. They shouldn’t be spooked away from a project just because the lead designer has never made a game before. However, all other things being equal, I’d rather have an experienced MMOG designer than an experienced game designer, and I’d rather have an experienced game designer than someone with no experience at all.
Movies are a good analogy. Yes, the industry needs to keep taking chances on new directors and new producers, but if you’ve got a big project to make, you usually want to get someone with experienced at it, unless there are other compelling factors that point to someone new. Perhaps game development isn’t a mature enough industry that experience matters, but obviously most game companies continue to think so, or they wouldn’t preferentially hire employees with experience…
Anyway, I’m not particularly down on Kaos War because the guy is inexperienced… he obviously wised up pretty quickly and decided to get serious, so that’s a big plus. Still, I know developers with experience and a more compelling design than Kaos War who have trouble getting publishers/investors interested in their title. But the idea that Kaos War might get funded before some other pojects I know annoys me. (Nevertheless, I’m all for helping Kaos War get funded, too…)
In a way, there already is a futures market for MMORPGs. MMORPG.com’s user-ratings for unreleased MMORPGs is interesting to watch. It even shows speculative behavior. For example: When Vanguard switched from Microsoft to SOE, Vanguard’s rating plummeted because of fears about SOE interfering with the product. (Although I’d expect Microsoft to interfere more than SOE.)
I’d think a futures market would need much broader inputs. The fears of SOE’s involvement with VG seem, to me, directly related to a specific sub-group of very-interested veteran MMORPG players and those who hang on their every word. A broader sampling may have seen a different impact, particularly when other folks not emotionally tied to the game look at the situation from a business-rational point of view.
Well duh! And they have an even better chance of predicting when the game’s been out a year 🙂
My point was that the much money you plan to spend on a game is determined well before beta. There’s some things that can be adjusted at the beta stage, things like messaging, advertising budget and projected maintenance costs. These can (and have) lead to alternate revenue streams, like RMTing or ingame advertising. It’s a shame those have happened so late into the game. Maybe that’s a lack of real or relevant research. Maybe it was blind hope. Maybe it was managerial or project intertia. Whatever it is, serious money is lost because insights are gained too late.
The quality and value of an experienced team is not just about their past history or star power. Rather, and particularly in the case of a dynamic genre like this, it’s that plus their ability to adapt. Change favors the prepared mind, and some pay for that preparedness.
Change? In this industry? Where?
Ok, I’m being somewhat pig headed there. Of course there is change. But the establishment isn’t the one dishing it out in big helpings. The only two companies I can think of with repeat successes both served up a sequel (EQ II, Lineage II). WoW differs from DaOC only in minor ways.
It seems to me that its the newcomers that provide the change.
To get back to Raph’s America’s Top MMOG, perhaps there’s merit in this. The new junior teams have heart, lack preconceptions and sometimes have good new ideas. What these junior teams lack is money, management and organization. A contest run by one of the big game studios might actually draw out some great ideas and people that could then be prototyped under the guidance of the larger organization.
I know it’s been said that ideas aren’t worth pocket lint. But really, this industry needs some new designs. I’ve got disposable income itching to be spent on MMOG subscriptions. Currently, I only pay/play CoH/V, and rarely so. There’s just nothing that grabs my fancy. There hasn’t been in a long time. It looks like I’ll be waiting a while yet before anything arrives that *might* (but probably won’t) be a game for me. And I’m not the only constituent of this unserviced market segment.
— Mmogless and wandering.
In the process of delivering a game at all. Another quote for ya: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. There’s a lot that changes from a concept overview plan to launch, everything from what the game does to how it’s delivered to how it’s managed to the genre to management can be fluid. This is particularly true if you’ve got a tight schedule or budget requiring concurrent development of new engines, existing assets and integration with new or existing systems.
Experienced teams with prior success have not just managed the creation and success of a title. They’ve managed and adapted to every change that came up through development.
Outside of the game industry itself, investors have still not come to the realization that investing in games can be every bit as profitable as investing in movies. Frankly, I don’t think many investors get movies but when they can tell their friends that they played golf with Kevin Costner or had dinner with Angelina and Brad, that drives interest. The game industry gives nothing to the investor other than what’s in the business plan and that doesn’t help the ego of these ego-centric individuals that have millions to invest. Very few investors outside of the video game industry invest in video games.
…Somewhere at a charity party near you… “So Joe, you invested in a video game company… Come over here and let me introduce you to the guy that setup my tee time with [insert star here]. Buddy, investing in movies is where it’s at in the entertainment industry… What were you thinking.”
Money moves hands socially most of the time. No one gives you money if they don’t like you. Funny that it took a year stint doing financial planning for seniors to realize this. It’s incredibly hard to get someone to move a million dollars into your trust without first getting to know them or bridging the divide to trust in some other way. TV or other more widely accepted media helps reinforce trust. People on TV are afforded a naturally higher level of trust by strangers. I saw this when my company built Greatshot.com for Fuzzy Zoeller Productions. I appeared on a local TV show and in a couple of local newspapers at the time to talk about the game and it seemed like I was noticed more as a result. Too bad I didn’t yet know how to take advantage of that brief moment of notoriety. People think they know you by what they hear, read or see before actually meeting you and that can play to your advantage/disadvantage. Now, through this site and game.net, this Damon guy has built in “trust” with investors that have seen or heard about the show. What he’s doing with the webcast is social networking and that’s what it takes to make money move. Sure you have to have a plan, a design document, a vision for the game, a staff, good organizational capabilites, quality artists, bandwith and more but none of that matters a hill of beans unless you can get the process rolling through social networking. I’ve seen a fair share of completed games get left for dust because the good team that developed the game didn’t have the right “connections” to take it to the next level. I can only hope that Damon doesn’t run out of social networking options soon and he might have a chance to get it funded.
Truebit- See #29 above, your not alone Mmogless and wandering I’m thinking…
Maybe the biggest problem is that you have to get some experience in this and you need the chance to experiment. That is a contradiction in itself for MMORPGs it seems. But you know what? I really think companys who want to make mmorpgs and get fresh meat in with some experience should look into the Emulator scene. So many people that start shards and crash and often never walk back but several who go back and try again and again without financial pressure and a more clear dimension. Getting one set up with 20 people concurrent is not a MMORPG, but its a MORPG, increasing, improving to maybe 100 and you start to get a feel of what it takes – maybe? Seriously, Raph, do you think this comes at least close a bit to what making a mmorpg is? After all you need maper and worldbuilder and coder and scripter and GM’s and today in UO shards you often have even Anim makers and patcher for items.
I think those free playgrounds for smaller number of people are a good start to get an impression and learn. But maybe I’m utmost wrong.
For whatever it’s worth (and I hope this doesn’t offend you :)), my favorite part of this site is the comments. You’re an interesting writer, Raph, but what other people say about what you write is more interesting to me than just the writings themselves. 🙂
I miss the days of MUD-Dev, when I would write seekritly under a pseudonym. 😉
FYI – A new video is out: http://www.games.net/video/player.cfm?vId=101300
They cut out the best bit though, the meeting with a publisher, probably because the publisher didn’t wan’t to be filmed. Instead, they cycle through some concept art that looks much like the concept art of any other MMORPG… except with a new twist on a chainmail/platemail bikinni.
My track record has been pretty good so far, the only two I’ve been significantly wrong about were JumpGate (I still think that 3D0’s half-hearted marketing/distribution did them in) and WoW (I figured it for 500K. Whoops).
I got AO’s initial numbers about right, but couldn’t predict that their launch-phase technical difficulties would continue right up to Camelot’s launch. Nailed SB almost perfectly, SWG and TSO also.
But it was all gut feel and simplistic trend analysis, about as indicative of future accuracy as guessing the gender of children by how the woman’s belly looks.
–Dave