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The Mystery Of Star Wars Galaxies
Tim Burke writes "I've got a piece up on my website that acts as a form of independent postmortem for Star Wars Galaxies, discussing my initial impressions and lasting conclusions on the PC MMORPG." Burke argues cogently enough that SWG lead designer Raph Koster comments that it's a "good essay" over at GameGirl Advance, despite direct criticism of his team as having a "prevailing assumption... that players make content, not designers", and the suggestion that Koster is "muleheaded" about "the importance of creating a sense of achievement in a persistent world entirely through barriers of time and repetition."
Ralph Koster was the worst thing to happen to UO.
SWG is a massive collection of screwups and random decisions that managed to pick up a large subscriber base, based on it's being starwars(Even though it's not). Proving that if you throw enough money at an mmog, it will suceed.
Its the "Me too!" attitude. Someone sees a burgeoning market, hops onboard hoping to ride the original products coatails to success. Sadly, its how industry mostly works these days. Witness feature 'borrowing' in Operating systems, 'innovations' in new cars and 'reality' television. Nobody wants to be the person with their neck on the line creating something new and innovative. Everybody wants to invest in a known quantity. Let someone else prove the market and we'll profit from it. MMOG's are just another example of this, as you have said. They were not the first and they will certainly not be the last.
Not really sure what the purpose of the message was, that you don't enjoy MMORPGs(to each thier own) or the financial reasons for developing a MMORPG. I will answer the financial one.
Simple answer why everyone and thier mother is developing a MMORPG is simple money, money,money.
With your average game with a $50+ price range the makes of the game will only see around $15 after all is said and done. So over the time it takes for the game to be developed for an average game you will see a time value of money in the 12-15% considering the amount you could of made from putting the money in the bank and just getting interest it is still worth it.
Now for your average MMORPG, you still have that $15 from the package, but you are collecting an additional amount each month, and for alot of people even years. Even with higher costs the quess is that the average MMORPGs has around 19% return on money with the bigger ones in the 30%+ range. Throw in yearly expansion packs and it is really nice money.
One of the smaller developers said they need around 50K players to break even with paying themselves a small amount,running the game and paying investors. It was guessed they had around 70K subscribers so that would be a nice chunk of change.
Ok, this process of everyone investing their asses in the product may incentivate innovation, but how many wrong investments were made? And now, what MMOG should I play first without having time sinkholes, idiotic admins (problem that is seen also by the linked article - see the highly censored SWG forums), and ton of bugs et al? At least AOL delivered you the packet you wished to retrieve on the internet (yeah, ok, along with SPAM, but this is the problem of the internet in the whole, not of AOL), and 3D cards delivered you pixels arranged to resemble 3d solids on the screen... but after SWG and the other batch of would-be-evercrack, how can we say that these services are delivering FUN?
MMORPGs are currently in the stage that 3D games were during the first few years of the PlayStation. They're definitely going to become a normal part of mainstream gaming in the future, but no one knows exactly how to make them yet. Somewhere, someone is cooking up a Final Fantasy VII or a Metal Gear Solid of an MMORPG , but no one really knows who has it, so they're just taking their best ideas and throwing them into the market to try and see what sticks. Eventually the gameplay will evolve into the sort of naturally refined gameplay that you expect from new 3D action games, first person shooters, 2D side scrollers, and the various other genres of games, but that's going to take awhile.
And personally, I'm going to do exactly what I did with the PlayStation: not sink a single dollar into the damn thing until someone delivers the REAL goods. Eventually, it will happen. Until then, you're paying for the beta test of the hottest MMORPG of late 2006.
I'm playing SWG, and i enjoy it a lot. Of course it's not for everybody. I don't ask everyone to like it, but this guy says plainly wrong things like :
... but it's really exciting, and new stuff is coming (player city with an elected mayor, ...)
* Advancement system is boring : this has already been discussed here. It's boring if you wanna be master in 2 days. Normal people will find it ok.
* You cannot sell anything until you are at high level : plainly wrong. I used to sell GOOD weapon powerups for a good price, and that's among the first items you can build. Now i'm tailor and i'm making tons of money, even though i'm only novice.
On the other side the game is full of bugs, servers are slow
I never really got into the MMORPGs. I felt that there was way too much room for them to turn into a cliqueish repeat of high school, which for me was a terrible experience. Remember what it was like back in school? Groups of friends would form cliques, and shun everyone who wasn't "in". Outsiders would get picked on mercilessly, and frequently would be attacked, beaten, or humiliated. Anything you had that was interesting would be stolen from you immediately. Teachers either liked you or hated you, and if they didn't like you they picked on you. Life was a constant stream of abusive encounters, with the only bright light being the fact that one day, you would graduate. Do you know what graduation *really* means? It means adulthood, and the full protection of the law, and it means that people who pick on you go to jail or get sued. Being an adult is wonderful. Being a kid is not. Regression, thus, is pain.
MMORPGs regress you back to a dark period in your life in which people can pick on you all they want, and never suffer any serious consequences. They don't have to worry about law enforcement, they don't have to follow the rules, they can do whatever they want because "it's just a game". It's simply horrible. I can't imagine wanting to do this for free, much less PAY to do it. So I agree with you; I think MMORPGs are going to crash and burn. But my reason for thinking this is the innate cruelty of the online human being, who can be cruel without facing any consequences whatsoever.
If you think I'm off base here, just watch any Slashdot thread. See how many people viciously flame everyone they don't agree with. See how many trolls start fights for no reason. Spend some time on Usenet, and see how badly THOSE people behave.
When I game, I game to get AWAY from my daily life, I don't game to amplify the worst parts of it, you know?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I'll have to agree with the article author that there are fundamental problems with the economy in SWG (or, at least, there were - I cancelled my account about a month after the game went live).
The most glaring issue is that there is no real advancement through manufactured goods in terms of the scale of the economy. A top-end weapon costs roughly the same order of magnitude as a newbie weapon in terms of the cost of materials required to construct the weapon. Because of this (and the players' evident unwillingness to charge the exorbitant prices they should for top-end crafted items), the best crafted weapons cost about the same order of magnitude as the bottom-end crafted weapons.
Because of this, there is very little room for more than a few people in the sellers' market. Get a factory fired up, and one person can produce a significant portion of all the goods their local customers need, and can use their spare time to produce special-request items on the side. Thus, new entries into the market must either undercut the market or go completely without sales while they skill up to Master in order to be competitive.
The crafting professions should have been designed so that top-end items were multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than bottom-end items, in terms of material costs to produce. The same % markup would result in a significantly larger inflow for those who specialized in top-end items, thus decreasing the impetus to bottom-feed (make items available at lower levels in the skill tree). This would open up those lower-level markets to relatively unskilled crafters, and would permit them to sell their items rather than simply using the "practice" mode on every attempt.
Additionally, crafting should have been designed so that lower levels of skill permitted the production of widgets necessary in the production of higher-level items. This is true already, in some cases, that you need a few of some crafted item in order to make another crafted item. But in order to prevent high-skilled players from simply cranking those bits out themselves, the quantities needed should have been in the dozens or even hundreds - enough to ensure that there would be a market for those items from lower-skilled players (if for no other reason than to save the high-skilled player a lot of time and trouble).
There are various other flaws with the game in terms of design and the expectation that players would do more than they are doing now. However, there are far more achievers in these games than designers would care to think (almost everyone has a bit of Achiever in them), and not coming to that realization was the design team's fundamental mistake.