It’s time for PREDICTIONS, that being the job of every pundit this time of year. But first, let’s see how I did last year so you can judge whether or not you should bother to read the rest of this post!
This is going to be a slow year for MMOs… …In the next few years following, we’ll see the results of everyone trying to go all aikido and step where WoW isn’t. But for this next year or so, you’re going to see the effect of an entire MMO industry three to four years ago going “Holy crap. They sold how many boxes? And our entire development team is in a WoW guild? Hmm.”
I’m going to call this one a HIT, since there wasn’t any good positive news out of the MMO industry this year except things that were kind of pre-loaded already from years past. (Bioware’s SW:TOR, Sony’s Freerealms) Plus, as we’re going to see, I really, really, really need to pad that hit percentage.
Specifically, PotBS will be a niche title a la Eve which does well long term but nothing spectacular out of the gate, Warhammer will grab over a million subscribers (counting both the US and European markets) which will make it the second biggest MMO, disappointing everyone who wanted it to be Teh Giant Slayer. Age of Conan will do somewhere in the 200K range, much less if there are launch issues (it remains to be seen if Funcom’s learned from Anarchy Online). No one will care about the much-vaunted nudity. It didn’t save Shadowbane, either.
Pirates of the Burning Sea – jury is still out. It wasn’t a smash hit, but after an initial server merge it seems to be keeping on keeping on, too, out of everyone’s radar and on SOE’s Station Pass life support system.
Age of Conan – well, I hedged and said that if there were launch issues, it would tank. There were some pretty significant ones, and all avoidable ones at that – fundamentally broken design flaws (equipment had apparently no use whatsoever, for example) compounded by rapid twice-a-week patching in response that finally broke Funcom’s version control safeguards (Necromancers had half their talent tree patched in one week accidentally, which made for some interesting ‘found gameplay’). And by all reports, it has tanked pretty seriously.
As has Warhammer, my biggest miss in this category – I predicted it to be over a million by this time. It’s hard to tell what their subscriber numbers are due to EA’s habit of only announcing “registered players“, but it’s safe to say if Warhammer had ever broken 1 million subscribers (or even registered users) it would be difficult to dodge the press releases. Failing that, the most visible metric would be “voluntary character transfers” in the wake of the hurricane called “Wrath of the Lich King” effectively closing half their servers. So we’re going to go ahead and call this a MISS. Damn it, we needed some hits this year from companies not named Blizzard. And we didn’t get any.
Speaking of Blizzard: Starcraft 2 will slip to 2009, sorry. However, fear not – the PC market will still be in a Blizzard hammerlock, as the next World of Warcraft expansion pack will ship just in time for the Christmas rush, dwarfing any other game’s launch that year. Note: I did not say “any other MMO game”. I meant “ANY OTHER GAME”.
Yeah. Never underestimate the ability of Blizzard to make the PC market their bitch. Last month here was NPD’s top 10 11 sales chart:
1. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
2. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Collector’s Ed.
3. Call Of Duty: World At War
4. Spore / EA Maxis
5. Fallout 3 / Bethesda
6. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
7. The Sims 2 Deluxe
8. Left 4 Dead
9. The Sims 2 Apartment Life Exp. Pack
10. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
11. World Of Warcraft
I made this top 11 just to show that World of Warcraft – the original, non-expanded World of Warcraft released years ago – is still just shy of the top 10 in TWO THOUSAND FRAKKIN EIGHT. And the top 2? Yeah, that’d be the same game. Warhammer? Age of Conan? Guild Wars? Hello Kitty Online? Nowhere to be found in the top 20. Welcome to the Blizzard Desert. Not only a HIT, but a body blow to the solar plexus. The only MMO title in the top 20 was Everquest 2’s just-released and generally well-recieved expansion at #14, just below Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy. Yes, below. And the linked-to PC World recap remarked on that with:
“They still make Everquest games?” What I said, too.
Hardy-freakin-har.
EA Austin — sorry, Bioware Austin will finally announce that yes, they’re working on Knights of the Old Republic Online. Everyone will yawn since that was leaked all over the place LAST year. Or maybe those leaks were MISDIRECTION! And they’re really working on Peggle Online. That Gordon Walton fellow is crafty.
OK, so they dropped the Knights part, but still, they had to announce sometime, so this is a HIT albeit somewhat of a gimme.
Free MMOs will continue to pull in more free users, more paid users, and more money than the vast majority of “old school” MMOs, as Raph Koster is vindicated in spades, over and over, when people start to actually notice that more people play Maple Story than World of Warcraft.
I’m going to call this a MISS for two reasons – first off, no one has really noticed yet that more people play Maple Story than World of Warcraft. Second, the reason for that is that World of Warcraft makes about a skillion more dollars than Maple Story, thanks to 80% or 85% of Maple Story players not actually paying any money. I still think free-to-play is a pretty significant market (and John Riccitiello apparently agrees with me) but… the jury’s still out on the big iron I think. Of course, it may well be that the only company that can still make subscription big-budget MMOs is Blizzard. Sucks for all of us not working there!
Second Life will no longer be all over the news as even Reuters figures out that a lot more people talk about Second Life than actually participate in it. They will continue to have server and client issues, and near the end of the year the first Second Life clones that were conceived back when Second Life was the new hotness hit the market. I don’t know what they are off the top of my head, and you won’t either, because as Linden already knows and these new kids will learn, enabling a game wholly based on user generated content in a 3D space is REALLY REALLY REALLY freakin’ hard.
Also a MISS. The media’s love affair with Second Life may have cooled, but some of the ardor remains. And more importantly, no Second Life clones have reached the market yet – the closest are efforts to bring an open source version of SL to the masses (driven largely by Linden Lab’s community mismanagement) but those are still alpha-quality at this point.
2008 will be to Facebook as 2007 was to Myspace – no one will care any more, some hot new thing will come along, and everyone currently working on Facebook-centric startups will feel awfully silly (but still make hojillions of dollars).
Bzzzt, MISS. Facebook still is where everyone knows your name (and irritatingly, your birthday. Thanks, Facebook, for reminding everyone I know that I’m old.)
The election matchup will be Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney, and Obama will win in a landslide. I’m willing to fudge on the Republican side given Iowa’s results but it’ll still be a Democrat landslide. Ron Paul will run from the right as a Libertarian candidate (I know, he said he wouldn’t, HE FIBBED DEAL WITH IT) and break 5%, which dwarfs the LP’s previous best of 2% but is still a statistical blip.
Mitt Romney? MITT ROMNEY? I don’t care if Obama DID win in a landslide, MITT ROMNEY? Dear god, 2007 Lum, what the hell were you smoking. Oh, and Ron Paul didn’t run as an independent and the Libertarians’ Bobbarr managed to get 0.40% of the vote. MISS.
So, now that we’ve established that I am wildly, wackily unqualified to make any predictions ever again, let’s do it ag’n!
* The video game industry is not going to be immune from the Great Recession. The MMO industry is especially not going to be immune, as the only proven path to success for MMOs is in huge budget gambles that have missed more often than not. There will be a couple of high profile announcements next year, but they are all games that managed to secure funding before the global economy fell over in a drunken stupor. There will be major, major consolidations between companies (“EA buys Ubisoft! No, wait, Ubisoft buys EA!”) which will result in consequent massive layoffs – layoffs which have dwarfed any to date. A not insignificant number of people, burned by the consequently flooded job market, will leave the game industry entirely for safer climes, and the usual incestuous job hopping will come to a screeching halt as everyone lucky enough to have a paying gig holds on tight to ride out the storm. Austin, Vancouver, and Boston will depopulate (not entirely – but significantly, as has already happened in Austin) as game development hubs as consolidation moves everyone towards California. The impact of this hammer blow will be felt over the next 3-4 years as new development slows to a crawl and the large publishers focus their efforts on safe, secure investments. Hope you like fantasy RPGs and Madden games.
* Those unemployed game developers have to do something – expect something of a boom in iPhone and web titles, both platforms friendly to small teams (in the iPhone’s case, sometimes talented one-man teams). Some really surprising and technologically sophisticated titles will be released there, and that will be where all the technical and design innovation is centered around. There’s movement by hobbyist/unemployed developers in semi-open platforms such as SL’s Opengrid and Metaplace as well.
* World of Warcraft will not deliver an expansion next year, focusing on live patching (effectively, the raid-level instances left out of WotLK’s release) as the company focuses on delivering its first Starcraft title and moving Diablo 3 into beta. Blizzcon will see an announcement of a new MMO that isn’t World of Starcraft, World of Diablo or World of World of Warcraft and everyone will glom to it as The Savior Of The PC Gaming Industry (which by this time will be pretty painfully obviously in desperate need of saving). Wrath of the Lich King will still be in the top 10 PC titles at the end of the year.
* Aion will do well in Korea. It won’t do well enough (like Tabula Rasa, Aion has been a high-profile and high-budget project in development for far too long). NCsoft will undergo serious retrenchment (related to the general global downturn) in Korea, although not in the West, because, well, they kind of already did that and there’s not much left to cut (though currently unannounced projects may disappear from lack of funding). Given the cutbacks from Webzen and Nexon earlier this year, this will mark the high water market of Korea’s investment in the US market, to be replaced as 2010 begins with Chinese investment, as the Chinese MMO market will continue to boom, unlike the West or Korea.
And… that’s it. 2009 is going to be a grim year. Sorry. On the up side, I think Battlestar Galactica’s final episodes will be pretty cool!
#1 by D-0ne on December 22nd, 2008
I have one prediction.
#2 by Dorath on December 22nd, 2008
Here’s a prediction: All of the ‘big ticket’ MMOs coming out in 2009 (and probably 2010) will require cutting-edge hardware to get decent frame rates, meaning that the people who play WoW on commodity hardware from 2006 won’t be able to switch even if they want to.
#3 by Joshua Meadows on December 22nd, 2008
Quit saying that Open Life Grid is the opensource SL!
You’re referring to Opensim, and OLG is simply one of many grids utilizing the free software that the Opensim development team has provided. OLG is only in the opportunistic forefront because the largest Opensim-based grid (OSGrid) is a free one used mostly by the developers for testing, and the only other commercial grids are largely like the esteemed (and now defunct) Central Grid. This is a good breakdown of why that particular venture failed: http://tinyurl.com/9e2zba
Opensim is the software upon which a bunch of people who saw the insane rates that LL managed to get away with thought they could emulate, hence the numerous amounts of similar grids that have suddenly sprung up. Sadly though this isn’t the greatest of things to me because Opensim is clearly stated to be just alpha software and the commercial grids are pushing it like it’s completely viable and a rival to SL when it’s not, and nobody who actually develops it claims or pretends it is.
Hopefully this rush will calm down and these missed expectations can cool off. Opensim has awesome potential to be something a lot better than SL, but most of the people you see creating grids are doing so without giving anything back to Opensim and without the Opensim team’s involvement or endorsement.
#4 by Scott Jennings on December 22nd, 2008
Thanks for the correction, changed the link to Opensim.
#5 by Bonedead on December 22nd, 2008
Good stuff, quality humor. I like your Xfire dealy do over there on teh side.
Happy sex!
#6 by Hatch on December 22nd, 2008
I’ll bet we see an engine update to WOW in the next few years. The hardware requirements are a joke. I can run five accounts on my hardware easily, and I can build my machine for under $850. At those rates doubling or even tripling the requirements would be fine.
I just wish they would put as much effort into PVP as they do into PVE.
#7 by Aet on December 22nd, 2008
Part of WoW’s initial appeal to non-gamers is it’s extremely low system requirements. I think you might see upgrades in terms of character animations or collision detection.
#8 by Moorgard on December 22nd, 2008
The reason Facebook is still popular is because I haven’t made an account there yet. Sorry about that.
It took me a couple years to get around to making a MySpace page, at which point that service became yesterday’s news. So if you want Facebook to go away, just let me know and I’ll get that page up and running.
#9 by Talance on December 22nd, 2008
I can definitely see upgrades for character animations, but I think adding collision detection would change the game fundamentally, probably too much. You can build a game to have collision detection (like, for instance, Warhammer), but I don’t think you can effectively add it in.
#10 by Joshua Meadows on December 22nd, 2008
@Scott Jennings
<3
#11 by Spitt on December 22nd, 2008
We have already seen a decline in World of Warcraft – Yes, I admit it, I am a powerleveling and gold selling entity. When Bush made it official, that the USA was in a recession, we saw a 20% decrease of everything across the board. When Americans did not know that they were in a recession, there was normal spending. Bush fooked-up by making the announcement.
My own prediction for WoW… We will see the beginning of a long overdue dis-honor system. This will be in a response to the growing and constant raiding of places like the XR. Massive complaints from all players about not being able to finish quests for hours on all realms, will bring about the dis-honor system.
MMOGlider will go out of business, by the second quarter of 2009. They will leave a vast hole in the botting community (which will cause my services to be needed more since we hand level). The price of gold in WoW will go up as will account prices. The other bots will become more popular… but lead to Blizzard finding and banning those users too.
Blizzard will pressure ISP’s and hosts to take down most emulators of their popular game WoW. For those which do not, Blizzard will take them to court forcing players to play the real WoW.
Diablo3 will have great out of the box sales. A ton of WoW players will try it and like it, leaving WoW behind. Since there will be little or no monthly fee, Blizzard’s income will dip slightly, but remain a powerhouse.
Late 2009, Blizzard will make the announcement of the next expansion. It will be dubbed “The Darkmoon Faire”. It will generate much excitement and speculation worldwide.
… End of predictions.
Regarding the grafix of WoW, I would expect them to offer higher grafix for people who can run them, but keep a very low running engine. I would not expect a grafix engine update at in the near future because probably 75% of the people out there use legacy systems.
I would not expect a WoW2 to be released, as that has shown to be a relative failure for every game which has ever tried that including AC and EQ.
#12 by Freakazoid on December 22nd, 2008
I predict that some blog/forum posters will still go overboard when trying to correct someone’s mistaken information. Keeping it simple just doesn’t pacify their unregulated nerd rage.
More on topic, I think your prediction on iphone/web game development is wishful thinking. Cellphone games are a niche at best, not even on the radar for the average consumer at worst. Web titles like bejeweled will probably stick around, but nothing outside what appeals to housewives will make a dent.
#13 by RedWick on December 22nd, 2008
What? No predictions about the collapse of the global economy? C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it! Heheh…
#14 by Vandermint on December 22nd, 2008
First, kudos on actually revisiting your predictions from a year ago. Not enough people actually do that.
I think the idea that the PC gaming industry will be “obviously in desparate need of saving” is extremely pessimistic. By most accounts we’ve just finished one of the best “Christmas” seasons in years: Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, WotLK, Spore, Crysis Warhead, Red Alert 3, The Witcher EE, etc. Warhammer has received pretty solid reviews and the LOTRO expansion seems to likewise be a critical success. While some of these titles have also appeared on the consoles, they are all PC-centric. That said, there’s some promising ports too: GTA IV, Saint’s Row 2, Braid, etc. Episodic adventure games have arrived as a workable format. Iracing.com might be the best thing to ever happen to sim racers.
And in 2009, at the very least, Starcraft 2 and Sims 3 loom as blockbusters. Personally, I’m just as excited for the latest Total War game and Dragon Age: Origins.
I don’t make my bread in this industry nor do I have the MMO focus that you do, but IMO, this feels more like a golden age of PC gaming than an industry in dire straits.
#15 by Vetarnias on December 22nd, 2008
Here are few random thoughts that come from reading this entry:
As mentioned in above comments: The industry will keep on believing the mantra that good graphics trump everything, and even excuse bad gameplay. “Age of Conan” believed that, and while “Warhammer” avidly sought to make it known that it was far more realistic as far as system requirements went, it wasn’t that much different. Top of the line computer less than a year old, or bust. Then they wonder why the games themselves go bust.
“Pirates of the Burning Sea”, well, at least that’s different. Very reasonable system requirements in comparison, with graphics good enough to not detract from the immersion experience. HOWEVER — PotBS, since it’s been brought up, is a quasi-failure for completely different reasons. As far as conflicts within a gaming community go, the first three months post-release were as close as you could get to a civil war. Recall “no crying in the red circle”? That roughly lasted from January to May, and when it was finally dumped, and that the inevitable “Where do we go from here?” was raised, nobody at Flying Lab seemed to be able to come up with an answer.
The greatness potential of the game is still there, but as I lost any confidence that the developers can exploit it instead of putting so much time and energy into things nobody really wanted (luxury clothing, town redesigns), or bringing in “solutions” that are even more objectionable than the initial problems (to counter 6v1 ganks, they once came up with the brilliant idea of allowing eight ships to enter as reinforcements for the underdog, essentially turning it into a 6v9 supergank), I am reluctantly forced to think that it is too late to save it unless FLS can come up with some miraculous solution. Others have said the game simply did not have enough features to survive under a subscription model.
This is completely different from “Age of Conan” in this respect: We can attribute the failure of PotBS to the inexperience of the developers (who relied on a player demographic that typically leaves dead games behind them, a fact which we now know that some at FLS understood but chose to disregard — the “Next Big Failure to come along”, etc.). AoC I am tempted to say tanked because of the arrogance of its makers. Funcom had had the previous disastrous launch of “Anarchy Online” to learn from, but apparently the only lesson they seemed to retain from this is that “no matter how rocky a start, it’ll come right in the end”.
Only by comparing AoC to AO could someone say that Conan launched without a hitch. Yet AoC at launch was not the bugfest which some people claimed it was (outside of class tweaks and other things suggesting that the developers hadn’t play-tested their game). What cemented this impression was, I would say, Funcom’s callous treatment of its player base, for instance denying there was a slower hit rate for female characters and making it verboten to talk about it on the forums, even after this was proved, and otherwise acting as though it wasn’t interested in the complaints of the community. Even complaining about forum moderation was verboten, even when it clearly turned abusive.
If WoW really wanted to poke fun at this, they should think of naming a small town “Gaute’s Hubris” in their inevitable next expansion. To rub it in, the innkeeper ought to only offer steak.
“Warhammer” underperforming did not surprise me. That game apparently decided early on that it didn’t need a community. No official forums at launch forced any “community” to commute over to the “Warhammer Alliance” forums which weren’t exactly known for their magnanimity when dealing with criticism of the game. Still, what might have been seen at Mythic to be a brilliant idea (“why bother with maintaining our own forums only to be accused of censorship every time we lock a thread or delete posts when a third-party gaming site can do it for us?”) just ensured there was no focal point for the community, which didn’t jibe with Mark Jacobs’ decision to be as forthright as possible. And the game itself did nothing to encourage interaction, from automated Looking for Group mechanics to the instancing of everything. AoC had a very richly designed world, perhaps even more immersive than WoW, though it definitely felt single-person RPG rather than a bona fide MMO; WAR didn’t even feel like a cohesive world at all, rather as one large excuse for doing instanced PvP fights. Both have laughably meaningless economies, too, but that’s beside the point.
As for WoW — Well, I have mixed feelings about WoW. What it does, it does very well. But that’s the problem. Every MMO developer/studio sees Blizzard’s bottom line and thinks, let’s make the next WoW to get some of their market share. It just doesn’t work. Players who play WoW will stay with WoW unless Blizzard really screws things up, but Blizzard, for all its faults, knows what it’s doing.
I get the impression that players who hate WoW don’t hate the game itself (except maybe for that “anti-carebear” demographic which I find laughable anyway), they hate the fact that its success has single-handedly destroyed the field by leading to WoW ripoffs that quickly fail by being ignored by WoW players and dismissed by WoW haters. Oh, there are many things I hate about WoW, especially its weird blend of ego-stroking and scorn for low-level players (“your gear is the bestest in the world… until next level, by then it’ll be teh suxxorz”), and its stubborn refusal to give any depth to its game world (even if that meant instanced housing, etc).
I can tolerate WoW for what it is. But I won’t stand “what it is” becoming an industry standard (hell, even PotBS retreated into that, from what I heard, with “elite” outfittings and I-win buttons) or even a litmus test for success. PotBS was often described as a loser against the WoW “juggernaut” — it’s like saying an indie film “lost” at the box office against a franchise blockbuster. Apart from the fact that they are MMO’s they have nothing in common. But this just reinforces the unpleasant “WoW or bust” approach.
#16 by VPellen on December 23rd, 2008
Lum, you forgot about Darkfall.
#17 by Jack-o-Lantern on December 23rd, 2008
My 2 cents….
International econimic factor will halt many yet to be developed projects. And many already in their development can suffer.
But those already estabilished titles can gain in subscriptions.
It’s just math on how much it cost an hour of fun and distraction. Going to cinema to watch a film cost (in italy) 7.50 euros. It’s less than 2 hours of entrateinment.
A subscription to WoW costs less than 2 films. But delivers a lot more entrateinment. At least calculating the time you usually play it in a month.
And this is true for any MMO.
#18 by Talance on December 23rd, 2008
This made total sense and I’d agree…. back in 2005. BC brought fewer raids and they’ve all but gone away with LK, at least on non-PvP servers. Do people really still raid XR at 80 on PvP servers? What’s the point, you think?
At any rate, the Barrens are so dead these days due to quicker levelling and DKs that I seriously doubt they’re going to implement anything like this. It would make raiding faction bosses impossible (the higher levels would be running from L15s more than L75s), and considering there are achievements to do so, it seems that Blizzard wants those kinds of raids to happen.
Blizzard will begin to really have an effect on the botting and gold-farming communities? One could only hope.
This is already happening, not really a prediction. They opened a full-scale assault on private servers a couple of weeks ago. Dozens of them are offline already purely due to the legal notice sent by Blizzard.
This is actually a little interesting. How much of an impact will Diablo 3 have on WoW subscriptions? It’ll be interesting to see.
I assume you’re joking here – the next expansion might have a lot of names, but I don’t think “Darkmoon Faire” is really in the running.
#19 by Tide on December 23rd, 2008
1) EA will begin merger talks with Vivendi or Fox.
2) EA begins investment talks with Carl Icahn with big-C jumping on the board before 2010.
I bet you 1 bagel + diet_coke.
#20 by damn you, capitalism! on December 23rd, 2008
Re: WoW & running on ancient hardware / Why aren’t more playing Warhammer:
I would have loved to try Warhammer, but my 2005 laptop doesn’t have a prayer at even starting the game. WoW, however, runs tolerably at close-to-minimal settings (I only have the spell graphics turned slightly up so I can see the green clouds of shit I’m not supposed to stand in in Naxx). In my very unscientific and informal survey of 20 people in my guild, 13 of them run wow at minimal or close to minimal settings because their computer is old & slow, too. Or, it’s new and slow because it’s cheap with on-board video and loaded down with spy/mal/ad-ware.
The point is that WoW has become a casual gamer’s game, which i’d bet is a larger market. If you gear your game to require cutting edge technology of the last 6 months, you’re excluding the fine folks like me and my guildies who find our children to be a higher priority than buying a new computer evey year or two. I work with a group of 6 developers, and ~none~ of them have a computer less than 2 years old.
All this boils down to my lament of “Damnit, I want to play your game, but it won’t run on my system, which leaves me no option other than WoW”.
#21 by Michael C. Neel on December 23rd, 2008
Activision is the only company left standing that could buy anyone, and I don’t think they need to or will. I expect non-game companies to pick through the bodies. Also, for $100 bucks now you can sell your game on xbox live – I think digital distribution gains ground in 2009 (sorry GameStop, we hardly liked ye).
#22 by Iconic on December 23rd, 2008
Vetarnias wrote:
“Warhammer” underperforming did not surprise me. That game apparently decided early on that it didn’t need a community. ”
As much as I think Mythic dropped the ball by not hosting their own forums (for very short sighted reasons, IMO), I don’t think this is the reason the game failed to live up to expectations.
Frankly, they just weren’t able to deliver the game experience that many people expected, and they weren’t able to get to market far enough ahead of Wrath in order to really capture and hold a portion of the WOW market share.
Basically, they have a niche that’s in demand (even moreso now that WoW PvP has been reduced to a total disaster) but they just didn’t execute the entire thing well enough to hook people who have experienced the competition.
#23 by Vivianne Draper on December 23rd, 2008
You have way too much free time on your hands dood.
#24 by Random Poster on December 23rd, 2008
“(even moreso now that WoW PvP has been reduced to a total disaster)”
I disagree with that sentiment. Arena PvP right now may be semi broken, but I find that the BG’s and Wintergrasp are still quite fun. Right now in Arenas if you are a healer you are dead in seconds. Whether that changes or not as resilience gets back in to play with people gearing up is yet to be seen.
#25 by Noel on December 23rd, 2008
Offhand, my predictions (outside products from the company I work for, which wouldn’t really be predictions) would be:
General industry news:
* The industry continues to have a banner sales year. However, due to the ever-increasing cost to deliver AAA titles, it’s not as profitable.
* Cheyenne Mtn. officially folds.
* The iPhone continues to rise in use as a gaming platform, on the wings of its ever-expanding user base and ease of publishing.
* Bioware’s MMO runs late (I know, I know – I’m using this as my freebie).
* Pay-to-Play model is discovered not to be the industry savior it was thought to be, however, does add a side-benefit to companies hoping to monetize on already existing games.
Blizzard news:
* Starcraft to ship in Summer 09.
* New MMO announced at their WWI.
* Slightly smaller scale – Jeff Kaplan moves (or already has moved) to the new MMO.
#26 by Zuzax on December 23rd, 2008
A few more random picks:
Digital distribution will force Gamestop to expand into the more traditional pawn shop mode, branching out into selling “used” firearms, jewelry, and other easily stolen items.
Champions Online development folds as Jack Emmert finally learns that one superhero game is more than enough.
Cryptic follows Turbine’s model with LotRO and waits until the movie IP completely cools off before releasing Star Trek Online.
Turbine continues layoffs and returns to an early-Asheron’s Call-inspired support model by having their receptionist act as the entire Live team for DDO.
Based off of the success of Fallout 3, Interplay issues a press release about a Fallout MMO and then returns to its unmarked grave.
Starcraft II will not be released 2009. Diablo 3 will not be released in 2010. Blizzard begins to issue company uniforms made out of $20 bills.
iPhone games will stall as the market continues to display an irrational objection to paying $4.99 for quality games, but will buy every $0.99 fart sound generator, cow bell, and virtual beer glass ever made.
#27 by Darren on December 23rd, 2008
lol. Nice post.
Love how you can always count on Blizzard to layeth’ the smack down on everyone else whenever it decides to do something.
I for one still play Warcraft III (map mode called Dota). But it’s still a surprise to me that vanilla WoW is #11 in top selling PC games of the month.
#28 by Vetarnias on December 23rd, 2008
Whatever happened to the time when cell phones were, you know, used for actually making phone calls? I want nothing more from one.
On WoW PvP: It shows that PvP has never been a central point to the design of WoW; if anything, it always looked as though it had been stapled to the game as an afterthought. It’s pointless, meaningless and strictly in there as yet another way for Blizzard to stroke the ego of its players.
Ironically, because WoW PvP has the distinctive attribute of irrelevance, it also has the merit of laying bare the sociopathic nature of ganking by stripping it of any utilitarian smokescreen used by some “hardcore” gamers. Sure, you have “Alliance” and “Horde”, but what else? You can’t cripple the other side’s economy (because you can bypass it through a combination of NPC drops, raid instances or quest rewards), and what would that change anyway? You can’t invade and hold territories that might be strategic to your side or whose loss would be devastating to the enemy. So what’s the point?
All you get as far as PvP is concerned is the usual gank between one geared high-level opponent and a low-level schmuck (with at best uncommon-quality gear) who has no chance of winning even with the best understanding of how PvP fights work. I’m currently level 40ish in WoW, and I can’t even hit NPC’s half a dozen levels above me with the most up-to-date equipment and spells of my level; what can I hope to achieve against a level-80 with purple gear? If you’re sure to win anyway, just one-shot me without getting sneaky about it like a cat with its prey.
What if on top of that my opponent uses the same stupid PvP techniques that those who call themselves PvPers use in every damn game out there — kiting, that annoying running around in circles just for the hell of it, stealth, and waiting until some nearby NPC’s have left the opponent half dead as a safety measure? That’s the infuriating part — PvP in WoW and elsewhere has degenerated into a series of clichés, all aided and abetted by the developers themselves who have allowed these “skills” to be considered, well, skillful by making those who use them win all the time. Might as well call the guy who cooks the frozen patties at McDonald’s with clockwork precision a skillful chef, for he’s bound to start believing it sooner or later.
But no, Blizzard’s player-ego-stroking to pad its bottom line has ganked everything else — including meaningful, balanced PvP.
#29 by JuJutsu on December 25th, 2008
“meaningful, balanced PvP.”
Lol.
#30 by Vetarnias on December 25th, 2008
Ah well, despite all my cynicism, at heart I’m an idealist. I’m pretty sure that “meaningful, balanced PvP” could never exist, especially if it’s 1v1. That’s why I have given up on solo PvP, because all it boils down to is inevitably gear and “skills”, not to mention level, or outside factors such as latency and framerate. (I play WoW on an Oceanic server, so I hear the “Aussies are disadvantaged against North Americans because the servers are in the US” line all the time.)
Group PvP is more my thing, where not only teamwork is necessary to succeed, but where terrain and strategy also matter — precisely what drew me to Pirates of the Burning Sea, before fights outside of port battles degenerated into risk-less ganks (unfortunately, level clearly made a difference in that game as well). How many games have that? Not many — and even then the chances that it’s going to be balanced are minimal.
It doesn’t help that developers are more or less engaged in a tug-of-war contest with their “hardcore” players — who certainly don’t want “balanced”, and for whom “meaningful” isn’t a priority.
#31 by bbe on December 26th, 2008
Well just one little correction here, Hello Kitty Online hasn’t launched yet, it’s still in private beta so you won’t see it in any charts I’d imagine, the christmas beta just finished a few days ago!
Merry Christmas everyone!
#32 by Vetarnias on December 26th, 2008
I’m surprised about Hello Kitty Online not being released yet, considering it’s a game every “hardcore” gamer told “carebears” to play.
My secret hope for 2009: Darkfall releases (yeah, right), and Hello Kitty Online immediately trounces it in player numbers.
#33 by Jeff on December 26th, 2008
Prediction:
All this talk of Blizzard changing the way MMO’s are released is completely debunked. The supposed promise of polished release, oft repeated by a certain someone with the last name of Jacobs, returns to unashamed pay to play our beta. (See Warhammer, Online)
#34 by Hawken on December 27th, 2008
You still post about WoW?
Wtf Lum get off your wow addiction and post about some other games. Just because every newbie on the planet plays that STUPID ass game doesn’t mean its worth news. How about Warhammer and how bad your old company is fucking up with the game?
Fuckin WoW that game is so done, please stop worshipping that toontown clone.
#35 by Jeff on December 27th, 2008
I don’t mind hearing about WoW, it’s a fun game, and obviously a lot of people are interested in it.
Yet I do concur with you Hawken, even though Lum did not work on WAR he was a Mythic employee, I would love to hear more pontification on what went wrong with WAR, and how a game that was promised a polished release received something much less.
#36 by The Claw on December 28th, 2008
My predictions:
1. Darkfall will do absolutely nothing of interest to anyone. Either it won’t be released, or it will be released and just simply not work.
2. Richard Bartle will say something completely reasonable to someone and cause a month-long flamefest to erupt across the entire gaming blogosphere. Again.
#37 by Vetarnias on December 28th, 2008
@The Claw: About Darkfall, nice way to make a completely risk-less prediction. From the MMORPG.com forums: “Darkfall=Ganksquads!” And this from a supporter of Darkfall, a game nobody’s even seen… What a great argument to convince people to play it.
#38 by The Claw on December 29th, 2008
Actually, Vetarnias, both of my predictions were meant to be amusingly risk-free.
#39 by Vetarnias on December 29th, 2008
Well, Mr. Bartle could buy himself a desert island at a cheap price before December 31st, move there to write a 2,000-page novel using a battered Underwood, and be done with the so-called civilized world for a while.
#40 by nerd gone bad on December 30th, 2008
With regard to Blizzard’s next MMO, I’m 99.7% positive it will be based on Starcraft. Probably called Starcraft Universe. Seriously, how can it not be? They have a pattern going, and there aren’t many sci-fi mmo’s. Perfect opportunity for Blizzard to literally KO the whole market solid. I’m not sure Blizzard will actually announce the next MMO they are working on this year and I don’t really think they need to frankly. With Starcraft II and Diablo III looking like they are ready to ship and WoW going so strong.
Judging that many people (and parents) are not likely to be enamoured with having to pay multiple monthly game account fees, Blizzard’s next MMO will not require a separate monthly fee, but rather Blizzard will just move all their users to a “Blizzard Account” that’s used to access all their sub-based games. This coupled with the release of Starcraft Universe will see Blizzard’s subs soar to over 30 million with ease.
iPhone games and apps are going to explode, along with..iPhones. All the rest of the market will shrink away as iPhone grows. Except perhaps Blackberry as it’s still considered more “business.”
#41 by Sullee on December 30th, 2008
WAR has been a very sorry disappointment. Not the least of all because they continue to make the same mistakes they made in DAOC.
Snooty management that buries it’s head in the sand when criticized? Check.
Horribly designed crafting system (WAR’s is right up there with the green-bar-of-boredom)? Check.
Out of control realm population balance exacerbated by outright dev favoritism? Check.
Horrible class balance with the OP ignored or nerfed depending on which realm they are in? Check.
Adding new classes that entirely and utterly obsolete existing classes? Check.
PvE raids to get requisite PvP gear? Check.
What’s next? An expansion that features underwater play and rewards overpowered gear and abilities thereby forcing PvP players to slog through or be sub-par?
#42 by Iconic on January 1st, 2009
“With regard to Blizzard’s next MMO, I’m 99.7% positive it will be based on Starcraft. Probably called Starcraft Universe. Seriously, how can it not be?”
Because they’ve already stated that it is not based on any of their existing franchises.
#43 by Viz on January 4th, 2009
Well, Scott, you were pretty accurate on those predictions you have expert credentials for, which puts you quite a few rating points ahead of political pundits, journalists, sportswriters, and market analysts.
#44 by 0173 on February 15th, 2009
Sorry for the bump but so far, Scott has been spot-on for this year.