Garriotts See Shakeup To MMOG Industry Coming

Next Generation is reporting from the annual DICE event, and has the gist of the presentation given by Robert and Richard Garriott about the future of the MMOG industry. From the article: "Richard Garriott, father of the Ultima series said, "After a period of growth, opportunities are closing, budgets are increasing to tens of millions of dollars, and companies need global infrastructure in order to publish. My guess is that over the next 3-5 years, only five companies will operate in this business, and unfortunately, many of the startups will be gone.""

Comments

Re:Five companies?

[MarkChovain]

There's a good site that tracks subscription numbers on lots of different MMOGs here. It has dozens of games, and has been tracking subscription stats since 1997.

There is also regarded as a immune system copy, which is very comfortable usable. It does take a couple of years from now.

Up to a point.

[vertinox]

After a period of growth, opportunities are closing, budgets are increasing to tens of millions of dollars, and companies need global infrastructure in order to publish.

I think this is because in order to maximize profit, you must have the best product which requires teams of coders, hordes of graphic designers, and armies of network admins to roll out WoW, EQ, and whatever other blockbuster game comes out.

So this is what is done...

However, larger companies tend to not take risks on unproven ground so there still will be room for startups to nudge their way, but they won't be blockbusters with 100,000 players.

Eventually, after technology and bandwidth costs aren't prohibitive or a factor and the game engines have gotten as realistic as they can so there isn't anything left but to create game content, then perhaps it will be more mom and pop shops again. But this might be a while...

Re:isn't this already true?

[siksia]

A lot of people seem to be forgetting about the rest of the world. The US is by no means the primary player when it comes to MMOG's. Korea in particular has so many that the rest of the world will rarely (if ever) see, and they're really the ones driving this industry now.

Re:With all due respect....

[Psychochild]

No, I know exactly who Richard Garriott is. I also know who many of the other developers that have worked on UO over the years. My business partner that I started Near Death Studios, Inc. with did contract level layout for UO after he left the original Meridian 59 team and before we started our company. A number of Meridian 59 developers had worked at Origin. Keep in mind that Meridian 59 originally launched about a year before UO did.

So, while I respect the Garriotts tremendously for their single-player game work, this doesn't mean that they are online game (or "MMO" if you prefer) experts. UO used Richard's setting, but much of the game was created by text MUD developers including the notorious Raph Koster. ;) Destination Games was also responsible for localizing Lineage for the U.S., but that game sank to a deep level of obscurity despite Richard Garriott's enthusiasm and despite being a staggering success in Korea. And, there's a history for the game Tabula Rasa; they've scrapped development of the game once and restarted already.

Now, I think that they are probably right in that there will be a big shakeup. World of Warcraft has opened up a lot of purses of people that want to duplicate their success, and there's a lot of money going to people with significantly less experience than the Garriotts. So, I suspect we will see a lot of pretty high-profile failures hit in a few years. But, I disagree in that it'll result in 5 or so mega-companies operating all the online titles. It's possible (but not necessarily easy) to carve out a niche and serve it; this is a perfectly valid alternative to their scenario. Given how frustrated people are getting with the "one size fits all" philosophies of the larger games, I think we'll see more people migrating to the smaller games once they become a bit more dominant.

Who is right? I'm placing most of my bets on the niche games. The Garriotts are obviously betting on the mega-companies. So, we have our differences of opinions. I'm just not quite well known yet to get to go to DICE to air my opinions. Although I do at other industry conferences, like the one in Austin.

Overall, I suspect this is a ploy by NCSoft to try to frighten off some competition from entering the MMO space. Scaring the people who might invest in a competitor away from the online arena allows NCSoft a bit more breathing room for more of their games to come out to less intense competition. It's been demonstrated that people who play online games generally prefer a newer game, and games that launch too close to each other tend to have one of the group dominate the rest. So, scaring off competition is the type of smart business decision I'd expect from Robert Garriott, too.

Some more insight,

Re:With all due respect....

[Darth]

I got the impression from your first post that you might not be aware of what they've done since origin. I was just trying to explain why people are listening to them about the MMO market and why their perspective might be worth taking a look at.

With respect to Tabula Rasa, my understanding was that they started over with it because the original idea was determined to be too confusing and too different when it was shown to people and less because it wasnt functional technologically. (what i mean is, it wasnt restarted for technical reasons, it was restarted because they decided the concept didnt work for the audience.) I dont think that that decision says anything really negative about Garriott or his ability to make an mmo. I think it says he tried something a bit risky and dropped it when he decided it wasnt working.

My personal opinion is that he is definitely right that there will be a few large companies that do the really high profile games like COH, WOW, EQ, etc. and if you want to make an MMO out of your franchise, you go to them.

At the same time, you are definitely right that there will always be a market for niche games like A Tale in the Desert or Meridian 59. The niche games can thrive as long as they can remain profitable with a small player base (compared to the major games like WOW). The niche developers will also need to accept that, barring something incredibly lucky happening, they wont be made millionaires by their MMO.

I think online play is the last area of computer gaming where the big companies like EA cannot lock out the independent developers because it's the one place the developers don't need their distribution channels to sell the game.

The independents will have to work hard to provide compelling and innovative gameplay though, to counter the marketing machine and budgets the majors have. The major games will probably stick to proven gameplay elements and steal the successful ideas from the niche games. In that sense, it will be a lot like true independent film vs. hollywood blockbusters.