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On The Over-Saturation Of MMO Games
An anonymous reader writes "Stratics has an editorial discussing MMO market saturation, specifically triggered by the recent closure of Microsoft's massively multiplayer PC game, Mythica. The piece argues: 'But there is a dark realization that is now being considered, just when does it end? When does the genre hit the ceiling and all that ends up happening is [that] companies resort to passing around subscriptions with no real growth. This is a question that is haunting corporations who have potential products laid before senior management - just how long can it continue? When does the opportunity cost grow larger than any potential earning?'"
You're looking at those text editors the wrong way. Pretty soon, emacs will have a MMO in it.
Two opposite things will happen that will allow more growth and diversity in the MMO market. First, the tools that are used to create MMO's will become more sophisticated and easy to use allowing smaller and smaller groups of designers to create worlds. Soon very small shops will be able to create intriguing niche worlds/games that will only require a small group of dedicated players to maintain.
Secondly, the big boys/girls in the field will finally figure out that the real money isn't in creating a specific game or world, but creating and maintaining a META-world in which other developers can create their own games/worlds. Then independent shops can create MMO games that operate in a particular world much as they would create games that operate on a particular gaming platform. So in "Nintendo World" you would be able to race cars, adventure in dungeons, space battles, and buy in to new "games/areas" when they are created...
The MMO model has just started. I can see a future in which ALL games are actually contained (or at least accessed from) within larger meta MMO worlds.
Kinda off topic, but there's a lot of stuff on this subject and various related ones in "Designing Virtual Worlds" by Richard Bartle. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in MMOs.
Going back on topic, there's a fairly good argument that's there's no real growth now-except in the switch from ticks to turn based real time(not a contradiction in terms-rather than each turn approximating 6 seconds, each turn is 6 seconds) the mechanics are extremely similar to the first MUDs. Just as Japanese RPGs are all remaking Dragon Warrior, MMORPGs are still stuck in the levels/classes mold, with repetitive mob killing and a levelling treadmill
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From the Mythica website: After a rigorous review of current and future projects, the decision was made that Mythica would not be one of the projects we would continue to invest in.
What projects you ask...
A project for learning MS programmers not to swear and teach them propper manners in their comment.
I think that the tech industry has felt this pretty bad with every aspect of new growth. When will it end? Should I realease my product and waste all of this capital? You won't know until it happens. Even then, I think it's a pointless question. The video game industry as a whole is still growing. As long as a product is in some way innovative, there will be people willing to pay for it. I think a better question is how many clones will people be willing to swallow, until they demand something new again.
No persistent world to date has cannibalized the user base of its predecessors, so why should we expect that to happen any time soon? Sure there is a steady decline in players later in a persistent world's lifespan - but that occurs with or without competition.
What about, in the intervening 3 years between major commercial releases, the million or so teenage gamers who make that transition into gamers-with-disposable-income-and-creditcards?
What about the games like World of Warcraft that are positioned to bring in non-peristent-world gamers into the market? Even if WoW fails, it will expose the genre to new players, and pull some of them in.
These games self-sustain and remain successful with well less than 100,000 players(ww2o,planetside,meridian59,second life,eve,etc). So every 3 years, when on the order of a million gamers become a new viable market for a persistent world game - publishers need only capture less than 5% of that to break even, or 10% to make mad cash. Add in the players who're naturally leaving older games - and why should we expect the market to ever level off?
Sure, theoretically, the rate of persistent world development could outstrip the rate of gamer-defection + the rate of new-gamer-arrival. But we're quite a ways away from that.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I could be totally wrong, but whoever puts out the first MMO that's fun to play without investing ludicrous amounts of time in it will make a pretty penny. Something along the lines of online PS2 game My Street, except, you know, good. Problem is, it's a lot easier to make some more shitty monster models and yet another barren wasteland in EQ than to make some interesting content.
So far all I've seen is leveling with swords, leveling with light sabers, etc. Who is going to innovate first?
I'm on top of my game like I'm standin' on Xbox.
The main problem for me with these games - except for this I could probably see pitching in for maybe two a month - is the absolute time suckers these games are. Now some games I can spend a lot of time on don't get me wrong, but the problem with a MMOG is that you can't just hit "pause" or save and quit when something IRL comes up. There's always a battle to finish or a safe spot to find. The publishers are so worried about the cheaters that they place ever more demanding conditions on the player exiting the game.
:)
Now clearly if my son starts crying or something like that I can just pull the plug and attend to my RL responsibilities, these are after all, only games. But what fun is it to return at a later time, stripped naked, missing hard earned XP, and with a corpse to find?
Ironically Mythica might've been a bit better - as I understood it, it revolved around shorter, pocket dungeons, making it easier to pick up and play and leave.
Ah well back to X2
As in Casinos where they all make money until Casino n+1, then they all lose money.
The best we can hope for in this is a Golgotha-like releasing of code, textures and models to the rest of the world. That would be fun.
(The determination of n is left as an exercise for the student.)
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I was never very attracted to MMO gaming because of my ego I guess. For the same reasons online FPSs aren't very fun to me unless it's with people I know. It's the little fish, big pond story. IMHO MMO games need to have some sort of mechanism besides keeping track of kills, experience and money that lets you know you've made a difference in the world.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
One universe and then when folks want to play a game, they all go somewhere meant just for playing games. Think: Sims + Ultima Online + Warcraft III + Halflife (2). It's the MMO part that is common to all of these and we all need to agree on some basics that can all work together.
I hate to say it, but if MMO is going to grow up, it needs to mature past the primal side of capitalism that wants to take it all.
Companies need to pitch something totally different that'll set them apart from the others. Having weekly events. Set up contests. Have the dev team make their presence known in the game and then give the players a chance to kill them (a la Ultima Online). Come up with a totally different cast of races to play as (humans, elves and dwarves are overdone. Get over it.) Let monsters be proactive, instead of being reactive. Maybe even let monsters roam into town and destroy if players don't kill it. TRY SOMETHING NEW.
MMO games are changing IMO. The problem is by the time they become good enough to earn my money, chances are I'll be playing CS2 and Quake 4.
One real problem is that as newer MMO's come out, the cost of entry is getting very high. Not in dollars, but time.
My cousin used to be a pretty fanatical Everquest player. As new expansion packs would come out, he'd have to spend hundreds of hours leveling his character up just so he'd be strong enough to try out the Planes of Power, or whatever the new hotness was. All his friends played, and played a lot too, so if he wants to quest with them he has to be fairly close in levels or he'll be pasted in any combat.
So with any new MMO people have to start over. They have a new character, no skills, and lose all their previous investment of time. If their friends don't switch, then it's another reason not to embrace a new MMO. Why go play if all your friends are still playing EQ?
The only MMO coming out that says they plan to address this is World of Warcraft. According to early interviews and alpha impressions at Gamespy, it seems that Blizzard wants you to be able to jump right in and have fun, regardless of what level you are. No more spending a few hundred hours killing giant rats and spiders so you can be tough enough to actually try doing something FUN.
So I don't know if MMO's will be inherently limited if they have proper design. The current crop of MMO's is getting very saturated however. Lowering the cost of entry (level treadmills, money, in-game loot) will certainly allow newer MMO's to compete however.
--
"Hands and feet are rarely discovered from these periods because they are usually the first thing carnivores eat. They make a tasty snack and are easy to eat."
- Dr. Graham Baker, South African Journal of Science
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
Yes, I've tried them. Hack, slash, hack, slash, repeat, until you gain a level. Occasionally do above in groups. Extremely rarely there is a scripted event that advances some "plot". The only people who like these games are those who have such thin and unsatistfactory social lives that these games supply them with their only real "social" stimulation. And yes, thankfully, that population is limited. To those who say that this is just starting, don't fight me, fight these tears.
.friends.
Those of you who rush to defend these games -- you mark yourselves off nicely as completly inconsequential in active society. Go play computer with your
No games exist that yet have the variables to account for everything. There are several factors influencing the growth of MMORPGs:
1) Built-in console gaming. Many more people play on consoles than PCs. Sure, there are console MMORPGs and the Xbox has built-in ethernet, but the PS2 and GameCube require adapters and the Xbox charges a yearly fee for access. You won't see true growth until a huge penetration in this market takes place. I'm thinking the next gen stuff will begin to do this.
2) Undeveloped/underdeveloped worlds. There is no server farm currently available that has the ability to create an entire world not bound by limits, and it may never happen, although I think it may happen in the next twenty years. MMORPGs have bought into the expansion pack mentality, which means you not only pay a monthly fee but you have to pay more now so you can access more? It's a ripoff. Of course, let's be realistic, no one can spend 7 years *cough* Doom 3 *cough* working on one project without releasing it, but most of the MMORPGs I've seen are released with tons and tons of buggy code.
3) Realistic worlds. Can we please cut down that tree with an axe, or set fire to a village, or smash that city wall? Can players then be set on fire when in a burning building? Can they be strangled to death? I think we're heading more and more toward VR but no one has yet managed to make a leap to it.
4) Boring leveling. Why is every game so hardcore on what level you are at? Why can't games be skill-based? You play a game long enough and you become skilled, in the same way you play a fighting game long enough and you can beat the button-smashers. Currently there is nothing like that, the 'skill' involves playing for months on end and killing boring creatures.
5) Player-built material. When will it finally move away from big companies supplying these, and go into open source type of framework like neverwinter nights? Maybe never, unless you want to allow anyone to release a console gaming title. And for that matter, why can't anyone release a console gaming title? Why do they have to pay Nintendo and Sony rediculous licensing fees? I have no answer to this, but it seems worlds would be much more interesting if you built a skeleton and allowed people to build on it. Playing a MMORPG game is like an amusement park ride. You ride it a few times, you enjoy it some, eventually it loses interest. Games that allow for player creativity do more for players. Games that allow for object building will the new norm, if you ask me. The more a person can do with a world, the more immersion, the longer the person will stay.
I hope the market becomes hyper-competitive where weak projects are snuffed out with little notice and warning.
Maybe then, the genre could actually have some quality control. Anyone remember the last MMO release that didn't require excessive patching?
It's not just a event-play issue. These games just aren't DONE. I cannot think of a single release that came out feature-complete, let alone balanced and finished.
MMO developers and marketers need to learn to finish their projects and deliver what they promise. I can think of no greater justice then having them prey upon each other for customers/development fees.
The MMOG (RPG is sometimes a misnomer) will not reach saturation until there is a game that:
... large enough user base to get kickstarted AND it has portability outside of the online domain in the form of D&D (not a requirement, but awfully nice). I look forward to Warhammer online but it has far less mass appeal. The ideas behind Anarchy Online (I don't feel an MMOG has to be a tolkien-esque fantasy) were quite nice but the game engine itself had too many problems. There? No. Star Wars isn't my particular cup of tea genre-wise and while I could get over that it still seems to be the same basic "kill the MOB" type that AO became.
a) is not too expensive to preclude play by people who are cash poor (over $10 is too much to pay for alot of folks).
b) has enough programmed intelligence to allow suspension of disbelief during gameplay (that includes graphics, UI, "AI", lack of serious bugs, etc)
c) does not require one to play for dozens of hours per week or even a couple of hours every day just to "keep up" to have a level of enjoyment
d) converse of c) does not easily allow the game to become boring if you -do- play a large number of hours
e) runs on more than just Windows
So far, each of the above (with the possible exception of "B") has been reached, but no more than 2 in any one game that I've played. I have been trying MMOGs since the early days and have played 5 of them commercially (ie, I was paying for it).
So far I have a couple of old MUDs that I still play on occasion, but no MMOGs are currently installed anywhere in our house. Not because I wouldn't like to have one to play, but because so far there isn't one.
Neverwinter Nights as an MMORPG (the way it started out) would have been possible
When a -good- MMO game does come, it won't matter if the market for -bad- MMO games is saturated, it will grow. It may be parasitic growth from the base of other MMO games, but that doesn't mean it won't be a good investment for the right company. Capitalist theory rules this beast.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
The major ones generally don't steal userbase from predecessors, but there are hundreds of smaller MMOGs out there, and that's about all they do.
I know of several games (mostly defunct now) whose core user base is almost entirely composed of former Dransik players. Dransik itself got the greatest bulk of its players from Runescape and Hellbreth. Tibia and Dransik have been exchanging players for most of their existence. When Dransik was reworked into Ashem Empires, it was heavily targeted at people who played the original version of Ultima Online. Heck, most of its developers worked on Ultima VIII and Ulimta Online.
With all this going on, most of these games are trapped in perpetual limbo. They get a steady influx of new players, but they lose the old ones just as fast and they never really get anywhere.
First off, I'd like to say I agree with some of what you said. I like the idea of having content added (maybe not weekly, I don't want to download an update every time I log on) and contests I can participate in. But, I really don't think classes and races are a problem. It is true that classes are all pretty similar because these games all take root in RPGs. So what? What are different classes that would make a difference? Go think up a class that is unique and it will probably fit in to one of your categories: thief, ranged attack, close attack, damage dealer, enemy charmer, etc etc.
;) If the company is making money, than it must be doing something right.
You complain about races, but someone made cat and lizard races, you just dismiss it anyways, so clearly races isn't the problem either.
The only thing MMO games need to be is fun. Period. You can have cookie cutter classes and races, you can borrow all your classes from fiction, you can have unique totally original classes, and none of them matter unless people like playing it.
The problem is a person doesn't know which is fun until you try it out. Most models make you pay up front before you know if you will like it or not. I tried EQ, it bored me to death. I tried AO, again, fun at first but then it just gets boring. I was fortunate to see SWG in beta to avoid that train wreck of a game. The only one that kept my interest is FFXI. Why? It has your cookie cutter classes and race. You level up. You want to get "phat l3wt". But it has quests and mission that make the game fun and interesting.
A lot of the things you complain about are the defintion of what is at the core of these games: being an RPG. RPGs as a genre are very popular and they naturally translate in to these MMO games. The genre isn't the problem, it's just the number of companies that don't know how to make them fun. It's not like CS2 and Quake 4 are going to be original games, right?
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Oversaturated is an exaggerated term. Right now you have a few big ones, world of warcraft coming up. Apart from that there's not much really. 10-15 years ago there were also hundreds of muds, but not nearly as many people as now with internet connectivity (basically only students then).
What is definitely missing are some good free 3D MMORPG's. The only one I know that's good and fun is Runescape, the rest seem to be abandoned projects or stuff that doesn't go anywhere.
Neverwinter nights is just about the only game that allows you to host your own RPG server.
The Everquest2 is launched and we'll see what this so called saturation is about.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There's an over-saturation of articles on this subject. Every second article in the games section of /. is about motherf*cking MMO games..
But not because MMO's have hit their peak. It's that all of the MMO's are the same. As another poster pointed out, they all have the same classes. But on top of that, they pretty much all have the same rules. No, or very limited PKing. Horrid point and click combat systems which don't appeal to the mainstream gamer. I think MMO's will really take off when they are blended correctly with fps games. Picture a MMO where combat is like Quake or Unreal but you can gain experence and new items/powers/gold from killing people/NPC's ala a RPG. Sure your level 60 character might be able to kill that level 1 guy, unless level 1 guy happens to be thresh.
Most of the MMO's now cater to the care bears, have too many rules, are overly complex, have poor combat systems,and are a time sink. Once this stuff goes, MMO's will really go mainstream.
MMO makers need to get off their high horse of "Creating Virtual Worlds" and focus on the fact that they are creating games. The thing to remember when making games is "Easy to play/learn, difficult to master". The current MMO's are "Difficult to learn, easy to master" (as long as you are willing to spend the time)
Things have only just begun. Personally, I'm hoping that all of the games and their proprietary networks will eventually be linked. It would sort of be like Time Bandits. It would be pretty cool if "fantasy characters" (wizards, etc) found themselves in modern landscapes and vice-versa. The possibilities are endless. You could have players teaming up to conquer worlds, to explore and trade, share technologies or abilities, have huge inter-world wars. It could be awesome.
So, to answer, no. MMO's are only just beginning.
You should check out Planeshift (www.planeshift.it). It has a full team of developers working on it almost full time, with a working client and non-advertising based free service.
The current version is a working test client with limited interactivity, but the next release (due in about 1 - 2 months) has implemented combat, experience, etc.
The game is graphically on par with most RPGs today, not quite as polished as Everquest 2, but in the same ballpark as online games from about a year ago.
The people working on it are very dedicated and this will probably be the #1 free MMO by the end of the year. Keep an eye on it.
You're looking at those text editors the wrong way. Pretty soon, emacs will have a MMO in it.
Give me Verant vi any day!
---- Just another spud server.
The problem you identify is due to a kind of unspoken cooperation between all the current major players in the MMOG sector.
All the existing MMOG games use the same basic client server model. This is fantastically expensive to set up and maintain (acting as an effective barrier to entry stopping smaller developers entering the market), and horribly inadequate at meeting the demands of a modern game.
When UO came out it basically allowed the player to do everything they could in single player RPGs of the time, in an MMO setting. The monolithic client server model prevents modern MMOGs from having even a fraction of the interactivity, physical simulation or world detail of a modern offline game. Instead, the developers can concentrate on making lots of cheap, dumb content to bloat up the client to multiple gigs.
Splitting players over many small shards (another horrible legacy limitation) limits the ability of players somewhat to cooperate and bring the developers to account over the game's shortcomings. In FFXI this is even cynically used to keep players playing until they can 'afford' to move to the servers where their friends are.
Nobody wants to put the investment into a distributed MMOG architecture, because nobody wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Until such time someone (or more likely, several competing someones) delivers a licensable distributed MMOG architecture, we will be stuck with microscopically variated EverQuest clones.
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Mythica was cancelled because it was a project close to Ed Fries, plain and simple.
1) Games are diverse. While people want application software all to look and work alike, they want all games to look and work different. A cookie-cutter game won't sell.
2) Game designers know it is a huge mistake to try to put too many different things in a game. You should not burden a racing game with puzzles, role playing aspects, RTS elements and first-person shooter stuff. Different types of games work for different people, and if you try to be everything at once you'll please no-one.
3) The required support would be devastating for any company.
Now, you might find some middleware for graphics and even for basic gaming functions, but not a toolbox that requires the game designer to just have a good idea. Any game worth anything will require a dedicated team of good technicians to build it.
Lessons learned from all the past attempts to create the ultimate program design tool/language. Remember Visual Basic? ADA? Clipper?
Puzzle Pirates.
I've basically played all of the main ones until FFXI.
:)
UO, EQ, AC1, AO, DAoC, EnB, EVE, AC2, SWG, FFXI, even Project Entropia and Endless Ages.. and some other misc ones nobody ever heard of.
Problem is, 9 out of every 10 MMOs are pretty much version 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, etc of EQ. It's like AOL here, they all try to emulate EQ because from a business standpoint it was a successful model.
That's where the investors go wrong in their thinking. In most other industries you can emulate something and make a good profit off of it because it is proven. The only time you can do that in THIS industry is if you are selling a NAME (SWG, FFXI folks?), or if you have a hell of a marketing director.
If you really want to hook people into this, you have to go about it in a way that makes them feel like they're transitioning from playing their normal sp/mp games to something where they still feel that magic that the sp/mp games give, but have that epic touch with hundreds if not thousands of people playing at the same time.
Once broadband completely replaces 56k, we'll hopefully start seeing MMO "twitch" games that play like your standard Counterstrike-esque game, low pings, high twitch. Planetside type stuff, only really feeling like the 16 person mp games of old, with thousands of people.
Turn them into the new "club", where people decide to login instead of wasting 50 dollars a friday night getting trashed. Centralize the genre into 'hubs' where you login to a central service and navigate to which game(world) you want to play that day, be it medieval/shooter/racer/sports/strategy/hybrid, whatever. Have a central avatar that you navigate to these portals that can also be used just to socialize instead of playing those games as well. Games within games.
All your base are belong to Google.
The following is a list of number of non-standard type races in the top 3 MMO games in the U.S., the game their in, what type of creature they are, compared to the number of standard type races and their ratio. Since FFXI's characters/races is purposely reworded and tweaked, I won't use them as an example in this.
Everquest : Number of non-standard races, 3. The Froglok, the Iksar, and the Vah Shir. Number of standard races, 12. Ratio, 1:4. Overall variety : Very bad, considering its not even one-third and the number of expansions its already recieved.
Asheron's Call 2 : Number of non-standard races, 2. The Lugians and the Tumeroks. Number of standard races, 1. Ratio 2:1. Overall variety : Bad, considering theres only 3 races to choose from. Two words : No variety.
Horizons : Number of non-standard races, 4. The Dragons (yes they're in games as monsters but players can FINALLY play as them), the Fiends, the Saris, and the Sslik. Number of standard races, 5. Ratio : 4:5. Overall variety : Good. Your standard bread and butter human-elf-dwarf combo is here while mixing things up (the dragons being the most obvious example).
Well maybe if you would stop putting ex-lax in my breakfast cereal the bathroom wouldn't stink so bad. Ever think abuot that?
World of Warcraft has been in development for 4 years now. MMO's have always taken longer to develop than other genres, so I agree. Over time it will take less and less time. Neverwinter Nights is a good example of how a toolset can be used by your average Joe to make some compelling multiplayer RPGs. However, there is still the hurdle of maintaining server farms to keep your game alive. This is another unique attribute to the MMO industry that it doesn't share with other genres. It's quite costly. I don't see technology being forgiving enough to advance to a point where having server farms is cheaper to build and maintain, unless someone figures out a way to outsource it and support them.