Building the Sports MMO Genre

Kheldon writes to point out an interview with David Chang of GamesCampus about the up-and-coming sports MMO genre. He also talks about their efforts to bring older demographics into gaming. Quoting: "One of the things about the baseball game in particular that's so great is that there is a leveling component, not just to the team, but also to players. So you're exactly right in terms of the persistence. We want people to not just play a baseball game, but ... to grow their team and their players over time. So, there are things where if you win a game, that's how you gain experience points. If you win against a higher level opponent, you get more experience points; if you bottom feed and you take advantage of lower-level players, you don't get as much, and so on. There are a lot of MMO-type concepts in the game. If you're talking about individual players, if you hit a lot of homeruns, or if you steal a lot of bases, your power or your stealing stat will increase over each season."

Comments

Re:I am clearly missing something

[Junior J. Junior III]

I know sports games are popular, but MMOs require a lot of time and devotion. If you care enough about a sport to play it with others online and devote months or years of your life playing it, why not pick up a ball a play the real thing outside, with friends?

• The offseason.
• The climate where you are might not allow you to play when you want to (eg rain/snow/etc.).
• The available facilities might be far away, busy all the time, managed by assholes, or cost too much.
• Can't find enough people to play with locally, or they all suck or they are all disagreeable.
• Sufficiently good virtual reality gaming might be good training for the real thing.

Besides, no one said you couldn't do both. When I was a kid, the videogame sports I liked most were the games I actually played in real life. Baseball Stars FTW.