I gave an interview to Wagner James Au over at gigaOM about my new gig which has gotten a lot of press (and flack via the press) in the past couple of weeks. Specifically, two paragraphs where I discussed the problems with standard MMO production (huge budgets, inability to manage projects) were boiled down into:
Why The MMORPG Subscription-Based Business Model Is Broken
To be fair, this isn’t the title I would have chosen (I probably would have used something involving obscure 1980′s alternative music lyrics), and I also wouldn’t have painted myself as some sort of latter-day Martin Scorsese moving into Youtube serials. But, hey, to be fair I did move from problems to solutions with the words: “So, in short, it’s broken.”
Now, when other places, especially those with a readership more composed of Warcraft players than dot-com venture capitalists picked up on the interview, the reaction was… well… mixed.
I think what he’s really saying is that the business model that he is no longer in is no good and the one he is now working with is totally awesome.
But hey, if Jennings wants to milk pocket money from kids and pestered parents, then that’s what he should say. There’s always a market for low quality shovelware with strings attached.
He made the leap? Wasn’t he pushed?
Since when was Lum the Knob an ‘Industry Heavyweight’ ?? Obviously the author of this piece is enraptured with Jennings, a low level code monkey and craptastic MMO player.
He got given the arse at one job, so now that industry sucks and is dieing, yet his new low level code monkey job is in the fast paced and exciting world of ..what was it again…..Web Browser Wars?
Obviously 2008 is the year that publishers and studios finally learn what a false religion The Cult of the Big-Name Designer is.
The takeaway from this is clear:
I Am A Big-Name Designer/Cult Leader
Rock! Also:
Never Ever Even Imply You Will Take World of Warcraft Away From People
Something I’m sure Richard Bartle would give me pointers on, if his email client has recovered yet.
OK – More seriously:
People Enjoy Playing Subscription MMOs
and the somewhat related
You Can Make A Lot Of Money From Subscription MMOs
Obviously, given the 11 million customer behemoth, this is a fairly obvious point. Blizzard makes money hand over fist. And rather more importantly, as Ben Zeigler points out in a well-written piece, NCsoft makes money hand over fist – and more last year from City of Heroes than Guild Wars. It’s a point well taken – both products are fairly old in Internet years, and Guild Wars has several orders of magnitude more people playing; yet City of Heroes makes more money, mainly because everyone is paying. (And also that NCsoft is still struggling with trying to monetize Guild Wars players over the long term – a struggle with any free-to-play game.)
So, when I say “this be broken, y0″, it’s more to the point of addressing this part of what I originally said, which many folks have skipped over:
The classic engineering dilemma is expressed as a joke: “Fast, Cheap, Good: pick two”. In game development, we *wish* we could pick two. We either crank out licensed console games on a one year cycle that literally burns through developers. Or we spend tens of millions just to keep up with the status quo. Or we have tiny budgets, which result in development that is neither fast nor good, and most of the time, consequently tiny results.
That is broken. There is little room for creativity and advancing the state of the art in any of those scenarios – either you are working too fast, have too little budget for your scope, or you don’t have the flexibility because you are responsible for a blockbuster-sized budget.
That’s not to say that innovation can’t occur using the standard model – look at public quests in Warhammer Online. Of course, then note that that is, most likely, literally the only innovative feature of Warhammer Online. Given those big budgets, it’s simply not responsible to get all crazy with the innovation. Counter example: Star Wars Galaxies, a big budget title which had innovation out the wazoo, and was unable to deliver much of it until well beyond release.
Of course, you can quite easily crank out a game that follows 80-90% of the World of Warcraft road map, charge $15 a month and be quite successful. Both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online look to have done so, as did Lord of the Rings Online. All of these games are going to keep their studios going well into the future. That’s hard to argue with.
But not impossible. You see, not every game is a success. Some games never make it out the door. (Not that I’d know anything about that – but more on that in a moment.) And if they do make it out the door, they might not be terribly successful. Maybe they took too many risks, or the wrong ones, or they somehow otherwise deviated from The One Holy and Apostolic WoW. It is very easy – ridiculously easy – to waste a LOT of money making MMOs. And the longer we cleave to the current production model, your chance of wasting money goes up, your amount of money you wasted goes up, and the chance you can ever make a game that isn’t a reskinned WoW goes down. (And eventually the market will tire of reskinned WoWs, really.)
Even beyond that, there’s some other key problems with subscription-based games, though:
They self-select the hard core. It is a struggle for the average online game to convince the average internet user to pony up a credit card number. In fact, that’s one of World of Warcraft’s biggest achievements – and one reason why even developers of MMOs that have been decimated by World of Warcraft’s release are somewhat philisophical about it. Hey, that’s 11 million people that entered in a credit card number. They might do it again! (Except that, well, a large proportion of those are playing in net cafes in China and paying by the hour. DETAILS.) But still – asking for billing information is a decision point. Decision points are where you are faced with the decision – do I keep investing my time, attention and money in this game or not? And the longer you can postpone that decision point, the better. Free to play games nail this, because they don’t have to ask you for money until you are well and truly invested in the game.
They leave money on the table and encourage bad actors to pick up the slack. By this I mean gold farming, primarily. No reputable subscription-based MMO will sell you gold because, well, you’re already paying them money. Charging for in-game money or items is double dipping, right? No one would stand for that. But clearly the market is there regardless. And as long as that market is not served internally by the game developers themselves, it will be served by people who not only do not act in the best interests of the game as a whole, but have a very real financial incentive to act contrary to the interests of the game as a whole – gold duping, hacking the client, farms of unattended macro bots, whatever. Whereas a game who has gold selling as a revenue model (and it can be done without making a Entropia Universe-esque ponzi scheme of gameplay – dual currency models being IMHO the best way of hitting this from the design standpoint) puts those bad actors elegantly out of business, because no matter how low salaries are in whatever sweatshop, a gold farmer will never be able to compete with a SQL query for the cost of doing business.
They encourage bad design. You gotta keep those people subscribed somehow. Hey, I know, let’s jack up the XP curve, no one will notice. Oh, they’re max level? Crap, put in some other time sink – hey, “reputations” sounds fun, let’s see if that works. Now, free to play games also suffer from all of these problems. Which is kind of funny, because in a free to play game, if you’re not part of the 5% or whatever of players that is monetized, you are costing the company money when you play. Ideally your play time should be minimized, not extended! But old habits are hard to break. Jonathan Blow (the Braid designer) put this best. When his comments on MMO design first came out I was quite pissed off at what he had to say – but in the main, he’s right. It’s probably why I was pissed.
“I think a lot of modern game design is actually unethical, especially massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, because they are predicated on player exploitation,” Mr Blow says.
He believes players will naturally avoid boring tasks but developers “override that by plugging into their pleasure centres and giving them scheduled rewards and we convince them to pay us money and waste their lives in front of our game in this exploitative fashion”.
It’s a vast oversimplification – but that doesn’t make it less correct an observation. And that is encouraged by the revenue stream of the slow and steady MMO gamer.
So, will free-to-play, or web-based, or any other trendy buzzword fix all this? Of course not. But we as developers have to start thinking differently. Or failing that, enjoy the few years or so of profitable WoW-cloning left to us. Either way.
A more personal note: referring to this comment?
I think what he’s really saying is that the business model that he is no longer in is no good and the one he is now working with is totally awesome.
While I can’t talk about what I was doing at NCsoft, I think it is a very safe assumption to make that the business and production model we were shooting for, and trying to introduce to a company not really used to it, was informed based on much of the above discussion. It wasn’t so much a case of “oh crap, they stopped paying me – go talk nice about the stuff these guys are doing!” as “oh crap, they don’t wanna do this any more – go find someone else who is!” I mean, I’m mercenary, but I’m not craven.
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You did hit on the Achilles heal of current MMOs with your Mr Blow quote.
The current gconcept of MMOs games will eventually be discarded for games that are predominantly fun activities. The player rejection is already happening to a serious degree with long time MMOers as we get older.
On the other hand your to close and not seeing the situation clearly with development costs.
It may be fun for you to design weird little cheap games(so good for you) but most of us dont really want to play them other than as an occasional diversion .
Most MMO players want expensive worlds with massive content and in depth design.
Steven Davis, on his Play No Evil blog ( http://www.playnoevil.com/serendipity/ ), has warned for years about the industry’s vulnerability on the “MMO addiction” problem. Jonathan Blow attacks the practice from the viewpoint of irresponsible design, but Davis believes there may eventually be public policy and legal ramifications, imposed on our industry from outside because we have so blithely ignored the issue.
In fact, those public policy and legal ramifications have already hit in other countries, as you know, Allen.
Anyway, Scott, glad to see you’re drinking the Kool-Aid these days.
What is bad if MMOs go torwards or into casino gaming which is regulated by public policy? The gameplay of RND does make for addiction, socialization, and big business at the same time.
Several good points here. But if I may add –
On the question of Credit Cards: I believe the system has gone downhill since a decade ago. I remember trying UO in the Second Age era, and not liking it. So I never subscribed after the initial free month, but at no point during the trial month was I forced to punch in a credit card number to play the game during the free month. Nowadays, I’m just installing a game directly from the store, and before I even get to log in for the very first time, I’m immediately prompted to enter my credit card information, never mind that I might choose not to subscribe after the trial month is over and that the company would therefore have no need for such information in the first place. And if I like the game and want to keep playing it, what could be stopping me from buying pre-paid game cards, hence doing away with the need for credit card information at ANY point?
I don’t care what convoluted legal arguments you might bring up to justify requesting credit information beforehand, and I don’t buy the idea that people have gotten more used to online purchasing since 1998. I’m still extremely queasy about that; never used PayPal, nor eBay. Furthermore, I’m one of those guys who never bother with beta periods, especially when it involves downloading large files that would jack up my Internet bill to the point where buying the box would actually be cheaper; case in point: Age of Conan.
So in my case, it’s essentially: If I like a game, I’ll consider subscribing; if not, I will be gone before the trial month is out. Just don’t force me to enter my credit card information more often than I need to. And once that practice becomes widely known, it’s just as likely to keep some people, non-gamers especially, from ever trying out MMO’s because it involves venturing into the unknown at your own risk. Would you buy underwear from a place asking you for your employment history?
As for free-to-play, or as I prefer calling them, two-tier games, there is good and bad design.
Good design: Everything in the game is accessible to you if you don’t pay real money, but it’s going to cost more, or take more time. I’m thinking of Puzzle Pirates’ “doubloon” oceans for this. Theoretically, you can buy anything the game offers, but it will just cost substantially more because of doubloon costs in addition to the initial cost in Pieces of Eight.
Bad design: Two-tier is rigidly enforced, and some perks are completely inaccessible unless you bring forth the credit card. I’m thinking of those games where a non-paying player would be limited to Armor of Uberness Level 4, whereas a paying player could have access to Armor of Uberness Level 7. Please note that I do not include purely cosmetic options in this category (I’m reminded here of that old Runescape scam, “free armor trimming”), but equipment which confers an actual advantage to paying customers. I’ve heard of some Korean MMO’s actually based on this model, but since I lack first-hand experience of those, I won’t elaborate. Worst I’ve seen, however, was a certain browser game I won’t name, which dispensed perks by having players call a 1-900 number. As I said, I’m queasy about giving away credit card information, but I’m even more squeamish when it comes to being billed through a 1-900 number, especially if the game is being played by kids with far easier access to a telephone than to daddy’s Visa.
Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure that non-paying players of such two-tiered games ought to be treated as deadbeats. Puzzle Pirates, to return to that, allows Pieces of Eight to be traded in for Doubloons (which are bought with real money), and vice-versa. Having more non-paying customers just means the price of doubloons goes up, giving even more in-game wealth tho those who *do* pay. (But at the same time, it does not confer a definite advantage on those who choose to pay, except maybe at the highest-stakes level, which is all but limited to an elite even without financial transactions entering the equation.)
While it is true that non-paying players, in such a system, won’t be encouraged to change their ways, I suspect that if paying real money were suddenly the only way to play the game, the vast majority of them would just quit rather than pay, and that a few of the paying customers would probably up and leave as well. Weird things can happen when willingly paying customers start getting the impression that they are being coerced into shelling out money to be competitive (I still haven’t forgotten that Chinese article you linked to a few months ago). Not to mention that getting rid of all said “deadbeats” is the best way to gut a community and kill the buzz around a game. Server issues aside, I’d rather have a community of 100,000 with only 5% paying than an all-paying community of 5,000.
I’m more concerned, however, over subscription-based MMO’s starting to give perks to people who pre-order the game. I’m not talking here about cutesy but intrinsically useless stuff such as an exclusive garment colour. Best example I can think of is Age of Conan players getting a free mount by pre-ordering. Normally, you theoretically couldn’t get a mount until level 40, but in practice, mounts were so expensive in-game that players could really start affording them around level 55. But by pre-ordering, gone was the need to even scraping up enough money. I stuck to PvE servers while there, but I can easily imagine how much of an advantage such a “perk” could have conferred to pre-order players on a PvP server.
“And eventually the market will tire of reskinned WoWs, really.”
It has yet to tire of reskinned Dooms.
>Never Ever Even Imply You Will Take World of Warcraft Away From People
Another handy tip is: Never Suggest that Some New MMO which Shares WoW’s Gameplay Does, in Fact, Share WoW’s Gameplay.
Richard
“given the 11 million customer behemoth”
Scott, I don’t think even that point should be conceded– roughly 6 million World of Warcraft players are in Asia not paying monthly subscriptions, but instead, primarily paying to play by the hour via pre-paid cards, points they buy from Internet cafes hosting WoW, SMS payments, etc. See “Concerning payment for online games” at this link:
http://www.gamingsteve.com/archives/2005/11/with_all_the_ta.php
That seems more like the kind of transactions you’re saying MMORPGs in the West need to experiment with. And that’s *6 million* WoW players, the majority of WoW’s base. What’s more, Blizzard’s not making a buttload off them, at least in 2006:
http://gigaom.com/2006/08/29/world-of-warcraft-2/
“unlike US and EU players, who each pay a subscriber fee of about $15 a month, Chinese pay to play by the hour, and what they pay isn’t much: the yuan equivalent of $.04/hour. And while they play a lot, this also means total revenue from China is just 15% of WoW’s Western market. ($30 million versus $200 million, in 2006’s second quarter.)”
As far as the credit card musings go, I wonder how many sales of Visa prepaid cards are based on MMO purchases – the sheer number of providers which only accept various cards of that sort, and the security and ease of cancellation with them has to be beneficial. Of course, that’s entirely tangential – it doesn’t take care of the actual _need_ to post a credit card number the instant you sign up for a game, or any of the other issues that could be resolved with a bit more morality and a bit less finger-rubbing.
Going back to the subscription model versus micropayments, it’s an interesting divide that’s getting a lot smaller as time goes on. For consumers, micropayment models (well, I use the $2-5 range for that) might be a bit more friendly – a player can pay for a week or a month of whatever mode of gameplay they so choose. It’s small wonder that MP-style games are becoming the norm, rather than the exception – except for that hundred-ton gorilla stomping about city streets.
I think there are a few more nails to pound into the coffin here, so let me see…
1. Many subscription-based games have a high cost of entry, even above the price to keep playing. While players might not think twice about plonking down $5 to see ‘a bit more of the game’ for an MMO with a free-to-play model, or even $15 to play a game for a month after trying it out, many games in this style also have an initial cost: $30 for the game, including a free month, or even $50-60 for new, big releases. For a game that the player can only enjoy for a month, that’s rather painful, especially when:
2. Most subscription-based games are more repetitive than many single-player or standalone games. As Jonathan Blow stated, and as many have realized, MMOs are one giant Skinner box: the rat keeps pressing the button time and time again, for the reward of a bigger sword, or better character stats. I think this is clear in World of Warcraft especially: however marvelous the story will be, there are going to be players who don’t take the time to enjoy it, and who just want to grind through and acquire shinies. There’s no mental or emotional advancement or involvement beyond the mere ‘finally, the last quest item!’ And while this is a problem with almost all MMORPGs, the price tag is again a huge detriment for a lot of people…surely they can get their ‘max level!’ kick elsewhere.
3. As fragile as many MMOs are nowadays, there’s no guarantee that when you come back after a break, your time investment will still be there. In fact, Funcom, in their infinite wisdom, decided that once a player stops subscribing to Anarchy Online, their characters will be wiped after three months – and possibly their account regardless of what they’ve purchased on it, though I haven’t gone back to check after I read that little piece of information. Free to play or micro-payment MMOs, while they sometimes have a soft limit on this – don’t log in for a few months, your character will disappear – tend not to have that sort of subscription issue. Instead, you just can’t use those bright and shiny features until you pay again.
Now, I do have to wave a very large thumbs-up at Three Rings for how they handled the dichotomy with Puzzle Pirates – keeping their subscription servers up, and implementing a Doubloon variant on separate ones. It’s gotten nearly to where they’re phasing out the subscription model entirely, but care too much about their playerbase for it.
I suppose there is a downside, though, as an absolute tangent – from my old MU* days, at that. The more subsequent servers are operational, the fewer hand-crafted events there can be without the playerbase claiming favoritism. I suppose I’m just an old (ha!) roleplayer, though.
Ah, come to think of it, there is nail #4 which I neglected to mention above: most subscription-based games do not let the player see much of the world before their trial runs out. While there’s the odd handful that do, many have restrictions which don’t merely discourage trial players, but actively cripple them – many more limit gameplay to ‘newbie sections’. In A Tale In The Desert, loathe as I am to speak ill of it, players are given 24 hours to explore, settle, and make camp – that’s in-game hours, not real-time ones. The problem is that the high-end game is so difficult to grasp from an observer’s perspective, it scares away a lot of new players.
I stopper paying for MMRPGs for the same reasons I quit smoking. – True Story
Dartwick: The big, expensive MMOs will always be there, because there is a hardcore market worldwide for them. What Scott was pointing out is that, with budgets now edging north of $40 million, there will only be a very few companies in the West that can afford the price of entry and they are not going to take major risks with that money. They’ll go with what works… which is why every major fantasy MMO feels much the same, past a certain point.
That is what happened in China, in fact; the MMOs were so similar that it was hard to stand out. How did they do it? They started by going free-to-play. The same may well happen in the US and Europe, despite the different cultural rules here.
Oh, and Scott? Now you know how I felt when you wrote about me, back in the day,
.
Durga the Dream Date
also, honestly, the only new thing about public quests in WAR is that they have a name and there are more than one of them.
Public quests sound alot like the Omen event from WoW, where players in moonglade have to kill x number of wolf mobs roaming around, then kill omen, and if you do then everyone gets a buff, and everyone on the quest gets an item and some rep.
So wow had the idea, they just didn’t bother to flesh it out.
Oh, Lum… It is without a doubt good to be the king… I don’t know fully, the business end of an MMO, but WOW does play right into the very heart of addiction. It is sad, yet I am guilty as many others of being able to be sucked into that vortex. I think it is why we are all here really. We started as addicts, now we are all “doctors” trying to see the truth. As we were so many years ago.
That guy about reskinned Diablos is right. We still have the same games all these years later, and we are still the vocal minority. Change? Still feared.
Good luck on your new venture Lummy. =)
A friend pointed out that it looks like I’m picking on Scott in the post above. I’m not; we still laugh about the whole Dream Date with Durga thing when we meet up in Austin at conventions.
Eh, this is MILD compared to some of the abuse I get when I mention a PvP-centric game in a less than flattering light.
From an artistic standpoint, I don’t think the best developers are ever going to want to make games that the player is supposed to play as little as possible. People get into this industry to try to make this hypothetical ‘best game ever’ that everyone in the world wants to play 24/7 from now until they die.
It’s like with Hollywood. Studios make movies to make money, but directors make movies just to make movies, and well, to get their friends jobs.
I am curious Scott if you still hold to the line that not that many MMO players are addicted. I believe in reference to the “40% of WoW players are addicted” spiel of a couple years ago you argued heavily that some just don’t get why we play MMOs so much. I have always thought a lot of players are more addicted than a lot of us would like to admit.
I don’t disagree with the assessment that MMOs play on the need to get that next +1 foozle, but I don’t think it is inherently different than any other monopolistic competitive market out there. I think it is foolish to believe that a different business model is suddenly going to result in dramatically different games and a change in the market. Yes, developers are guilty of injecting nicotine into our hard drives, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist, free to play or not.
>>Scott Jennings Says:
Eh, this is MILD compared to some of the abuse I get when I mention a PvP-centric game in a less than flattering light.>>
Your scars are my scars, my brother! **coughcough**
Don’t feel bad. The cellphone market is fairly broken also. Though they do have a prepaid model and if it weren’t for things like a $1 per day minimum that might actually fix the problem of hardcore users having economic advantage. Did you hear they outlawed early termination fee contract clauses in California? I’ve actually given line-sharing for unlimited texting a few brain cycles just for kicks, because I am NOT paying $15 / month to transfer low weight TEXT, ffs.
And don’t get me started on the automotive industry. Who Killed the Persistent Virtual World? … might not be as popular a documentary as the electric car one.
Where the anlaogy breaks down of course is that games are art. It pisses us off when the investors mess with L’Art, alot more so than when they muck up something as banal as a stupid phone service.
>>”While I can’t talk about what I was doing at NCsoft…”
Darn. I was hoping that the secret could be revealed since it’s dead. Or at least severely understaffed…
Oh I get what Scott is saying Jessica.
I just think hes missing the point. He really is talking like a movie director moving to youtube serials. Although I think a much better example would be a car maker in the 1910-20s as a semi-custom industry into turned into mass production industry.
If it making one off games him happy thats great. But to argue that the big productions are failed model is not accurate. They are brutal but they are the models every one cares most about.
And yes innovation always comes slower to realization once productions become larger.
I was addicted to games, computers and programming (and I got quit a few ‘F’s due to those addictions).
To this day I am still addicted to computers and programming languages. I spent most of my time on those. I am still playing WOW, but I play it less than an hour each week now. I even play starcraft sometimes.
People will also be addicted on something, I think we are programmed to do that. If they found nothing in this world attract them anymore, they commit suicide.
Sorry this is rather far from the topic, just can’t stand other talk about how bad the addictions are.
I’m all for subscription based MMO’s. Microtransactions are for people who enjoy getting nickled and dimed to death, or as we call them around here, console gamers.
I think that regardless of the limitations of big studio budgets, subscription will remain the best way of ensuring that your persistent world has quality content generated for it on an ongoing basis. The only alternatives I can see are open-sourcing or licensing after the polish has been applied by the pros with the megabudgets. Or private servers being run as small enlightened dictatorships, with the underlying code tweaked to reflect different styles of gameplay, and new content designed on the fly.
To me, what is broken is the D&D model. Level, gear, repeat. It’s meaningless and ultimately not much fun. It makes me wish more devs had cut their teeth on Greg Stafford’s work (Heroquest, Runequest 1st through maybe 2nd edition), instead of Gygax’ and Arneson’s creeky old beast. Why not engineer the meaning into the mechanics instead of trying to shoehorn the satisfaction in with Pavlovian rewards after the fact?
Taking the persistent element and playing with it, point buy systems that put the player in charge of character design, etcetera. There is such a wealth of game design ideas in the pen and paper end of things that are eminently translatable, and everyone is too afraid to use them (Champions will reputedly be point-buy, but I am deeply skeptical of how much freedom they will really allow their players).
The innovation is going to have to come from a strong personality given reign by a big studio. We don’t have a working “art house” model for the industry yet. I’d love to be able to license WoW or AoC’s geography and models and generate my own content using a powerful menu system that accommodates a non-coder and make worlds for my friends, but we’re not getting that this decade or maybe even the next.
I want to set the record straight on Guild Wars vs. CoX. Guild Wars grossed roughly 10% less than CoX, by doing nothing in Q2 (except for minor updates and some pre-made events, aka hitting the button). CoX, on the other hand, had a significant update (Issue 12).
Guild Wars has not put out any major content updates since Q3 2007. CoX put out three major content updates. Now, I will admit the major content updates of Guild Wars are much bigger than the ones from CoX, but still… Guild Wars is sitting on a nice long, fat tail while CoX still has to “work” to keep its subs up.
So now I wonder who net (i.e. “made”) more?
I don’t think subscriptions and big budgets are the same issue. Large budgets and fear of innovation is the same Innovator’s Dilemma that large companies or market leaders of every industry face. And so far no one’s found a way around it. Microsoft and Oracle and other companies have tried to buy innovation by buying up small companies who have proven products, but still that has a hard time overcoming the culture of fear of innovation. ( even Rockefeller did the same thing – buying up all the smartest people he could find).
Now a large budget producer might want a subscription model to make their money back faster, but that doesn’t mean a subscription based product had a large budget. The converse is not always true. So it’s right to say the large budget causes fear of innovation, but that’s not the same as saying subscriptions do.
Of course a company would not be advised to change (innovate) a game that is already out in production, even without subscriptions, that is taking a chance on losing your already existing customers. Though I guess it again depends on how much money they bring in.
Subscriptions vs pay per use is an old and ongoing argument. It has good points and bad for any industry. And of course there are more models that I can see being used: pay to remove advertisements for example.
Oodles of VC money + stupid game ideas = bad MMO economy
Some of the topics discussed here remind me of the “Finite, Fragmented and F*cked” editorial I put up, rather coincidentally, a few days back. I see some real synergies in the thoughts:
http://www.mmocrunch.com/2008/08/24/finite-fragmented-and-fcked/
The biggest problem facing MMO’s is the same problem facing the single player computer games. Most companies start from the ground up, creating a current generation game engine, then the art work and content. It is this repeated recreation of the underlying foundation of games that creates the large budget. If companies would just change to a modular system that allowed incremental upgrades, or, just reuse the same game engine from the previous game, they would have a huge jump in progress.
Sure, at one point, games were changing rapidly in the level of graphics used, that a new game engine was necessary. But, as computers and code have become more complex, it has become uneconomical. The amount of money spent to go from a DX9 game engine to a DX10 game engine has to eat up a huge amount of a games budget. Yet, this expenditure is barely recognizable to most not familiar with graphics. And, given that cutting edge graphics are not usable in MMO’s due to other requirements, it is extremely wasteful, and unnecessary. We are already seeing companies license game engines, as opposed to creating their own. There are even companies marketing tool sets specifically for MMO creation.
Jack Emmert and Cryptic Studios are starting their third MMO on the same game engine and in house development suite, which, according to Jack, will have this new MMO hitting retail in less than three years. That has got to create a huge savings in the amount of money spent on development. All without having to worry (unduly) about business model, marketing, or investor paranoia.
To borrow the car analogy, current cars are hand made, one of kind, units. Its time to learn from Henry Ford, and build a production line.
There’s room for blockbusters and for niche games. MMOs are not a lot different in the very big picture than any other entertainment product or service.
Most of the big fish are going to be little fish that grow on their own, not venture capital funded Frankenstein monsters that grow from nothing but raw parts.
So if you’re not a big time player already and you want to be a big time player someday, it’s probably a lot better to start out as a small time player and work your way up. The good news is that the market is far from tapped out at this point.
Too many nails hit on the head… and you’re right on the you’re right… MMO’s are games that exploit what a players needs!
Shame other fan boy bloggers don’t see some of this wisdom.
Just a small note/nitpick regarding something you said above:
“No reputable subscription-based MMO will sell you gold because, well, you’re already paying them money. ”
Eve-Online both takes your subscription money *and* sells you gold (ISK) through Time Codes. You can also buy a character with real money. I believe they are somewhat reputable as well.
Only somewhat.
Thats not what EVE does.
What EVE does is allow players to trade in game items to other players in exchange for prepaid game time.
Its a rather clever attempt to straddle the fence. Im not really comfortable with it but it isnt enough make me stop playing EVE. At least everything is derived from game play, and it only encourages farming to limited degree because the only meta reward going to the player is more game time.
I fear change.
Like someone above said, the subscription model is brutal not broken. On the other hand, notwithstanding all the flaws that you have pointed out in games based on subscription – it is a proven model for bringing in revenue $$$$. Unlike the amorphous handwaving you seem fond of pointing out as “better” solutions.
I just find it funny that the guy talking about addiction is named Blow
Well speaking of gold farming, the gold farmers have beat Richard Garriot into space! :
“Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG. The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7583805.stm
Gaming Philosophies associated with social dynamics of PvP in MMORPGs
Back in June of 2006, I was asked to join a discussion on the IGDA Forums by a game designing friend of mine. Noticing I had a firm grip on sociology, ethics, philosophy, and psychology I soon found myself in the deep end of the pool being asked about things that we are only now just discussing in the gaming industry. After handing out my opinions like they were candy, I was quickly looked upon as a fruit cake by the designers who frequent that forum, and noticed I was unsupported in my viewpoints. Much of my statements revolved around a particular thread about WoW and it’s greatness, admittedly I am anti-WoW, but I must say that in my defense all of my statements were general and targeted for MMO’s overall.
A excerpts of previous conversations concerning this topic debated on entierly different forums follows;
“Originally Posted by AshenTemper
How is this any different than when EQ was the king, though? Granted, WoW emulates a lot of EQ but other games have been coming to light that go another route.
Yes, a lot of corporate money is backing the same model because they see that Vivendi (through Blizzard) basically has their own money printing press now. But you’d be surprised by how many companies realize that its silly to butt heads with WoW with the exact same game with a different candy shell.
Players, on the other hand, generally think that the game they love is the best game ever. And yet, year after year, they find new games to play.”
“Drakiis
It isn’t different, Vivendi/Blizzard did the exact same thing as Sony/Verant did in the day. Yet cloning is what seems to be happening Sean, many companies do emulate the same design to make a bundle of cash, gain a foothold in the market so opportunity opens the door for them and they can diversify later or obtain connections in the industry and gain lucrative deals for future projects whether MMO related or not. The trends flow in predictable measures, if companies see gamers responding in such force for a specific game then all other companies follow suit and unfortunately the companies look at the majority and the majority are being mislead because of the general ignorance associated with the typical “New Gamer” who doesn’t yet have a clue to the true potential of the medium. In essence game companies are responsible for influencing the trends because their grip on the communities color the perspectives of the gamers.
Now obviously as people do, we change, we evolve, learn and grow. Some gamers from WoW will do this, as has happened in the past. Take me, I wasn’t always this way. Shamefully as a child of everquest, I bought into their “vision” at first, and as I played I began to see things I had never noticed before even though they had always been there. When I caught my baptism by fire and discover Lum the Mad, it wasn’t long to see the disease and rot from within as Sony with iron grip controlled how the game was played and designed, since then the tidal wave of MMO’s flooding the market has shone me all the similarities of design. While each game is a measured dance to come into retail at specific times, to counter other games, or blow away the ruling king of games.
The companies just seem to be changing up small design aspects, when it is the big picture in question. They wrap it in new graphics, but this is illusionary, the graphic technology will always evolve as our industry improves it, how does that translate into a great game? Especially if it’s something that would happen no matter what game you play. EQ went through 4-5 graphic improvements alone while I played it and tweaked play and design hundreds of times, yet the core of the game always stayed the same. Get my meaning?
Game limits need to be avoided while in concept, and a whole rethinking is necessary on how MMO’s are done. Throw out the old tolkien playbook, and the D&D 1st edition rule books. Levels are flawed, grinds are weak, greedcentricity is negative and has a bad impact on community and is what makes pvp unacceptable to most carebear gamers and game designers because they want to keep their “uber happy stick of unemployment”. Players that realize all of this are the gold in the sunshine, but unfortunately games are now targeting all generations of players and many of them are not looking for any of these things because they don’t know that any of these things are more beneficial to what they are being force fed.
I agree with those statements if your looking at it as a structured business venture and from the perspective of a designer. While I am very certain that many of those in game development have their roots as game players something gets lost in the translation between “It’s my job” and “It’s my hobby”. Design from my perspective is not perfect and I am not so blind as to see that my opinions are more often then not in the wrong. I realize my knowledge in such areas is tenuous at best, but more likely nonexistent. Though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the social, psychological, and creative impacts felt by players as a whole with in the games design.
I agree that much of what I spoke of was as I said overly dramatic and carried little substance, however the the truth is still never the less prevalent, that games follow a tend and that trend is in question. Why else would your guild as well as all the other guilds I’ve come to admire and respect be waiting? Would not the perfect game have already been created if all that you say is true?
Is not the definition of the word creativity stem from being innovative, and does that not also mean doing something that has not been done? So given that, wouldn’t a game company or development house seek to improve something, or invent and create something that has never been seen instead of reach out and live off the work that has been previously done?
By following a trend, you have not been creative, you have not invented or improved the current industry standard, there by all your really accomplishing is pirating past achievements and resting on your laurels for the pursuit of money.
I realize it takes money to make money, though I believe there are as I initially stated other aspects to gaming that current design does not address very well, it is the social and psychological dynamics at play in a community. Something everyone here seems to all agree on. You want pvp, you want good guy verse bad guy, player justice, community, recognition, and player fame, a story driven by you or your guild, a dynamic living breathing world not a static re-spawn world tightly monitored for bad behavior or slightly off center from pc comments, you want guild verse guild, and epic explorable areas, combined with less grind and itemcentricity, you want player kingdoms. None of which can be accomplished without some risk great or small.
Will every attempt to innovate yield positive results? Probably not. Will it cost money? Undoubtedly so. Without such though, the world and games in general would be a very boring place. Just think of all the things in games or otherwise we wouldn’t have if people just followed the ebb and flow of design, if people concerned themselves more with the cost then the results, or if companies looked at the untold millions of revenue instead of making something unique.
I have heard that no MMO makes money in their first 1-5 years or better and some never fully recover invested interest, I understand that they are costly endeavors with many employees, and that no game is created in a vacuum or that no game can function without huge logistical support structures outside of the game itself.
I am merely commenting on game ideologies concerning the things players want and that design in general either completely ignores this point or doesn’t understand it. I am looking at the community aspects as well showing the fact that as a social game, with humanistic mentalities you can’t compartmentalize it using flawed industry standards that have been handed down since the beginning of time.
That creativity requires sacrifice, and the players know this apparently more than the game companies. By default players are a community and communities are often times linked directly with the game in a symbiotic relationship which reflects how well it’s received and by what success it generates. WE are paying the bill regardless of how minor or insignificant it may be, and if we had a game that wasn’t cloned or refurbished with a dynamic tool set success could all but be guaranteed and a game company could make a strong case for taking risks.
There are many companies out there with capital to spare, and they voraciously hold onto this to cover projects that in the past they never even participated in. They get this huge chunk of money and diversify, why? If I started a company making MMOs for PC, why would I diversify making say Xbox 360 games if I previously had no experience in it? When I could use the money I made from my MMO experience to enhance our understanding of the concept and become the best at it, there by continuing to produce MMOs far more superior then others who branch their efforts.
Not meaning to sound callous or rude, but on the one hand you state companies have no venture capital and cannot take risks then you state that companies can make a lot of money in a MMO if done right, proceeding on to say if I had 10-20 Million would I risk it on a questionable project.
Well to this I say, if done right means following a industry standard, proven concept, or trend just so I can make money for future endorsements on a project unrelated to my current field of work, or so that I can enhance my business posture with stockholders, and strengthen my portfolio so I can be bought out. I think I’d opt to be a leader in the field instead, I realize that’s easy to say sitting from the cheap seats but how else can one make a game that can compete? You don’t get to be the best by following the pack, you can’t be Alpha Dog by being a Omega.
I’m not disagreeing with you completely, I’m just seeing a different picture on the other side. A community and a game are linked and most games fail because the community fails due to lack of social enhancing mechanics or restrictive play which limits interaction to grind scenarios based off of item-centric quest based play or care bear for those familiar with the term.
Lastly, before I get called on it, since game designers I’ve spoke with in the past always do, quest based game play is by my definition a game designed from the ground up which promotes questing at it’s heart. Quest based game play doesn’t mean a game can’t have quests it means the game design is based totally on it to the exclusion of general exploration and adventuring due to the lesser returns on such activities. It usually required people to meet many demands as far as character design and group composition.
A player may need to be a certain level, a certain class, have certain gear, be at a certain location, on a certain part of the quest, or to have the quest before he can enjoy the benefits of completion, and there can be many other such hoops players are expected to jump through depending on the quest system in general. This form of compartmentalization and isolationist game play means you only see or meet people before or after a quest in centralized staging areas. Pardon me, but that’s LAME, if I wanted to have such an experience I could go stand in line in Kmart.
Anyhow If you’ve gotten this far, and not completely destroyed your keyboard in a fit of rage at my comments, shaken your head in utter disgust or just plain given up on my idiocy I invite a response if your eyes are not bleeding. I hope you’ve taken no offense, and if you have I do apologize.”
DUMP THE TRENDS BECOME INNOVATIVE IF YOU WANT CASH.
Welcome to slashdot
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/28/1651241
This statement from EA supports your thesis about subscriptions beeing broken
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/29/ea-mythic-activision-world-of-warcraft-estimate-is-overblown/
I’m sure I read this article about 5 years ago. The names have changed, but the issues remain the same.
@Drakiis: “DUMP THE TRENDS BECOME INNOVATIVE IF YOU WANT CASH.”
Fine, if you can accept innovation as being evolutionary, not revolutionary. The MMO industry’s biggest success comes from a MMO that refined a lot of long-established MMO mechanics in one game (and also rode a perfect storm of factors that led to an unexpected success).
The WoW-killer will probably be a version of WoW that you can play on a browser – not a revolution, but an evolution.
“This statement from EA supports your thesis about subscriptions beeing broken
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/29/ea-mythic-activision-world-of-warcraft-estimate-is-overblown/”
Not at all.
All that says is: if you’re a newb to making MMOs and you want to succeed on the highest level, then you have to have a lot of money ($100 million) to play ball. That’s not even an established fact, it’s just one guy’s opinion.
There’s nothing “broken” about anything. It costs a lot to jump right into the deep end, because you don’t have the team and the business structure in place. It costs a lot of money to do that stuff on the fly. Strangely enough though, you can be really successful if you have the financial commitment. Funcom spent supposedly only $25 million on AoC, and even though the game is a failure on a lot of levels, it’s still going to make back the investment quickly, and then go on to a long lifetime of making money. If Funcom had spent $50 million instead, it might have been a WoW killer and made hundreds of millions in profit.
How much money do you think S-E has made from FFXI at this point? With 400k-500k subscribers, they’re raking in cash on a massive scale on a business that long ago paid for itself. How much is EQ2 making despite being marginalized by bigger fish like WoW? A lot of people are making a lot of money even if they’re not leading the industry. Show me the non subscription games that are actually making this kind of profit. They don’t exist (yet).
I agree. I just came upon the realization this week that THAT is the reason I can’t get into MMOs. Most medium, be they books, movies, television programs, have a natural flow, an arch that is followed. Games are no different. There is the learning phase, the applying phase, and the mastery phase. With MMOs, the point is not to make a good game (though that can definitely be a secondary concern), but it is “how long can we keep a player playing this game”. This type of thinking leads to thinning down the gameplay that is there. I used to think that it was the combat mechanics of MMOs that I didn’t like, but I realized that if you are going to have me farm rats in an FPS, I will likely get just as bored just as quickly. Games should be long enough to allow players to discover and use new mechanics. MMOs brutalize this by tricking the player into mindless tedium long after the novelty has worn off.
Of course the immediate question then: “Why are 11 million players still playing WoW?” Well, outside of Blizzard’s “fun with numbers”(tm), I would say MMOs hook into two things: 1) people’s desire to be better than other people. 2) People’s desire to collect things.
Those two aspects can keep people playing a game long after the mechanic has become boring to them. Afterall, RPGs are one of the few genres where no skill is required, just time. Given everything else in life takes some type of eureka moment or some type of honing of skills, it is very relaxing to know that if I put in X hours, I will be rewarded with Y. So, sure, this has a place, but it isn’t what I’m looking for in an MMO.
I just would like to say, that my experiences on the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) forums was more then adequate proof to me that when you talk about World of Warcraft with any negative emphasis you put your reputation in the hands of those who feel they (blizzard)are Omnipotent in the gaming industry, and there are many a developer or design company toadies that will quickly come to defend the all knowing, all seeing Gods of Online Game Design. My first experience there as a guest was to see a post labeled “Why WoW is great” and post within that thread. While I am just a average joe who likes to game, and hold no championship game designing pedigree I was only expressing the things MY community (as all of them that spring up around a game are) was looking for in a online game, especially a persistent one. However it quickly became apparent that my views were not appreciated nor accepted, and that I was labeled a “elitist” and a “lowest common denominator”.
I won’t bother describing anymore, sufficient to say the mentality was that how could I a simple peasant of gaming comprehend the whole of game design not having the knowledge they possess, and what could a mere subscriber know of anything concerning WoW when there are 9 million+ buying into such a trend? Gaming trends, especially combined with the business models you speak of are just the tip of the sword with what’s wrong with games these days. Unfortunately it’s so much easier just to hop on the band wagon, because then you don’t have to really think, and that is the point to my diatribe.
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