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Are MMOs Time-Release Vaporware?
KKnDz0r writes "Australian technology and gaming site 'Atomic' raises an interesting question about the dangers of MMOs that go bust. Are they part of a new breed of games that render themselves completely useless and without value if the parent company goes belly-up? It certainly seems that way in some cases, with Fury and now Hellgate: London both going to software heaven, leaving a player base holding relatively useless client software."
While it's certainly not an issue for the large, continuously successful MMOs, we've lately seen a huge influx of companies trying to grab a slice of the MMO pie, some of which will inevitably fail. It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?
When World of Warcraft bites the dust, you'll have a whole hell of a lot of people with 10gigs of data on their drives that does seemingly nothing. Thankfully, when that happens, it's a simple matter for the 11-million-some subscribers to switch over to a private server.
However, for fans of smaller, less popular MMOs, they're essentially screwed if their provider shuts down and nobody's reverse-engineered the server software.
I think it would be a good publicity stunt for the software companies if, when they shut down an MMO, they release the server software for private use. They don't necessarily have to open-source it since their own proprietary code might be re-used in future projects, but if they at least gave the die-hard fans a way to keep enjoying the game, they could build up an even more loyal following rather quickly.
mmos are pointless imso (s=superior). but i dont really like pc games anways.
Not liking PC games kinda sucks the 's' out of your opinion.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The development of MMOs shows that we'll soon see this happen a lot more often.
MMOs have turned into the love child of VCs. They see the success of WoW, see what kind of a huge cash cow it is, and of course they want a slice of that cake. We will see a lot of MMOs pop up left and right in the near future. Actually, we do already see that happen.
Now, early MMOs were mostly a kind of game for a rather small audience, and they were developed as such. EQ, UO, let's not talk about Meridian, they didn't really expect millions of subscribers. And because of this, they aimed lower and already considered the game successful if it managed to break even, which, in turn, wasn't so terribly hard to do with lower expectations (from the players), lower cost of development and the "new kinda game" smell all over it, covering the stench of tedium.
We're now in a post-WoW world. And players have seen it. Love it or hate it, WoW is, from a purely playability and long term interest point of view, very successful. The world is big. The graphics are nice. The quests are easy but managable. Boring from time to time, but never as boring as many others were in so many other MMOs. And most of all, the game is very open end. You can't have it all. Even if you play constantly, have no life outside of it.
Now try to recreate that. Your problem, as a developer, is twofold. Your prospective players will judge you by the "fun" they have in WoW. Your VCs will judge you by the revenue of WoW.
Can you compete with that?
To make matters worse, you have to be different from all those hundreds if not thousands of other MMOs that are pumped into the market. So you have to be "new" in some way. Do you think EQ could even get a foot into the door today? Let's even give it up to date graphics, do you think it could? By today's standards it's boring, it's static, it's limited.
So the bar gets higher and higher for new MMOs. The cost rises as well. VCs want their money back. And the share you can cut out of the cake gets smaller and smaller with more and more competition.
So we'll see a fair lot of "small" MMOs fold. Often within their first year. We'll have to watch subscriber numbers closer, and be prepared to jump ship in time when we notice the game fails. I mean, who wants to "waste" his time building a character that's gone soon?
Which bears the question, why don't we just play to have fun? I mean, like we used to? Aren't games meant to be, you know, fun?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
World of Warcraft is not something to be seriously competed against-- its multi-million subscriber base is a gigantic anomaly, in an industry where 250,000 subscribers is still a prodigious number. Buy-in for end-users is low enough that you can have simultaneously active subs on several games for under $50 USD per month, which is less than a lot of people pay for TV.
And while I don't care for Stormreach either, it certainly hasn't failed yet. Failures are actually extremely rare in the industry-- a bad game can last a very long time, if the publisher is determined to squeeze every dime they can out of the last few tens of thousands of subscribers that haven't moved on to something else. Even games that have failed spectacularly out of the gate (Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, or Vanguard, for example) can limp along for years, or rally behind tightened code and newly released expansion material.
I never understood paying for MMO software. So you pay 50 dollars, for the priviledge of paying 15 dollars a month?
Pick one way of charging, and stick with it. Either lower the barrier to entry and only have monthly fees, or lower the abandonment rate and only have up-front fees. But don't double dip.
*Note: I have played several MMO's at various points in my life.
The ______ Agenda
Sturgeon's Law applies to MMO players as strongly as it does anything else. 11 million players still means there are over 9 million crappy players.
And despite the moaning of everyone about WoW's playerbase, one of its biggest strengths is the fact that so many people play. MMOs benifit (or suffer) from extremely strong network effects. Try playing WoW on a very low-pop server, it's horrible unless all you want to do is solo quest. Switch to a high-pop server and the world comes so much more alive. Now if only they'd increase the server populations a little more... 2.5 - 3k concurrent at peak is only just starting to fill the world up.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Usually it is owned and so mired in ownership issues that is would be useless if the "owner" wanted to release it.
I worked for a...da da daaaaaa...DOT COM and between EDS, who had an agreement with us, Washington Mutual, who was acting as our white label credit department, and venture capitalists in South Korea and Europe, our technology was so tied up in who actually owned it, no one could even claim the authority to shut down the web site. The company is gone, but the web site is still active hasn't been updated since 2001, and the host is still being paid by some financial shell organization who has received instructions to do otherwise. Why, because noone has clear legal authority to do so.
Now, can you imagine what happens to the servers and code of companies that go belly up and why most can't, even if they wanted to, open up the system, or at least provide a free license to operate servers without them?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.