Great Game Ideas Right Here on This Site

RealPvPisFPS

If anything that I perceived on games from 2012 is that the majority of gaming companies lack any sort of creative ideas for new games.

 

I myself have read several topics on this site alone from people who had some great ideas and concepts for everything like mmorpg's to action games. If I had the funding I would grab these individuals on this site with those great ideas and start my own gaming company, we would be the number 1 gaming company.

 

With that said why can't these companies hire anyone that is creative?

KenFisher

As I see it, there's two factors involved.

 

Publishers are looking for profits, not creativity.  An unproven design with strong creativity isn't likely to even be considered for production.  A good sized game is 20+ gigs of artwork, content, and engine.  That's one large pile of cash, so they try to avoid risks.

 

Second is development cycle.  Concept to release is years.  I'd guess two at minimum and five for huge projects.  Second guessing market trends several years in advance is quite tricky.  Designing in 2012 for a 2017 release means that by the time 2017 gets here the design could be unpopular even if it would sell like crazy at the moment.

 

danwest58

You also have to take into account that the MMO population is so deluted because there are over 500 MMOs out there.  Until the MMO industry gets reset which will take 5 to 10 years after many MMOs shut down then and only then would new companies like yours work again.  The core problem of the MMO Industry is this, they want to make Blizzard type money and will create a game in hopes of being the next blizzard.  Which will not happen because what the MMO Population is like today and the fact that these companies are driven by greed.  The first few mmo companies like Orgin, Sierra On-Line, and yes even SOE and Blizzard, wanted to make great Online MMOs not 1 of them thought of making an MMO that was over a few hundred thousand players.  Once Blizzard started showing it could have Millions of players in a game everyone wanted to replicate this and started pulling in non MMO players.  Greed caused the deluting of the MMO population and ever increasing the number of MMOs out there all trying to obtain the Blizzard dream.  Once banks no longer loan out money for companies to do MMOs, more mmos fail and close, as well as more Players stop playing and buying MMOs we will then see a return to an industry that thrives. 

RealPvPisFPS

Two very good replies and very accurate indeed.

botrytis

I don't think you will see publishers return to what was. The reason being is the only way they can make money is to get more people into playing their games not less. If there was a return to MMO's styles of the past, they would lose customers (the new customers) at the expense of saving the older customers.

There may be one or two games that will come out that cater to the older style MMO's but that is it. The industry has moved on.

The developers are not lazy, as some posts in this thread claim, it is more that they have moved on the posters are stuck in the past. Attitudes, like the posters above me, illustrate that point. MMO's were not thriving in the past. Many were barely making it but many companines saw MMO's as a fringe market not a mainstream market. With the advent os WoW, LOTRO, etc have shown that there is quite a bit of money and market to be made. That is what the companies are looking at.

TSW, Rift, TERA, GW2, and even SWTOR all have tried to do some different things to bring in more people. There was an initial success with many but it is the follow through that keeps players and allows the company to grow. We shall see what happens in the future.

Companies haven't forgot the past, I think they are trying to forget it.

Eleazaros

Getting funding for a multi-year project means you need some metrics to show you can get a return on the investment.

As such, I don't think there is a lack of creativity but risk-aversion is pretty large when you're talking about 10's of millions at risk.  Also, as a project progresses, it will need to be "iterative" but with a business plan that shows it should succeed based upon other previous successes - meaning some type of "clone" to show it can get the money back - WITH profits.

To put this in perspective - let's look at EverQuest - EverCrack as it was jokingly called in it's day.

989 studios started the project while at Sony. 

As it progressed, it became very expensive compared to the standalone games yet they wanted to continue it.  SOE balked a bit at this so 989 split off under a new production name - "Verant".  Verant then drummed up the funding to keep the design going and finally released EQ.

After release, it was a hit - showing it could and would remain a viable money maker.  Yet 989/Verant was going broke trying to maintain and grow the game - too little resources to keep it the way it was at the start. 

SOE stepped back in and "brought it home" - then lowered the tech support/customer service levels and helped focus them on pulling more profits out of the game.  Good for SOE, not so good for many of the gamers in it.  CS took a big hit but the game did survive and advance.

It became a success model for other, later MMO's to follow and WoW, when it came out, blew the lid off what anyone thought was possible for a video game. 

EQ2 was heavily overshadowed but not a flop in its own right as well -- they took 2 different paths to how they presented play.  EQ2 went for more realistic graphics with light playing along sword-blades, continuation of the "zoning" style game, etc... While WoW took a more "cartoonish" style look which "maximized" what the graphics could present without all the reralism attempts (which would and did come up short) in a game like EQ2. 

This gave WoW a huge world -- I still remember the open beta, climbing on a bird to fly for 15 solid minutes across the world, over battles, etc...  That was radically different than "zoning... please wait..."  every 2 minutes while running across the world at less than half the speed that bird flew in EQ.

Different apporaches but all based upon an intial base model yet quite different in visuals and what those visuals could provide - at that point in time.

As development of MMORPG's progressed along certain lines of acceptance by the gamers, it actually defined the genre to what we know and many are getting bored with these days.  "Chase the carrot" with "gear FTW" and all that.

NOw a days, small changes here or there have been seen but "aren't enough" to keep interest in them for long. 

Look at the hype to each MMO over the last couple years - highly anticipated are very close to cookie-cutter with a few vairations tacked on.  Aion - with flying characters and such.  Rift with dissolution of multiple classes by blurring them and a more dynamic grouping via "rifts" that you simply walk up to.  Now GW2 - as an "ultimate" MMO which it, like Rift, has some slight variations off the "level/gear up" model but trying to make interactions easier and more enjoyable - yet, again, it too is hitting issues.

All this while income from these games is less predictable yet costs aren't really going down but actually going up to make and maintain them - all the while the gamers are losing interest faster.  This means they need to recoup costs and earn profits in a shorter time window before 'burnout' sets in and the game fades back.

Hell, at one point the "high earnings" was seen to be across the first 2 years from a games introduction - that has now been reduced to under 1 year.  As such, pricing models need to increase while the gamers are less willing to spend so we see more P2W models coming out.  "Art" such as "pretty stuff" only sells so much but "pay to win" - you can sell a hell of a lot more to those who find buying chars & buying gold "worth it".  So the closer a game can get to an obvious P2W, the more they can get back before it's fading.

Again - something needs to change but trying to get the funding to build a more original style of play will be difficult and won't be allowed to vary too far from the central mark unless a very well funded group can put it together  while accepting the risks.

That takes gunts from investors and that kind of risky guts is very uncommon - especially in "down times" for economies.  People invest to make money, not lose it so profits are essential to keeping a project going.

Sidraket

Originally posted by botrytisTSW, Rift, TERA, GW2, and even SWTOR all have tried to do some different things to bring in more people. There was an initial success with many but it is the follow through that keeps players and allows the company to grow. We shall see what happens in the future.

Companies haven't forgot the past, I think they are trying to forget it.

Superficial things. You can change fluff and gimmicks around all you want but if the core mechanics are the same its the same game. This is the thing people complain about, and this is the thing nobody is changing.

 

Every one of those games is 'solo-questgrind to the level cap', 'do endgame content involving raiding and instanced pvp'

 

Just because the subscription model is different, they try rifts/dynamic events, or allow you to have multiple roles on the same character instead of needing to make two characters, or even remove one of those roles by essentially just making them unneeded (which isnt new anyway, as wow removed the CC role, we are still stuck using eq style roles even if you remove some), doesnt change they all have the same mechanics.

Compared to games of the past which were dramatically different from eachother and focused more around creating a living world rather than creating a content grind the above games are all the exact same game with different skins.