GDC: 10 Reasons NOT to Make MMOGs

Warrior-GS writes "Gordon Walton, who helped create such games as Ultima Online and the Sims Online, is at the Game Developers Conference giving a seminar on "Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Run a Massively Multiplayer Online Game". GameSpy has been providing coverage of GDC, with several game previews and several conference reports. They also have a hands-on report of the Nokia N-Gage from four of their editors, and a somewhat unorthodox report of the Game Developer Choice Awards, where Metroid Prime was named Game of the Year. The convention continues through Saturday."

Comments

Ten real reasons why MMOGs should NOT be built

[Dukeofshadows]

10. We need the money from our existing product without having to worry about competitors 9. Only three-four companies can afford the costs of having to import programmers 8. Script-kiddies figure out how to cheat so fast that the game stops being fun 7. Paying customers can sue you if someone phishes out their credit card number (did we find out the hard way?) 6. There are only so many people with the skills to handle this kind of work, with only 100 not getting their check from Bill Gates 5. We need to recoup our losses from the last IPO before we can let more people into this field 4. Such games "might promote deviant behavior" which the parents of the players could sue us for if their kid does something crazy and blames on our influence 3. Our non-engineer company chairman is still addicted to the game and is holding up our decision-making process 2. Hackers will gravitate towards any popular online gaming sites and may end up raiding your accounts due to inadequate security 1. We haven't been bought out by Microsoft yet!