Speaking earlier today at the Evolve conference in Brighton,  Michael Pachter a videogame analyst for Wedbush Securities, stated that he believed the MMO market is as big as it’s ever going to get stating:

In the next couple of years [following 2008] MMOs peaked; we didn’t know that [it had peaked] untilStar Wars launched. I, and many other likeminded people thought that Star Wars would expand the market place.

Star Wars was supposed to bring in all of these new people that had never played an MMO before, just because they loved the brand. We know that Rift just took players from other existing MMOs, and the same with Conan and Lords of the Rings. Now the same thing has happened with Star Wars.

It looks to me as though the MMO market is as big as it’s ever going to be – as far as subscription MMOs. People willing to play $15 a month.., there are six or seven million of them. Period. If Star Warscouldn’t expand it, when it’s made by BioWare, nothing can do it.

That’s why Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios went out of business, because he couldn’t get financing [for his MMO].

This analysis of the market seems very short sighted to me. While I fully agree that the current state of the MMO marketplace is flat, it has in no way reached its limit and how could it? There has been zero innovation to the industry for nearly a decade and the industry is only 15 years old.

I remember when RPG’s were a niche market in gaming during the 80′s and 90′s, but over the last decade with series like Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Fallout and BioWare’s other Star Wars RPGs, they’ve vastly expanded the market. Today you have games like Skyrim shattering sales records.

If you go back to the early days of Elder Scrolls, Fallout and even the original Diablo, sure they were popular, but they were still in a niche market compared to the rest of the gaming industry. Today RPGs are the considered mainstream thanks to the innovation from developers over the last 15 years or so.

On the other side, MMORPG’s have barely changed despite what some studios claim. They’re stale, repetitive and rely entirely too much on developers ability to push out new content.

There’s no doubt MMORPG are in a slump, but I don’t believe the genre as a whole has peaked, it’s just waiting for a development studio to break the mold and light the way.

The European Court of Justice recently ruled that gamers have a right to re-sell their used digital games stating, “an author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet“.

This basically means that it’s illegal for game companies to prohibit the re-sale of their digital games to other gamers. Meaning it you want to sell your used MMORPG account to someone, it is now legal in Europe and the company can no longer ban you for doing it.

This has even greater implications for services like Steam, who’s entire library of games can fall under this new law. Although in the case of Steam, the law does not state the company has to go out of their way to create a service to allow gamers the ability to re-sell their games.

This is good or bad news depending where you fall on the selling MMO accounts controversy. I sold my D2 account about 10 years ago, so I’m for it as I never agreed with the companies who said they own my account, I always found it to be an overreach of their power. Hopefully we’ll see something similar happen in the US within the next few years.

While this is certainly not MMO gaming news, it is something I thought many of our readers would appreciate. Amazon is having a big July sale for PC games and offering some deep discounts for downloadable versions of them.

Below I’ve listed some of the biggest titles for sale, but there are also plenty of bundle deals for games like Borderlands, Bioshock, Civilization and more. Head over to Amazon to check out a full list of their July deals.

• Max Payne 3 – $29.99 – 50% off
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – $29.99 – 50% off
• Battlefield 3 - $35.99 – 40% off

When I started playing MMORPGs, there was no such thing as a daily quest, but as theme-park MMOs developed and became the standard, and leveling times shrunk, developers needed a way to keep players playing. So the Daily Quest was born.

Here we have a system that is so boring and monotonous, I find it hard to believe that it still even exists. Basically, developers decided to create a quest system where the player would farm for some sort of token to obtain the items or rewards they were seeking.

This system, of course, adds nothing to the game itself, and just creates an atmosphere where players are logging in and repeating the same content they did the day before, just for the sake of collecting points.

I can remember the first time I ran into a daily(repeatable) quest and I just stood there wondering, “WTF is the quest marker still up? I just finished it.” Being in that mindset, I have very rarely ever repeated a daily quest in any game because I quite franking don’t want to do the same thing I just did the day before. This sometimes becomes difficult as I don’t always remember if I’ve completed the quest before or not, so sometimes I’ll just skip repeatable quests even if I didn’t do them.

SWTOR was the only game where I actually did do dailies daily, but only the space missions, because they only lasted about 5 mins and gave out huge amounts of XP. I hated doing them, but the rewards were just too great not to.

Dailies are whats wrong with today’s MMORPGs; where instead of dynamic, engaging content, developers shovel out horrifically boring quests, and tell you to repeat them every day if you want to progress. Let me also make the counter-point as to what the difference between sandbox and theme-park games is in terms of repetitive content:

With theme-parks, the dailies don’t change. You already know exactly what you need to do, how long it will take, and what the results will be. There’s really no mystery, and all you need to do is go through the motions of actually doing it.

With a sandbox, it’s not always the same, even when it is. You can decide to claim the same tower every time you log in, but who’s defending won’t always be the same, or perhaps you’ll need to defend it. Sometimes you’ll succeed, other times you won’t. Even gathering resources is not always the same. Sure the actual gathering part is, but you never know who you’ll run into and if you’ll make it back with all your loot. There’s a sense of the unknown with sandbox MMOGs where even if you think you know what will happen, you can never be entirely sure it’ll play out that way.

The same is true for games like League of Legends and any online FPS like Call of Duty. Sure the maps are the same, but the events that take place never are. It’s that human element added to daily quests that theme-park MMOGs do not have, and what makes them a terrible gaming mechanic used too readily and openly as is.

What do you guys think? Do you enjoy dailies? And if so, for the love of god, why?