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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.""
That holds true for most industries. Remember, when cars first came out there were many many car companies. As cars got more and more complex there were less and less companies, until today you have maybe 7 or 8 major car companies in the world.
The same is true about the computer game industry in general. When games were new and a lot less sophisticated, there were thousands of publishing companies. Today we have..what, 4 major ones? EA, Ubisoft, Veventi, MS and...?
There's only a market for about 5 MMOGs worldwide.
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Garriott (and/or Garriott) demonstrates a notable lack of vision when it comes to the willingness of indie developers to work in a variety of gamespaces. Not all games require tens of millions of dollars of content to be interesting to at least a small number of people, and the key to a successful game isn't necessarily selling millions of copies worldwide. In truth, all that's needed is to make a game that sells enough copies/subscriptions to make the money back on the development costs (i.e., the developers' families have food on the table).
Take A Tale in the Desert, for instance. It's an independently-developed game, published in online form only. The small development team has been maintaining the game for nearly three years off the $14 per month subscription fee from several hundred (perhaps a thousand or two) players at a time. Is this game a mega-super-ultra blockbuster? No, of course not. The market can only support a few of those at one time (though that'll increase as more people discover the genre). But is it successful? Definitely. It's not only stayed afloat for three years, but the enthusiasm of its subscribers and its developers continues to thrive.
Puzzle Pirates is another good example of an indie MMOG that has achieved success in the market (as well as critical acclaim). And what's more, MUDs are still around, some with dozens or hundreds of players daily experiencing freely-developed content. If Garriott were operating under valid assumptions, these MUDs would have died off long before WoW entered (and increased) the MMOG market.
Garriott is probably right that there's only room enough for a few World of Warcrafts or EverQuests or Lineages at a time. The expectation has grown that these games will require thousands of person-hours in development, and as customer expectations inflate, the costs for these games will eventually become prohibitive to all but larger media companies who can afford to bankroll such projects. But it demonstrates blindness to what's going on in the trenches to say that the market will suddenly close off to small developers with big visions.