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You know why WoW is still the biggest western mmo?
bcbully
Member EpicPosts: 11,838
Bigger by more than double the next? Because western developers haven't given those gamers a reason to leave. If all you are gonna offer is questing, dungeons, and battle grounds, those players might as well stay with WoW. WoW has that stuff in spades, that's WoW's thing.
Stop spending more resources on marketing, and marketing talent than you do on design, and programming talent.
"We see fundamentals and we ape in"
Comments
There's a lot of truth to that statement, as that's how everything else on the planet works, but gamers are willing to apply that to every game except the one they are looking forward to. If a game comes out and charges 15 dollars a month, it needs to have equal to or more than what WOW has compiled over the past decade in order to pull the WOW gamers away from their game.
Charging less per month isn't an option because it will immediately be perceived as inferior and MMO gamers will avoid it, so their only option - if they are going to continue with the level-based gear-dependent class-restricted design - is to offer more than what WOW offers.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
This is pretty much a +2
Do something different, or if you're going to do what WOW does, make sure it's VASTLY superior. Even the games that are attempting to do things a little differently are starting to seem similar to each other, sort of but not exactly like Neverwinter and GW2
The genre is defined by X... you can put t-shirts on X... you can put X on the moon... heck you can even allow people to put their own thing in X... in the end it's still X.
Players are bored with X. That means they are bored with the genre. No amount of twinking... fiddling... rewriting... expanding... contracting... free... not free... hard... easy... solo... not solo... action combat... stupid combat... consoles... PCs... PVP... no PVP... they do it's still going to be X.
We want something new... and that will NEVER be more X. The genre is old and tired. We need a new genre. Not a sandbox. Not a themepark. Not a hybrid of the two. A totally new and unique genre that hasn't been seen or done before. The gaming company that comes up with that will triple WoW's revenues in a week without breaking a sweat.
But that is something very hard to do... come up with something new. So easy to recycle everything we already have done in the past. Unbelievably easy. Astronomically easy. So easy even a computer can do it without the aid of human intervention. The genre has been done to death... to death. To death death death death death.
We're the idiots who think spending $400 on a Dyson yields a superior vacuum... no, it's slick marketing to hide the fact that it's still a vacuum that you could have bought for $30 based on the actual cost to manufacture it.
F2P will continue to be the biggest thing in MMORPGs so long as they continue to make MMORPGs... we know we're getting X no matter how they try to disguise it. Eventually no one is going to bother with them at all because it's been sooooooo beeeeeen thereeeee donnnnnnneeee thatttttt for the past 4 years and counting.
Wait I thought Guild Wars 2 had all the money and talent needed to make a game that topples WoW.
Also they had the hype behind it higher than even SWTOR did from all its TV commercials. Yet still didnt do much at all.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
offer me massive raiding with a high level of difficulty and lots of teamwork required...... I will play your game.
WoW doesn't offer this anymore =(
your too pro. No game can offer you what you want, since your raid also likely have too much raid history, as well as known to look up fights on google for how to beat them. no point making something that cant exist.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
same here mate.
the steel shines red with enemy blood. It sings of victory, granted by the gods. And as they return bleeding but proud, the horizon burns and the song is ringing LOUD!
That's why I like Rift. Raiding in Rift is pretty hard. It's not as hard as it used to be, but still hard. I remember being one of the first guilds to raid, and we wiped like 10 times per boss lol
Nor do they beat Blizzard at their own game, the standard theme park MMO unless they come to the table with something truly revolutionary such as thought activated controls or something.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
You think wiping on a boss just 10 times to beat it is much?
But thats how WoW got as big as it did. I agree with you, but that was the key to WoWs success. It was and still is a fairly mediocre game but... the marketing and advertising campaigns kept it in peoples face and eventually brought in non MMO gamers. Hell PC's would ship with WoW, it was always on TV, it was advertised all over the place where anything remotely close to geeky was going on.
WoW is the biggest because it spent more on marketing, and marketing talent. No other game has ever had as much of a marketing budget as WoW. CoD comes close but even that is dwarfed by the marketing budget for WoW. Hell, you have no idea how much money they spent getting WoW into China alone.
The development budget was barely a blip on the radar compared to the marketing and advertising budget.
I do agree with you about spending that money on development, but as WoW, CoD, and others have shown... the big money comes from simply sinking 80% or more of your budget into marketing and advertising.
i never claimed i was a pro, so there is no need to be a jerk.
WoW changed their raiding to smaller, overall easier and less difficult to enter content...
also with new gen tech they can add variety to every potential boss encounter, making google far less reliable. Also reading about and doing are VERY different.
You've clearly never owned a Dyson.
I think one of the staff hit the nail on the head when he mentioned polish.
You can be at odds with the things that Blizzard puts out, the time they take (they once themselves said that the only thing they delivered on time was Blizzcon), the changes ("dumbing down") they made to World of Warcraft, but it has polish in spades. Oh, and content too, of course.
It's cheaply made, breaks easy, and is out performed by several lower priced vacuums which are oddly enough better made. I hope many here don't own a Dyson as it really is nothing but marketing that sales it. I don't agree that it's the same as a $30 vacuum, but it is outperformed by a large margin by vacuums like the shark for instance which has a better build quality and still manages to be cheaper.
Many of us have been saying this for years. The MMO genre is different from others where you abandon a game and by the next incarnation of it the following year. When you release a new MMO you are competing against MMOs with up to 14 years of content in them. That is a tough nut to crack.
I honestly think this is why companies thought subscription was dead when it isn't (no this isn't a post about how F2P shouldn't exist, both options should exist).
They'd release a brand new game with a fraction of the content, along with generally a lot of balance issues and bugs, with no free trial a $60 box price followed by the same sub as existing games. So a player could choose between a free trial and simply $15 a month with no box fee on older established games such as WoW, which had tons of content and years of polish/balance tweaks and get 4 months of play for their 60 bucks. Or they could buy the new game where'd they run out of content in 2-4 weeks and be bombarded with bugs and balance problems and on top of it all only get 1 month of play for their 60 bucks.
Major corporations fear innovation because it is "risky". So instead they follow the same path over and over and over to the point where everyone is bored with it and instead of seeing it as their fault they proclaim "the MMO genre, TV dramas, movie industry is dead". They switched to reality TV because viewers stopped watching TV and reality TV cost a small fraction to make compared with a big hour long drama. They did this because they said TV was dead. Yet Netflix releases House of Cards and millions of new people sign up because they're dying for something new. HBO releases Game of Thrones and gets more viewers each week than the vast majority of shows on television yet HBO is only in a fraction of homes and people pay them money each month often times just because they want that one show. Network execs say they don't understand why 14 million people watch each new episode of The Walking Dead. TV isn't dead, people are tired of getting 4 new cop/detective shows each year and nothing original. And MMO players are tired of seeing another clone that does everything the same as what exists. We just don't have those outlier companies pumping out truly different MMOs yet to churn up the industry.
I would say look to the indies and be willing to support a game that is going to be rough around the edges, but at least it will be innovative and interesting as opposed to having fancy new graphics and no real substance. If 2 million people are going to buy each new big budget MMO each time it is released just to quit in a month because it is "shockingly" more of the same then the companies will never change and try something new.
The question though is if a sticker with "Blizzard" on the game would have changed that.
But not at all is hardly true, the game might not have Wows population but it certainly have more active players than any other Western MMO besides that.
To me it seems that most MMOs players are either playing the same game as they did 5 years ago or jumping game every 3 months or so. That makes it close to impossible for new games to beat the old.I am pretty sure it have to do with the fact that reaching the endgame today is so fast and that most of the new games are too similar to the old ones.
Why get rid of all your maxed out characters to start from the beginning in a game that is close to the same but just with prettier graphics?
GW2 did some things differently but it wasn't enough. That together with the current reasons for PvP just isnt enough for many players are its problems. I believe that GW2 like the first game will increase it's population eventually when the second expansion or so hit but a truly huge western MMO needs to be more different from the rest than GW2 is. I dont see GW2 ever reaching more than 3 mil active players no matter what they do with it.
There are many interesting kick starter projects that are promising but then again they might all fail due to lack of funding and competent devs, like most indie MMOs.
That's like saying modern MMORPGs haven't succeeded because they've been about combat.
Unless you're implying you think a completely unguided game would do better, it's going to have some form of questing. Basically every content-driven game you can think of is going to have some sort of quests, missions, or objectives.
Unless you're implying a MMORPG shouldn't have cooperative content, it's going to have some form of dungeons.
And unless you're implying a MMORPG shouldn't offer PVP, it's going to have some form of battlegrounds. While this is the easiest to agree with personally (all MMORPG PVP sucks due to progression,) from a business standpoint it's not a good idea.
The real reason MMORPGs haven't done better is they haven't provided a game with superior combat (or whatever other core game mechanic they would choose to try.) The moment-to-moment gameplay experience is the game. In fact "30 seconds of fun" is one design lens Bungie used to make Halo so successful. Those 30 seconds are the game. If you don't iterate to find the right 30 seconds, you end up copying WOW's skin-deep features instead of the actual thing which makes it successful: having the best gameplay on the market.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Post of the Day. 100% correct.
Exactly.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Yes. Too much for fun. Not as much as old out-of-fashion games ... but there is a reason why devs don't want players to wipe 1000 times before they get the boss.
You can do it with non-MMOs though. Look at LoL. Take the arena concept and run with it. Put in a good F2P system. Now they have a game more popular than WOW.
Indeed. When I got to end-game in SWTOR I thought to myself 'why don't I just play WoW.' WoW does everything SWTOR does, and does it better.
I didn't go back to WoW by the way, I just quit.