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Slashback: MMORPG Trends
Some additional details on stories we've previously discussed. The Garriott brothers gave a talk at the DICE conference earlier this month, and while Next Generation offered the gist of the Garriot keynote, Gamespy has a detailed look at their predictions. We also talked earlier about World of Warcraft as the new golf. C|Net has a deeper look at the trend of networking in Azeroth. From that article: "With more than 5.5 million people now playing WoW and joining guilds for everything from police officers to soldiers returning from Iraq, it was bound to happen: The rich guys have carved a virtual space to call their own. In fairness, the six-month-old guild isn't just for rich folks. There are plenty of bartenders and regular workaday types in the group as well. But what sets 'We Know' apart is its concentration of movers and shakers in the technology world."
... that even with the amount of new subscribers (more $$$) in WoW and the new servers they keep adding, I still see heavy lag and wait times to get into servers. Why when I'm paying $15 a month should I have to suffer like this?
although true there is a business reason for that. UO, Everquest, Shadowbane all combined still dont have a fraction of the subs that a game like WoW has.
Dont get me wrong I dont like WoW all that much but I respect what they accomplished.
Bashing in all the sacred cows like death should mean something(only to hardcore players obviously), progession should be hard and slow(again hardcore niche players), etc.
They went against the norm and made a game that although viewed as "too easy" by many,
just dominated the market.
so lets see, spend 50million dollars and make a niche game that gets 150k subs, or spend 50million to make a more casual "easy" game that gets 5million subs.
when it comes to getting investors to spend that kind of money on a game you know exactly which one they want.
for the niche hardcore market your going to have to figure out how to make them a lot cheaper which probably means a lot less content on launch. figure out how to run it on super cheap hardware, and support it with minimal people. probably can be done but not much incentive to do so from a business standpoint, but there is certainly room for more niche/hardcode MMO games.
as for this article, Im not really interested in what Garriot has to say, the guy that takes reasponsibilty for UO when he didnt have anything to do with its success (he wasnt even there anymore he had already sold origin to ea). He has been working on UO2/TR for almost 7 years now and he is trying to tell us whats going to happen to MMO's..please Id rather hear from the makers of WoW, or some of the even larger MMO games that are in China then here anymore unfounded crap from the garriot team.