Today’s Bombthrowing Comes From A Veteran Grenadier

I think Jarnis’ post above shows exactly why Richard Bartle is right on the money. Jarnis looks for any reason to hate a game that isn’t WoW.

LotRO has bad animations? What? How exactly does this impact gameplay? And no content? If there’s one thing I’d say about Turbine is that they can produce content like nobody’s business. If this were a problem, I’m sure it is only an temporary problem.

EQ2′s shadows disappear? Seriously? This is the best you an find against the game? And, you can’t stand “SOEBay” even though a majority of the servers don’t support this? If anything, it made the game better because SOE seemed a lot quicker to shut down gold farmers. I very rarely got gold farmer spam, and the in-game mail system had a “report spam” button built right in.

The problem is, as Dr. Bartle implies, is that people are content enough with WoW, no matter what anyone else offers. There will always be a reason to hate another game, no matter how mundane or trivial. And some people are happy to go out of their way to point out the problems.

The larger issue here is that WoW created unrealistic expectations. If I can’t have any flaw in my graphics engine to please people like Jarnis, then it’s hopeless. (I’ll note that even WoW had it’s share of graphics engine problems, although people seem quick to forgive them.) Developers were already worried about development costs after EQ. Blizzard came along and used their incredibly deep pockets to create a game with a budget that is still impossible for most mortals. They also set up the ultimate Catch-22: either you have a lower budget and you have some flaw that people can claim makes your entire game suck, or you get the $50M in investment and walk on pins and needles about pissing someone else’s money away and threatening your career.

And, don’t take that bit about ruining a career lightly. Just look at what happened to Sigil; not making value judgments here, but they did spend a lot of money and heads did, unfortunately, roll. And what would I , the great indie supporter, do if someone forced me to make a game with a $50M budget? I’d clone Wow, for two reasons: first, this is what the person giving me $50M almost certainly wants, and second, because when my game has some minor flaw (such as not using the same username/password for every player as their WoW account does by default), nobody will blame me for my stupid ideas fucking up the game. I might be labeled an unoriginal hack, but at least my career will still be intact.

Some more fuel for the fire.

It’s not sour grapes. If it were, then Richard would have said something to the effect, “close it down just like I would do with any game I did not create.” Go read that interview, Richard’s not one to mince words.

Instead, he’s taking it as an interesting intellectual exercise. Take the juggernaut that’s affecting the industry (for both good and ill) and shut it down? What would be the effects? Richard is playing a game here, because he’s a world-class game designer and understands what the game is to be played.

And, really, it’s nothing more sinister or spiteful than an intellectual exercise. Because, if he were 110% serious the answer would be, “take over WoW and laugh all the way to the bank while funding my ideal game.” Well, at least mine would be.

Reading through the comments here, it’s easier to see the rift between player and designer. I think most people just don’t understand what Richard was saying when he lobbed the bomb at the end. He clarifies his position, which is pretty much what I said about it being an intellectual exercise above.

A few comments I thought I’d respond to:

Steve wrote:
If they’re gems, why are they still unknown?

Games don’t remain unknown merely because they suck. I could list a few dozen games you probably haven’t played that are superb games. An easy example is Beyond Good & Evil. The game did terribly in sales, but most people who have played it agree it’s a truly wonderful, fun game, worthy of being in “Top N Lists”. Just because people aren’t playing a game doesn’t mean it’s not fun.

One big issue is marketing. It’s hard and it’s expensive. So, if there were a small gem of a game out there that can’t afford big advertising, it’ll probably get lost in the tidal wave of people that can afford marketing. Numbers I’ve heard for WoW’s marketing budget are larger than many MMORPG budgets before WoW launched.

I experienced this myself when we revamped Meridian 59‘s client with a new rendering engine. (It doesn’t make the game compete graphically with other games out there, but it was supposed to be the first step toward many upgrades to the game.) Unfortunately, we finished just before WoW launched and my marketing budget was about three orders of magnitude too small to get any significant notice. That’s why I’m working on other projects these days.

Frag wrote:
I’ve played most mmorpgs, and stopped playing most mmorpgs

Newbie designer mistake #1: Assuming everyone will react the same way you do.

Not to pick on you, Frag, because other people did the same thing. The problem is that not everyone will react like you did. Sure, not everyone who loves WoW would go seek another game immediately if it went away, but some people would.

In retrospect, I suspect that completely closing down WoW would have an effect that Dr. Bartle didn’t intend: since the majority of WoW’s players are in China, all those Chinese players would support different Chinese games. This would give those games a boost, perhaps enough to jump to other markets easier. In the end, this would probably be a big boon to Chinese games.

Yunk wrote:
To get rid of WoW is like saying “let’s get rid of that which is forcing us to strive to be better” or like saying “I can’t possibly compete so let’s just get rid of the competition” .. not a good idea, and not a way to get better games. We’ll just go back to the games we had before.

But, here’s the fallacy: it’s not making people make better games. It’s making people give up because they literally cannot compete. You don’t get $50M in funding in the game industry without a lot of issues. Blizzard was in a unique position: they had resources from a large company to rely on, an established and eager fanbase, and a degree of creative control rarely seen in any game company. You can’t just click your heels together and wish to have the same situation. This is one reason why it’s nearly impossible to compete with WoW directly.

Let’s take a look at history, shall we? EQ launched in March 1999, and the first “big” competition to the game, DAoC, launched in October 2001. (Sorry, AC fans; isn’t it fun to be marginalized?) That’s 30 months later. (You might also note that DAoC’s budget was about $4M if I remember my figures right.) Now, here we are 32 months after the November 2004 launch of WoW. Where’s our DAoC? You could argue that LotRO fills that role, but that’s not good news. The rate of development should be increasing after all these years, not remaining so static. This is not a reason to be excited, because WoW is not encouraging people to get better; it’s the opposite: it’s encouraging people to not even try.

Rich wrote:
Anyway, I read Bartle’s post and see him saying WoW is a barrier to other developers (or more likely, investors/publishers) willing to take risks. And maybe for players as well?

You got it in one.

To spell it out, on the developer side the problem is that you have two funding options with two results:

* Have a “small” budget (maybe “only” $20M like the original SWG spent), and fail because your game isn’t WoW enough.

* Have a “small” budget and hope to find your niche. Of course, the more money you spend on development the less you have for marketing, so your game will likely remain unknown. (See my response to Steve above.)

* Have a large budget ($50M , please, as Dr. Bartle mentioned in the interview) and have Vanguard-style problems. Problems that can ruin a career.

* Have a large budget and succeed wildly. How many people have done this since WoW launched over 2 years ago? Maybe LotRO, as I said above.

Unfortunately, games are an art, not a science. You can talk all you want about people believing a game to be a success, but until it launches you just don’t know for sure. I think Auto Assault shows this well, because the reviews during demos for the game were nothing but enthusiastically positive; yet, the game launched and people shunned it like an unfun plague.

Some insight.

Yunk wrote:
I still fail to see the difference between games and other industries.

Perhaps you should learn more about other industries? Let’s look at two other industries in particular: books and movies. I’m going to focus on the base costs to develop a work. Additional costs for creation (printing, pressing, etc.), distribution, and marketing are left as an exercise for the reader. So are examples from still other industries.

Books are different than games (particularly MMOs) because it only takes one person to create the core of the book. Often other people are involved in editing the book, but they do so in series and not in parallel. So, a book is written by a very small group of people. Books also have a much lower cost to develop: even if you pretend that the equipment used to write the book are only going to be used for the book (a laptop and word processing software for each person), that’s still below the $100k to $1M (or more!) required to write a small-scale MMO. (There are opportunity costs for the writer, especially one without a contract, but these are not precisely measurable and similar to the opportunity costs of the developers of an MMO.) Also note that a “big budget” book doesn’t cost any more to create; it costs J.K. Rowling about the same to write the latest Harry Potter book as it would take for me to write something publishers will (probably) handily reject.

The big issue here is that for writing, it’s hard for new authors to get recognition from the traditional publishing system. Publishers are hesitant to give new authors a chance, and will often desperately underpay them; Rowling reportedly made only about $4000 on the first Harry Potter book, for example. Of course, this is similar for MMO development, where publishers also won’t even talk to you if you don’t have some history, or if you have the whole game ready to publish (that is, managed to fund the game yourself). Even if you do get published, don’t expect a good deal, or expect one that will even allow you to stay in business in some cases. Plus, players tend to be hesitant about supporting an indie MMO because it’s not backed by a large company. (The logic goes that if the game were any good, obviously a large company would want a piece of it. Don’t laugh, someone told me that line as an excuse not to try M59.) But, this is where the similarities with games end. Selling 100k books makes you a best-seller. Having 100k subscribers makes you an awkward “not small, but not large, either” game like EVE.

Now, let’s look at movies. One big difference is that the costs can vary widely, but they don’t necessarily impact the quality of the film in the same way budget impacts the quality of a game. On the high end, most of the cost goes to pay actors. One of the celebrity magazines I saw while waiting at the grocery store said that Daniel Radcliffe, the star of Harry Potter, made $50M. That’s approximately the cost of our largest MMO ever paid for one actor! Of course, there’s an entire system set up to cover the costs of making a movie and allowing actors to be paid that much. The only way anyone, even the top-tier celebrity designers, made that much money in games was to sell out to a large publisher (and then watch their company die slowly, in most cases).

On the low end of costs, you have The Blair Witch Project which reportedly cost $22,000 to make. That will almost get a mocap studio to give you a few decent animations. (And, remember, as Jarnis said above, if your animations aren’t superb or if you don’t have enough content, your game sucks.) And, while Blair Witch didn’t look all that great (even if the shaky camera work was an artistic decision), nobody’s complaining that the shadows aren’t realistic and therefore writing off the movie entirely. Enough people were interested in the movie’s premise to go see it despite the low-budget. Now, if you ignore the mainstream and go truly indie, YouTube has shown that with very little budget you can create some pretty interesting movies. But, with that same budget you can’t make an MMO game, unfortunately.

And, if you’re one of those people that want to pass off that old lie about “it’s the gameplay, not the graphics”, I have one answer for you. I think I’m legally allowed to slap anyone stupid who still tries to that old defense.

And, yes, I will admit there are some exceptions to the rule. But, if success stories like Runescape were easy to duplicate, it would have been done already. Alternatively, even though Sherwood Dungeon has 1.3 million unique players per month, it’s questionable if it fits in the same category as other persistent worlds (but, that’s another long debate topic, I’m sure). In the end, I haven’t seen anyone even mention these games as alternatives, and I don’t anticipate people flocking to these games as real alternatives to WoW.

So, let’s summarize why MMOs are different than other media:
* The cost to compete with the market leader is too high.
* Further, there are no adequate ways to fund a high-end game.
* The costs to do an indie MMO game are not low enough to do independently.
* Primarily because you cannot do a true MMO with 1 person.
* An MMO game, particularly an indie game, will always have some flaw that allows people to “hate” it.
* People judge an MMO by the amount of money that went into it more than they do for other media.

Any further proof will require you to enroll in a business course, or to start paying me for business consulting.