Actually, most online multiplayer RPGs (or "MMORPGs") are good for this in my experiences, particularly ones that reward interaction but that don't necessarily require it. I found that playing online text games (MUDs) back in college actually helped me get at ease with socialization in a non-threatening environment. If I made a serious faux pas, I didn't have someone angry or upset right in my face flustering me. I also learned how to communicate with people and learn how words that had one meaning for me had a separate meaning for other people; in other words, I learned the importance of body language and other visual cues.
I'm an introvert: socializing tends to tire me out. (I recommend the excellent book The Introvert Advantage for people that want to know accurate definitions of introversion and extroversion.) I didn't get a lot of practice since I preferred to be by myself when I was younger. However, talking and playing with people online was enough to let me interact with people and get comfortable doing it. If I got too tired I just wandered off to kill some monsters and play the game.:)
This isn't to say that talking to people online is all you need to do. On the contrary, you need to follow up and deal with people offline as well; D&D was my venue of choice for that in college. However, I think online socialization was the important first step to allowing me to learn how to extrovert so well. I own my own business and have to deal with other people on a regular basis. I've learned little tips and tricks on how to deal with getting tired from interaction with others, and I know where my limits are.
The parent post is right. Indie games often do compete with other games, at least in the mind of the consumer. You may not create your little war game to compete with other war games on the market, but you can be sure that the war game fanatic is going to be comparing your game to every other game he has seen.
The trick is to have a unique selling point that draws people. For a "casual" game, that usually means having a more streamlined experience and a lower price point. If a person can jump into a game and buy it for $20, that's worth a lot more to most people than if the game has a multi-hour tutorial and costs me $60.
For other types of games it's harder. My own game, Meridian 59 is a small Player vs. Player (PvP) focused game. Definitely not for everyone, and it tends to cater to a hard-core audience that has enjoyed the game over the decade it has been running. The game isn't graphically impressive, so it runs on older computers. The game focuses more on skill-based PvP rather than level-based monster grinding. It couldn't be more different than World of Warcraft (WoW) unless we took out combat.
People still compare Meridian 59 to WoW, though.
WoW is bigger. WoW is prettier. WoW has more classes. WoW has better loot. The $10.95 per month for Meridian 59 is "almost as much" as the $14.95 per month for WoW. WoW has to be a better game because more people play it.
Now, I don't develop the game to compete with WoW. I'm mostly happy keeping the game running for the people that truly enjoy the unique aspects of the game. But, even if I'm not competing with WoW people are still going to compare my game to it despite what I think.
Hah! Us small-scale game developers (I run Meridian 59) do it for the love of gaming and technology. What kind of gaming and technology geek worth the title could avoid reading Slashdot?;)
There are a few misconceptions in your post. Unfortunately, lots of people make them.
First, WoW does not make $90 million per month. A large portion of those 6 million subscriptions Blizzard claims are in China, and Chinese players pay US$0.06/hour. They would have to play more than 8 hours per day to reach $15/month, and China has restrictions on how long minors can play these types of games. (I made a post on my professional blog with more details and links to references.)
Second, the 6 million subscription figure is worldwide. As I said above, most of those players are in China, a market that was not available to most of the previous games one might consider. The half-million figure you state is for North American subscriptions for previous games. Comparing this to Blizzard's last press release claiming 1 million North American subscriptions, we get a figure of 2x rather than 10x as you state.
Don't get me wrong, Blizzard certainly has done very well and surpassed the "old guard" quite handily. They also proved all the naysayers wrong that said the fantasy online game market was oversaturated and no new game could possibly do as well. But, it is best to keep the figures in proper perspective when discussing this topic.
All that said, I do agree with your central point: the Blizzard and Warcraft brands were well-loved for being great games from a pretty honest company. This definitely helped them make an online RPG that surpassed all previous records.
On the other hand, the Atari situation is different. I suspect most of the income goes to Bioware, so Atari doesn't make much off the premium modules; they likely expect to make more from sales of NWN2 and want as little competition as possible. Some people that won't get getting the newest patches and content might look to the sequel for an upgrade. Is it the smartest move? Not sure. But, the decision did not totally come out of left field.
There's often discussion about "games as art", and some people question why it's important for games to be considered "art" instead of being just fun. This story shows one of the biggest reasons: it makes the medium of games more legitimate and less prone to attacks like this.
Do you think this bill would have passed unanimously if we were talking about violent books? What about violent paintings? Consider Goya's El Tres de Mayo. It's extremely violent, but we consider it art. I remember seeing this painting in my text books in school in history. We don't fret about kids seeing the blood and violence.
Of course, game developers also need to take some responsibility here and create more works that are worthy of the title "art". And, even if games are considered as having artistic merit, there will still be politicians that try to play politics with it, just as they do with music these days.
I discuss this a bit more in a essay and comments on my professional blog.
Honestly, it was a very small thing that kept me from using OpenOffice: I couldn't print envelopes. No matter what I did, it would not print anything the envelope when I sent it through my printer. MS Office worked just fine, so I went back to that.
Maybe it's been fixed by now. It was a known, listed bug and scheduled to be fixed in the next major revision. I couldn't wait around for that to happen. I run a small business, so I didn't have time to go fix it myself. I had already sunk money into MS Office, so I didn't feel like paying someone to go fix it. In the end, it was just easier to go back to what I knew instead of beating my head against something that didn't work.
It's nice to have alternatives, but if they don't do what you need then there's really no point.
The biggest problem with multiplayer games on mobile platforms is communication. Being able to chat with other people is an important part of the experience. Otherwise, you're just being charged more to play a single-player game.
I own and operate the online game Meridian 59. The game was released nearly 10 years ago, and the original client used a raycaster type engine similar to the original DOOM games. (We have since upgraded the engine to use 3D hardware acceleration on the PC.) It's often been suggested that we put the game on the mobile platform since the system requirements are so low.
Unfortunately, there are several problems. First, avatar customization is huge, and it takes a lot of resources to do that properly. Even modest Meridian 59 installs to about 100 MB. You'd have to do a lot of severe compression to get it to work right.
And, as stated above, you don't have good communication. Ironic, since you're usually using a phone. But, if you use voice you'll be taking up part of the bandwidth you need for sending data for the game. As someone else pointed out in comments, most phones won't support the data throughput and response you need for this type of game.
In the U.S., you also have the typical problems associated with mobile gaming. I have a fairly recent phone, but it still doesn't play most of the games out there. Most people can't afford the phones that keep them on the "cutting edge" and able to play these types of games. Why buy an expensive phone to play a crippled version of a game? Less users means that you'll have to increase the price in order to still make enough money to justify doing the phone version instead of a full-blown PC or console version.
So, there's a reason why you don't see these types of games on mobile. Perhaps eventually we'll get to the point where we have good networks and proper phones, but not anytime in the near future.
C'mon now, there's reasonable consensus about what innovation is and isn't.
Not really. You obviously have what you feel is a good definition of innovation, but there are a lot of people that will disagree with you. If there's a solid definition for innovation, then why don't you share it with the rest of us?
You can hardly say that Square...
You seem to have a beef with Final Fantasy and Square that is affecting objectivity. Some of the points you bring up have very little to do with gameplay innovation ("prerendering technique"?). Was FarCry innovative when it demonstrated a number of newer (but not original) rendering techniques even though it had throughly derivative FPS gameplay?
Personally, I think the sphere grid system of advancement in FFX was very innovative. I don't know of an earlier game that used a similar mechanic, but I wouldn't be surprised if another game has done something similar. But, if that mechanic is original, does that make the whole game innovative? Probably not, but you were arguing that the specific mechanic isn't innovative.
Comparing Black and White to Catz/Dogz is silly. You could argue that, but you'd look a fool.
Ah, now come the personal attacks; a typical response when losing an argument. Don't worry, I don't take things personally. But, I should have B&W to a more obvious game like Creatures, instead. Or, am I still a fool for comparing two games where gameplay consists of training one or more neural nets, represented in game as "creatures", how to behave using positive and negative feedback? Or, will you argue that god-game layer was innovative (even if obviously derived from Populous)? Or that the gesture-based spells made the whole game innovative?
Fable did include a reasonable amount of new concepts and ideas over and above what Rune offered....
So, who decides what is a "reasonable amount" of "new" concepts? I guess it passes your personal tests, but there are other people that disagree. Consider Tomb Raider or Crusaders of Might & Magic as other games with varying degrees of similar gameplay mechanics. I still say innovation is in the eye of the beholder. It seems that you are proving Fable is innovative merely because you said so.
Also, stating you are a professional game developer doesn't really back up your arguements when they main (and far as I can see, only) game you develop is one you purchased from someone else. Excuse me while I scoff.
Again with the personal attacks? I made a single comment at the end of my post to show that I had some authority to speak on the things I did, not to make any invalid points valid.
But, yes, I bought Meridian 59 from 3DO before it went bankrupt. However, I had worked on the game for about 2 years while at 3DO. This is something your Google search probably wouldn't be able to tell you. Anyway, I've been working in the game industry since 1998, after quite a few years of amateur game development, including text MUD development in college. During my professional career I've worked as a programmer a single-player PC game, developed a simple scripting language for console game development, maintained a graphical chat system, designed small games as requested by customers, programmed a handheld game demo on contract, and started a business to develop online games that ended up purchasing the game I had worked on previously. I have worked with and gained the admiration and respect of many online developers who have been developing projects longer than you have probably been playing games.
So, while you're busy scoffing, feel free to share where your authority to define innovation comes from other than, "because I said so online!"
The parent post shows one of the biggest issues when discussing "innovation", it's not very well defined. As the old joke goes, ask 5 people to describe "innovation" and you're likely to get 6 different answers. The definition really depends on each individual.
For example, the parent post says that all Final Fantasy games have, "Random battles, spells and bosses." Of course, so do many other games in the RPG genre, such as the old Wizardry games. How much change is needed before something is really innovative? Does Darklands count as derivative because it has random battles, spells, and bosses? Even though the "spells" are in terms of alchemic potions and prayers to saints? Does the historical setting of fantasy medieval Germany score some points? But, if these features make the game different and "innovative", why does a change in a system in Final Fantasy (such as the Materia system in FF7) or the setting (such as the industrial setting of FF7) fail to qualify? (Personally, I'll disagree that the changes to advancement like the materia system or sphere grid are "little" changes.)
Likewise, people can say things are innovative out of a lack of knowledge of games. The parent post says that Deus Ex is innovative, but many of the features found in that game first appeared in the System Shock series. So, does this mean that Deus Ex isn't really innovative? You could make similar arguments for Fable (which shares similar gameplay with Rune) and Black & White (which you could argue just puts Dogz or Catz in a more interesting environment.)
So, the original question remains: what is the limit for something to be innovative? Does it have to be completely different than anything that came before? I don't think that's realistic, because every game borrows some element from other games. Are sequels automatically disqualified? Not really, you can have innovative mechanics and gameplay wrapped up in a familiar type of story; however, some sequels are obviously just derivative. So, where do you draw the line? Can you make that consistent?
Of course, this whole argument ignores the fact that innovative games are very risky, and that the market is very hesitant to support anything too unfamiliar. For example, you need to have something identifiable (like a name such as "Final Fantasy") before people will try something "new" out. On the other hand, games that have been widely considered innovative (such as DOOM, The Sims, etc.) have been the catalysts that have grown the industry by leaps and bounds.
I've never used them myself, but a friend of mine swears by Sea-Band. It's supposed to be good for different types of nausea, and he says it works wonders to combat the motion sickness he gets while playing games.
Again, I've never used them, just passing along info that might help. They could be total quackery for all I know.
Different people have different reactions to games. There's been a lot of writing trying to explain what causes motion sickness. Personally, I get motion sick of I haven't played fast-action 3D games in a while. After I play for a bit, I can go for hours without getting the reaction. But, if I don't play those types of games for a few months I find myself back at square one.
I actually played Meridian 59 when it first came out. No offense, but I wasn't that impressed.
Of course, things have changed in the past 10 years since M59 came out. This is another aspect of marketing, to let people know that the product is "New and Improved!" We've poured a lot of new content into the game, rebalanced things, even got a new rendering engine as an alternative to the old software renderer. Of course, it's still the same game that focuses on character advancement and PvP combat, but even those have changed over the years.
As for GalCiv2, a quick Google search shows that the game will enjoy some print marketing. Print advertising isn't cheap, and they would likely get much better results by having an "online street team" that probably costs about the same.
[A] better game will have strong success and fanbase beyond the initial sales....
True, but many games are like other entertainment media in that most of the sales happen at launch. Game players, in general, enjoy new things. Older games are generally seen as inferior, so encouraging people to buy the game at launch will boost sales. Recurring sales are not as valued, particularly by games in retail because shelf space is limited. A game that sells a steady trickle will make less money over a short period of time than a newly released game that's been hyped excessively and expects big sales.
I certainly didn't mean to make it sound like "online street teams" are the only way to market, but you do need a good marketing plan. A "viral" product becomes so because of a marketing plan. Hotmail had a hook in being one of the first and better webmail applications, and they were advertised every time someone sent an email: "Hotmail.com, what ISP is that you're sending from?" Firefox definitely had a very strong marketing angle, they were just lucky enough to have enthusiastic supporters. And, they definitely did have a superior product with great features like tabbed browsing. But, notice how much better Firefox did than Mozilla.
And, Google is interesting, too. The original search engine did pretty good, but many of their more recent offerings have worked with the "exclusivity" angle if they're trying to break into an already established area. Orkut and Gmail both had a field full of competitors, but they managed to drum up a lot of interest in people by making them "invite only" to start.
Games are a different beast than the things you've mentioned. Portable email, a great browser, and a fast search engine are things that affect the way you work on the internet. I'm firmly in the camp that the internet is important for daily life, so having something that improves your internet experience is pretty much vital. Games, on the other hand, are luxuries so you can't use exactly the same marketing techniques. Having people say good things about the game helps, but playing a game isn't going to make your life easier like switching to Firefox from IE does.
In the end, "online street teams" are very effective for game marketing. Luxuries that are perceived as popular and cool are more desirable, in general.
Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works. If you have the best game in the world but nobody knows about it, you just have a good game you've probably invested a lot into. (For an indie, that's probably a lot of time in addition to some of what should have been your retirement fund.) Once people know about it, then you have a profitable business that lets you make other games.
The main purpose of marketing is to let you know about a product and drive demand. Of course, many times marketers use marketing to drive demand of sub-par products. Because of this, people become suspect when a company mentions its own product because it is not an unbiased source of information. However, if someone that doesn't appear related to the product or company endorses it, people are much more likely to give the product a chance. Especially if that person is on a forum you already participate on and you can look at their posting history and see that they hold some of the same opinions you do, too. This is why you have "online street teams" as described by the person in the grandparent post.
Many people think that spending more money to make a better game would be better in the long run. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. Marketing is vital to selling a good game, because if you don't sell your game you probably won't be able to make your next game. The whole myth of "if you build it they will come" is just that, a myth. It sometimes happens, but you can't rely on it as a business plan.
For example, I could mention my own game, Meridian 59, and tell you about how great the character development and PvP combat is. However, most people won't be interested in clicking on the link because they know I develop the game; I am obviously a biased source and I would tell you my game is great even if it were objectively one of the worst games ever (it's not, but most people still won't believe me). Even if you did visit the site, you might not find the game's screenshots to be that attractive because we don't doctor and/or misrepresent the screenshots; the game is about 10 years old by this point and our tiny company doesn't have the funds to revamp all the graphics and update the 2.5D engine to full 3D (and get 3D models of all the 2D art we'd have to replace, etc). However, if you had read several different people (shills or not) talking about how fun the game was despite the graphics, you might be more willing to try the game out. Even after you logged in you might be more willing to stick with the game a bit longer than you might otherwise, because other people found it fun and many people want to "fit in" with the "norm". (Of course, the person reading this is the exception to that rule, and you want to play the game because it's something only an intelligent individual would enjoy.)
And, if you really want to get meta, you might wonder to yourself if this discussion isn't just a way for me to get you intrigued about my own game without being obnoxious about it. Well, less obnoxious, maybe.;) (For the record, it isn't because most people interested in the game would probably have stumbled across it by now given my postings here on Slashdot. This is just a situation I'm rather familiar with for obvious reasons. Of course, many people probably don't believe me because I have an interest in people playing my own game.) See, I know how to do the sleazy marketing techniques, I just find it all too distasteful. On the other hand, people aren't exactly rushing out to reward my scruples.:P
The truth is that you really need something to get the audience's attention. Having a good game is only the first step. The next steps are getting people aware of your game, and then getting them to want it. So, all this is just a long winded way of saying that the game wouldn't have necessarily been any better overall if they put their marketing bu
I don't think it would be so hard to increase the # of quests about 4x, and then make it so that they run on different, random timers, so that each playthrough (since all your alts are exactly the same) could have a randomized encounter, or that you could interact with the consequences of other people's encounters.
And you would be wrong, unfortunately. Content like quests take a lot of time and effort. Coming up with a quasi-original storyline, writing it out, proofreading, coding up the mechanics, and debugging all take considerable time. You can streamline the process, but that just makes all the quests feel really similar. (If you really take a deep look at WoW, you'll see that most of the quest mechanics are very similar, actually.) Adding in the things you suggest would make the quests more interesting, but they would increase the complexity of the quest system and this would make the quests harder to implement, and this means it would take longer to provide the same amount of content.
The other problem with your suggestions is that it would disrupt the gameplay for other people. Sure, it feels a bit cheezy to stand in line behind your friends an "heal" the "sick" girl by doing quest one after another, but that content is always available. Consider what would happen if the girl stayed healthy for a while after being cured. First, only one person could really do the quest (even if multiple people could attempt the quest), so some people might be going through the motions without any hope for reward. Even if she fell sick on an occasional basis, healing her would still be essentially meaningless in the context of changing the world, but now you have less interesting content to keep people occupied.
In my own game, Meridian 59, the quests are limited. If you fail a quest you have to wait before attempting it again, you can't just leap back and try the quest again. But, this is probably the one aspect of core, non-PvP gameplay that generates the most complaints. People get very frustrated and very angry because they can't play the game as they expect to be able to. So, having a "randomized" quest isn't going to make people happier.
Now, you could turn the quest around and have it so that the items to cure the "sick girl" could also cure other infirm people. Yet, that basically kills the what is really great about WoW's quests: the direction it gives a player. Going around and killing monsters aimlessly to collect doodads is exactly what makes other games so "boring" in comparison. Going to collect magic stardust and then wander around trying to find a sick NPC to cure to complete a quest isn't a whole lot different than what you get in other games. It's the fact that the quest NPC, with the obnoxious yellow punctuation symbol over their head, gives you direction and promises you a reward that makes the quest system so effective.
Some thoughts from a developer and (well, former) WoW player.
It's not a contradiction. Your reading comprehension obviously failed where I explained that WoW did, in fact, grow the market. But, there's a difference between if they had grown the market without cannibalizing other games, and the fact that they did cannibalize other games in order to grow the market.
That's some beautiful circular reasoning.
Perhaps you'd like a working definition of circular reasoning? There is a catch-22 here, in that nobody really makes new experiences because they don't sell and new experiences don't sell because no one makes them. However, this is not strictly true. There's been a number of indie games that have been released with quite interesting "new experiences", yet they languish. Puzzle Pirates has been the most notable, but A Tale in the Desert has only gained about 1500 subscribers despite the fact that they offer a new and very different experience than other games. Even my own game, Meridian 59 offers something beyond the strict class/level based gameplay even if it isn't "new". People don't fall over themselves to reward people who take risks like this. Why should I waste my money doing something "new" if nobody is going to bother playing my game?
Also, claiming that graphics somehow equates to how much of a "risk" developers take is completely invalid. WoW isn't exactly "cutting edge" in the graphics department, yet that wasn't "completely ignored".
And you'd be wrong. WoW's graphics are "cutting edge" (well, not so much anymore, but still neat), they're just not "photorealistic". Blizzard went with a cartoony style which has served them well in their previous games, and it was readily accepted by the market. However, don't think for a moment that they somehow had less artists creating assets or less graphics programmers throwing in neat effects than any other team. Creating art assets is a huge issue in game development.
But hey, I'm not the "professional game designer". You must know what you're talking about.
Someone who has worked in the industry for about 8 years speaks authoritatively? Shocking.
That's probably why your game needed a buyout just to stay alive.
Yes, that would be me and my business partner buying out the game from 3DO, a company that went bankrupt not too long after that. We were former developers that had worked at 3DO and who fixed up and relaunched the game. We did it largely by borrowing from family and credit cards, but we did launch the game. We even poured our resources into updating the rendering engine to make the game look better.
We bought out Meridian 59 because we were former developers and wanted to save the game from oblivion. We also wanted to... wait for it... provide new experiences to the market! The first step was to get people interested in Meridian 59 as something different, then use the income from that game to build new games that didn't just copy previous games wholesale. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. People really aren't interested in new experiences, M59 basically makes enough to keep me from starving but not much more, and those "new experiences" you hunger for aren't happening by my hand. To top it all off, someone tries to label me as a "noob" on Slashdot.
Anything else you'd care to be terribly wrong about?
For Normal servers, switch to one that's at Medium traffic - they've been there for a long time, and are well established, but actually have less traffic than most of the New-tagged servers, which got a small influx from every High and Full tagged server on launch day.
Until, of course, they decide to offer transfers to people from a high-population to your medium-population server. Then you get to experience an influx of rude people, lag, and wait queues during most of the time you're interested in playing.
No, what we're seeing is potential market slowdown, not a saturation. It's true that WoW did cannibalize from other games in order to get their figures, but prior to WoW launching most people estimated the number of U.S. online gamers to be less than a million. Now WoW has boasted over 1 million subscribers and the other games are still humming along for the most part, including my own game Meridian 59. But, WoW still grew the market overall in North America.
As for Vanguard, they've always said they were trying to capture the "hardcore" players from old EQ's time. The developers want to make the game again, taking into consideration all the things they learned from doing it the first time around. There are some people that truly enjoy that sort of challenge, and if you can make enough money it makes sense to service that particular niche. It's a question of if they can make enough money from the people that will be interested.
And, some of the "bad" ideas do have some merit. The best times in a game are when you are first playing the game and seeing everything "for the first time". I've been making online games professionally for over 8 years now, and have been a game player for as long as I can remember; but even someone as jaded as I am got sucked into WoW and enjoyed just wandering around. Now, of course, I don't get that same sense of wonder while wandering around. But, if there were longer travel times, as Vanguard is proposing, then there might still be parts of the game I had not seen yet. I might still be interested in exploring new areas to see the sights instead of canceling my account a while ago.
I wish more companies would try and create truly *new* experiences in the massive genre, like what's going on in Korea.
The problem is that the market doesn't reward the companies that do this. Just look at how people are reacting to this article. Yes, admittedly, the team is looking to recapture the feel of a previous way of doing things, but the message here is still, "This isn't how my favorite game does everything, so it must suck!" People aren't willing to try (and pay for) "new experiences" so developers get a bit skittish about trying to develop them. If you take a look at some of the games in Korea, you'll see that there are a lot of really unusual games. For a while the largest games in Asia had 2D isometric art like the Diablo games. Frankly, most U.S. players would ignore those games based on the screenshots alone.
As soon as the market shows they're interested and willing to pay for "new experiences", you will likely see more of them. But, as long as any game that isn't cutting-edge graphics wise is completely ignored, you'll see developers take the "safe" path and focus on graphical presentation. It takes a lot of money to make a competitive online game, and it makes no sense to risk $50 million or more on a "new experience" that people are most likely ignore or criticize when the Slashdot article comes out.
Some thoughts from an experienced online developer,
I got an Atari 2600 and later an NES. Computers were much too expensive for my family to own. However, I did work on computers every chance I got. There were Apple II's at school, at the local community college, and my great uncle owned one as well. The local library also had a Commodore 64 they loaned out for a week or so, and I got that a few times.:)
In the end, I still became a programmer. I got a degree in Computer Science (and Spanish Literature) at the university. The difference is that I'm a game developer these days instead of working on business apps.
But, maybe you would have worked at Pizza Hut in high school. That's what I did for a bit of extra cash to buy NES games.:)
Stronger in the number and strength of bonds between people. I'm not going to go into extensive detail about social networking, but people in smaller communities often form stronger bonds. Essentially, you run into the same people more often and you get to know them, for better or for worse.
A good offline comparison would be a small town vs. a large city. In general, "everyone knows everyone" in a small town, and it's harder for secrets to remain secrets within the community. In a larger city, you tend to interact with the same number of people but less frequently. The bonds between people tend to be much weaker, especially if there's a chance you'll won't see that other person again anytime soon.
If you're interested in more information, you might want to start reading up on the Dunbar number as a starting point. It's instructive to see why a smaller game of 150 people feels a lot more cozy than a larger game with thousands of people: the larger game segments into smaller groups and there's more "us vs. them" competition.
Ever heard of MU online? Probably not. It was considered the largest online game in the world (not sure if it still holds that title now, though). It was never released in North America, yet it was tremendous in Asia.
There are also a number of other indie online games that you might not have heard of. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates and A Tale in the Desert are two of the more original, for example. Just because you've never heard of these games doesn't mean they don't exist or that they aren't something to be noted.
As for Meridian 59, that's mostly an issue of poor marketing. You can see a bit of the game's information and history on Wikipedia. The game was originally launched by 3DO, but they never put much effective marketing behind it. The company largely considered the game, and by extension the whole online game industry, to be unsuccessful. There are interviews with 3DO CEO Trip Hawkins, even after the launch of EverQuest, where he says the market isn't ready for online games. With a bit more serious marketing, you probably would have heard of the game.
No, I know exactly who Richard Garriott is. I also know who many of the other developers that have worked on UO over the years. My business partner that I started Near Death Studios, Inc. with did contract level layout for UO after he left the original Meridian 59 team and before we started our company. A number of Meridian 59 developers had worked at Origin. Keep in mind that Meridian 59 originally launched about a year before UO did.
So, while I respect the Garriotts tremendously for their single-player game work, this doesn't mean that they are online game (or "MMO" if you prefer) experts. UO used Richard's setting, but much of the game was created by text MUD developers including the notorious Raph Koster.;) Destination Games was also responsible for localizing Lineage for the U.S., but that game sank to a deep level of obscurity despite Richard Garriott's enthusiasm and despite being a staggering success in Korea. And, there's a history for the game Tabula Rasa; they've scrapped development of the game once and restarted already.
Now, I think that they are probably right in that there will be a big shakeup. World of Warcraft has opened up a lot of purses of people that want to duplicate their success, and there's a lot of money going to people with significantly less experience than the Garriotts. So, I suspect we will see a lot of pretty high-profile failures hit in a few years. But, I disagree in that it'll result in 5 or so mega-companies operating all the online titles. It's possible (but not necessarily easy) to carve out a niche and serve it; this is a perfectly valid alternative to their scenario. Given how frustrated people are getting with the "one size fits all" philosophies of the larger games, I think we'll see more people migrating to the smaller games once they become a bit more dominant.
Who is right? I'm placing most of my bets on the niche games. The Garriotts are obviously betting on the mega-companies. So, we have our differences of opinions. I'm just not quite well known yet to get to go to DICE to air my opinions. Although I do at other industry conferences, like the one in Austin.
Overall, I suspect this is a ploy by NCSoft to try to frighten off some competition from entering the MMO space. Scaring the people who might invest in a competitor away from the online arena allows NCSoft a bit more breathing room for more of their games to come out to less intense competition. It's been demonstrated that people who play online games generally prefer a newer game, and games that launch too close to each other tend to have one of the group dominate the rest. So, scaring off competition is the type of smart business decision I'd expect from Robert Garriott, too.
UO came out about a full year after Meridian 59. Admittedly, I wasn't part of the original M59 team, but I've been working on it for the greater part of 8 years. I've run the current incarnation with a shoestring budget and a small team. Therefore, I know for a fact that the field is not (and will not be) limited to a half dozen "big boys".
I have the utmost respect the Garriots, but they built their reputation on single-player games. However, I find their conclusions in this matter flawed based on personal experience and observation.
Single-player game developers (even superstars) often don't understand online games.
The reality is that a small game can make a modest income. The game I administrate, Meridian 59, makes enough to keep me from starving to death, but it'll never be as big and amazing as, say, Lineage. But, people who enjoy hard-core Player vs. Player (PvP) with consequences enjoy our game immensely. We're happy keeping our classic game alive (it first launched over 9 years ago) and serving a niche.
One problem is with the term "massive". People look at the smaller games and turn their noses up at them. Our game with about 100 players on at peak isn't very "massive", so most people give it a pass. In reality, the community is actually quite a bit stronger. But, no one puts out press releases about having "the best community" or "the most enthusiastic customers". It's all about "the most people playing (and paying!)" in press release land.
The problem with the Garriots' predictions is that online is a medium, not a genre. There's a LOT of untapped potential out there, too. Take a look at the Korean market and you'll see an amazing array of games. Of course, one issue in the U.S. market is that the existing audience expects millions to be poured into the production values of the game. As soon as people realize that gameplay really is more important, you'll start seeing a lot more options out there.
Personally, I think the future is in niche games. Why go visit a game trying to cater to the lowest common denominator when you can go visit a game that caters more specifically to your tastes and the tastes of people like you. Of course, as with most boutique offerings, don't expect the price to remain at the rock-bottom like it is now.
I agree, although I'm not as much a soloer. I had a group of friends that played on a regular basis, and it was fun to go in and do things with just the 5 of us. We cleared a lot of the stuff you can do with only 5 people, usually by the skin of our teeth.
But, we all got to the point where we couldn't do much more with our current characters. Our only avenue for advancement was to go on raids, and the five of us would have to start relying on others. We knew each other well and were able to coordinate without voice chat, etc. In fact, I played a druid before the 1.8 druid buff patch and was able to offtank just fine because the other people knew what the limitations were. Compare this to the typical raid situation (especially before that patch!) where the Druid was expected to be a secondary healer and Innervate bot. (Of course, people aren't thrilled these days when I tell them I'm Feral spec...) The game is good, but for me it is losing a lot of what made it unique.
But, from the numbers Blizzard reports, we're in the minority. The conventional wisdom was that many people were still working up characters, but I suspect more people find the raiding aspects more fun that the rest of us do. Blizzard is still claiming to have large numbers of players playing the game, so the grindy aspects of the game obviously aren't scaring too many people away.
But, at the end of the day, I still have my own game to go play that doesn't demand 40-person raids. Meridian 59 might be small, but it's still something I can play without devoting my life to it. (Developing the game, on the other hand, has consumed much of my life.:P)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most online multiplayer RPGs (or "MMORPGs") are good for this in my experiences, particularly ones that reward interaction but that don't necessarily require it. I found that playing online text games (MUDs) back in college actually helped me get at ease with socialization in a non-threatening environment. If I made a serious faux pas, I didn't have someone angry or upset right in my face flustering me. I also learned how to communicate with people and learn how words that had one meaning for me had a separate meaning for other people; in other words, I learned the importance of body language and other visual cues.
:)
I'm an introvert: socializing tends to tire me out. (I recommend the excellent book The Introvert Advantage for people that want to know accurate definitions of introversion and extroversion.) I didn't get a lot of practice since I preferred to be by myself when I was younger. However, talking and playing with people online was enough to let me interact with people and get comfortable doing it. If I got too tired I just wandered off to kill some monsters and play the game.
This isn't to say that talking to people online is all you need to do. On the contrary, you need to follow up and deal with people offline as well; D&D was my venue of choice for that in college. However, I think online socialization was the important first step to allowing me to learn how to extrovert so well. I own my own business and have to deal with other people on a regular basis. I've learned little tips and tricks on how to deal with getting tired from interaction with others, and I know where my limits are.
My thoughts,
The parent post is right. Indie games often do compete with other games, at least in the mind of the consumer. You may not create your little war game to compete with other war games on the market, but you can be sure that the war game fanatic is going to be comparing your game to every other game he has seen.
The trick is to have a unique selling point that draws people. For a "casual" game, that usually means having a more streamlined experience and a lower price point. If a person can jump into a game and buy it for $20, that's worth a lot more to most people than if the game has a multi-hour tutorial and costs me $60.
For other types of games it's harder. My own game, Meridian 59 is a small Player vs. Player (PvP) focused game. Definitely not for everyone, and it tends to cater to a hard-core audience that has enjoyed the game over the decade it has been running. The game isn't graphically impressive, so it runs on older computers. The game focuses more on skill-based PvP rather than level-based monster grinding. It couldn't be more different than World of Warcraft (WoW) unless we took out combat.
People still compare Meridian 59 to WoW, though.
WoW is bigger. WoW is prettier. WoW has more classes. WoW has better loot. The $10.95 per month for Meridian 59 is "almost as much" as the $14.95 per month for WoW. WoW has to be a better game because more people play it.
Now, I don't develop the game to compete with WoW. I'm mostly happy keeping the game running for the people that truly enjoy the unique aspects of the game. But, even if I'm not competing with WoW people are still going to compare my game to it despite what I think.
I've posted some other thoughts my game development blog.
Some thoughts from another indie developer,
Hah! Us small-scale game developers (I run Meridian 59) do it for the love of gaming and technology. What kind of gaming and technology geek worth the title could avoid reading Slashdot? ;)
There are a few misconceptions in your post. Unfortunately, lots of people make them.
First, WoW does not make $90 million per month. A large portion of those 6 million subscriptions Blizzard claims are in China, and Chinese players pay US$0.06/hour. They would have to play more than 8 hours per day to reach $15/month, and China has restrictions on how long minors can play these types of games. (I made a post on my professional blog with more details and links to references.)
Second, the 6 million subscription figure is worldwide. As I said above, most of those players are in China, a market that was not available to most of the previous games one might consider. The half-million figure you state is for North American subscriptions for previous games. Comparing this to Blizzard's last press release claiming 1 million North American subscriptions, we get a figure of 2x rather than 10x as you state.
Don't get me wrong, Blizzard certainly has done very well and surpassed the "old guard" quite handily. They also proved all the naysayers wrong that said the fantasy online game market was oversaturated and no new game could possibly do as well. But, it is best to keep the figures in proper perspective when discussing this topic.
All that said, I do agree with your central point: the Blizzard and Warcraft brands were well-loved for being great games from a pretty honest company. This definitely helped them make an online RPG that surpassed all previous records.
On the other hand, the Atari situation is different. I suspect most of the income goes to Bioware, so Atari doesn't make much off the premium modules; they likely expect to make more from sales of NWN2 and want as little competition as possible. Some people that won't get getting the newest patches and content might look to the sequel for an upgrade. Is it the smartest move? Not sure. But, the decision did not totally come out of left field.
Some thoughts from a game developer,
There's often discussion about "games as art", and some people question why it's important for games to be considered "art" instead of being just fun. This story shows one of the biggest reasons: it makes the medium of games more legitimate and less prone to attacks like this.
Do you think this bill would have passed unanimously if we were talking about violent books? What about violent paintings? Consider Goya's El Tres de Mayo . It's extremely violent, but we consider it art. I remember seeing this painting in my text books in school in history. We don't fret about kids seeing the blood and violence.
Of course, game developers also need to take some responsibility here and create more works that are worthy of the title "art". And, even if games are considered as having artistic merit, there will still be politicians that try to play politics with it, just as they do with music these days.
I discuss this a bit more in a essay and comments on my professional blog.
Honestly, it was a very small thing that kept me from using OpenOffice: I couldn't print envelopes. No matter what I did, it would not print anything the envelope when I sent it through my printer. MS Office worked just fine, so I went back to that.
Maybe it's been fixed by now. It was a known, listed bug and scheduled to be fixed in the next major revision. I couldn't wait around for that to happen. I run a small business, so I didn't have time to go fix it myself. I had already sunk money into MS Office, so I didn't feel like paying someone to go fix it. In the end, it was just easier to go back to what I knew instead of beating my head against something that didn't work.
It's nice to have alternatives, but if they don't do what you need then there's really no point.
The biggest problem with multiplayer games on mobile platforms is communication. Being able to chat with other people is an important part of the experience. Otherwise, you're just being charged more to play a single-player game.
I own and operate the online game Meridian 59. The game was released nearly 10 years ago, and the original client used a raycaster type engine similar to the original DOOM games. (We have since upgraded the engine to use 3D hardware acceleration on the PC.) It's often been suggested that we put the game on the mobile platform since the system requirements are so low.
Unfortunately, there are several problems. First, avatar customization is huge, and it takes a lot of resources to do that properly. Even modest Meridian 59 installs to about 100 MB. You'd have to do a lot of severe compression to get it to work right.
And, as stated above, you don't have good communication. Ironic, since you're usually using a phone. But, if you use voice you'll be taking up part of the bandwidth you need for sending data for the game. As someone else pointed out in comments, most phones won't support the data throughput and response you need for this type of game.
In the U.S., you also have the typical problems associated with mobile gaming. I have a fairly recent phone, but it still doesn't play most of the games out there. Most people can't afford the phones that keep them on the "cutting edge" and able to play these types of games. Why buy an expensive phone to play a crippled version of a game? Less users means that you'll have to increase the price in order to still make enough money to justify doing the phone version instead of a full-blown PC or console version.
So, there's a reason why you don't see these types of games on mobile. Perhaps eventually we'll get to the point where we have good networks and proper phones, but not anytime in the near future.
My thoughts,
C'mon now, there's reasonable consensus about what innovation is and isn't.
Not really. You obviously have what you feel is a good definition of innovation, but there are a lot of people that will disagree with you. If there's a solid definition for innovation, then why don't you share it with the rest of us?
You can hardly say that Square...
You seem to have a beef with Final Fantasy and Square that is affecting objectivity. Some of the points you bring up have very little to do with gameplay innovation ("prerendering technique"?). Was FarCry innovative when it demonstrated a number of newer (but not original) rendering techniques even though it had throughly derivative FPS gameplay?
Personally, I think the sphere grid system of advancement in FFX was very innovative. I don't know of an earlier game that used a similar mechanic, but I wouldn't be surprised if another game has done something similar. But, if that mechanic is original, does that make the whole game innovative? Probably not, but you were arguing that the specific mechanic isn't innovative.
Comparing Black and White to Catz/Dogz is silly. You could argue that, but you'd look a fool.
Ah, now come the personal attacks; a typical response when losing an argument. Don't worry, I don't take things personally. But, I should have B&W to a more obvious game like Creatures, instead. Or, am I still a fool for comparing two games where gameplay consists of training one or more neural nets, represented in game as "creatures", how to behave using positive and negative feedback? Or, will you argue that god-game layer was innovative (even if obviously derived from Populous)? Or that the gesture-based spells made the whole game innovative?
Fable did include a reasonable amount of new concepts and ideas over and above what Rune offered....
So, who decides what is a "reasonable amount" of "new" concepts? I guess it passes your personal tests, but there are other people that disagree. Consider Tomb Raider or Crusaders of Might & Magic as other games with varying degrees of similar gameplay mechanics. I still say innovation is in the eye of the beholder. It seems that you are proving Fable is innovative merely because you said so.
Also, stating you are a professional game developer doesn't really back up your arguements when they main (and far as I can see, only) game you develop is one you purchased from someone else. Excuse me while I scoff.
Again with the personal attacks? I made a single comment at the end of my post to show that I had some authority to speak on the things I did, not to make any invalid points valid.
But, yes, I bought Meridian 59 from 3DO before it went bankrupt. However, I had worked on the game for about 2 years while at 3DO. This is something your Google search probably wouldn't be able to tell you. Anyway, I've been working in the game industry since 1998, after quite a few years of amateur game development, including text MUD development in college. During my professional career I've worked as a programmer a single-player PC game, developed a simple scripting language for console game development, maintained a graphical chat system, designed small games as requested by customers, programmed a handheld game demo on contract, and started a business to develop online games that ended up purchasing the game I had worked on previously. I have worked with and gained the admiration and respect of many online developers who have been developing projects longer than you have probably been playing games.
So, while you're busy scoffing, feel free to share where your authority to define innovation comes from other than, "because I said so online!"
The parent post shows one of the biggest issues when discussing "innovation", it's not very well defined. As the old joke goes, ask 5 people to describe "innovation" and you're likely to get 6 different answers. The definition really depends on each individual.
For example, the parent post says that all Final Fantasy games have, "Random battles, spells and bosses." Of course, so do many other games in the RPG genre, such as the old Wizardry games. How much change is needed before something is really innovative? Does Darklands count as derivative because it has random battles, spells, and bosses? Even though the "spells" are in terms of alchemic potions and prayers to saints? Does the historical setting of fantasy medieval Germany score some points? But, if these features make the game different and "innovative", why does a change in a system in Final Fantasy (such as the Materia system in FF7) or the setting (such as the industrial setting of FF7) fail to qualify? (Personally, I'll disagree that the changes to advancement like the materia system or sphere grid are "little" changes.)
Likewise, people can say things are innovative out of a lack of knowledge of games. The parent post says that Deus Ex is innovative, but many of the features found in that game first appeared in the System Shock series. So, does this mean that Deus Ex isn't really innovative? You could make similar arguments for Fable (which shares similar gameplay with Rune) and Black & White (which you could argue just puts Dogz or Catz in a more interesting environment.)
So, the original question remains: what is the limit for something to be innovative? Does it have to be completely different than anything that came before? I don't think that's realistic, because every game borrows some element from other games. Are sequels automatically disqualified? Not really, you can have innovative mechanics and gameplay wrapped up in a familiar type of story; however, some sequels are obviously just derivative. So, where do you draw the line? Can you make that consistent?
Of course, this whole argument ignores the fact that innovative games are very risky, and that the market is very hesitant to support anything too unfamiliar. For example, you need to have something identifiable (like a name such as "Final Fantasy") before people will try something "new" out. On the other hand, games that have been widely considered innovative (such as DOOM, The Sims, etc.) have been the catalysts that have grown the industry by leaps and bounds.
Some thoughts from a professional game developer,
I've never used them myself, but a friend of mine swears by Sea-Band. It's supposed to be good for different types of nausea, and he says it works wonders to combat the motion sickness he gets while playing games.
Again, I've never used them, just passing along info that might help. They could be total quackery for all I know.
Different people have different reactions to games. There's been a lot of writing trying to explain what causes motion sickness. Personally, I get motion sick of I haven't played fast-action 3D games in a while. After I play for a bit, I can go for hours without getting the reaction. But, if I don't play those types of games for a few months I find myself back at square one.
Some insight,
Hey, I was just gonna post that link! :) Glad to see someone else paying attention.
Have fun,
I actually played Meridian 59 when it first came out. No offense, but I wasn't that impressed.
Of course, things have changed in the past 10 years since M59 came out. This is another aspect of marketing, to let people know that the product is "New and Improved!" We've poured a lot of new content into the game, rebalanced things, even got a new rendering engine as an alternative to the old software renderer. Of course, it's still the same game that focuses on character advancement and PvP combat, but even those have changed over the years.
As for GalCiv2, a quick Google search shows that the game will enjoy some print marketing. Print advertising isn't cheap, and they would likely get much better results by having an "online street team" that probably costs about the same.
[A] better game will have strong success and fanbase beyond the initial sales....
True, but many games are like other entertainment media in that most of the sales happen at launch. Game players, in general, enjoy new things. Older games are generally seen as inferior, so encouraging people to buy the game at launch will boost sales. Recurring sales are not as valued, particularly by games in retail because shelf space is limited. A game that sells a steady trickle will make less money over a short period of time than a newly released game that's been hyped excessively and expects big sales.
I certainly didn't mean to make it sound like "online street teams" are the only way to market, but you do need a good marketing plan. A "viral" product becomes so because of a marketing plan. Hotmail had a hook in being one of the first and better webmail applications, and they were advertised every time someone sent an email: "Hotmail.com, what ISP is that you're sending from?" Firefox definitely had a very strong marketing angle, they were just lucky enough to have enthusiastic supporters. And, they definitely did have a superior product with great features like tabbed browsing. But, notice how much better Firefox did than Mozilla.
And, Google is interesting, too. The original search engine did pretty good, but many of their more recent offerings have worked with the "exclusivity" angle if they're trying to break into an already established area. Orkut and Gmail both had a field full of competitors, but they managed to drum up a lot of interest in people by making them "invite only" to start.
Games are a different beast than the things you've mentioned. Portable email, a great browser, and a fast search engine are things that affect the way you work on the internet. I'm firmly in the camp that the internet is important for daily life, so having something that improves your internet experience is pretty much vital. Games, on the other hand, are luxuries so you can't use exactly the same marketing techniques. Having people say good things about the game helps, but playing a game isn't going to make your life easier like switching to Firefox from IE does.
In the end, "online street teams" are very effective for game marketing. Luxuries that are perceived as popular and cool are more desirable, in general.
Have fun,
Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works. If you have the best game in the world but nobody knows about it, you just have a good game you've probably invested a lot into. (For an indie, that's probably a lot of time in addition to some of what should have been your retirement fund.) Once people know about it, then you have a profitable business that lets you make other games.
;) (For the record, it isn't because most people interested in the game would probably have stumbled across it by now given my postings here on Slashdot. This is just a situation I'm rather familiar with for obvious reasons. Of course, many people probably don't believe me because I have an interest in people playing my own game.) See, I know how to do the sleazy marketing techniques, I just find it all too distasteful. On the other hand, people aren't exactly rushing out to reward my scruples. :P
The main purpose of marketing is to let you know about a product and drive demand. Of course, many times marketers use marketing to drive demand of sub-par products. Because of this, people become suspect when a company mentions its own product because it is not an unbiased source of information. However, if someone that doesn't appear related to the product or company endorses it, people are much more likely to give the product a chance. Especially if that person is on a forum you already participate on and you can look at their posting history and see that they hold some of the same opinions you do, too. This is why you have "online street teams" as described by the person in the grandparent post.
Many people think that spending more money to make a better game would be better in the long run. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. Marketing is vital to selling a good game, because if you don't sell your game you probably won't be able to make your next game. The whole myth of "if you build it they will come" is just that, a myth. It sometimes happens, but you can't rely on it as a business plan.
For example, I could mention my own game, Meridian 59, and tell you about how great the character development and PvP combat is. However, most people won't be interested in clicking on the link because they know I develop the game; I am obviously a biased source and I would tell you my game is great even if it were objectively one of the worst games ever (it's not, but most people still won't believe me). Even if you did visit the site, you might not find the game's screenshots to be that attractive because we don't doctor and/or misrepresent the screenshots; the game is about 10 years old by this point and our tiny company doesn't have the funds to revamp all the graphics and update the 2.5D engine to full 3D (and get 3D models of all the 2D art we'd have to replace, etc). However, if you had read several different people (shills or not) talking about how fun the game was despite the graphics, you might be more willing to try the game out. Even after you logged in you might be more willing to stick with the game a bit longer than you might otherwise, because other people found it fun and many people want to "fit in" with the "norm". (Of course, the person reading this is the exception to that rule, and you want to play the game because it's something only an intelligent individual would enjoy.)
And, if you really want to get meta, you might wonder to yourself if this discussion isn't just a way for me to get you intrigued about my own game without being obnoxious about it. Well, less obnoxious, maybe.
The truth is that you really need something to get the audience's attention. Having a good game is only the first step. The next steps are getting people aware of your game, and then getting them to want it. So, all this is just a long winded way of saying that the game wouldn't have necessarily been any better overall if they put their marketing bu
I don't think it would be so hard to increase the # of quests about 4x, and then make it so that they run on different, random timers, so that each playthrough (since all your alts are exactly the same) could have a randomized encounter, or that you could interact with the consequences of other people's encounters.
And you would be wrong, unfortunately. Content like quests take a lot of time and effort. Coming up with a quasi-original storyline, writing it out, proofreading, coding up the mechanics, and debugging all take considerable time. You can streamline the process, but that just makes all the quests feel really similar. (If you really take a deep look at WoW, you'll see that most of the quest mechanics are very similar, actually.) Adding in the things you suggest would make the quests more interesting, but they would increase the complexity of the quest system and this would make the quests harder to implement, and this means it would take longer to provide the same amount of content.
The other problem with your suggestions is that it would disrupt the gameplay for other people. Sure, it feels a bit cheezy to stand in line behind your friends an "heal" the "sick" girl by doing quest one after another, but that content is always available. Consider what would happen if the girl stayed healthy for a while after being cured. First, only one person could really do the quest (even if multiple people could attempt the quest), so some people might be going through the motions without any hope for reward. Even if she fell sick on an occasional basis, healing her would still be essentially meaningless in the context of changing the world, but now you have less interesting content to keep people occupied.
In my own game, Meridian 59, the quests are limited. If you fail a quest you have to wait before attempting it again, you can't just leap back and try the quest again. But, this is probably the one aspect of core, non-PvP gameplay that generates the most complaints. People get very frustrated and very angry because they can't play the game as they expect to be able to. So, having a "randomized" quest isn't going to make people happier.
Now, you could turn the quest around and have it so that the items to cure the "sick girl" could also cure other infirm people. Yet, that basically kills the what is really great about WoW's quests: the direction it gives a player. Going around and killing monsters aimlessly to collect doodads is exactly what makes other games so "boring" in comparison. Going to collect magic stardust and then wander around trying to find a sick NPC to cure to complete a quest isn't a whole lot different than what you get in other games. It's the fact that the quest NPC, with the obnoxious yellow punctuation symbol over their head, gives you direction and promises you a reward that makes the quest system so effective.
Some thoughts from a developer and (well, former) WoW player.
Wow, nice contradiction.
It's not a contradiction. Your reading comprehension obviously failed where I explained that WoW did, in fact, grow the market. But, there's a difference between if they had grown the market without cannibalizing other games, and the fact that they did cannibalize other games in order to grow the market.
That's some beautiful circular reasoning.
Perhaps you'd like a working definition of circular reasoning? There is a catch-22 here, in that nobody really makes new experiences because they don't sell and new experiences don't sell because no one makes them. However, this is not strictly true. There's been a number of indie games that have been released with quite interesting "new experiences", yet they languish. Puzzle Pirates has been the most notable, but A Tale in the Desert has only gained about 1500 subscribers despite the fact that they offer a new and very different experience than other games. Even my own game, Meridian 59 offers something beyond the strict class/level based gameplay even if it isn't "new". People don't fall over themselves to reward people who take risks like this. Why should I waste my money doing something "new" if nobody is going to bother playing my game?
Also, claiming that graphics somehow equates to how much of a "risk" developers take is completely invalid. WoW isn't exactly "cutting edge" in the graphics department, yet that wasn't "completely ignored".
And you'd be wrong. WoW's graphics are "cutting edge" (well, not so much anymore, but still neat), they're just not "photorealistic". Blizzard went with a cartoony style which has served them well in their previous games, and it was readily accepted by the market. However, don't think for a moment that they somehow had less artists creating assets or less graphics programmers throwing in neat effects than any other team. Creating art assets is a huge issue in game development.
But hey, I'm not the "professional game designer". You must know what you're talking about.
Someone who has worked in the industry for about 8 years speaks authoritatively? Shocking.
That's probably why your game needed a buyout just to stay alive.
Yes, that would be me and my business partner buying out the game from 3DO, a company that went bankrupt not too long after that. We were former developers that had worked at 3DO and who fixed up and relaunched the game. We did it largely by borrowing from family and credit cards, but we did launch the game. We even poured our resources into updating the rendering engine to make the game look better.
We bought out Meridian 59 because we were former developers and wanted to save the game from oblivion. We also wanted to... wait for it... provide new experiences to the market! The first step was to get people interested in Meridian 59 as something different, then use the income from that game to build new games that didn't just copy previous games wholesale. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. People really aren't interested in new experiences, M59 basically makes enough to keep me from starving but not much more, and those "new experiences" you hunger for aren't happening by my hand. To top it all off, someone tries to label me as a "noob" on Slashdot.
Anything else you'd care to be terribly wrong about?
For Normal servers, switch to one that's at Medium traffic - they've been there for a long time, and are well established, but actually have less traffic than most of the New-tagged servers, which got a small influx from every High and Full tagged server on launch day.
Until, of course, they decide to offer transfers to people from a high-population to your medium-population server. Then you get to experience an influx of rude people, lag, and wait queues during most of the time you're interested in playing.
Not that I'm bitter...
No, what we're seeing is potential market slowdown, not a saturation. It's true that WoW did cannibalize from other games in order to get their figures, but prior to WoW launching most people estimated the number of U.S. online gamers to be less than a million. Now WoW has boasted over 1 million subscribers and the other games are still humming along for the most part, including my own game Meridian 59. But, WoW still grew the market overall in North America.
As for Vanguard, they've always said they were trying to capture the "hardcore" players from old EQ's time. The developers want to make the game again, taking into consideration all the things they learned from doing it the first time around. There are some people that truly enjoy that sort of challenge, and if you can make enough money it makes sense to service that particular niche. It's a question of if they can make enough money from the people that will be interested.
And, some of the "bad" ideas do have some merit. The best times in a game are when you are first playing the game and seeing everything "for the first time". I've been making online games professionally for over 8 years now, and have been a game player for as long as I can remember; but even someone as jaded as I am got sucked into WoW and enjoyed just wandering around. Now, of course, I don't get that same sense of wonder while wandering around. But, if there were longer travel times, as Vanguard is proposing, then there might still be parts of the game I had not seen yet. I might still be interested in exploring new areas to see the sights instead of canceling my account a while ago.
I wish more companies would try and create truly *new* experiences in the massive genre, like what's going on in Korea.
The problem is that the market doesn't reward the companies that do this. Just look at how people are reacting to this article. Yes, admittedly, the team is looking to recapture the feel of a previous way of doing things, but the message here is still, "This isn't how my favorite game does everything, so it must suck!" People aren't willing to try (and pay for) "new experiences" so developers get a bit skittish about trying to develop them. If you take a look at some of the games in Korea, you'll see that there are a lot of really unusual games. For a while the largest games in Asia had 2D isometric art like the Diablo games. Frankly, most U.S. players would ignore those games based on the screenshots alone.
As soon as the market shows they're interested and willing to pay for "new experiences", you will likely see more of them. But, as long as any game that isn't cutting-edge graphics wise is completely ignored, you'll see developers take the "safe" path and focus on graphical presentation. It takes a lot of money to make a competitive online game, and it makes no sense to risk $50 million or more on a "new experience" that people are most likely ignore or criticize when the Slashdot article comes out.
Some thoughts from an experienced online developer,
You'd probably be doing the same thing.
:)
:)
I got an Atari 2600 and later an NES. Computers were much too expensive for my family to own. However, I did work on computers every chance I got. There were Apple II's at school, at the local community college, and my great uncle owned one as well. The local library also had a Commodore 64 they loaned out for a week or so, and I got that a few times.
In the end, I still became a programmer. I got a degree in Computer Science (and Spanish Literature) at the university. The difference is that I'm a game developer these days instead of working on business apps.
But, maybe you would have worked at Pizza Hut in high school. That's what I did for a bit of extra cash to buy NES games.
Stronger in the number and strength of bonds between people. I'm not going to go into extensive detail about social networking, but people in smaller communities often form stronger bonds. Essentially, you run into the same people more often and you get to know them, for better or for worse.
;)
A good offline comparison would be a small town vs. a large city. In general, "everyone knows everyone" in a small town, and it's harder for secrets to remain secrets within the community. In a larger city, you tend to interact with the same number of people but less frequently. The bonds between people tend to be much weaker, especially if there's a chance you'll won't see that other person again anytime soon.
If you're interested in more information, you might want to start reading up on the Dunbar number as a starting point. It's instructive to see why a smaller game of 150 people feels a lot more cozy than a larger game with thousands of people: the larger game segments into smaller groups and there's more "us vs. them" competition.
That good enough validation?
Have fun,
Ever heard of MU online? Probably not. It was considered the largest online game in the world (not sure if it still holds that title now, though). It was never released in North America, yet it was tremendous in Asia.
There are also a number of other indie online games that you might not have heard of. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates and A Tale in the Desert are two of the more original, for example. Just because you've never heard of these games doesn't mean they don't exist or that they aren't something to be noted.
As for Meridian 59, that's mostly an issue of poor marketing. You can see a bit of the game's information and history on Wikipedia. The game was originally launched by 3DO, but they never put much effective marketing behind it. The company largely considered the game, and by extension the whole online game industry, to be unsuccessful. There are interviews with 3DO CEO Trip Hawkins, even after the launch of EverQuest, where he says the market isn't ready for online games. With a bit more serious marketing, you probably would have heard of the game.
Some more info,
No, I know exactly who Richard Garriott is. I also know who many of the other developers that have worked on UO over the years. My business partner that I started Near Death Studios, Inc. with did contract level layout for UO after he left the original Meridian 59 team and before we started our company. A number of Meridian 59 developers had worked at Origin. Keep in mind that Meridian 59 originally launched about a year before UO did.
;) Destination Games was also responsible for localizing Lineage for the U.S., but that game sank to a deep level of obscurity despite Richard Garriott's enthusiasm and despite being a staggering success in Korea. And, there's a history for the game Tabula Rasa; they've scrapped development of the game once and restarted already.
So, while I respect the Garriotts tremendously for their single-player game work, this doesn't mean that they are online game (or "MMO" if you prefer) experts. UO used Richard's setting, but much of the game was created by text MUD developers including the notorious Raph Koster.
Now, I think that they are probably right in that there will be a big shakeup. World of Warcraft has opened up a lot of purses of people that want to duplicate their success, and there's a lot of money going to people with significantly less experience than the Garriotts. So, I suspect we will see a lot of pretty high-profile failures hit in a few years. But, I disagree in that it'll result in 5 or so mega-companies operating all the online titles. It's possible (but not necessarily easy) to carve out a niche and serve it; this is a perfectly valid alternative to their scenario. Given how frustrated people are getting with the "one size fits all" philosophies of the larger games, I think we'll see more people migrating to the smaller games once they become a bit more dominant.
Who is right? I'm placing most of my bets on the niche games. The Garriotts are obviously betting on the mega-companies. So, we have our differences of opinions. I'm just not quite well known yet to get to go to DICE to air my opinions. Although I do at other industry conferences, like the one in Austin.
Overall, I suspect this is a ploy by NCSoft to try to frighten off some competition from entering the MMO space. Scaring the people who might invest in a competitor away from the online arena allows NCSoft a bit more breathing room for more of their games to come out to less intense competition. It's been demonstrated that people who play online games generally prefer a newer game, and games that launch too close to each other tend to have one of the group dominate the rest. So, scaring off competition is the type of smart business decision I'd expect from Robert Garriott, too.
Some more insight,
UO came out about a full year after Meridian 59. Admittedly, I wasn't part of the original M59 team, but I've been working on it for the greater part of 8 years. I've run the current incarnation with a shoestring budget and a small team. Therefore, I know for a fact that the field is not (and will not be) limited to a half dozen "big boys".
I have the utmost respect the Garriots, but they built their reputation on single-player games. However, I find their conclusions in this matter flawed based on personal experience and observation.
Have fun,
Single-player game developers (even superstars) often don't understand online games.
The reality is that a small game can make a modest income. The game I administrate, Meridian 59, makes enough to keep me from starving to death, but it'll never be as big and amazing as, say, Lineage. But, people who enjoy hard-core Player vs. Player (PvP) with consequences enjoy our game immensely. We're happy keeping our classic game alive (it first launched over 9 years ago) and serving a niche.
One problem is with the term "massive". People look at the smaller games and turn their noses up at them. Our game with about 100 players on at peak isn't very "massive", so most people give it a pass. In reality, the community is actually quite a bit stronger. But, no one puts out press releases about having "the best community" or "the most enthusiastic customers". It's all about "the most people playing (and paying!)" in press release land.
The problem with the Garriots' predictions is that online is a medium, not a genre. There's a LOT of untapped potential out there, too. Take a look at the Korean market and you'll see an amazing array of games. Of course, one issue in the U.S. market is that the existing audience expects millions to be poured into the production values of the game. As soon as people realize that gameplay really is more important, you'll start seeing a lot more options out there.
Personally, I think the future is in niche games. Why go visit a game trying to cater to the lowest common denominator when you can go visit a game that caters more specifically to your tastes and the tastes of people like you. Of course, as with most boutique offerings, don't expect the price to remain at the rock-bottom like it is now.
Some thoughts from someone else in the industry.
Have fun,
I agree, although I'm not as much a soloer. I had a group of friends that played on a regular basis, and it was fun to go in and do things with just the 5 of us. We cleared a lot of the stuff you can do with only 5 people, usually by the skin of our teeth.
:P)
But, we all got to the point where we couldn't do much more with our current characters. Our only avenue for advancement was to go on raids, and the five of us would have to start relying on others. We knew each other well and were able to coordinate without voice chat, etc. In fact, I played a druid before the 1.8 druid buff patch and was able to offtank just fine because the other people knew what the limitations were. Compare this to the typical raid situation (especially before that patch!) where the Druid was expected to be a secondary healer and Innervate bot. (Of course, people aren't thrilled these days when I tell them I'm Feral spec...) The game is good, but for me it is losing a lot of what made it unique.
But, from the numbers Blizzard reports, we're in the minority. The conventional wisdom was that many people were still working up characters, but I suspect more people find the raiding aspects more fun that the rest of us do. Blizzard is still claiming to have large numbers of players playing the game, so the grindy aspects of the game obviously aren't scaring too many people away.
But, at the end of the day, I still have my own game to go play that doesn't demand 40-person raids. Meridian 59 might be small, but it's still something I can play without devoting my life to it. (Developing the game, on the other hand, has consumed much of my life.
My thoughts,