MMO Report Tips World Of Warcraft As Leader

Thanks to VE3D for reprinting details of a new online gaming report discussing MMO trends and estimated game popularity. According to the excerpts from the Themis Group's report, online gaming will grow from $960 million revenues in 2003 to $4.10 billion in 2008, and the chart estimating "expected popularity of new persistent worlds... in descending order by projected subscriber base twelve months after launch" is headed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft, followed by Sony's EverQuest 2 and Turbine's Middle Earth Online. The report also suggests: "Success with a license challenges developers to find a way to implement the license's core appeal into an MMG-style game - a challenge which Final Fantasy Online met, but Star Wars Galaxies did not."

Comments

Next!

[idlethought]

Interesting that the 'Best' MMO is always the one that will be released next.

Re:Next!

[*weasel]

MMOGs do get stale. people leave. eventually the publisher decides that it isn't worth the resources to continue to operate on the lower profit margin than what they previously enjoyed when it was more popular.

what they want to do, instead of closing shop, is to try to pull back in all those people who tried their last game, and start the profit cycle over again.

i think the people making business decisions want to cannibalize the old player base. new games mean new purchases, higher fees, and a brand new level treadmill. but doing a sequel gives them a built-in market that reduces the risk in developing a new game.

(i also think these suits are very different people from the actual devs, but i digress)

And quite frankly, so long as these games are defined primarily by their underlying systems - the devs will always want to try to start over with a clean slate, to 'fix' all the things that went wrong last time. Yet they likely are still in love with the world, fiction, and genre of the old game. so i doubt they'd protest too strongly.

Not until a disaster like AC2 is duplicated elsewhere, and the players no longer fall back to its predecessor, but instead become disillusioned and quit altogether will this trend stop.

like everything else the publishers and devs do 'wrong' - it won't change until consumers stop paying for the product.

until players -don't- buy into a massmog with a terrible release, publishers won't care about a couple weeks or months of instability.
until a sequel fails to cannibalize the playerbase of its predecessor in the franchise, or until a sequel fails to secure enough purchases from the old playerbase, pubilshers will always try.

Re:Powerleveling

[decapentaplegic]

it'll be dominated with folks that just spend more money being the more powerful people in the game.

This didn't seem to hurt Wizards of the Coast's "Magic: The Gathering". When I was playing a lot five years ago, that game was entirely dominated by people who could aford to buy the powerful rare cards. None the less it was the most popular game around, in both the hard core and casual circles.

Metaverses

[jafuser]

MMO gamess are fun for a while, but I think after you've seen 2 or 3 of them, you realize that the difference between them isn't really all that remarkable. They all have the same general framework of doing mundane tasks to increase virtual rank.

I think the next big online phenomenon is going to be metaverses.

In a metaverse, you are not given a bunch of artificial skills and abilities. You (the person behind the keyboard) are the determining factor of your online persona's skill. And it's not a twitchy kind of skill either, it's pure creativity.

The first time I logged into a network and was able to communicate with other people around the world in real time, I knew it was going to eventually catch on and spread to the point of being mainstream phenomenon.

Now I'm getting the same feeling now, as I've jumped into the "metaverse" environemnt known as Second Life. I've played a handful of MMORPGs before Second Life, and got the impression from them that all online environments would have basically the same general template.

My first day within SL was like my first time on the internet, I was overwhelmed that so much creative flexibility could be organized in a real time multiperson environement. It's sort of a feeling like walking down a very long narrow confining hallway which suddenly opens up to a wide open outdoor field.

The metaverse-like applications we have currently are nowhere near the sophistication of those dipicted in science fiction, but to be fair, we're just getting started. Before too long, I predict that they are going to be as mainstream as the internet is now.

I think MMO games are nearing their limit for flexibility. The only direction to go from here is to open up the virtual world that make up these games and let your users truly create the content. Of course, when that happens, it's hard to stay confined to a theme or license, so it seems inevitable that metaverses will be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder.

Re:Expected and undeserved

[Stray7Xi]

RP isn't determined by the game so much as it's determined by the community. The only successful RP communities I've seen were formed because the twinks would get ostrasized. The problem is getting a large enough RP community that it has the ABILITY to ostrasize twinks and not let them be overwhelmed.

Anyone ever play a consent based mu*? No one can drag you into an RP scene without your permission. So if someone wanted to be ass they could go into the plaza and shout out how the government is all evil but refuse to RP with any of the feds that want to beat/imprison the guy. Sounds like it'd be pretty awful, but it works on smallscale since no one else has to RP with that twink either, he gets ignored and leaves. RP breaks on largescale because you don't deal with the same people day to day, reputations mean nothing.

Why's this matter? No one wants to play the oppressed character. You can't get together a hundred friends and oppress a single person.. cuz that person can just leave, log off, etc. You can only hinder their fun. Not that I'd want to play a game where I can be oppressed. What kind of society can you build with only predators and no prey. Few players want to play a weak character, but in real RP games they're some of the best fun. All of my favorite characters were the ones with serious flaws.. a junkie, a mute and a character with a crippled arm were my most memorable.

These games are all based on the reward is power... thats what makes the players act that way.