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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?'"
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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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?"
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
- It's hard enough keeping latency low in a static world - where only minor changes are occuring (players moving, weapons fire and the occasional explosion). If a thousand people were building/changing/demolishing houses, planting/felling trees, digging up roads, erecting giants statues of themselves, etc
... it would be nearly impossible to maintain a playable speed.
- The game has to offer the same level of challenge to all new players. Whether the join at the Beta stage, or after the game's been running for five years. This is difficult with a static world, but if players can shape the world this could be nearly impossible. Resources would get walled off, shops would get destroyed, etc
... Great fun for the early adopters, less so for new players.
- Dynamic worlds would require much more active maintenance. The company running the game would have to keep a very close eye on the world and play a much more active GM role. If the GM is good then the previous problem could be greatly reduced. However skilled, attentive GMs cost money, especially as, for any sizable game world, you'd require more than one per server.
None of these are insurmountable problems - but it's likely to take a few years, and better home connections before truely dynamic game worlds are available.This however is only a temporary problem. Once we all have 100Mbit fibre connections and are connecting to servers with 4x20Ghz CPUs this won't be a problem.
OK, so we have one huge "games" zone that everyone jacks into the One True Metaverse to get to. Now we have the same problem: I set up my own part of this zone where people can, for example, take part in a game based loosely on the RPG "Paranoia" (or any other such game). How do I attract enough people to my part of the zone so that you always meet lots of people there?
As you can see from this example, you haven't solved the problem, you've merely renamed it. The capitalism part comes in because there is a natural scarcity: of players who want to play MMOs. If you don't try to compete to gain your share of this market, or if there is a glut on the market, your "zone of the Metaverse" will be deserted.
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.
I wasn't thinking on quite the same scale as you. I was thinking more along the lines of visible rewards for good roleplaying or for sending lower level characters on quests etc.. But any sort of dynamic reward system would require more GM involvement and I think that is where the future lies for MMORPGs.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
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?
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.