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

On the contrary...

[*weasel]

quite to the contrary.

the happy math for corporations is that the costs of a massmog fall as it becomes more popular.

consider bandwidth:
an OC-24 can handle 8 times more players than an OC-3, and yet it costs far less than 8 times more per month. (more like 3-4 times as much.) as the game becomes popular, and bandwidth usage increases -- bandwidth cost per player drops.

consider bugs:
using the 'shard' model (several 'copies' of the world that each serve a subset of the total playerbase) - the number of bugs to fix holds steady as the number of shards is increased. You don't have to make twice as much content to appease twice as many players - you just plug in another shard.

Also, as the game ages and becomes more popular, the bugs decline. (bugs such as anything that isn't a GM-request like harassment and such) the number of calls to customer support (eg. hardware compatibility problems, crashing problems) decline. the growth of the 'known bugs' means average call time itself drops. the cost of customer support per player drops.

consider hardware:
hardware costs decline as time goes on (and it takes time to become popular). what was a very expensive server farm for Sony when Everquest started in 1996 is now slower than the much cheaper server farm they last added around 4 years later. Hardware cost per player drops. Assuming the worst case, the cost of hardware doesn't measureably fall, still only means that hardware costs would hold steady as the game becomes more popular.

consider staff:
you need a certain number of people to ensure 24x7 service at a constant level of quality for a single server farm. yet you do not need twice as many people to cover twice as many servers. furthermore, over time, utilities and procedures will make the most commonn problems easier to deal with, and the bug fixes will make exceptions less frequent. server-maintenance staffing costs fall as the game becomes more popular and the game ages.

customer support for bugs also decreases as outlined above.

the only staff that need to increase in proportion to the growth in playerbase are in-game customer service staff (GMs). this at worst is another cost that holds steady as the game becomes more popular.

consider content:
also using the shard model (purely a business decision, not a technical one, i assure you) the same number of designers/artists that supply an expansion that will keep 1 shard of 2000 players happy, will keep an infinite number of shards of 2000 players happy.
average cost of content per player decreases.

also keep in mind that Sony had a 60% profit margin on monthly fees for Everquest when it cost $10/mo. now it costs 30% more (at the least), and do you honestly think they're spending a dime more on service and support?

Sony even had a profit on retail box sales, for the game and expansions, over their costs to develop the software and install the hardware. (the reason everyone charges for the box on the shelf - even if subscriptions flop they break even if they can sucker a couple hundred thousand people into trying it).

the way these games are designed, the bigger the game gets - the more they profit.

only when the player population starts to dwindle do the profit margins fall again. when you have too many underutilized servers. when you have too much staff. many companies will slowly consolidate and layoff to maintain their profit margins for awhile - but eventually running the game just won't be worth their time. They could put those resources on the Next Big Thing and go back to their old profit margin.

Expected and undeserved

[theefer]

I really don't expect much from WoW. Blizzard is a great game company, and I'm still a big Starcraft lover. They make nifty, well polished games, but WoW sounds just so unoriginal. Yes, the design is quite cool, and so are the races, and the spells ... But does it really sound an RPG ? No. Can you expect to have a really interesting roleplay with orcs and humans and the other races available ? I don't think so, and it does not seem to be the point. Does it bring MMORPG to new grounds ? No. Is it gonna be a hit ? Probably.

Reading the latest big report on the games seems to bring two main conclusions : (1) the gameplay is still open and under discussion, (2) the gameplay is plain unoriginal. They are building a well thought game upon the existing basis, but there is really no risk taken whatsoever, nothing that could really make it the next generation MMORPG.

As an amateur MMORPG game designer myself, I have found that there are an incredibly large amount of possibilities in that genre, but as always most commercial products stay in the same area, ever perfecting one type of game without risking to discover new ones. Too bad Blizzard did not dare to try though, they'd probably have done it the right way.

For my part, I'm waiting for Ryzom, not because it has a much more original gameplay than WoW, not because of its gorgeous graphical design (probably the best out there for an MMORPG), but becauses it dared to leave the traditional fantasy field to explore a new, fresh and tribal universe that is simply fascinating. The objective is more to carry the player into a dream-like original place than put him in front of monsters to fight.

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.