There’s a young guy over on the BioWare forums who has lately taken a real shine to disagreeing with absolutely everything I say when I’m posting over there. It’s kind of charming (albeit in a slightly annoying way), to the degree that I’m sure he’d happily argue that black was white, up was down, and left was right if I had reason to start posting about such things on those forums. But, happily, he did go some way to inspiring this post, along with a selection of other forum posters across a wide spread of the MMORPG community out there.
You see, there’s an attitude I’m coming across more regularly these days that suggests if an MMORPG doesn’t have more than 150-200k subscribers, it is some kind of abject failure that hasn’t lived up to its developer’s wishes. (Yes, it’s always nice when forum posters are seemingly flies on the wall of all these development meetings and, apparantly, have the inside running on what developers want from their games, where they live, and probably what they’re planning to eat for dessert after dinner tonight… but I digress, dear reader).
It seems rather obvious to me, meanwhile, to point out that the MMORPG market is, ultimately, a finite market. There are only so many video game devotee’s who are yet to be made aware of the concept (especially after the success of WoW took the genre out of relative obscurity), and there isn’t a new batch being grown on trees somewhere, or cloned in the basement of someone’s house to appear next weekend. What we see now is, I believe, the market as it stands for the next few years, give or take some minor fluctuations.
Added to this finite market concept is the fact that the market is fragmented. Between the bona fide MMORPG classics that people are still playing (in varying numbers), such as UO, EQ, SWG, EQ2, DAoC, CoH/CoV and even WoW… to the newer games that have yet to find their real place in the market, such as PotBS, AoC and the soon-to-be-released WAR… to the titles we’re all eagerly anticipating such as TSW, DC Universe Online and BioWare’s un-named project… oh, not to mention the plethora of freebie games on the market from Asian countries… we have gamers, with limited funds, and time, spread really thinly. The marketplace is super-fragmented right now and is only going to get MORE fragmented as time goes by. Scary, huh?
Where does this leave the industry? Sadly, I must concur with a number of my peers and say that it will probably stifle innovation. As more companies become risk-averse, they will seek to release games that don’t “rock the boat” too heavily, in a desperate bid to grab a couple of hundred thousand subs; which seems to be pretty much the average market share that games in such an environment – even really good games, mind you – can pull these days. A friend of mine used to work at SOE with the SWG team and he said to me, rather sadly I must report, that we’re unlikely to see a game like SWG ever again, precisely because it thought too far outside the box to what “the norm” is in today’s MMORPG market and it’s highly unlikely a developer would ever green-light such a different kind of game.
I desperately hope he’s wrong and, as you can tell from past writings of mine, I long for a developer to do something absolutely mind blowing and creative in the MMORPG space for a change… I really do hope for that… but part of me realises that, yeah, he’s probably right about things. The market, in many ways, is totally f*cked, folks.
Oh, and my little mate over on the BioWare forums? He disagrees with the concepts expressed in this post after I ran a cut-down version of these comments to see how it would fly. I guess it’s comforting to know that the more the industry loses its spark and edge, the more some things retain a comforting sameness that money just can’t buy.
If you are really fond of the old SWG, it is worth taking a look at Darkfall. Might turn out to be good, awesome, or simply mediocre and gank-festish.
i agree its a finite market since the world population is finite. However, there is still room for growth. Just like WoW pulled FPS gamers into the MMO genre, other popular IPs like StarWars or Warhammer can do the same. Secondly, there are more and more people making Video Gaming a real hobby, rather than it being a geeky-hardcore thing. As soon as consoles get involved you got yourself a much bigger audience as well.
Secondly, I never said if they didn’t get millions of subscribers they were a failure. I even said LOTRO was a profitable operation. However it went from 200k to 150k subs in a short period and is already on the decline, whereas other MMOs with such sub levels were on the rise and only started to decline several years after their launch.
Also even though a lot of MMOs might be released, not all of them will be stable. Vanguard got it’s plug pulled, Hellgate: London is a goner, and so on.
The same will happen when much better MMOs come on the market, I predict LOTRO will decline faster and faster especially with Warhammer’s release.
There will always be a minority who play games like LOTR because it IS lotr, and city of villains cause its a super hero MMO, etc. but the majority is going to move on to bigger and better things.
So the unnamed BioWare MMO has the ability to 1. steal a lot of MMO customers. 2. Draw in a lot of new MMO customers especially IF it is infact Starwars.
Our conversation of LOTRO’s success was in the light of BioWare’s aim for their MMO. And as i’ve quoted from their interview they are out to compete with WoW. And competing with WoW is not 150k subs, but more. So in the light of that, LOTRO isn’t succesful and thus can’t be taken as a model for BioWare’s game like you were suggesting.
Darkfall has to actually be released first. Until then, I’m not jumping on the fanboy drool-fest wagon, since it has a much greater chance of beating Age of Conan in the Titanic Turd contest than it does of being the Second Coming.
I see your point about a finite audience. But if you take into account the non-sub direction a lot of MMO’s are going, then while that number may still be finite, it does get much much larger.
Maybe a lot of future innovation will occur there. Those games may not be as polished as WoW, but once the innovative idea gets out, the next WoW will copy it and bring it to the more largescale MMO’s, maybe even improve the idea as well (again just like WoW).
The other big thing I see that stifles innovation is the extremely large amount of time it takes to create a good MMO. Not to mention, that innovation via expansion (ie shorter time to deliver) is hard to do without alienating your own playerbase.
“Business ruins the industry” as my friend mike said.
Right on, Oz :)
another website full of WoW fans…. seriously, im happy that some of you (all of you that write these articles) may be WoW fans and have te opinion that WoW is some unearthly god of MMO’s. but please lose the ZOMG WoW IS TEH AWESOME aura of your posts. Im not just referring to this post but most of the ones i read, the post about the WoW killer saying made it sound like it’d made you cry for 40 days.
You lot really sound like typical deluded WoW fanboys… ‘reviewing’ other MMO’s and then calling them because there not identical to WoW, of course age of conan will be crash prone etc, thats because it was just released
so im MY conclusion, if your going to write these blogs try to be a little more mature, although i love WoW myself it IS becoming swiftly outdated, its about time blizz got to work on a second new warcraft MMO if you ask me.
Nice post, Rob. And I share your SWG lamentations.
Regarding the finite audience, I’m inclined to think that games like Spore are more likely to expand the market more than traditional MMOs are. Spore’s asynchronous social model is just the kind of thing to show non-gamers and non-MMO gamers just how much more interesting games can be when others are involved. It’s a gateway drug to bigger things. Kinda like how my mum played bowling on the Wii one Christmas, which dramatically changed her perspective idea about what video games could be. Now she wants a DS.
I think WoW has probably already pulled in 80% of the potential paying playerbase out there. It is everywhere, discussed in every workplace, etc… So while the market may still grow, it will be at a very gradual rate and, for the most part, fluctuations in subscribers to each game will simply be a reflection of which games the current crowd is most interested in. The settled game companies know this, and they know that to grow their products they will need to primarily pull subscribers away from other current MMO’s.
Any new games coming out have now enormous hurdles to clear in terms of polish and ‘conformity’ to the perceived requirements to make a successful MMO, and the players who will trial the games have now well formed preconceptions of what an MMO is and must do.
At the same time, those games that got in the door early (UO/EQ/AO/SWG etc…) should be able to hold steady subscriber bases as long as they gradually add content. If the parent game companies recognize this, and scale overhead and support accordingly, they can make a small but tidy profit for years to come. Their games don’t match the current ‘template’ for how to make an MMO but they tend to have more depth and quirks than the bland new cookie-cutter offerings and that will hold down a paying subscriber base(nobody will ever make a new game with mechanics like the original SWG or current AO, for example).
Comments getting deleted for disagreeing with the irrational views of the writer. Can’t handle negativity can ya?
Raul, you have a rather large comment posted up there as the third comment to the post, so your opinion on the topic certainly isn’t being deleted. Anyone with a pair of eyes can quite clearly see that. What has been deleted, meanwhile, are pointless personal attacks. Continue to make them, and we’ll continue to delete them – I can’t be clearer than that. If, however, you want to post more in response to the actual topic, feel free.
Depending on the definition of ‘MMOG’ I either completely agree or completely disagree with Rob’s original post. If ‘MMOG’ means ‘quest-based, fantasy-type role playing game’, I think the market is nearing saturation – there are only so many people that will play those types of games, and WoW (for better or worse) has really cornered the market, and other games are going to attract essentially the same type of player. Anything else that tries to match it is going to run into the same issues AoC had – big marketing spend, lots of buzz, and then (surprise, surprise) at launch it did not deliver everything everybody expected… Well, clearly, that kind of polish takes some time, but by putting itself up as an immediate challenger, AoC had to live with the hype, as well as the downside associated with it.
However, if the definition for ‘MMOG’ is any game that can be played online with massive numbers of players, I think there is a lot of headroom in the market, and a lot of different games ideas that have yet to be thought of. How many people are playing Pogo now, how many do Pirates vs. Ninjas on Facebook?
Its not long before those people decide to start playing other types of games, and once developers get through the technical barriers of getting lots of people into their worlds – highly scalable networks/servers, and well designed clients that can give decent frame rates while managing heaps of unique players – then they can start working on different game mechanics and different game ideas that will bring new people into massive-scaled online games. I think some of those games might already exist (or be under development) out there, and if they are smart, they will focus on polish and ease of use before going BIG, because the standard is now much higher, and players will have less patience for crappy (or under-polished) games as there is always WoW to go back to.
Hi Paul, I used the term MMORPG exclusively throughout the piece to indicate that I wasn’t referring to just any old game that can have a large number of users online at any time. So, I would suggest, you are in agreement with what I’m saying about these “quest based games”. The only thing I would add is that not all MMORPGs are “fantasy based”. There are also sci-fi ones (SWG, AO), ancient world ones (ATITD I & II), and so on.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… to the comment from “B!te me” that said, “… please lose the ZOMG WoW IS TEH AWESOME aura of your posts…” FYI, I’m not a WoW gamer at all. Not interested in it one iota. Infact, I have some pretty anti-WoW views at times. I mentioned it once in this post, as part of a long list of games on the market. I’m perplexed by your comment, to be quite honest. It might sit better on an actual WoW-related post?
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