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MMOGs Branch Out
Via Kotaku, a Wall Street Journal article looking at ways the Massively Multiplayer genre are opening up to new players. Besides new game genres, the article discusses changes in revenue collection schemes. From the article: "The industry's traditional business model is to charge about $50 for the game software and a monthly subscription fee of about $15 for online play. That model has proved risky: When a game is highly popular, the monthly fees yield steady revenue streams for many years. Some of the industry's earliest hits, such as EverQuest, released in 1999, still have many users. But monthly fees have been "a significant barrier" to growing the market, said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, based in San Diego."
I like the Eve Online model, myself. The game is free to buy and can be downloaded from their site. Monthly fees are about average for the market, and go down if you buy them in larger quantities at a time. You can cancel your subscription and they will hold your character and account for a -very- long time (they did it for me for 8mo) without you paying a nickel, and you can resume with all your cash, skills, items, etc. later, so cancelling a subscription for a 1mo vacation, or while you move if you know it will take a month or two to get the 'net hooked up again, or whatever, and it's all good. Also, the server goes down for 1hr. a day for maintenance, and patches / x-packs are released (free of charge) on a regular basis. That's not to mention that they regularly set records for most players simultaneously playing on a single server, or that they are ranked at the top on mmorpg.com for quite some time. It's an awesome model, and something I would love to see other companies strive to meet.
Unpleasantries.
This article brought up an interesting revelation in my mind. It stated at the end how the number of retiree's playing MMO's is increasing. Now my mom and dad were born in the 50's, they'll be retiring in 10 years, and they introduced ME into gaming. My first memory is at 4 years old playing an educational game called Mixed Up Mother goose. As I got older I actually played Diablo II online (on the realms) with my mom when she was out of work. My dad played games like CnC Generals and the likes. My mom has recently even given games like EQ and WoW a shot. It makes perfect sense if they were to retire tomorrow (unlikely) that they would pick up MMO's. Even my grandma has confessed to me she's played her slot machine game until 4am on some nights ("wow grandma I didn't know we had that much in common") Now my conclusion is that if games become more user friendly to begin with, easier to pick up and get interested in and allow for a larger interest and larger market it is very possible and logical to me that retirees, in 15+ years (and even more so come the time gen X retires), may very well replace your typical retiree activities of today (think Bingo, knitting, romance novels, etc.) Compare the demographic similarities of your average mmo player (16-20 something) and a retiree: Lots of free time Moderate levels of expendable income (or access to it like parents/kids) The desire to do something that involves commitment and shows progress (think knitting, quilting, crafts) Now future retirees will have more tech savy and important factors like being able to understand a sort of virtual world, but other than both my parents slow repsonse time (another thing I think will slowly change) it seems perfectly viable for a retiree to be the next MMO demographic. Or maybe my family has a genetic addictive personality and for some reason all of it gets channeled into video games and vodka (in grandma's case)
This article brought up an interesting revelation in my mind. It stated at the end how the number of retiree's playing MMO's is increasing. Now my mom and dad were born in the 50's, they'll be retiring in 10 years, and they introduced ME into gaming.
My first memory is at 4 years old playing an educational game called Mixed Up Mother goose. As I got older I actually played Diablo II online (on the realms) with my mom when she was out of work. My dad played games like CnC Generals and the likes. My mom has recently even given games like EQ and WoW a shot.
It makes perfect sense if they were to retire tomorrow (unlikely) that they would pick up MMO's. Even my grandma has confessed to me she's played her slot machine game until 4am on some nights ("wow grandma I didn't know we had that much in common")
Now my conclusion is that if games become more user friendly to begin with, easier to pick up and get interested in and allow for a larger interest and larger market it is very possible and logical to me that retirees, in 15+ years (and even more so come the time gen X retires), may very well replace your typical retiree activities of today (think Bingo, knitting, romance novels, etc.)
Compare the demographic similarities of your average mmo player (16-20 something) and a retiree:
Lots of free time
Moderate levels of expendable income (or access to it like parents/kids)
The desire to do something that involves commitment and shows progress (think knitting, quilting, crafts)
Now future retirees will have more tech savy and important factors like being able to understand a sort of virtual world will become more prevelant, but other than both my parents slow repsonse time (another thing I think will slowly change) it seems perfectly viable for a retiree to be the next MMO demographic. Or maybe my family has a genetic addictive personality and for some reason all of it gets channeled into video games and vodka (in grandma's case)
Actually, you are gravely mistaken.
I'm not a 'ganker d00d'. I derive no enjoyment from ganking defenseless people. But the 'alternative' offered - nobody can hurt you, so you might as well be playing single player - is kinda pointless as well.
To me, enjoyment comes from playing MMOs that do not feel like a padded cells with everyone wielding a foam rubber bat.
My current favourite is EVE Online. The whole core of the game is PvP. Note, this is different from 'ganking' and 'griefing'. In EVE once you learn the ropes, in order to advance, you need to leave the kiddie pool of Empire Space, and either sink or swim.
In order to survive in the 'open' areas of 0.0 space, where everything goes and whoever has the biggest guns & largest fleets says if you can ever enter the areas, you need to have diplomatic skill, combat skill and solid gameplan. Pointless ganking will get you labelled as pirate, and every living soul in 0.0 will shoot you to small bits on sight - which is way too expensive in the long run, as every ship going 'boom' actually costs ingame currency, and the amounts are NOT tiny. Make yourself worthwhile to a big alliance, and soon you have people funding your PvP ships that you then use to defend the people that do the funding. Or you can go other way around - get to (ab)use the riches of the low security space with the protection of player 'guards' keeping the space secure, but in return you pay a share of your profits to fund said defense.
So, in EVE, if you want to kill someone, you *can* do so, but like in real life, murdering sprees rarely pay off. Sure, there is no 'permadeath' in EVE, but it's as close to it as you can have in an MMO. High end combat ship going BOOM with all the shiny stuff can mean several weeks of recouping your losses. When everyone is packing big guns, and every death truly hurts, people tend to use those big guns responsibly. Diplomacy plays a lot bigger role - large alliance just threatening to use those big guns (in large numbers, with large alliance bankroll to cover any losses) is a much bigger deal than the actual battles that follow. Unsurprisingly EVE's playerbase is quite mature compared to general maturity level of MMOs.
Large scale wars, diplomacy, manufacturing, mining... with hundreds of players in cooperative alliances watching each other's back to survive in the most 'hostile' environment there is in a MMO just makes any 'padded cell, go ahead, fight a bit, nobody will lose anything meaningful and if you die you'll be back ready to fight in 30 seconds' games kinda weak.
And Guild Wars is kinda weak, because the combat is ultimately pointless, and there is no game universe with any kind of immersiveness. A nice medieval quake in a padded cell with no real stakes, but not really to my taste.
Bit like, say, WoW battlegrounds. Or your average quick bash on a public CounterStrike server.