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MMORPG: Money, Money, Money
JTacomis writes "There's an
interesting
article up at Business 2.0 magazine about Sony Online and EverQuest.
It says that EverQuest makes Sony over $5 million a month. Star Wars
Galaxies is expected to make even more than that. It's a long and in-depth
articles that takes us through the whole back-story to EverQuest. One
interesting fact: EverQuest almost didn't get made. According to the
article, the idea was originally turned down inside of Sony."
In Ultima Online, you can now change your character name, which was previously fixed. But, quess what, it costs $29.99. Can you believe it!! A simple DB query, I believe. Sheesh.
Yeah, a lot of projects are initially turned down for business investment ONLY because they suck.
You see, a business project needs to be shown to be profitable (in the short or long term), and if the original business plan didn't drive that point home, well, it'd be rejected by management. Plus the original business plan would have had to fit into Sony's core business model. If not (and this plan did not!), the plan would have to be much more detailed and robust.
It isn't that management is always stupid - most executives get dozens of business plans thrown in front of them every week. They have to pick and choose the most likely to succeed.
After all, it doesn't make anyone look good if $10 million was "lost" in a business plan that most senior executives would laugh at.
It's kind of like FedEx. We all know that business plan only got a "C" at Harvard Business School. But the fact is, it should have gotten an "F". As a business plan, it sucked. Sure, in the end it turned out to be a wildly successful and profitable business... but the initial business plan could be summed up as "likely to be a failure".
Ideas that have "almost" been turned down by Sony are legend, the point about Sony has always been that they tend to take a punt on this "possible" cases rather than doing the standard corporate drone concept of "doesn't look like something we've done before".
As the recently departed (as in dead) chairman said of the Walkman "if we'd asked focus groups we'd never have made it". They've also almost not invented CDs almost didn't get into the console market etc etc etc.
Sony are the company that doesn't kick itself years later saying "damn we though of that why didn't we try it".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Once the game is developed 5 million is a lot per month.
Development costs are covered by the sale of the game+manual+first month subscription package, day to day running costs (coders doing bug fixes, server system admins) are pretty negligable, considering companies like Blizzard and the EA can afford to do it for their customers for free, and newbie helpers/game testers/Wizards/Gods whatever, tend to be players prepared to do the work for free.
So all those Evercrack subs are sheer monthly profit, a nice little earner, even for a megacorp like Sony.
As for Starwars or whatever the MMORPG of the month is stealing custom, well that will happen, but a lot of their customers will be ex Evercrack addicts, looking for a new fix. There's plenty of burnt out players who while never wanting to touch Everquest again, won't be adverse to trying a new game out.
Remember kids, Choose life, or rather than MMORPGS choose Heroin, or crack cocaine, at least those drugs get you out of the house, meeting people now and again.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
I think what is interesting is that the flat-fee model rewards playing a lot -- I guess these companies have balanced out server loads with making sure the game is popular. More people playing for long periods of time = better word of mouth, happier players, more $10-15/m in the future.
For the record, I only ever played Ultima Online and I think I got to be a Noble Master Warrior, all on a friend's account and PC. I played so much I made him fail freshman comp sci and drop out of school. So beware! Don't let me play Star Wars, say, at your work, or you'll be fired!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I agree that most of the MMORPGs are going to start competing for the same small group of people. Though new worlds and themes will bring in some people who don't currently play, I can't see this ever being more than a niche market. In the article it states that "one third of players 18 and over spend more time in the game world than at their paying job". I don't see that this type of commitment is possible for the majority of game players. One possibility for them to attract new people is to have a tiered pricing structure like ISPs do with dial-up access. If I'm paying $14.99 a month for playing Star Wars Galaxies then I would want to play as much as I could to get my money's worth, but if I pay only $5.99 for 20 hours or so then it might be more palatable.
989 Studios actually started in 1995, working on a project called 'Turret Syndrome' - a tank-combat RPG. In 1996 they shifted to work on a MMORPG concept - Everquest.
They completed Everyquest in just 3 years time, at double the initial budget. $7 million dollars.
About a year after releasing Everquest, 989 was asked to provide copies of marketing research they did before deciding to go ahead with the project. They admitted that they didn't do any research, because if they had, they would not have been able to justify even making the game.
This becomes much more of an issue as the market becomes riddled with next-generation MMO-Games (I believe we're at the 3rd or 4th gen. right now).
The big three used to be Asheron's Call, Everquest, and Ultima Online. More recently there are challengers such as Anarchy Online, Dark Ages of Camelot and that one space-age MMORTS game. While all have acheived a significant user base due to its hype, they don't seem to have the stability that the "big 3" still manage to maintain.
I've played all three of the big 3, and it is truly difficult to balance between even two of them, playing 8-10 hours daily.
Getting back to the original point - the upcoming MMOers will need to rely on more than hype, as can be seen by the current offerings. Hopefully they've learned the lesson by the launch of Anarchy Online.
As for the current big ones - it's slowly getting to the point where the only players are the dedicated ones, so there shouldn't be much of an "mass exodus" when new ones appear - probably more of a gradual one.
No, I have no idea why I wrote this much at 5am.
Blizzard will sell on name alone. Personally, I hate the whole massively online genre, but will purchase this and play it for at least a month or two, just because its Blizzard, and they have a proven track record. I am sure that other people will, too. I see its only real competition being SWG, as people longed to be padawans long before they were at home in Azeroth.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I've played all three of the big 3, and it is truly difficult to balance between even two of them, playing 8-10 hours daily.
What?! You play a game for 10 hours a day? As a habit?! Good god, man.
I can't believe you ponder the difficulty of "balancing between two games" like pondering the difficulty between balancing work and family.
I remember years ago when the very first Sim City came out. I thought it was great game. I wasted too much time on it. I realized once that had spent 7 hours in one sitting playing that game. I deleted the game from my system and haven't been a game player since.
But, holy shit, to repeatedly play any game, or any number of games for 8-10 hours a day, strikes me as dysfunctional. Is this typical for gamers? How do you get anything else done?
This post sounds like a flame or a troll, but it's not. That post just threw me for a loop.
Software Wars
I find MMPORPG's really annoying. I find the people annoying, I find the experience annoying, and I find paying for the annoyance annoying.
I loved EQ for the first 3 months of play, but realized I just don't have the time to focus on 'levelling' and after accomplishing my first big quest and getting a nift item, I realized everyone will do that quest, kill that monster, get that item. My actions don't change the world one iota.
So I gave up and waited for DAoC. It at least allowed the world to be affected through the PvP/realm vs realm option, which was a cool concept. I played, found a group of people to play with who played in character and didn't metagame -- but of course they all played 4-6 hours a day while I could only play 4-6 hours a week. Thus they quickly increased in level and I didn't, which means I couldn't join them on group adventures because I wouldn't get any xp.
Now we come to Neverwinter Nights which so far is exactly what I've always wanted. I can create the world, I can play in the world with other people, and our actions can change the world. And I don't have to be annoyed by yet another meaningless online wedding/funeral/whatever.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
~NullPointerException
The idea of sieging is great, I think many will have tons of fun with Shadowbane. I also think that number of realms having impact on the realm is great (and especially the artifacts), but it was poorley implemented here. Due to the problems the dev's have with fixing or adding 'small' elements, it is obvious that the entire technical and non-technial (gameplay) design is flawed.
I remember about 15 years ago, I saw a tape player deck that did this neato trick to reverse directions. See the front of the deck there was a cylindar in the middle so that you could see through its plastic the tape you were jamming too. When you hit the reverse, after a bit of an audible pop and a noticable wait, it jumped out and flipped around. Very cool. However, this trinket costs entirely too much to justify its purchase so it died out soon thereafter.
The lesson was that while an eye catcher initially, people (often subconsciously) remembered that it was a TAPE DECK they were after. Had that feature been secondary to good sound, quality interface, etc, then it might have done better. As it was, the flippy thingy was the entire purpose of this deck, the sound was crappy, the price was hefty, there were limited i/o ports and connection types, plus it was heavy and big as a hog.
DAOC... how the hell can it make sense to say "we are immersive and you have a real impact on the world with RvR" yet your char is a pale cookie cutter that is limited by the uber-level system they have. You have no real impact on the world. What I wanted to see was a marauding band of trolls to loose upon Hibernia and slaughter the stupid NPC's that just stand there day in and out. Wipe clean the map and then setup camp.... oh wait, you cant do that! There is no incentive for real conquest.
Would you rather pay $150-$200 for a game and not have monthly charges, or pay $40 for a game and $12.95 a month to play it?
Go ahead and do the former. You'll go out of business because too few people will be willing to pony up that much money upfront.
People (and companies) are funny like that -- they'll pay ongoing fees instead of a large upfront fee. Partially because ongoing fees are easier to budget for, partially because there's not such a sense of commitment with a smaller upfront fee.
On the flip side, there's no way in hell that I'd want you to pay a large upfront fee instead of monthly. Monthly gives me an ongoing revenue base, which is great since I probably have ongoing expenses (like staffing, rent, etc). The large upfront fee gives me spikes in revenue - which is hard for me to budget for and isn't viewed kindly by investors.
I played EQ for nearly 3 years, had 2 accounts for a year, and bought the expansions up to and including Luclin. So I guess I spent something in the neighborhood of $700 on the game alone in that time. So yeah, it would've been cheaper for an upfront version. But if I had to pay $200 to just start then I never would've played, and that's a huge stream of revenue gone. (And while I will never again play anything like EQ again, I can't really be too pissed -- without it I never would've met my wife, who also played).
On the flip side, I bought lifetime memberships for both my TiVo's, at $200 each. One has already paid for itself, the other will do so within a few months.
One MMORPG that is in beta right now, Neocron (www.neocron.com) is considering using in-game advertisements in order to generate revenue. The setting for the game is futuristic (though based on a 21st century environment), so the idea would be to have billboards in-game advertising to the target audience of the users (e.g., hardware / software manufacturers). While I'm not too keen on having my online gaming experience intruded upon by ads from AMD or NVIDIA, I might be willing to overlook the real-world intrusion if the monthly fee is lowered (or non-existent).
I suspect this thing will have a huge churn rate. 90% of the users will drop out within a month. Remember the last time Lucas overestimated the fanaticism of his fans? 80 Billion Tons of Jar Jar Merchandise now 70% Off.
With a movie-inspired game, everybody wants to go to the places from the movie. That's going to be a problem for an MMORPG. Sure, you can have a huge number of instances of the universe (shards), but then, what's the point of having a big shared online universe? Either the world is mostly empty, the world doesn't let you go where you want to, or there are lines like Disneyland on a bad day.