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Making MMOs Massive Article
MMO PC Article by Rob Fahey
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Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz' widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial is a weekly dissection of one of the issues weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers.
"How do you beat World of Warcraft?" is a question I've heard asked plenty of times in the past four years. It's the wrong question. Other developers and publishers have been asking the right questions all this time - questions like "what can we learn from the success of World of Warcraft?" and "how do we co-exist with World of Warcraft?"
Many companies have tried to clone the success of Blizzard's game, with extremely limited success. Others have attempted to appeal to the hardcore audience who, some argue, are marginalised by the mass-appeal of WoW - a generally doomed endeavour, since that audience may be noisy online but it's actually extremely small in size and not hugely lucrative. Others still have tried genuinely new approaches, but have failed to learn WOW's vital lessons about accessibility and progression, and have paid the price.
Sony Online Entertainment is one of the companies which has struggled to get the questions right. From being the largest operator of massively multiplayer games in the western world, thanks to the success of the Everquest franchise, SOE has seen its fortunes decline as Blizzard's star has risen. Everquest maintains a legacy audience, but new launches such as Vanguard have badly misjudged the marketplace and failed to attract significant subscriber numbers.
This week, however, SOE is the darling of the online gaming world, thanks to the launch of its much-trumpeted free-to-play MMOG, Free Realms. Just a month after its arrival, Free Realms has signed up two million users - and that's on the PC client alone, with the PS3 version still in the pipeline.
Free Realms is exactly the kind of departure from the WOW formula which is likely to succeed in the market. It's aimed at a different market segment, with a focus on appealing to young teenagers - and particularly girls, who make up a third of the player base at present. It's built on a radically different business model, with the game being free to play but expandable with the purchase of in-game items or upgrades. Those purchases are supported by the sale of Station Cash cards at a widespread retail network of big US brand names like Blockbuster, Best Buy and 7-Eleven.
Yet this departure from the norms of the MMOG world is tempered with a clear understanding of the things which make games like WOW appealing and addictive. Free Realms, from the first glance, is accessible, entertaining, and takes care not to overwhelm the player with stats. Its interface is simple to navigate and its character archetypes are fun and easy to comprehend even for newcomers to the fantasy genre.
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Comments: 1-23 of 23 in total
Poster
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One of the biggest issues with most MMO's from a personal perspective is that so few of them release mac clients. As a mac owner who has no desire to own a pc to play games it leaves me with very little choice. Its the biggest factor in my continued playing of Wow, I would love to have tried Warhammer or Conan, but no mac client means no try for me. Champions online is likely to be the most interesting new MMO for me simply because they are bring it to 360 (which I do own for gaming), so I still don't need to move to a PC to play it. Fingers crossed it doe's actually see release on 360, and plays well too.
While I don't think releasing mac clients of every MMO will save there bacon in every case, it would certainly give them a bigger audience to entice.
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most recently on 29/05/09 @ 22:52
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If Apple had released OS X as a standalone competitor to Vista a year ago, you might have had your wish. Now that Windows 7 appears to have become the successor to XP that Vista (or OS X) should have been, that boat may have sailed. But that's a discussion for another thread.
Good article. :)
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most recently on 29/05/09 @ 23:14
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Personally, i'm starting to be sick of some of these GameIndustry articles and their talk of "projections for growth", "lucrative audiences" and "directions the market needs to take". I'm a gamer not a shareholder.
I think my best interests lie more in the 'direction' of having game companies remain relatively small, take some creative risks every now and then and focus on us poor 'noisy' hardcore minority rather than endlessly growing and opening new markets everywhere, teenage girls, pensioners, first time mothers, no one is safe.. let's hope we get one of those nice retro gaming articles tomorrow, it'll be the perfect antidote for all this 'biz' nonsense |
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Yes, How DARE they try and attract people other than boys and middle-aged men to games. It's OUR industry, damnit.
It quite clearly states that it's an editorial for the business side of the games industry. If it bothers you so much, you don't have to read it...
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most recently on 30/05/09 @ 03:26
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All this biz nonsense? You won't have any of your precious games without the biz nonsense. Besides, the projections for growth and the new emerging markets will dictate where developers and publishers allocate their resources. IE: It directly affects the type of games you will be playing in the years to come.
And your suggestion that some small developers should just take some risks is laughable. Do you have any idea what is at stake when a developer goes out for funding and commits all their resources to something? Clearly not. And when these small companies you seem to like so much actually do make an original game they will no doubt have to cut some corners somewhere because they lack the resources to polish it. So it comes out and gets a 7 out of 10. A for effort. C for execution. And do you buy it? Do you fuck. And why on earth would they listen to the hardcore? Annoying stupid geeks who are very small in number and complete tossers. All the companies that listen to the harcore? Yes, they go under because the hardcore can never agree on what they want. If anyone listened to you we'd still be having to start from the beginning whenever we die. Oh, and you're not a gamer or a shareholder. Just a twat. |
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Making everything accessible and polished is something most of the industry hasn't learned yet idd. Just like providing timely demos/trial versions and enough pre-paid cards for those withouth credit cards (a much bigger audience than anyone suspects, some idealists really need their digital distribution dream bubble pierced).
That's one side of it, the main reason why so many people still haven't plugged into MMOs is that the gameplay experience hasn't evolved at all. It's just grinding with artificial low-responsive (combat) controls (which pale in comparison with regular action games), whether it's a narrow PvE street with half-assed PvP options or the complete other way around with heavy PvP and too few computer/developer controlled factors. In other words, the genre hasn't had its Half-Life, StarCraft/Total Annihilation moment yet. I really can't blame gamers who are sticking to traditional genres to get their game fix, MMOs just feel too stuck in their own mindset to be worth such a big time and money investment. |
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The key to a successful MMO is keeping the userbase "hooked".
Once you hook them with the gameplay/concept, the "community" is the real USP, or rather the thing that keeps people from moving on. What Blizzard have with WoW you can't beat. They can only lose for themselves, because there's no way a developer can beat having a whole society of real humans you actually *know as people* to play along with. Its the same as Xbox Live; once you have created a real sense of community on your service its a massive barrier for any competitor to broach. Offering parity of service is no longer good enough as you need to offer something so clearly better that people will migrate in groups, and that's a tall order. Because ultimately the real "draw" is the people you know, the service is just a facilitation mechanism. |
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i knew full well the kind of retarded "you owe all your games to the biz, silly!" response I would get from some people and told myself i wouldn't bother, but still...
see jstar, I know where my games come from, who makes them and why. That doesn't mean i feel the urge to tell the games industry what it should or should not do in order to make its business more profitable. Because that's how some of these articles are delivered, not as predictions or assessments but as something of a preachy wishlist of things to come. As if we a) had some say in it or b) would somehow benefit from it. I don't tell companies big or small what to do. That's not my place. But it's an empirical fact that smaller companies are the ones usually taking the most risks and producing the output that I enjoy (and yes, buy) the most, lack of 'polish' or no, so, egoistical twat that i am, i don't see the intrinsic benefit (for gamers) of the industry growing ever larger, reaching all new markets and producing stuff none of us will ever be interested in. Maybe if the next GamesIndustry.biz article cared to explain that instead of assuming it is so i'd find these reads more enlightening. The thing is, i don't give a damn where new markets are found or what resources are allocated for them, it's the article that bothers me not the reality behind it. Yes Genji, it wouldn't have bothered me if i hadn't read it (thanks for pointing that out) but i did, so it does, and i know it's so evil of me to say so here please forgive me all you industry connosieurs.. And jstar please realise that Eurogamer readers in general and the ones taking the time to read an article and post a comment on its thread on a saturday morning in particular are pretty much the hardcore minority in the industry's eyes. |
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Personally, i'm starting to be sick of some of these GameIndustry articles and their talk of "projections for growth", "lucrative audiences" and "directions the market needs to take". I'm a gamer not a shareholder.
Why not avoid reading them then? It's a GameIndustry article, about industry and business, so naturally you're going to get business phrases cropping up. I await your future comments after articles about racing games, complaining about the prevalence of terms such as "cars" and "steering". |
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The problem that MMO's have is that they think World of Warcraft is the rule. It's not, it's the exception - there are better MMO's out there. More polished, refined ones. There are also dozens of old MMO's that have survived close to a decade now with a much smaller userbase. There are MMO's that cater to Role Players, PvP fanatics and those who like dungeon crawling.
WoW's sheer size and scale now requires it to have tens of millions just to operate, but it's easy to forget they didn't have that at the start and didn't need that at the start. MMO's should be there to provide alternatives, to keep the market from going stale but should definitely note that WoW may be the dominant force but no-one would describe it as a perfect game. MMO's can all survive if people stop trying to be Blizzard's behemoth. Learn lessons, but the more you copy the more money it takes and the more likely you run out of money - if people want WoW they'll play WoW. When I look for a diversion in MMO terms I'd like it to be totally different, which is why Spellborn has my curiosity peaked. Be yourselves, have new ideas, because people who want WoW will play WoW, not a pale imitation. |
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YourMessageHere
31/05/09 @ 08:39
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My flatmate was a WoW addict. I initially watched his playing with almost the same degree of interest in how much better a game could be when playing with many others, something that prior to this was represented by the only truly challenging opponents available in FPS games. However, through that experience I realised that the only way I'd ever put myself through the hell of playing with that many other completely unknown people was if the world on offer was really engaging, AND the gameplay highly fun, AND it was possible to not have to deal with other players if I didn't want to, relegating them to basically scenery (all of which was unlike what I was seeing). The amount of idiocy, griefing, pettiness and general shitness of behaviour in every conceivable way that I observed during my flatmate's WoW career, coupled with the tedious repetitiveness of the basic gameplay, suggests to me one very good reason why a lot of games start with high subscriber bases and tail off.
As an extension of this, I for one have gone right off multiplayer games with anything other than a very few people I already know well, or a very occasional blast on something that's highly structured and thus keeps the idiocy of people in check to some extent. For me, games are supposed to be a release from the idiocy of others, not an amplification of it. Free Realms is not a game that I know anything about, but if the 'free' in the title refers more to freedom of playing style than lack of cost, it's only a matter of time before the trolls move in, the subscribers who don't love the game totally realise the depths which it can plumb, and go and find something cheaper and less unpleasant to do. |
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I think what he's referring to is the idea of gaming as a business, a way to make money, rather than an evolving art form where people make things because they are enthousiastic about them, because they are cool and interesting.
But it is a business - that's unavoidable these days. And I'm interested in both the creative side and the business side. To simply blinker yourself to the economic realities of producing games these days is, IMHO, very narrow minded. But hey, what do I know? |
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notmyrealname
01/06/09 @ 07:21
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lol iceman, mac users don't even make 10% of the computer audience, and even less of those game. Just buy a pc if you want to play games. Your rant makes no sense but reeking of mac-fanboyism.
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optimusprym8
01/06/09 @ 08:07
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one of the problems with MMOs is getting accurate reviews out for them, where the reviewer has actually played it for a length of time rather than just faffing about with the character creation tool and knows something about the genre, isn't that so EG...
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NegativeZero
01/06/09 @ 08:13
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@YourMessageHere: like most MMOs, WoW experiences vary wildly depending on when and what server you play on, and who you play with. Playing in a solid, casual or semi-casual guild with friends (especially people you know offline) on a 'normal' (non-PvP) server is incredibly different to the experience you'd have if you're playing with random people, or in an extremely hardcore guild, or on a PvP server and whatnot. Personally the first time I tried the game I tried to join some friends on a PvP server, and having to deal with dipshits constantly really soured me toward the whole thing. It wasn't until over a year later when I tried it out again on a non-PvP server that I started enjoying the experience, and even then I had to fiddle around for quite a while before I actually found a class that suited the way I play.
The gameplay IS repetitive but that's a general failing with these sorts of games. Especially the earlier parts of the leveling experience, which is where a lot of people come unstuck I suspect. One of WoW's strengths is that the actual leveling experience is far better structured and all the classes are properly balanced so that playing solo isn't like pulling teeth (try rolling a healer class on a korean grindfest MMO and you'll understand what I mean) but even they were far from perfect early on. There's a lot of areas that are simply terrible. Especially quest design. They've come a huge distance, Wrath of the Lich King content in comparison to the original 1.0 content is like night and day. It's true that WoW is an exception rather than a rule, and that it's unlikely that any game will ever directly challenge it until it begins to run out of steam itself, but it's certainly not just a case of right-place-at-the-right-time like a lot of people seem to suggest. It's simply the most polished, well-rounded, consistent and accessible MUD-derived MMO on the market, and by a fair margin. Personally I suspect that the game that will knock Blizzard off their current perch is going to be something that actually breaks out of the MUD mould entirely. |
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What worries me is this general trend to making things more and more casual
I mean, seriously, if having to patch your game is enough to turn people away, are they really worth catering towards? People with such a tennuous attachment to the game are just as likely to drop it when eastenders come on, or when they hear the kettle boil, or loose women comes on telly, and it worries me how it's this market 'rather then this percieved 'hardcore', which is driving the MMO market. I dont see why a game has to appeal to everyone (and ultimately satisfy no-one) fgor it to be successful. I think, in many ways WoW has damaged the MMO market by providing a benchmark which everyone should not be trying to strive towards. Yes the mass casual market is lucrative and it does need to be tapped, and it does help the community for it to be tapped, by expanding the gaming cumminity, but it should by no means become the only sort of MMO apparent. |
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Catering to as wide a range of audience as possible has to be of benefit, being able to do stuff in a team of who're not all after exactly the same thing raises the interaction and helps maintain interest.
At the same time having plenty of content that can be played and enjoyed solo makes it more likely people will end up meeting online without feeling like they have to keep to defined schedules. |
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I still don't understand why so many publishers, developers are so focussed on creating MMO's, while history has shown it's the hardest game/service to make?
The gameplay draws you in, your friends keep you there - is a very good description how the genre works
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 02/06/09 @ 10:13
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Comments: 1-23 of 23 in total
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