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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?
That's easy. Buy the code from them. If it's not already owned by a parent company, you can probably get it for fire-sale prices. Chances are that it's already legally the property of creditors though-- purchasing or even renting the servers necessary to launch an MMO is an extremely costly venture, let alone the costs of payroll and development.
...I should point out that Hellgate: London was not actually an MMORPG, and it includes a single-player mode so it can indeed be played even if the servers are no longer available.
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.
I guess it might be nice if they open-sourced the software so that people could run their own servers... But I really have to kind of wonder what the point would be. What makes these games fun isn't the amazing engines or terrific game mechanics - its the players.
These days there's hardly any gopher servers out there (yes, I know there are a few) - so gopher clients aren't particularly useful.
Players move on to the newest, shiniest games out there. Without constant upgrades and expansions, players get bored pretty darn quick. And then your playerbase shrinks... There aren't enough people around to get groups or run raids... Which means less fun for the remaining players... And before too long there's nobody left to play with.
I suppose someone might pick up an open-sourced game server and expand/improve it enough to keep people playing... Might even do a good enough job to get people to pay for it... But I really have a hard time seeing any game living for terribly long after it's been abandoned by the original company.
I mean, there's a reason these games go under in the first place - they aren't making enough money because there aren't enough people playing them. Open sourcing the code might allow a few die-hard fans to keep playing... But the odds are pretty damn good the game will be dead (or close enough) before too long anyway.
And really, as an MMOG player myself, that doesn't bother me. Unlike a novel or a CD or something like that I don't feel that I'm purchasing an item when I buy an MMOG. I feel more like I'm joining a club... What I gain is the fun, experience, and memories of playing with other people. Not an item that I can revisit later on. It's like when you go on vacation to Mexico - what do you really have to show for your money when all is said and done? A few souvenirs maybe... Some photos... But the main thing you have are the memories of what you did.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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.
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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.
isn't this a problem with the whole SaaS concept? At least with a game you don't lose anything that has "real" value.
What rubbish, some of the first MMOs ever made, gemstone, Ultima Online, Meridian 59 (the first 3d mmo) are still going strong.
Everquest is almost 10 years old (1999) and that's still going strong.
Back up your baseless claims.
It's not that simple, I've been trying to get the source code to the game hardwar, but without knowing who the copyrights belong to it would be illegal for the CEO of the old company (who lives 30 minutes away from me) to give it to me. In fact if the owner showed up and he had GPL'd or handed out the code he could be taken to court.
The law firm that sold the assets of the company knows but they want £250 to look through their records and find out the information.
You also have to realise that not all code in owned by the company, there could be code from different games companies, libraries such as Havok, etc which makes open sourcing the game difficult.
I think how evil the company is has nothing to do with it at all.
With that being said you should contact and get in there quick before it hits the copyright blackhole (ownerless because no one knows who owns it). This happens to a lot of game source code.
This is an MMO that beta'd, died, came back with fan run and company verified servers, died again, came back under gametap, died yet again, and now maybe might come back with fan servers a second time.
At this point I doubt Cyan even owns Myst, Uru, or Plasma, the engine they bought and built up. I don't see any future where the fan's will get source code to the servers, or even the ability to run a server free of Cyan's control. Any company going belly up after investing millions obviously hasn't recouped that money, meaning the people that invested in them now own the IP, and why would they give it away? I doubt *they* give a rats ass about the fanbase.
You might be saying to yourself that Uru is still a single player game, and yes, this is true, but that isn't what URU is about, it's about the community. I've played all the myst games, and this one feels the most dead of them all, because you are alone in a world meant to be filled with other player characters.
And you people claim to be geeks. Here's the crux: Vaporware gets announced, but never released. Abandonware gets released and then abandoned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware
One goes out and buys specialized client software to access a service. One pays a monthly fee for the service. One uses the software to access the service. The service goes away. The software has no more use.
Where is the poblem? Go out and buy the client software for some other service if you really want that service.
Here, let me give you a real world comparison.
Here, have another:
Exactly what is it people are complaining about? Is it that the specialized client software they "bought" doesn't work with every other MMORPG? Or, are they just whining that they can't play the game anymore? I ask because the game is not the client. The game is the service run by the company. No company, no service, no game.
Should people who paid for a CompuServe client and subscription bitch and moan because they now can't use the software they bought?
To anyone who is whining about not being able to use the client for that MMORPG that folded, pay attention:
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
BTW, what is it with /. and the rendering of apostrophes? Is it just me, or Firefox, or what?
If you type on a non QWERTY keyboard, such as most of those in Europe, there's a good chance you're using the "wrong" apostrophe. On my German keyboard here for example, there's the "real" apostrophe on shift # (just left of the enter key), as well as the backtick/foretick key beside ß (which also doesn't display correctly, like this - ÃY). Slashdot doesn't handle a great deal of characters that aren't standard ASCII, which includes the foretick (renders as Â). Oddly enough, the backtick renders fine - `. It's pretty common for people in Europe to type the foretick rather than an apostrophe character, because it's easier to reach and you don't have to press shift on most layouts, whereas for an apostrophe you do. It's still wrong though, and looks hideous in a lot of fonts, even when it does display correctly, so I'd advise training yourself against it. In the case of copy/paste (I noticed it happens for you when quoting), be careful that the characters you're pasting in are correct, as the simple act of copying from a webpage may mess things up depending on the clipboard system in use (I seem to have no problems here using English language MacOS X 10.4 with Firefox 3.0.3, but potentially different combinations may be an issue)
I notice the foretick I've typed here doesn't render the same as your "apostrophe" however, so I wonder if you're typing yet another different character. As you can see from this post, I've used a fair few "real" apostrophes and they all show fine.
Despite my claims about the foretick/whatever-else not looking right and that you shouldn't use them as apostrophe, I ALSO think Slashdot needs to hurry up and actually support all of these characters (I mean come on... Unicode is NOT hard), because it's REALLY annoying to have to type things like Köln, when I'd rather just type Köln (which renders here as as KÃln). There's a LOT of characters that don't show correctly:
And many many more...
(note that some of these characters are required to correctly spell ENGLISH words also... æ in Encyclopædia or loanwords that we don't really have any alternative for, such as façade... so it's not even a decent excuse for them to say that Slashdot is primarily English speaking.)
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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.
They sold close to a million copies and PLENTY of people gave the game a try.
The problem was that they listened to you.
They did release AO2.
They just didn't copy the sci-fi setting but the horrible launch.
AoC for those who been there for AO know they AOC really stand for Anarchy Online Continued.
Dark&Light still holds the #1 spot in bad MMO launches, and Vanguard is a strong number 2, but AoC sure as hell gave both a run for their money. And Funcom sure as hell ain't a SOE who can survive with a dozen games all performing mediocre.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.