Will cloud gaming kill social games?
“Cloud gaming could completely change how the video games industry works,” [EEDAR CEO Greg Short] said. “Why would you play FarmVille when you can play World of Warcraft on the same machine?”
via EEDAR: Cloud gaming could kill Farmville | Games Industry | MCV.
No, Greg. Let’s not confuse a delivery mechanism for an audience. A huge part of the audience that likes social games doesn’t like World of Warcraft. I know this is shocking and bizarre to hear, so let me reiterate it. They don’t like the games you do.
It is true that cloud gaming offers higher levels of presentation right now. What it doesn’t offer is the right sort of content for the mass market audience.
Could you deliver a social game that has broad appeal via cloud gaming service? Sure. You could have done it via a Playstation 3 too. But nobody did it because of the audience mismatch. And the cloud gaming services’ prime selling point is that they deliver high-end graphics.
We are already seeing social gaming move onto mobile devices that have plenty of power to deliver fancier graphics. And when we do, we see that it isn’t the graphics that make the difference. It’s the gameplay. And the fact is that overall, and granting that there is plenty of evolution to come, social games have the right gameplay for the mass market.
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It’s not the graphics that make World of Warcraft so compelling either. For years now, WoW has had last generation and worse graphics yet players flock to the game. Many newer MMOs have been released with far prettier graphics without making a serious dent in the number of subscribers Blizzard maintains for WoW. Greg Short doesn’t get it based on that quote.
Cloud gaming might impact delivery of content in a similar way that CDN’s have changed the way large scale web sites function but I can’t see cloud gaming taking over the world. In all my years following the game industry and participating in game development, one thing I’ve come to understand is that no single technology ever “Takes over the world”. Older technologies that were once mainstream become increasingly niche based markets in an ever expanding game market. MMOs didn’t destroy the single player game. The Wii controllers didn’t destroy the game pad controller. Social games didn’t destroy the MMO and neither will cloud gaming destroy the social game. At best, the market will grow to accommodate cloud gaming and at worst, the market will reject it and we’ll view cloud gaming as a fad in 5 years.
whew… i saw the headline in rss and went “seriously, raph?” thinking it was your opinion and not a quote. came by to go “uh… no, raph!” but, luckily, it appears that was unwarranted.
i guess i shoulda known we’d agree, eh?
m3mnoch.
I heard a similar assumption when I interviewed the OnLive folks, a belief that somehow improving the delivery method of high end 3D games is going to increase the market, despite the lack of any evidence the market is moving in that direction.
While I agree that it’s not a Farmville killer, server-side render with thin client/no client streaming kills some big obstacles for the audience that would like to play a AAA MMO, but didn’t have the gear, or the patience to download, or the wherewithal to buy a retail box.
Would meeting that demand be enough to push an MMO into the “mass market”? That remains to be seen. But I suspect it would be a huge boost in markets where high-end gaming rigs are rare (but video streaming is ubiquitous).
And I still maintain that it’d be an interesting experiment to build a Farmville-like minigame into an existing MMO and market it to Farmville players as a gateway into a larger world. There’s no reason you can’t include ‘social game’ content as part of an MMO without altering the fundamental structure and conventions of the genre, and no reason that players who are there just for the ‘social game’ have to jump on the leveling treadmill.
I know some people who still play UO this way — they chat and water their plants and don’t much worry about not being GM anything.
What markets are those? It’d have to be places with phenomenal network infrastructure, but where either consoles or well-performing PCs are absent or limited. That describes where exactly? Decently performing PCs are common in the countries with great network infrastructure in Asia, though consoles are rarer. Commodity PC hardware is now easily capable of pretty high end graphics in China, for example.
I actually think UO and SWG and Eve already have this. The barrier is actually the world, it’s in the way of getting to the social game piece.
I’m neither a fan of the current generation of what are called “social games” nor am I convinced of the promised value of “cloud gaming.” (I am, however, a big fan of what are referred to as “quotation marks.”)
That said, I think it is conceivable for a game to be based upon a style of play that appeals to fans of social gaming while delivering higher production values that could benefit from the cloud gaming platform.
But it isn’t going to be World of Warcraft, nor is this game just going to magically spring to life on its own. Just because you can deliver higher production values doesn’t mean you will attract a broader audience–unless it directly enhances the play of the game, you’re just offering a shinier coat of paint.
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@Yukon,
Arguably, the modifications to the fundamental structure of adventure games needed to support the non-adventuring “crafters” (indicating the broader class of more social play, including interior decorators, shopkeeps, etc.) in the MMO titles of the last decade and a half profoundly influenced and altered their evolution at the core level.
Which, erm, I would argue, so.
*ahem* I’d expect the integration of social gaming to cause (perhaps not require, but cause) fundamental alterations to structure and convention. It would be a natural consequence of fundamental alterations to player expectations regarding games.
Pinochle players cannot understand why solitaire or blackjack exist.
That is why casinos flourish and retirement homes live on borrowed time.
Did you ever play Poker at a casino?
I…almost dread the possible replies to this.
Do you see a way to get the world in sync with social gaming?
I think the larger point is that the historical association of games with their platforms will diminish when cloud-based, platform-agnostic distribution becomes the dominant method of delivering media. Gaikai has already demonstrated that World of Warcraft can be played on Facebook. Board games, PlayStation games, Facebook games—these and similar identities will be less meaningful when consumers are faced with the option of playing Red Dead Redemption or My Vineyard on the same device. The virtual store shelves will be stocked with thoroughly disparate titles that have never been in direct competition. I don’t think the games themselves will disappear. I think what differentiates market segments will be stronger than ever and we will see more product categories as a result. There will be social games; we just won’t see them the same way anymore.
Many office environments, which are also a common place to access social networks and tend crops. Cloud gaming essentially improves the availability of content-heavy games (Crysis on the iPad, WoW at work, etc), and I’ve found it very useful to accept that concept in general, without picking nits about where exactly it does or does not make sense.
As you say, the real question is if there’s demand for content-heavy games in the social space. Social games seem to thrive on short bursts of casual, uninvolved play, where the amount of content is very limited. But there’s a lot of open debate about more complex “Social Games 2.0”, the availability of better technology via Unity or mobile phones, and about MMO’s as platforms, so it’s clear that the shape of social gaming will likely change a lot in the following years.
To describe that transformation as “being killed” is stupid, and to consider Cloud Gaming Providers the perpetrators of that murder is incredibly biased.
If we accept UO as the first “massive” MMO, the social element has been central to the experience from the inception of the genre, to the extent that any MMO without crafting, fishing, trade and/or other significant non-combat elements feels unbearably shallow.
That’s why I don’t believe that expanding and encouraging the social game side of MMOs need to change the essential gameplay of players that enjoy adventuring. The social elements already exist. The balance may shift, but I believe the end result would be more game for everybody.
It’s in UO and SWG largely because YOU deliberately put it there, and in other titles because they are following in your footsteps.
I question whether the obstacles to social gaming in an MMO world are inherently structural, or if they’re driven primarily by developer and player misconceptions. There’s a status hierarchy in our heads where PvPer>Adventurer>Non-combatant, and it’s a hard sell that somebody who tends bar all day might be as deserving of reward and recognition as the bloody barbarian atop a mountain of severed heads.
But from a structural standpoint, how much trouble would it be to have a button up front that says, “Quickstart: Farmer” that skips all the weird stats and statistics, spends a bit of time in the paperdoll dressup game (customize character), and drops you on your own garden plot somewhere to play the farm minigame?
You never have to leave the farm region if all you want to do is farm… it’s Farmburg 3D, maybe with an optional town market minigame. Want to know what happens to all that food? The town also include the Happy Chef 3D minigame. Need some more exotic ingredients? You can buy harpy eggs from wandering adventurers… or if you’d rather gather them yourself, the game will then introduce you (gently) to the combat/adventure class system.
You lead the ones who want to be led to the larger game, but you don’t try to push the ones who are perfectly happy baking bread and having tea parties. More importantly, you take pains to let them know they’re just as valued and important to the world as the hardest of the hardcore swordswingers.
Maybe that’s not a viable approach, I don’t know. But I believe integrating “social gamers” into a VW with traditional MMO conventions CAN be done with the right marketing and new player experience, and I belive it would be to the benefit of players and the industry to do it.
Throughout the developing world, cellular and wireless deployment is booming, but the hardware to tap into those networks is mostly things like $99 hand-crank portables. That’s not a market segment with a lot of disposable income, but if you’re clever enough to harness their IP creation potential in exchange for game time (and other compensation), you’ve got a commodity you can sell to their more affluent peers in the developed world for liquid value.
The specifics of how to accomplish that are beyond my expertise. But if I were giving it serious consideration, I’d probably start by studying the computing dynamics of the rich and poor in someplace like Brazil, perhaps in the context of a user-generated world like Second Life.
Social in “social game” is shorthand for the noun social network which is used as an adjective; social is not an adjective that describes a noun. Social games are social-network games. This is a genre, a platform-defined category. You cannot force UO, SWG, or whatever into the category by treating social as an adjective because the market does not see social games that way.
Who cares what anything is called? Who cares what they are doing right now? If they are potential customers, shouldn’t that be something to look at?
Oh, sure, some people may think that these social gamers are not interested. But then, were we not all going “wow” when EQ had 450k subs? You know, before WoW came out?
@Amaranthar,
I remember a parody site once reproducing a headline with an addendum, such that it read thus:
“EverQuest reaches 250,000 subscribers. 200,000 people glance at credit card bill and say ‘Damn, I thought I canceled that’.”
😛
Well… what things are called matters if you’re trying to shift public perception. If MMO=WoW in the mind of the general public, then it takes some marketing muscle to position your MMO as something different than WoW (this applies even if you happen to be WoW).
If you can position yourself as a “social MMO”, with aspects of both social networking games and MMOs, you can cross markets — even if those social aspects were there all along but have been under-utilized or ignored by your core gamer audience.
My belief is that MMOs can survive and thrive by actively courting non-combatant social players, and the necessary changes are less about design than about attitude. “Cloud gaming” removes some of the technical barriers — downloading the client, having the hardware to run it — but the challenge is drawing in the social gamer and providing them with enough accessible fun that they want to stay, set up shop and invite all their friends.
@Peter S.
Well, he had a thing against level grinds, back then, he did.
[…] when you can play World of Warcraft on the same machine?” Metaplace cofounder Raph Koster responded on his blog, “A huge part of the audience that likes social games doesn’t like World of […]
@Yukon,
There’s a lot of regular MMO gamers who have been waiting for more social game play too.
Crafters and trades people, players who want to make a mark through their game play running caravans and as ship captains, players who want to establish temples, players who want to run cities, and they all want more meaning to it all.
If a game can show what they are building, and how it works, and give these MMOers as well as Farmville types a deeper experience that pushes their buttons, and then adds the adventure and thrill of a fictional world that other gamers want, tie it all together with meaning and do it well, they can be the next big thing.
Players have been waiting for it. They’ve been calling for it. They’ve shown they now have a lack of interest in the clones.
All the industry people have to do is use their heads. I don’t know why this is so hard. But I sense they are so locked into their circle that they won’t. I sense it’ll be someone who is in between in making games. Someone who can see the massive potential from “social gaming” and the desires of MMO players, and can put it all together. I sense it’ll start with a simpler game first. But it will have to be marketed right to catch the gamers we’re talking about. And from there, it will grow into a full fledged world with all the adventure, and all the meaning, and all the diversity, that will make for an entirely new experience.
Designers keep grabbing for the ring. I think they’re missing it because they think of crafting and social minigames as something you do with an alt or during the downtime between dungeon raids.
They just need to understand that if you’ve got a good solid minigame for farming, blacksmithing, or underwater basketweaving, then some people will log in just to socialize and enjoy the minigame, they will never see or care about the 27th level of your new epic raid dungeon, and that’s okay, this is something to be cherished and encouraged.
If you can integrate their efforts into the broader game economy without spoiling their fun (or the economy), that’s gravy.
But instead we get things like the UO fishing system. It needed some work to make it less of a mindless button mash, but instead of a more nuanced system to explore the joys of fishing, we got… mandatory monster bashing and chests full of adventuring gear.
Or asteroid mining in EVE Online. I love prospecting, and whatever game I’m playing, if there’s something to be discovered and extracted, I’ll be there. But in EVE, if I want to go after anything other than common resources, I’m pushed into the PvP zones. I’m no longer playing the prospector game, I’m playing the sneak around game or the protection racket game or the “Surprise! My mining ship is really an armor tanking pirate killer!” game. And while those games all have their own quirky charms, they’re not the game I wanted to play.
I’m not saying these are bad designs, but they’re very deliberately created with the “everybody wants an adventure” mentality. Let go of that, see that not everybody wants “hack hack pew pew” (or only wants it on their own terms when they choose it), and you open up your world to a host of people who’d never otherwise give it a second look.
Yukon, agreed. Crafts and every other aspect should not be treated as just mini games. Everything should integrate. That gives it all meaning.
Keep PvP mostly restricted to warfare, and let those who join military orders, militia, or armies do the fighting. Keep everyone else out of it as much as possible. I say that because I think there needs to be some means of control for select groups that requires a “right” to PvP anyone who breaks down their control, in specific circumstances. That leaves it up to the other players as a choice to go against that control and risk the PvP. I also think there needs to be allowable “crime”, but with consequences heavy enough to stop the “rampant” or anything close to that. That allows for some deep conflict over special things, but who’s going to risk heavy consequences for a bushel of turnips, ya know?
@Amaranthar, Yukon,
To play devil’s advocate, when you have two non-overlapping game systems, why do you not have two separate games? At that point doesn’t “client” become “portal”, with “walk down this hallway for player-on-player gunbattles” and “walk down this hallway to visit your greenhouse” and “the Casino’s down the third hallway on the left”?
If the point of your game is as an umbrella or environ for multiple sub-games (and totally not sucking up by giving the example of Metaplace), that’s one thing. Most games, though, have one theme they’re strongly pursuing and others are added either opportunistically or grudgingly (or, well, vestigially, as most “crafting” in MMOs can be abstractly described as an unusually specific quest turn-in: bring me exactly three iron bars, exactly one potion of a very particular strength, and exactly twelve leaves of one specific type of shrub, but I digress).
More to the point, if you have two communities that don’t interact beyond the superficial chat-lobby sense, then can’t it be said that you have two separate games that happen to share a chat lobby?
(Reminder: playing devil’s advocate! Except for the parenthetical, which kinda got away from me. 😛 )
@Yukon
Fundamentally, I think that the problem is that when you go to solve that problem, the most ideal solution for the sort of player that’s more into social gaming still doesn’t include an actual world. Instead you’ve got cross game data streams that function pretty much the same way that gifting works. You’ve got friends in another game that we make? They can push a button and send you some item that you can only get from that game.
Having that transition space is a barrier like Raph says, even if you drop them directly into their corner of the game. Part of this is because you’re providing them choices, and choice is actually a barrier in and of itself. If those choices aren’t meaningful to the gameplay, and having an option for an adventurer class isn’t meaningful for someone who only wants a farmville experience, it’ll exert some amount of weight simply by existing. It adds to the complexity, complexity adds to confusion, and these games are mass market in large part because they are extremely simple.
Only a marginal number of players will ever put enough time in to want to graduate to the next level of complexity. Having something that’s simple and mindless is exactly what’s necessary for the market segment. Adding anything beyond what’s needed to gather players is actively harmful to keeping them. Maybe I’m a little cynical about it, but I really don’t see anything that suggests otherwise.
@Discussion about cloud computing:
Cloud computing will take over everything eventually, I think that’s inevitable. Not this year, and maybe not next, but eventually. It has to. It’ll be driven by content providers and the obvious benefits it provides the end user. Buy once play anywhere is an easy sell, and platform fragmentation is too big a deal for an increasingly marginalized market to deal with. Already we’re at the point where you have to be on the 360, PS3, and PC to really have a chance of getting the numbers you need unless you’re a super huge franchise. Removing porting costs and inconsistent hardware configurations from the equation helps make it possible to break even. But rather than the cloud replacing social games with AAA games, the cloud is the only way that AAA games get to exist at all.
And it will completely change the way that the industry works, just not in terms of which markets exist.
Yukon Sam said,
I’m not saying these are bad designs, but they’re very deliberately created with the “everybody wants an adventure” mentality. Let go of that, see that not everybody wants “hack hack pew pew” (or only wants it on their own terms when they choose it), and you open up your world to a host of people who’d never otherwise give it a second look.
But then Amaranthar said,
Crafts and every other aspect should not be treated as just mini games. Everything should integrate. That gives it all meaning.
These aren’t the same thing, though. The interesting flipside of Yukon’s point is minigames as instancing: the larger effect is, at best, invisible to the player unless they go looking for it. You couldn’t play the minigame without stepping through the world itself (and all its griefer peril) to get to it.
I mean, with this sentence, “You lead the ones who want to be led to the larger game”, you’ve already fallen back into the same mindset you’re criticizing, Yukon. By relegating certain activities into safe zones, you take away the entire point of a worldy game and marginalize those activities in the same stroke.
Some MUDs have internal games like chess or cards, set aside in specialized rooms–I was really only interested in Achaea for the chess for a month–, but in theory you could still have someone walk in and kill you in the middle of the game.
I guess it’s about prime directive. Are you providing the experience of participating in some world, or are you providing a set of activities that should each be enjoyable? The latter doesn’t need good integration: you could have a flimsy fiction tying together all the minigames with no larger game in the greater scheme of things. Sure, even in the former, the individual activities contributing to the experience ought to be enjoyable, but that’s a contributing factor, not an end goal.
Hrm. I think I’m trying to say something here and not succeeding. I’m going to go eat lunch and maybe try again.
It’s a little baffling to see someone compare apples (a technology for delivering games) with oranges (a genre of game designs) like that. Of course he’s just doing it to promote his product as “best thing since sliced bread”. But it’s like saying “Well, consumers have been wanting cars in red and blue, with cup holders, and they like mini-vans. So, next year we think they’ll switch to buying cars that use our new and improved piston design and our more efficient alternator.” Huh? Consumers care what the game is like, not what the client and server computers are doing “under the hood” to let you play it.
Whoever above mentioned “server side render” makes me wonder whether there’s even much technology improvement being talked about here, or some crazy dead end. Seems like “server side render” says “Let’s move the demanding computing work far away from the player, putting way more demand on the server architecture, overloading the bandwidth, and making latency issues far more noticable and annoying.” Sounds amazing to me! Maybe I’m missing here? I just want to use cloud computing for my existing server architecture, not some crazy solution where I’m trying to send full-screen bitmaps over the internets 30 times a second, and falling back to slide-show style animation whenever I can’t actually manage that. (Of course it’d probably go through a video codec, reducing image sharpness and increasing the extent to which server CPU can become an overloaded resource, rather than just bandwidth. Or letting you throw zillions of servers at the problem to bloat your overhead costs, like Second Life does!)
Oh, and if you want mini-games or social gaming inside any kind of “classic” fantasy MMORPG shell, you make it so that players doing those activities cannot be killed or even attacked, ever. Period. That’s not a mass-market desired game “feature” of playing cards or running a farm, isn’t and never will be. It’d keep ’em away in droves.
When we launched Furcadia, we deliberately left out even having a combat system programmed in, because from seeing things DikuMUDs as opposed to TinyMUDs, we knew it would all but kill a basic element we wanted in our game – conversation. In grind games, when people do talk, it’s generally just about grinding. Grouping, buying, selling, etc. If you want the mainstream consumer to come in, conversations need to be more acessible to a newcomer, more varied, and more interesting. Some of our users actually even roleplay, something that’ll just get you made fun of or ignored on a lot of the hardcore gamer type MMOs.
No, Michael, you’ve got it backwards. It would be “you couldn’t get to the world without stepping through the minigames.
And my point you quoted was to simply stress that it’s not separated minigames, they can and should be part of the world as a whole, integrated into it. But protected as much as possible to keep players from being rampant griefed, or anything close to that. And possibly totally protected, but that’s another argument to be rummaged through.
And my point you quoted was to simply stress that it’s not separated minigames, they can and should be part of the world as a whole, integrated into it.
My point was basically that this was the opposite of what Yukon Sam is asking for. He doesn’t want meaning; he wants fun.
I thought it was because of this…
“If you can integrate their efforts into the broader game economy without spoiling their fun (or the economy), that’s gravy.”
So, that’s what I was stressing. It’s possible he meant what you thought, and I wasn’t absolutely sure myself. But I didn’t get the impression that he meant for the game play of the farmville “minigames” to be separate from the rest of the game. Maybe he’ll get a chance to clear that up.
@Dr. Cat: Considering that Google’s working on 1 gigabit internet *right now* I’d certainly say that in 5-10 years the bandwidth and latency issues almost certainly won’t matter in a lot of places. It doesn’t make a ton of sense for right now, but it almost certainly will make a lot more sense than dedicated hardware going forward.
Which requires more bandwidth now? A game like WoW or this Cloud gaming?
More importantly, I guess, is when there’s a bunch of players on screen at once.
The other thing I wonder about with Cloud gaming is about cheating. Can a client still read what’s coming in? Can bot’s still operate? Would dupes be easier to detect and stop?
@Amaranthar, so WoW would use *far* less bandwidth than gaming on the cloud. We’re talking several megabits a second bandwidth in terms of base requirements. Latency is also a problem, a bigger one than bandwidth actually, as you need to keep things under an ~80ms threshold round trip to make it feel natural. That’s from button press to image update, so it includes things like how quickly you send data from your input device and how quickly your monitor updates. Your network transversal needs to be somewhere around 20-30ms or less to make it work. So there’s a lot of issues, and current infrastructure doesn’t quite work right.
But the core idea is that the client is as thin as you can make it; all it does is accept input from the user and then display an image that’s generated on the server. There is absolutely no game logic or rendering on the client side. This severely limits hacking and significantly improves security as many common techniques will no longer work. From the perspective of “the client is in the hands of the enemy” it’s about as good as you can get. There are still mechanisms that can be used to automate certain tasks however, so it’s not necessarily possible to eliminate bots etc. But any hacks or bots would have to rely entirely on image processing and not memory reading, as the only thing being sent to the user is pixel data, so what they can do would be limited and it’d be quite a bit harder to pull off.
Oops, also meant to mention: the number of players on screen is fundamentally irrelevant to a cloud based game, except in that it may impact compression algorithms. All you’re sending is an image and a completely empty field has just as many pixels as one filled with player characters moving every which way.
As far as current MMOs go, bandwidth requirements are very very low even in the worst cases, except for games that dynamically load content that only exists server side until cached, like Second Life.
I agree with the general point of the article, that cloud gaming will not kill social games. However, I don’t agree with some important details.
“…social games have the right gameplay for the mass market.”
In 2010, this is correct. However, the demographics for social games skew towards higher ages. Going by the PopCap survey, 1% of players are less than 18, and 5% are less than 21. Granted, the study can be flawed, and the sample size wasn’t very big. But it seems to fall line with most other statistics I’ve heard, and what I’ve experienced empirically( a vast majority of the farmville gifts I receive come from older relatives, with close to none from relatives younger than me ).
This means that social games are completely failing to connect with young people, who are the key to the genre having any long term success. From what I’m seeing, the genre will die off with the older demographic that is playing it. So, in 2010, yes, it is mass market. But in 2030, I doubt it. That doesn’t mean that no one will develop a game with social networks as a platform that appeals to young people, but social games in their current form, aren’t it.
Interesting topic. But i dont agree to Greg Short, because the games are very different in complexity. Farmville is for users which just have a boring time, while World of Warcraft needs much time to invest.
Eolirin, that’s what I guessed from what I understood of how things worked.
In the game that I envision, and Yukon too I think, it would be critical that cheats be stopped. The economy has to be kept working on a “realistic” foundation of supply and demand and it has to stay balanced against inflation and such. All the obvious things cheating ruins in game economies that we’ve seen.
By adding need across different aspects through “integration”, even farming gold is sort of held in line, as the more farming the more need is also created for food and gear upkeep, which the production of also increases need across the various aspects. “Everything affects everything else.”
Take out the godmode advancements of level grinding. Start by thinking of this game as a game without any skills or levels, and all about the game play and world and what happens. But of course players do want some advancement, so then add in something in the percentiles range, like UO started with. Keep it simple, then add layers that don’t affect balance much. Small bonuses, new abilities, special effects. Maintain balance. There is nothing in WoW that couldn’t be balanced in this system, that I can think of. The only thing you lose are the big numbers and constant instant gratifications, but you are replacing those with things happening that have meaning. The big problem with the WoW type of big leaps is exactly the same as with duping. Inflation that makes things lose value. This does not work in a “worldly” game. You could still have classes, you could still have advancement. You just have to bring it into balance. Even D+D P+P didn’t have this kind of extreme imbalance, and that was already affected by it so that level 10’s didn’t work with level 20’s.
So you have a game that works very well for the “farmville” type of player. Take out the item shop, of course. Fairness, balance, and simplicity in playing. Depth in what you do with it in the world.
————-
There’s another thing too. With this Cloud Game, you can have items on the ground. No lag for the player. This is something that games have killed, and all the possibilities of it’s use are gone. Think of all the stories from great literature, and remove “items on the ground”, and see what I mean. Would Sherlock Holmes have had anything to do without them? Would Golem have ever found the ring? Would Tonto have ever stacked rocks as a sign?
Think about skills like Tracking, where you could actually track…tracks.
Think about merchants setting out their wares in a public market (with ownership rights).
Think about marking trails and dropping bread crumbs.
Think about a player with an ancient artifact of power, dieing in some unknown place of exploration, and unable to find his way back. Think about that artifact laying there, undisturbed, for several years, and found later by another player. Think about the story here. Think big.
Think about the Holy Grail. Because this is the Grail of gaming, of exploration, of roleplaying, of “worldly”.
To be fair Amaranthar, even though there’s no issue for the client, there’s still a LOT of issues for the server. Part of the reason why you don’t want lots of items around on the ground is because it makes the item and world databases a lot harder to deal with. You have to track positional data for every single item in the world, and that’s not a small task. And you have to do constant state updates on all of those items.
It’s not impossible, but it’s expensive, and you need a compelling gameplay reason to include it as a feature, or a clever way to mitigate the resource cost, or you need to take something else out to make room for it, etc. It’s all about trade offs. Remember that UO had a *lot* of server lag issues as a result of the mass amounts of items in game, especially early on.
Bah! “Hey, lets not make a better game, we have excuses!”
That’s the way I see it, Eolirin. But I do understand that, mainly, most games being developed wouldn’t have much need for this, because they aren’t geared towards “sandbox and worldly”. They are geared towards control, direction, sleep walking, and all things not related to sandbox and worldly.
And I’m ok with that. I see the upcoming death of MMORPG’s as sort of a cleansing.
Uh, having worldy elements doesn’t actually imply that the game is better. You can make some pretty terrible worldy games that do nothing beneficial for the genre.
If you’re going to put a database intensive feature into a game, it has to be with intention and in a skillful manner. It has to tangibly add to the experience not just tick off some vague immersion/worldy check box. The art created by items in UO pose a very valid reason for that system to be in the game, but it may be possible to create viable ways of harnessing the same sort of unique player driven creativity without actually going down that road. If you can find a less resource intensive way of achieving the same sorts of gameplay, then you should definitely take that path.
And if you think we’re going to see more worldy games as traditional MMOs become rarer, I would think again. The deeper you make your games, the smaller the market for them. MMOs aren’t in decline because they’re too shallow, it’s because they’re not shallow enough. The mass market doesn’t want deep immersive experiences. And the “core” markets are too niche for the increased costs of appeasing them. Farmville is the future of online gaming, not UO. UO is a relic of the days when the internet was inhabited almost entirely by, for lack of a better word (and I mean this with great affection), geeks, and not normal everyday people. It takes a certain type of person to love escaping into another world; to enjoy getting away from mundane reality. And much as we may enjoy that, normal every day people do not want worlds, they’re happy with their own. They want time wasters. Something to fill the empty moments between stuff that happens in the real world. To them, the net is not some other place, it’s just an extension of their every day reality and that’s all they want it to be. As Raph said, the world itself is the barrier.
MMOs are expensive and have a limited market, and social network games are cheap and have a huge market. As depressing as this may be, it’s how things are.
I threw the term “server-side rendering” out there, because I’m not fond of “cloud gaming” to describe this technology — it’s… so… FLUFFY!
But “server-side rendering” is misleading as well. As I understand the architecture, you’re doing the rendering on a seperate server cluster optimized for the purpose. I can speculate further on the back end, but as I’m a player rather than a developer, my speculations are just that — speculative.
As to whether strong social minigames would weaken the fabric of a worldy world…
We’ve been arguing PvP for over a decade now, and while we were pontificating, the market voted with their feet. They don’t mind competition; they enjoy it. Well-balanced PvP systems are more popular now than they ever were. What they don’t want is somebody sticking a pointy stick into their back while they’re trying to participate in a backgammon tourny.
Backgammon is PvP. Manipulating commodity prices to undercut a competitor is PvP. Buying a new dress to look hotter than that little tramp Becky is PvP. PvP isn’t really the issue. Violence is.
In the bulk of social games, if there is any violence at all, it’s so abstracted as to be unrecognizable. And that’s the way social gamers like it. It reflects the real world as they see it. Yes, in real life any one of us has the capability to pick up a Swingline and attack the guy in the next cubicle. But we usually don’t. Even active-duty combat has been characterized as long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Most MMO gamers, on the other hand, are accustomed to wholesale slaughter for extended periods of time, and that applies to both PvE and PvP. To an extent, other players are just another ‘mob’.
So it’s a stretch for MMO gamers (myself included) to envision a system where the gameplay we enjoy exists, but it’s possible to have a full and fulfilling career in the game without ever having to deal with either PKs or aggressive mobs. But I think that’s the reality we’re going to have to not only accept, but embrace, if we want to grow beyond our current niche.
The community may segregate itself along lines of common interests, but that already occurs. At least if we’re all in the same world, there’s some crossover, communication and community.
Of the games currently on the market, I think Sony’s ‘Free Realms’ best approaches what I’m thinking of. It’s far from perfect, and I find the family-friendly focus cloying (I’m playing ‘Fallen Earth’ right now, and one of my favorite features are the expletives that my characters spew out when I toss them into the thick of a fight). But I can’t think of any reason why a grown-up version couldn’t work.
@Brian Gilman
An alternative theory is that by 2030, when all the young people of this generation have grown up and have jobs and mortgages and spouses and small children and well established social circles and routines… they will be interested in playing different games than in their youth.
I would think it only natural that gaming tendencies would change with age and lifestyle.
However, you really have to answer the question, “What is the appeal of social games to the current older demographic?” before you can say whether or not it will appeal to future older demographics.
I would say one enduring aspect to it is that social games can be played in small chunks without diminishing the appeal – coffee break style.
Back to PvP? *groans*
There is no reason why a “Farmville” sort of player has to be involved in PvP.
If there’s player built and run cities, in a deep social game, then let’s have armies that players can join if they like PvP, or not if they don’t.
Let’s give cities defenses so that PvP in them is very hard to beat, so that players don’t try unless there’s a very good reason to.
Let’s have battles over resource centers that are away from the cities, so that the Farmvillager can leave the battle area if they don’t want to be around it, while the PvP between military people rages on away from the cities.
Let’s have a justice system that is hard on PKers (if there is PKing at all) so that most players simply don’t, without a big reason for it.
Not absolute, but that allows for a world to be a world, and have real meaning, while keeping most of the PvP away from the Farmvillagers.
Ya can’t get all Farmville players to go for a MMORPG, not even most. But there’s still quite a large possibility to attract some pretty big numbers, if a game has a really deep and meaningful world that includes an economic/trade model they find appealing.
It’s sort of like what Blizzard did with new fans that never heard of MMORPGs. Only it’s not a WoW clone.
My hypothetical hybrid is shaping up to look something like this:
1) Web-based. No client download (or transparent client plug-in).
2) Quick-start. Play now, decide on class/stats/skills during the course of play as they’re required.
3) Freemium/microtransaction revenue model, at least for non-combatant play. At a bare minimum, an extended free trial to get them good and hooked before you hit them up for a subscription.
4) Free starter plot. No weeks or months of ‘kill ten rats’ before you can afford a farm.
5) Asynchronous play. Trade with people offline, chat only if you want to, leave the farm only if you want to. Nobody can even set foot on your land without your express consent.
6) Safe to walk away from. You can answer the phone or go change the baby’s diaper without getting eaten by a mob or ganked by another player. Ever.
7) Varied. Play the farm game (and only the farm game) if you want. Or play the farm game and the cooking game. Or the cooking game and the market game. Or join the town militia and learn to fight monsters and/or other people.
8) Connected, loosely. Other players can’t attack you or even set foot on your farm… but they can perhaps change the tax rates (within reason), and issue decrees with modest impact on your productivity. You can cooperate, or sell your goods on the black market to aid the resistance, affecting the availability and price of local goods. If you’re solely a farm player, these are just global events like the weather. Nobody can burn your farmhouse to the ground and salt your fields.
10) Competition — battle it out with other farmers for market share, if you want. Have tomato fights and tractor pulls. Participation is strictly voluntary; rewards amount to county fair ribbons and maybe a short-term discount at the feed and seed.
I’m undecided on specifics like whether farms should be instanced (probably so, but i see valid points against it).
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@Scott
“Coffee break style” is perfect.
Even now, what you are saying is going on. Complaints from MMO players, WoW in particular (of course), that players don’t have the time they used to have are common. This may be a big reason gamers try newer games, then go back to WoW. Who wants to go through that level grind to end game all over again? Most complaints are “it’s boring”, but there’s also this one.
It seems to me that all those new players WoW brought in are no longer new. No longer looking for that same experience.
I’ve said for years that MMORPGs need to incorporate an “Ages of Empires” sort of game play into the works. Particularly involving crafts and trades. Set it in motion and if you want to, log off. Instead of you as your character, you have your character with a “house”, as in a compound/manor with hirelings for menial labor. This would also make for a more realistic time frame when making products, which would make an economy work better. It also evens out the playing field with powergamers. And it allows all those more casual players a much more competitive position in the game. It’s just too good, all the way around, until you get to that small segment of heavy powergamers.
@Amaranthar (#43)
Huh. Have you, um, ever actually played EVE? I mean, aside from Yukon’s rant on the matter above (and it seems that his experience predates Apocrypha with the scanning and the wormholes?), you’re pretty much describing EVE right there.
As long as, you know, you can stand to do mining all day. It’s not exactly advertised, but it’s actually what I do, so I can speak from experience.
—
As for “coffee break style” MMORPGs, I actually put together a skeleton of an idea to make a platform for those. It’s here: http://movement.aqualgidus.org/ It’s inspired by Farmville, of all things.
Hm. I don’t know what you mean by “Ages of Empires”, since AOE is an RTS and doesn’t have any crafting or trade systems. I don’t know what you mean by a “much more competitive position”, since I don’t know why comparing apples (crafters) to oranges (PvPers?) is competition anyways. Maybe competing for dev attention? Sibling rivalry between Cain and Abel?
Michael, I’m lost. I can’t for the life of me understand what dots you are connecting there. Although I have never played Eve, from what I’ve read about it, what I was saying is nothing like Eve. In Eve, you have a safe zone. My idea doesn’t have that sort of safe zone. It makes players safe from PvP because they are citizens and not in the military, or because of a heavy handed justice system. In Eve if you want better resources, you have to enter PvP zones. Nothing like that in my idea. There may be some similarities that I’m not getting.
The Ages of Empires reference has crafting and trades. You build resource centers and harvest and build. That’s a general idea of what I’m saying. You’d build a field, set laborers to it. And do the same for mining. Now, I was hoping that people could draw the conclusion that you’d do this also for blacksmithing and other skills. Build the shops, and make things.
And I didn’t mean “competitive” as in PvP, I meant as in economics. Under the “you make a sword, you make a sword, you make a sword” game play, powergamers have the time to outdistance others. They are the wealthy and successful in the game. What I’m getting at is that if you set an NPC to making those same number of swords, log out and leave your NPCs working, and it takes 24 hours for the NPCs to complete it, this player is at the same point as the powergamer was in the other game. He’s competitive.
I’m surprised that Puzzle Pirates hasn’t come up as a MMO with a strong player economy. Most of the shops have crafting puzzles and except for some item drops in Atlantis and Cursed Islands, most items have to be made by players, including ships, supplies (rum and shot), swords, bludgeons, mugs, clothing.
Here’s a diagram of the economy
http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Economy_diagram
There are people who used to play a lot and are now mostly talking and doing social games (parlor games like poker, hearts, spades) playing along with people who take island ownership seriously.
Too bad it’s in Java and unavailable to the iPad/iPhone.
In Eve if you want better resources, you have to enter PvP zones. Nothing like that in my idea.
Not actually true. Mostly requires a constant supply of luck and knowing how to quadrangulate gravimetric sites.
There isn’t actually a safe zone. It’s entirely possible (and occasionally a specific objective: http://www.hulkageddon3.machine9.net/ ) to take out major mining vessels in highsec. It’s incredibly hard: the CONCORD police response is near-instantaneous, but it’s not always fast enough. It’s something newbies need pounded into their heads: there is no safe zone, you are not safe in high sec, there is no safe zone. Sure, it’s designed as one, but it’s not actually one. There is no PvP flag.
So, difficult to beat defenses (requires a full sieging operation), check. Battles generally don’t happen where people are mining (unless miners are being targetted), check. Justice system is harsh and automatically enforced with extreme prejudice, check. Cities is a bit of a complicated and incongruent concept.
Like I said, mining is what I do in EVE. I roll out to an obscure lowsec system in my Orca and my two or three Hulks, spend all day stripping asteroid belts, and then someone refines it and hauls it to Jita to sell the minerals. Now, granted, I haven’t played all year, but I easily made 400 mil in a month.
The Ages of Empires reference has crafting and trades. You build resource centers and harvest and build. That’s a general idea of what I’m saying. You’d build a field, set laborers to it. And do the same for mining. Now, I was hoping that people could draw the conclusion that you’d do this also for blacksmithing and other skills. Build the shops, and make things.
So something like this? http://www.burningsea.com/page/guide/economy
Or this? http://www.eve-guides.com/ui/index.php (all the way down, last section)
Basically, crafting in both of these is about gathering materials, switching on a timer, and letting the bread bake. I’m not convinced yours or their idea or implementations are “the best”, but I think there are more similarities than differences here?
I haven’t tried Puzzle Pirates, but I’ve seen movement from the social game side towards MMO modes of play. I spent a few enjoyable months with FaunaSphere, which has a rudimentary quest and combat system (well-written and amusing) alongside a fun, albeit sometimes frustrating, pet breeding game.
My “rant” about EVE is just the facts. Hell, I LIKE EVE. I especially like the revised scanning system, which fed into my prospecting bug better than the somewhat unimaginative mining system. But I wasn’t keen on the wormholes, which, often as not, dumped you into an open PvP zone and NPC mobs that disassembled experienced players for scrap. And nothing about the scanning system is a casual-friendly lark: it takes weeks of training and substantial capital investment to even access the system, and a rudimentary grasp of three-dimensional triangulation (quadrangulation?) to succeed at it.
An ironic aspect of “social” games is that they provide strong solo gameplay. If you’re dependent on other players for security, access to resources, a market for your goods, or even an opponent, then you’re gated if there are no other players available. Farmville encourages and rewards cooperation with others (shallow and asynchronous), but it’s not required. Nobody can gank you for plowing outside the guard range.
If you could satisfy people who enjoy group play while not alienating solo players, you’d have walked a tricky tightrope in designing a viable “social MMO”.
Michael, on the Eve thing, no, not the same at all. My justice system functions everywhere, if it’s outside of warfare. Eve’s only functions in the safe zone. And that zone is pretty damn safe, since attacking someone there means almost instant death, or destruction of your ship at any rate.
So it’s not close to the same thing.
On similar ideas…
PoTBS has the huge problem of losing it’s game play integrity because of the cash shop. Pay more, “win” more. Where’s the competition in that? But the idea certainly looks interesting. It’s in a basic form to what I’d like to see, where you build the shop, you add on to the shop with special tools or benches or whatever , you man it with NPCs, you train them up according to your own skill, and you set those NPCs to work. While you can add your own labor to it too for detail work, but the mass production generally comes from the NPCs.
Eve, again not the same thing. Maybe you can see that now.
Yukon, I especially like the revised scanning system, …. But I wasn’t keen on the wormholes
Yukon, you know that you can get perfectly good gravimetric sites in high sec, right? Like I said, constant supply of luck, but it’s not uncommon.
An ironic aspect of “social” games is that they provide strong solo gameplay. If you’re dependent on other players for security, access to resources, a market for your goods, or even an opponent, then you’re gated if there are no other players available. Farmville encourages and rewards cooperation with others (shallow and asynchronous), but it’s not required. Nobody can gank you for plowing outside the guard range.
Right. That’s the part where you disagree with Amaranthar. To him, this means the game is without meaning. To you, this means it’s reliably fun.
Amaranthar, Maybe you can see that now.
Not really. I’m sure any other similarities I find will be dispelled by new qualifiers you haven’t mentioned yet, so the discussion is kinda pointless. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to ask what you play these days and if you enjoy it?
Michael, several points you made to address.
1) Yes, it would seem that Yukon and I disagree on supply and reliance on other players. I do think that you get more “social” with more interaction with other players. That’s a different “social” than “social gaming”, as I’m sure you couldn’t miss. Pretty sure, any ways. I think. Maybe.
2) You can’t see the differences there once you required more information on my general statement, and I gave that to you?
3) You have a problem with me getting more specific because you were pushing for it, what can I say to you? Eat something gross? Stick some That’s “new qualifiers” up yers?
4) As a matter of fact, while I can get some basic fun out of many games for a period of time, I don’t find any of them enjoyable for very long. I start looking around for something else. I don’t find anything else, in what I want, fantasy worlds. I end up going back to something I left, but not playing a whole lot.
Does that sound familiar? I mean, really really familiar? It should. Because it’s a very common scenario being played out by many, many gamers over the last couple of years.
@Amaranthar,
Are you done flaming me yet? Should I continue to try for a civil discussion, or is that not going to work? You’ve taken offense at every comment I’ve made in this thread. It’s getting on my nerves.
The gaming population is aging and diversifying. Even gamers who used to be ‘hardcore’ find they can’t hold a job, raise a family, and devote 4-6 hours every night to a WoW raiding guild.
I think many “social game” players are the same people (or at least the same type of people) we’ve been discussing for the past few years as “casual” MMO players. So I’m trying to envision a world where more casual players can jump in, have great fun in short bursts with or without other people online, and go away for extended periods without seeing their progress within the game eroded.
And I remain convinced that it’s possible to provide an experiences like that within the context of a traditional MMO with plenty of deep, chewy content for the ‘hardcore’. As Raph said, the world is a barrier. But I don’t buy that there’s no way to overcome that barrier without sacrificing the world.
But I’m free to make that assessment from the comfort of the player’s chair. It’s easier to vaguely discuss a hypothetical game than design a game, and easier to design a game than to see it through the development process to release. It may be impossible in the current climate to get a project like this underway.
If so, it’s a pity, because I’m becoming increasingly convinced that creating virtual worlds that specialize in just one type of user experience is slowing the growth of the field as a whole.
@Yukon, I’m not sure I buy that it’s slowing the growth of the field. If anything, increasingly large amounts of small scale games that focus on a very specific mechanic and nothing else is leading to rapid system iteration in a way that we haven’t seen in a very long time. Whether something coherent comes out of the sort of disparate mess of new growth is questionable, but coherence may not actually end up being important in the end.
It diminishes the value of the concept of a virtual world as a deep, coherent, independent place but that’s always been a subset of what it meant to have these sorts of games. The net itself becomes the MMO, the farmvilles become a particular dungeon experience, twitter becomes the guild chat, facebook the city space to socialize in, etc. Everything’s getting tied together more and more, mixed and matched, and nothing needs to be viewed in terms of being independently coherent.
I have many fuzzy half formed thoughts about that transformation and what it really means, but I think we’re really going to need to be looking at things in terms of “threads of experience” rather than interlocking mechanical systems. That is, twitter, blogs, instant messaging and email need to be looked at as a whole as a thread for communication, the various options for games that can be played as all fitting together as gameplay themes rather than actual discrete elements, etc. Everything blends together creating a singular experience that encompasses everything we do online. Twitter is equivalent to guild chat, farmville is equivalent to soloing in WoW. In this view, the concept of bridges between gameplay types being built directly into each experience doesn’t necessarily make any sense; you don’t need any mixing and interaction in a farm sim when there are avenues that exist outside the game that bridge people into those different experiences. Someone sees a friend playing something they haven’t checked out so they go try it. They like it, or they don’t, they keep playing it or they don’t. But the options are diverse and the barrier to entry is next to non-existent, so they don’t need the designer to prompt them to do this via in game hooks. So what actual value does direct interaction between different modes of gameplay provide? Does it really benefit gameplay significantly?
On a funny side note… UO just announced its next “booster” (mini-expansion) — “Adventures on the High Seas”. And while there are few details, it looks like the fishing system is going to get… wait for it… more monster bashing. Whooo!
I’m not really that dismayed; my fisherman is an armor-plated combat machine. At least people with cooking skill are not attacked by random biscuit elementals. Yet.