Slashdot Mirror
World Of Warcraft Crushing PC Game Industry?
simoniker writes "Age of Empires co-creator and Iron Lore co-founder Brian Sullivan has been discussing his studio's first game, Titan Quest, but along the way has openly wondered whether World Of Warcraft's success is part of the reason for the decline of the PC retail game market. Sullivan commented: 'For retail PC games, I think the biggest problem is World of Warcraft... It is such a compelling MMO game that it sucks up a lot of money and time that would normally be spent on other retail PC games.' Does WoW's growth actually mean that PC games in other non-MMO genres may sell fewer copies?"
As for making a name for themselves in the market, Sullivan feels that some of the biggest competition comes from MMOs, not because they are competitors in the genre, but because people simply enjoy playing them so much.
...Really, that isn't an argument, it's stating the obvious.
His entire argument is that any game that's more popular than his, especially MMOs, takes away from his game.
Gamers are an educated demographic, for the most part, and have fantastically high standards. When something that comes out is so good that it shakes up the entire industry, complaining about it will get you nowhere. It's kinda like he's making an "I'm hardcore and therefore better!" argument, but applying it to the big kid on the block (yes, WoW is a "casual" game in many respects, but he's not addressing that aspect).
And even at all that, aspiring to understand why it's so wildly popular so that he may make better games seems to have escaped him.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Like this guy is just upset that his game hasn't got the stuff, and in one last final grab at attention he tired to get it on Slashdot, because before this, I had never heard of the game (probably because it doesn't have a big enough fan base to really get it mentioned alot, atleast not in the corners of the internet where I lurk. Seriosly though, he needs to figure out that an RPG unless really innovative these days isn't going to attract attention because they have been done over and over again.
Infact the last innovative RPG I remember was themed after an MMO infact (and I would love to see more on similar theory. Players want more freedom (something the MMO introduced, another player to a traditionally single player world) and now the RPG makers are going to have to catch up, they have to introduce a human like AI, that can give the element that for so long they have been lacking (and Yes I know there are multiplayer RPG's out there)
Did someone say cake?
Ok, it may be that people are caught up in WoW. But that will fade eventually. Then they'll move on to something else.
And then there's people out there who, like me, look at WoW and go "Geez, I don't have the time to devote my life to this." and never play it. I've looked at it in fascination, but I've also woken up on Sunday after a long binge of Civilization X, and wondered where my weekend went. Those experiences taught me that I need to pick my gaming prudently. So I don't play WoW. I've already seen people's lives disappear when they start playing.
Also, like any other "where are the gamers?" question, you need to make sure the games you're making are fun or you have no room to complain.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'd love to play WoW, but I have a job, I take night classes, and I'm trying to find that elusive thing called "girl". Dumping time into the hole of WoW would kill off at least one of those. And I think when I'm 50, I'd rather look back on the fun times I had with (eventual) children than fun times I had with avatars in a world that didn't exist.
Maybe it's just me.
Reeses
Personally, I can't stand WoW - I just don't much go in for that "I put on my robe and wizard hat" crap, but something else did turn out to hook me in rather completely - in my case, it's EVE Online. Since I've started playing that, I haven't spent any time with CS:S, BF2, or any of the other titles I generally spent time on (not even GTA).
I'm not saying the game I like is better than the game in the article, but what I do observe is that a well-crafted MMOG can pull a player in for hours and weeks at a time. I know I don't bother considering buying games right now, because I know that I probably won't play them - hell, I'm not playing the ones I already have. So you have probably four big MMOGs dominating the landscape, which is great for Blizzard, CCP, etc., but the rest of the industry sees a decline.
So what's the problem? If you want to compete with the market leaders, produce something more compelling, exciting, shiny, and innovative than what's out there. Don't whine that better games are eating your lunch. From what I see, the big MMOGs are winning because they are that good. Now, if someone were to put out a spaceship-based MMOG where you could dock into a station, exit your ship, and engage in FPS combat to take over the station, land on the planets to do missions, PVE, PVP, world-building, etc., I'd be in line at midnight to give it a try. I bet if someone did a robe-and-wizard-hat MMOG where there were no shards or instances (a-la EVE's ginormous server cluster with anywhere between 15,000-25,000 players on at any given time), then you'd see guys in tunics camping outside Fry's.
In the games industry, if you can't beat 'em, go work for EA, where you can at least be sure of steady income for producing shit rerun knockoffs. Or you could do better, and actually beat 'em.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Look at it this way: the more time your peers waste on unproductive activities, the easier it will be to advance your own career.
It's not about WoW taking all of the gamer's money. $15 a month is not even a dent in even a casual gamer's entertainment budget.
It's about time. Between work, WoW, and the occasional outing into the real world, there is no time left for these other games.
In fact, WoW has actually SAVED me money. Now I spend $15 a month for my gaming needs, instead of the $200 I previous spent buying a new game every week.
You can be playing several games at once, playing an MMO does not mean you do nothing else until you grow tired of it and quit. I think you'll find that there are more then 1.5 million Americans that call themselves gamers, so the question is more why aren't they buying your game. Maybe the answer is that it sucks.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I'm sorry that you have a half-dozen friends that have no self control, but from personal experience, this statement is false.
My roommate, my girlfriend, several other friends, and myself all play WoW. Yet somehow, we manage to maintain education, employment, church attendance and participation, and interpersonal relationships, trips to see family, and even playing other games, watching movies, reading books, and playing sports. Oh, and we still manage to get a good amount of sleep every night too.
The problem isn't that WoW allows you to play for more than 3 hours ( from time to time, my friends and I have been known to play the game all day long ). The problem is that your friends have decided that they like the game enough to play for long periods of time every day ( or most days ). They made a choice as to what was most important to them - in this case, it was the enjoyment they get out of playing WoW.
Personally, I'd be pissed if this ever were to happen - when I want to play WoW for a long time, I like having the choice to do so.
Please ignore any obvious problems in this post.
I wager that, in fact, it isn't.
I had the opportunity to get a beta copy of WoW at DefCon a few years ago and I passed on it because I didn't want to get sucked in. A couple of weeks ago I went out and bought two copies of the game so that I can play it with my girlfriend. I play for a couple of hours a week and it is something else for us to do when we want to hang out. I still manage to make it to the temple to stay ontop of my kung fu training, I still make it to work, I still hang out at the bar with my friends.
The point I'm getting at that it is possible. It's as possible as it is to do ANYTHING else if you want to. If doing things besides playing an MMO is important to you then you will find a way to do it. If you want to get lost in an MMO, you will do that. Just because most people have problems balancing their lives doesn't mean that it can't be done.
I was a heavy player of WoW for almost a year. From the initial release in 2004 until about early spring of this year. I just got tired of the grind after getting to 60 in June of 2005. My brother continues to play to this day but I just don't see the fun. I might check it out when Burning Lands or whatever it's called shows up but I've since discovered some decent games to play for fun like BF2 and others.
I'm sure there are a lot of others like me who didn't feel like raiding another dungeon yet again for that one piece of armor
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
> Raiding is interesting for the challenge that certain instances provide, as well as just chatting
> about with my guildmates.
Exactly. Who cares if you get some l3wt at the end of it or not, raids are fun just for the socialization factor.
Would you rather spend four hours watching television or listening to your tank getting drunker and drunker and drunker as the raid goes on into the evening? "I'm puh-hulling aggro as fash has I can here, wasnhuff wonee fight me??? AH DAMNNT! Who hitten me? BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASHURDS!!!!!"
I have a full time job (game developer) and I'm part of one of the high end WoW guilds here in the US, http://www.elitistjerks.com/
We raid four or five nights a week. It's scheduled during the evenings and we try to keep our raids to a maximum of four hours. I get home from work, eat dinner, then raid in the evening. I'd rather be doing that then watching mindless television or something. I'd say I play around 12 to 20 hours of WoW a week and quite enjoy it. Sure, that's more than a casual player who plays it a couple hours a week, but I'm not putting 80 to 100 hours a week into the game.
/// Zoid.
I have a friend that used to pick up 1 or 2 FPS games a month. Since he got hooked into WoW... well, that is all he has played. (I think he picked up Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter a few weeks back). But, by having a huge game like WoW, people put their money, and their time into that ONE game. Heck, when I played WoW for 6 months, I only bought 1 or 2 new games. Generally, I would have bought 5 or 6 new games in that time. Heck, it even stuck with me AFTER playing WoW. My buying habits are WAY down. To 1 game every 3 or 4 months. I was generally buying 1 or 2 new games a month. (I would say 4 new games every 3 months). From just what I have seen in myself, and others, I would say that WoW has a very real, and very negative affect on PC gaming in general.
Most people that have asked this question of me, are the same ones that sit on their ass and watch 4-5 television shows per night.
I've stopped buying PC games, but not because of WoW - I stopped playing WoW almost a year ago. PC games just don't appeal to me anymore because most of them aren't any good. PC games have devolved into just a bunch of "sequels," however, many of them are not so much sequels as they are blatant knockoffs of games that were hits in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I still own most of the originals, and I can just go play those again - no need to pay extra just to see some more polygons.
It doesn't help that the cost of a high-end video card has become absurd - I used to get a nice midrange card for $250-$300, with prices in the $400-$500 range, I'd be better off to buy an Xbox and not go through the hassle of upgrading my mainboard, video card, RAM, and CPU just to be able to play games that are just going to give me deja vu.
If PC game developers want to woo back gamers, they need to start making games that are worth the costs. Right now I just don't think they're doing that.
raid starts at 8:00 and at +/- 23:30 you can go to sleep.
(assuming you mean 8pm?) 5.5 hrs twice a week = 11 hrs per week
I'm sorry, but that's not "casual gaming". 2hrs/week at a push is what I'd call casual gaming. The type of thing you can pick up and play when you feel like it, not when it's scheduled.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
That's pretty much what has put an end to my gaming activities: lack of a good story. Heck, I'd even settle for some really good puzzles in an adventure game. It's been a long time since I played a game that had any sort of major impact on me, the way a good book or movie would. And my standards are not all that high or high-brow by any means. But the kinds of plot devices and cliches employed in a lot of games are just too stale for me.
That doesn't mean a game with a lame plot can't be enjoyable: GTA Vice City was enjoyable, even though the underlying plot was completely inane. Scarface, from which VC borrowed heavily, was a decent movie because it showed character development, whereas in VC, crime does pay while the protagonist remains essentially unchanged by what's going on around him. But I could even live with all that if there was a way to influence the plot somewhat, or to interact with the non-player characters. But instead, the plot is usually static and relegated entirely to cutscenes.
Recently I got interested in interactive fiction, which I recommend to anyone tired of the lack of good stories in mainstream games. Interactive fiction has grown considerably, compared with the old text adventure games from the '80s, to the point that people will be offended if one equates interactive fiction with text adventures. Good, new adventure games can still be found, though. Besides, interactive fiction is the only game-like medium that has managed to induce a serious brain-fuck, at least for me. Check out http://wurb.com/if/ and play Shade, 9:05, or Spider and Web, to see what I mean.
WoW is to PC Games what Magic was to pen & paper RPGs. Sort of. I remember back in the early nineties when Wizards of the Coast was a > 10 employee shop that published this little Card Game called Magic. All hell broke lose and 4 years later the RPG market was crushed beyond recognition. The only ones that survived and still are around and not bought by Hasbro or crushed are Steve Jackson Games and Palladium Books.
I have the feeling WoW is doing the same. It's the only game that's still selling well that runs well on my box. Guild Wars only means of success is being not like WoW and cheaper (free) to play.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
15 years ago you could find text adventures on the shelves at Babbages. I could actually find a decent turn based war-game by SSG. Now if you want ANY of these (or other types of games) you have to go online and order/download.
What is popular is determined by what is available and what is available is determined by what is popular. It's a vicious cycle which ends up homogenizing the prime shelves of the stores. An addicting fun game can still sell, but unfortunately game companies (and more importantly investors) see a direct correlation between funds re-cooped in development cost and cost of development. It's the "Hollywood" effect happening to games. Big special effects, star power, etc are banked on to get BIG sales. Software retailers have become like grocery stores where they only make decent money if BIG volume sells.
As a result, the store has BIG name games, with BIG development costs, BIG advertising and what investors hope will be BIG returns.
I've often thought about how Richard Garriot sold Akalabeth at a Game store. That just couldn't happen today. Not because games arent good, but because there is no way for games like his to get the exposure they need.
Somebody needs to come up with a way to get the independent game market back into the minds of consumers. Get the best games (independant) packaged with Dell, or Apple. I don't know..but there needs to be some creativity in thinking about how to get the word out.
This is an easy one. Think of all of the people you know who play WoW. Think about their game playing habits before they bought it, and their habits now. The avid gamers I know who started playing WoW are no longer avid gamers. They are avid WoW players. Period.
The CRUSHING prices they want for the games now. They expect that every kid has an UNLIMITED budget for game... Not at my house. LOWER your prices and you will see a RESURGENCE in game buying. The bloody things have gotten to be WAY to costly for what you get.
As with many things the industry get's TOO GREEDY and keep going until they price the customer out of buying it.
EVE requires constant massive time injections - basically travelling takes a lot of time and making money to aquire a half-decent ship requires lots of time doing repetitive taks (mining, trading, missions).
From the several MMORPGs i've played (WoW included), the only one that doesn't push you by design into one or more "time-sinks" is Guild Wars - which is also the only one where you don't pay a monthly fee.
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Back to the overall theme of the thread
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The threat posed by WoW to games such as Titan Quest is much more basic than it being a time-sink for hardcore gamers:
- It simply is one of the best RPGs out there.
If you concentrate on the basic RPG aspects of WoW and forget about the whole end-level content stuff (which indeed are just time sinks for hardcore gamers) and PvP aspects (some of the major problems with the game have to do with griefing by high-level players), it turns out that WoW is very much a voyage of wonder and discovery, way up there amongst the best such as Neverwinter Nights (beter than Oblivion IMHO).
At the same time, Titan Quest sucks (starting with the view point never going high enough to allow you to see enough around you no nor low enough to allow you to play in 1st person view and feel like you're the hero).
The time sink problem is only an issue for game publishers targetting the hardcore gamer market segment - as yesterday's teenage (hardcore) gamers age and turn into today's adult (casual) gamers, more and more of the gamer population consists of gamers which don't have the time to seriously go into online RPGs and would rather just have games which you can just pick up and have fun for half-an-hour.
Maybe the industry should start targetting the part of the gaming market that's actually growing???
Nonsense, it's an artificial comparison to compare the expense on a per game basis. Instead, look at the cost per hour of gameplay and do the math.
Let's say that I play games 25 hours a month, a fairly casual gamer. Each traditional PC or console game (Civs aside) take about that long per game, plus or minus 10 hours. So let's say I'll buy 8 games a year - at $40-$60 per new game, that's $400/year. That's compared to $50 startup plus $15/month the first year of WoW, or $230/year. So even if you buy a couple of other games (the only other game I've bought in the last year was Civ IV, which has a shorter-but-similar "long playtime" effect), you're still ahead of the game.
If you game more than that per month, MMOs are even more economical. Clearly, less money is being spent in total on games in that scenario, which I contend is a lighter-than-usual gamer.
The issue isn't the money that's being taken in by WoW, it's the player time. People aren't not buying other games because they can't afford them, they're not buying them because they don't have the time to play them.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
It's a simple truth that when you're ponying up montly fees to play a game, you're going to want to play that game to feel like you've got value out of your dollar. In that sense, it's seems unlikely that most people would play more than one MMO at a time. It's too much of a financial burden to justify a very small portion of your month, at the same rates, to play a second or third MMO.
Next is the issue of time in cooperative gameplay. I don't know about you guys, but most gamers have a day job and a life outside of gaming. An MMO cuts into the latter immediately, and in extreme cases it can cut into you day job. For people that enjoy a good social life, a book, a movie, their significant other, their children, their parents, and so forth, it's a tall order to take much time away from any of those. To commit the time to play in a cooperative environment, especially in a clan structure, can literally be impossible for working people with a family. To justify that monthly cost of an MMO, you need to play it. To play it, you need time you don't have. So, if you can possibly squeeze in time to play 10 hours a week at particular clan-coordinated times, you're only doing it for one MMO.
This is why I won't buy a game like WOW. It's going to suck me in. It's going to take me away from a lot of other things. So, I buy single player games that I can pick up at any time and put down at any given length later. I even like games like Guild Wars, where there is no monthly fee but simply episodic content releases.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."