Developing Online Games Book Reviewed

Thanks to Frictionless Insight for putting up a review of Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky's new book, Developing Online Games, a New Riders-published title written by two veteran MMO creators. The review mentions, in particular, that "..the central theme, the nail-it-to-your-face, tattoo-it-on-your-forearm message of Developing Online Games is that persistent world (PW) games, like EverQuest, aren't a product, they're a service. It is a failure to understand this unassuming statement that has caused such trouble for the PW genre." There's also an excerpt from the book available on the FI site. Update: 06/26 15:29 GMT by T : Here's Peter Wayner's review of this book from April.

Comments

Spreading thin

[sixb0nes]

Hard-core PC gamers may be relatively small in number, but do they ever spend a lot of time and money on their hobby! Reliable estimates put the number of these players at between at least 4 million and possibly as many as 6.5 to 7 million in the U.S. alone, of which at least half play either PWs or retail hybrids regularly online. The total worldwide may be as high as 15 million.

Now spread 15 million across the growing selection of available MMO games - and we'll see how far your game will go.

I'd be interested to see how many people jump ship when a new MMO ships. How many people subscribe to more than one game at the same time, and will they just leave after all the time they've put into their game? Maybe one day you can swap up chars between games if it is developed/published by the same company.