MMOG Giants Prepare For Battle

Next Generation has a look at the increasingly crowded business of running an MMOG. They talk with Jeffery Anderson, CEO of Turbine, Robert Garriott, CEO of NCSoft, and John Needham, SVP and CFO of Sony Online Entertainment about the business of worldcrafting. From the article: "MMOG companies are in the midst of a bitter fight to carve out market share, each trying new weapons ranging from classical retail, to neo-shareware, to straight-up digital distribution."

Comments

Re:US Consumers are freaking idiots, apparently

[cowscows]

That may be true initially, cause there's plenty of free crap out there, but once word of mouth gets around from the people bored enough to try it, wouldn't that make the difference? Add in a decent marketing campaign, and I don't think there'd be much of a problem if the game itself was free.

I played Puzzle Pirates for over a year at around $10 per month because I could download it for free, and even try it for a week at no charge. And that's a fairly unusual MMOG, which at first glance seems rather childish and dumb. I never would have tried it and completely forgotten about it if they expected me to give them some money just to try it out.

I think their quoted market research and studies are just an excuse for trying to get more money out of people. But if it works, which it seems to be doing, then good for them. I wouldn't have thought that creating artificial shortages of a new product would be a particularly effective way to sell a product, but apparently it works. People are weird I guess.

Re:Since When

[Golias]

I have 1 GB of RAM on my 1.42 GHz mini (which made a HUGE difference)

I play at 1280x720 (the native resolution of my wide-screen TV projector), and on a relatively crowded server, I can stroll through Ironforge without much more choppiness than my friend gets on his uber game PC with a GPU card that cost more than my entire mini.

Granted, he's running with all the pretty special effects at full-throttle resolution, but that's what he bought that hot-shit graphics card for. I'm simply happy that I find the game playable on cheap hardware like the Mac mini and the iBook.