Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Why did MMOs become about the money and numbers?
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
Telling me what? What exactly do you think I'm claiming and what's your response to it?
No, you're assuming that there are as many sandbox games as there is demand for them. That's an assumption and shows you don't understand how markets work. There are a lot of sandboxes in development. That should show you that sandbox players are being underserved.
No, you didn't. I've explained why sandbox games require less content than themeparks. By definition sandbox games allow players to create their own content. You give them tools and then they go to work. Yes, you have to create the tools, but that's much cheaper than making endless expansions and level caps and new dungeons/raids/gear/etc.
You need to stop with this holier than thou attitude regarding economics. I know more about economics than you. I build predictive models for a living. Why don't you stop appealing to authority and answer some of my points? Smaller games require less startup costs so they don't NEED as many players to play their game. The argument about how much mmo's cost is completely fallacious.
Except people are merely arguing against the possibility of them selling out. Nobody is accepting that it's something that can happen and then having a discussion about whether or not it has. They're acting like a bunch of quasi-economists, claiming that MMO's just HAVE to appeal to this many players otherwise they wouldn't survive.
You don't think that ever happens to a degree? I know its something fans like to shout about if they get so much as a hint of something they don't like. And it was one of the things I had in mind when I said it is very hard to judge intent. But is does occur, or do you think for example that every gaming company that has been sold to a bigger company was struggling financially or something?
The issue is intent, we were not there, so it is very hard to know one way or another.
You think there's a rational argument to be had when a fan declares the object of their fandom has sold out?
You don't think that ever happens to a degree? I know its something fans like to shout about if they get so much as a hint of something they don't like. And it was one of the things I had in mind when I said it is very hard to judge intent. But is does occur, or do you think for example that every gaming company that has been sold to a bigger company was struggling financially or something?
The issue is intent, we were not there, so it is very hard to know one way or another.
Most of the time spent seems to be on whether or not this kind of thing is possible, instead of a discussion about whether it's happening or not.That is not his argument. His argument was that high profile games need wider audience to support themselves. Which is fairly understandable, right?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I assume by high profile you mean high budget. Yes, the bigger the budget, the more subscribers you need.
Overwhelming majority of such accusations are completely subjective, irrational and born of ignorance. I would never make such statement myself.
So what if one company served one niche first, then another, maybe broadened it a little to get more potential customers? I get it. I get why they would do that. They don't owe anything to anyone. Its just business. Always has been. Earlier I wrote:
...the bottom line is, most game developers are not in the business to make games for themselves. They make games to make money, which in turn pays the bills and feeds the family. Some designers are fortunate enough that their preferences coincide with the segment they are trying to serve, but I doubt this is the norm.
Going for the mainstream niche is safe. That is why those games get the most funding, but therein lies the hardest competition as well. If you can't compete in the mainstream niche, you have to do something different. Pretty basic stuff.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
So the problem is I don't understand how you can say that my claim about companies selling out is bogus and then say something like this. Your excuse is what? that "most game developers" do it? Look, if you're not pissed that they're selling out, good for you. But the process you're talking about is basically selling out but maybe put in a more favorable light.
There's a lot of talk about paying back investors and feeding the family. Do you think it's possible that a lot, if not most, of these larger companies that are driving the genre at the moment are making decisions out of self interest? And not just to pay back some nameless, faceless investor?
Also, do you guys deny that some companies do indeed have a vision that they stick to? This is the kind of company we're contrasting the sell out companies with.
As you say, going for the mainstream is safe. And do I have to explain the very basic concept of risk/reward? Do you think going for the safe bet is going to end up in a better product than if they innovated more or took more risks?
There is no "selling out" when it is all they've ever done! I don't need to remind you that they don't do this for charity, do I?
Of course they serve the customers! It is in their best long term interest to do so. If anything, some of those kickstarter projects are much more cutthroat than any serious game company.
And "vision" is a marketing tool - part of building a brand. You are naive if you think they are something more than that.
What is your problem then? Are you pissed that companies don't gamble their money? Entirely new concepts are rare enough and putting a large investment on one is extremely rare. Only Sims and Portal come to mind. The norm is that new ideas come from indie developers which are then refined by the larger ones.
Bioware/EA bet ~$175 million on SWToR. Do you think they had any mind to take risks with that money? WoW had 12 million subscribers at its peak. Don't you think it prudent to stick with what you know in order to keep them? Sure, playing it safe can backfire sooner or later, but unless you have a crystal ball to tell you the future, it is better than the alternative.
Its just too much money to throw around on a hunch. Risk and reward are so disproportionate here that it is not worth it.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I don't know where you're getting this "all they've ever done" stuff. You're the one that said you could see a company serving one niche, then another, then broadening their market. You then said they don't owe anything to anybody. I agree they don't owe me anything, but what you're describing is selling out. You start out serving a group of people, then you alienate that base by changing things in order to attract more people to make more money. It's not always about survival, it's often about "greed." I use the term greed lightly because I don't think there's anything wrong with somebody earning a living, but it is indeed selling out for the purpose of making more money.
And yes game companies and ESPECIALLY individual developers can have a vision of a game that they want to create. It doesn't have to be "what game should we make in order to make the most money."
You guys love accusing me of assuming things, but I'm sure nobody is going to call any of you out on this... considering several of you have made this fallacious argument before and nobody has spoken up except me. You have no reason to think that the current level of innovation/risk taking is the limit to what a company could handle. You're assuming that on a spectrum of risk-safe that they're somewhere in the middle. It seems pretty likely to me that many of them are still trying to recreate past successes, often to their own undoing. Do you just not want to believe that a company will sometimes go for the safe, free, watered down choice? As a pure money-making machine this is a good idea. As a game developer whose first priority should be to make a GOOD game, it's a bad idea. This seems so obvious that it should be intuitive, but for some reason you guys can't see it. I don't get it.
Here's a thought experiment. If WoW never existed, do you think we would have the same kind of regurgitated "SAFE" MMO's we have today? I doubt it. I think the market would be more niche and more innovative. The downside to this is there would be less capital thrown at developers. I'm not claiming that you can spend the same amount of money on a sandbox as you can on a themepark. Instead of one $10 million dollar MMO, I'd rather have two $5 million dollar ones or three $3 million dollar ones or whatever. But then there's also the idea that sandbox games would in theory just cost less in general because they require less "content."
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Just to clarify the point of that hypothetical question about WoW never existing was to help illustrate the idea that MMO's aren't at some equilibrium between risk/safety. I see no reason to assume that if the genre were any more innovative that would mean they're taking more risks than they can afford.
As to the one remark I saw about companies with money not making a more targeted game...
If you look at companies willing to make a niche game you are either going Indie or crowd funding like they are doing with Camelot Unchained.
Companies don't have money for most of these projects... they have investors money. Which in the end is the direct relationship between what gets made and what doesn't...
That is why earlier in this thread I was alluding to... EQ was more popular than UO. UO pulled up on number after Trammel but that was after EQ had taken a huge lead. If UO had done better than we would have a more diverse market up until 2004 at least.
The thing about my SWG comment was... everyone in the west thought EQ was king with around 450,000 concurrent subscriptions. So at the release of SWG it was the fastest selling MMO and came close to EQ Numbers... closer than any other western MMO. That is why there was a lot of positive PR at the time...
If that was how the market stayed we would have seen investors willing to fund more diverse projects because the market would have shown that there was money to be made in more than one core game. When WoW came out in November 2004... it was in many ways EQ Evolved and obviously that became the only factor about future investment in MMO's (for the most part at least).
That's why I said if WoW had only been as successful as SWG ... (or hadn't been made at all). Its not that WoW was bad exactly... but its numbers were so large that's all investors could think about. You look at 38 Studio's and think about the fact that Curt Schilling personally lost a reported $50 million of his own money... (along with other investors including Rhode Island having 10's of millions more). That's not really pocket change to toss around making a niche game... and WoW made other core types "niche" until someone makes a non EQ Clone (WoW was an EQ Clone imho) game that has big numbers.
The relevance is in the significant amount of money it takes. When a project costs ten million dollars, and interest is going to accrue over five year's time before the first payment is even made, the amount of money an MMORPG is going to return becomes important. The investors are within their rights to sue the developer, shut down the game and sell any and all assets to recoup their investment. However, they know they're not going to get their money back (look up 38 Studios and see how well that went for investors), so showing how much money a game can make before getting the money is important. The games are about money and numbers before they're even developed.
You guys are literally just explaining the economics behind people investing in a project, you're not presenting any evidence to suggest that the market is currently at a level where they can't afford to make a more targeted game with a smaller playerbase.
By the way, all of this stuff about investors wanting to make their money back etc doesn't really jive. Smaller games would cost less to make so they wouldn't need as large a playerbase to regain their startup costs. Also, it's a smaller market so there's less competition. Themeparks are just a larger bet with a potentially larger return. All of this nonsense about mmo's costing $10 million dollars so they have to appeal to more players is just that: nonsense.
MMORPGs are about money and numbers because they have to be. Even when Ultima Online was produced, it was about money and numbers because there's no other way to secure the funding necessary to produce the games. Again, that doesn't mean developers are building games for investors, it means they are convincing investors that the games they want to build will produce money, through numbers.
Do you know what selling out is? Serious question. Because they way you're arguing suggests that you simply don't believe that a developer would release a mediocre product in order to make more money. Do you know what selling out means? And if you do, do you think it's possible that he MMO genre over the past 15 years has been slowly selling out? If not, why?
I have decided that you are either a troll, or simply too dumb to understand it when people who work in the industry say something. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but really, what's the point? You're just going to work in the "shift from sandbox to theme park", and then get huffy whenever someone brings up anything else. Then you're going to ignore actual evidence. None of your arguments so far really make much sense, and they all depend on your opinion, setting yourself up as the authority on what's right and wrong. Then you're going to try and move the subject to something irrelevant.
Yeah, either a troll, or a dumb troll.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Uhh what? It was a serious question. Do you know what selling out is? Your arguments indicate that every company in the industry does whatever they do because their hands are tied. It seems like your overall point is that MMOs cost a lot of money so they have to branch out to other players. I continue to point out the fallacy with this and you guys continue to claim that I'm just being stubborn? or something?
A smaller, more niche game wouldn't need to generate as much revenue so your fallacy is coming from the implied assumption that the company has to spend a certain amount on an MMO. As I said many many times I can buy that a "typical" "modern" MMO costs up to $10 million dollars to make... it makes basically no difference and yet it seems to be all you talk about.
I'm more inclined to agree with him then your panel of "experts." Claiming that because development costs are high and therefore must reach a wider audience is missing his point. Development costs are only that high when you insist that a new game "must" have everything that a 5 year old game has and more; if you start out the design process with that mentality, you are always going to have problems. The market is more crowded now, to be certain, but the number of games that are truly competitive has never been smaller because no one wants to take the time to build to that level, but rather insist on leaping for the heights out of the gate, wondering why they fall flat on their face when they don't reach it.
You could still easily follow the same path EVE did with it's slow steady growth; there is a growing market for a game where the devs and designers themselves can actually interact with the players more often rather than being completely isolated from them, and where the players actually interact with each other. Raw quality of the systems in the game may not be as high, but they often come with much stronger social elements and a stronger community, giving them a major edge in that department, and those things don't take millions of dollars to do well, they just take effort and a little bit of time to get started.
The error in the logic Im seeing on this thread is that state of the art graphics, tons of dev created content, and cutting edge combat systems are an absolute requirement for any mmo of any kind. Sandboxes actually do much better when devs don't try to create all, if any, of the content, so that's one big cost mostly removed. Graphics are less critical because because the players are actually busy doing things rather than watching every grass blade to see if it's "pretty" enough; they still can't detract from the game, but they don't have to be a major selling point, so that's a large cost reduced, even if it isn't eliminated. That leaves the world design, core mechanics and game systems, which are more likely to be very solid if that is the primary focus of the devs, rather than being one of many concerns; it also can largely be done without actually touching code or hiring a lot of people, as most of this work is designing it on paper, with actual implementation being only a small part. Now, you're not going to chase WoW with this approach, but you're not going to effectively chase WoW with any approach; not even Blizzard is going to have much success in that endeavor. It will, however, give you a solid, reliable player base that is well within the numbers needed to support the initial investment and future development, just like what CCP had with EVE.
It's no surprise we're starting to slowly see a return to more reasonable expectations of what budgets and profits will work. You are absolutely right that 10 million dollar games require a massive return, and the market is showing that such returns are unreasonable expectations even when casting a wide net; f2p and b2p are bubbles that will burst, and the models will fade away for the next new thing. Subscription based games that provide a more reliable income and allow a game design that makes people want to pay than making them need to pay are going to make a return, even if they don't dominate simply because it's a model that works with reasonable numbers like what EVE has or EQ had.
I agree with your whole post but this is a point I've tried to make several times and the most I've gotten back is "that's a myth" with no explanation.
A little bit of elbow grease could potentially go much further per dollar spent than developing high end graphics. Having a well thought out system is both cheap and incredibly important.
It is not that developers insist on anything, it is the customers that do. When you release a product, your customers will expect standards and attributes of similar product.
Even on very these boards people whine with each new released game how the game is missing this and that feature or content that was already present in game released x years ago.
The opposite approach is to create some new concept, but that bears high risk since it's next to impossible to tell how new product will be recieved.
Still, the most common and best measurement of demand, what customers want a state of the market - sales and generated revenue of similar product.
Easy, yet only 1(2 if you count WoW) game in whole MMO history managed to do so? Can you elaborate on the "easy" part?
Exceptions do not make rules.
Yes, just like CCP is releasing 2 expansions per year, having +300 devs working on the game... I assume they really like to waste money on things they don't need, because sandbox does not require much content and one that does, actually does not even require coding knowledge, right?
Take note, that it is 300 people working on a game that can benefit of having no landscape due space settings.
You can ask Perpetuum devs how that worked for them - going with minimum content and grow over time. In fact, you can ask any dev who got same thinking. Or even better, you can provide successful examples how such approach - low content, poor graphics actually worked for anyone.
The problem is, you ignore fundament element here - the cutomer. You automatically expect that there are heaps of people sharing same view willing to shell out money on such game.
It is all within your rights to disagree but that does not change the fact that you are wrong. Your claims are based on your personal bias and beliefs, having no ground or backing.
You essentially say that everyone in the industry is doing it wrong, and you know better than anyone. If the things worked the way you portray, we would not be having this conversation and market would look actually different, the point is, it doesn't.
You already formed up your conclusions and then invent a theory to support it, regardless whether it actually works. Such thinking is falacious.
First off, please don't try to break things apart by individual sentences; it's really, really annoying, and you miss the forest for the trees when you do it. Second, your points are not entirely invalid, but they are not entirely valid either.
Yes, customers drive the market, but again, you seem to think that the average themepark MMO player is the entire market and that this forum is in any way representative of anything useful for game devs to look at. Forum dwellers rarely like the unfamiliar, as they can't effective argue about it, and they tend to be hyperly critical to boot, so of course they are going to nitpick every little detail they can. And while themepark players are, and probably always will be, the largest segment of players, there are other players out there, and in numbers worth chasing if you ignore the anomaly that is WoW.
Second, nowhere in my post did I preclude future development of content or graphics; I was talking about initial upfront costs, and those are areas that CCP did not, and still does not, have to focus on as a key aspect of the game, even after all of these years. The content is still driven largely by the players, and each player is responsible with making his own personal story, not CCP. And because most of the dev driven content has been able to added a little at a time, costs for it have been minimal compared to having to do it all upfront, and its been able to be shaped to what players actually want in the world as well, making it more effective than slapping random dungeon 130 in just to give players something to do.
Lastly, someone creating a sandbox cannot ignore content, or features, or graphics, and nowhere did I mean to imply that. However, a good sandbox focuses on the total experience, with the individual components being less critical to the overall success as long as the total product allows the player the freedom to create their own interesting stories; therefore, cutting edge graphics, gameplay, and design are less important than how well the different aspects of the game work with each other. Even among single player games and themeparkish MMOs, the better remembered games are rarely innovative with the individual features; its the completeness of the experience and the stories that level of completeness create that are memorable, not the fact that one component is really, really cool. The biggest problem I have with games that tout shiny graphics, or really cool combat, or some other really cutting edge content, is that it actually often hurts the game for several reasons. First, it tends to make the rest of the game seem commonplace and copied in comparison if the devs aren't careful, hurting the overall game experience. Also, once the initial flash of newness wears off, it just doesn't have the same bang for it's buck. This is only made worse by the fact that often times, the rest of the game literally is largely copied because they spent so much time and effort on that one aspect that they didn't have enough of either left to do large portions of the rest of the game, making large parts of it feeling bolted on for the sake of being able to counted as a feature on the feature list. CCP has largely been able to avoid this, because for the most part, the different systems do fit into the core game as a whole, even if many of them still feel incomplete; incomplete but still part of the game is still far better than being bolted on simply to flesh out the feature list.
Ultimately, what has been lost in lost in the $10 million dollar budgets is that flash costs more money than function, and has a lot less staying power on top of it, making it even more of a race to get that profit back in the first month, making the game even more dependent on flash, with the cycle getting shorter and shorter every time it's repeated. It's not a sustainable model, and we're starting to see the effects that overblown budgets and an overemphasis on flash have on the market. Chasing the popular has always been dicey and led to shortlived products, and once the current bubble bursts, I think you're going to see a lot more companies return to at least some extent to the longer term model simply because that is what will sustain the basic bottom line. Ultimately, the next big company is going to be the one that builds up a solid first game that they use to support themselves as they branch out; CCP is already on the road to doing this, and they or the SOE that built EQ are a far better model to look to than Blizzard, EA, or the other megacorporations. EA only survives by being scavengers, having to constantly find new markets because they saturate and kill profits in any market they have been in for very long. Blizzard would have faded a long time ago without WoW, and probably will fairly quickly as WoW fades; the lack of new IPs recently will destroy them, as any new IP will have to compete to establish itself in a saturated market.
Well I'm sure standards could be set artificially high when you have developers focusing so much more on aesthetics than on gameplay. Also, it's important to note that we (I, at least) aren't advocating for a game that's going to appeal to the masses. I'm specifically talking about niche games, so there are many examples that prove you don't need state of the art graphics for your game to be successful. Look at minecraft for goodness sake. If there are players that simply won't play the game unless it has spectacular graphics, then those aren't the target audience. Again, I'm NOT advocating for a game that appeals to the masses.
It's subjective. But the vast majority of all games fail. So in that sense no type of game design would be "easy" but relative to making an expensive themepark in a market that already has a crap load of themeparks, I would think making a small, modest sandbox game and building on whatever success you have would be "easier."
Well I don't really play EVE but I don't think it's a problem if the game is very successful and they can afford to add on developers and content like new ships etc. But if you're trying to argue that EVE has to have these expansions, I'm not sure if that's true or not. It seems that themeparks like WoW REQUIRE these expansions, otherwise people get bored of doing the same raids over and over.
I really can't wait for a day when you guys get taken off your pedestal of "well this is how the market currently is, so it must be true!" It's such a BS way of arguing. We've already given you reasons why the market is the way it is. MMOs for YEARS were just trying to copy other successful themeparks when the market was already overly saturated with themeparks. That's not free market forces at work, that's the market taking time to figure out what people want. And after so many themeparks failing or having to go f2p, I'd say they're figuring it out.
You ignored my last 2 posts to you but I'll re-ask one of questions I asked before: If the market currently has a good grasp on what players want, why is there a relatively large influx of sandboxes in development? Or at LEAST alleged sandboxes. If they deliver or not, we'll see. But it's pretty obvious that there's a huge demand for sandbox games.
Pretty certain the MMO genre would've been fine without WoW. Actually it would probably be better since there would be a lot more variety than a sea of copy cats because WoW was so hugely successful.
But you know, prior to WoW there hadn't been an MMO that launched from an already well established and huge fanbase. There also hadn't been any advertising of MMO's anywhere beyond magazines and websites occassionally. WoW hit the TV where the masses were with colorful and amusing ads which caught the attention of the masses.
For many people it was their first MMO which also gave them nothing to compare WoW to so, understandably it was great for them. For a long time before WoW people had been wanting games that had a huge scale and that they would be able to play with many other players.
So, WoW basically came out at the right time and got the word out where previous MMO's were capitalizing on this want, as well as the devs simply making the game that they wanted to make, but unlike WoW, they didn't have a pre-established fanbase with a huge following, nor did they advertise to any degree near what Blizzard did.
If modern MMO's did what pre WoW MMO's did, with todays graphics and other gameplay elements that modern technology allows for, WoW would be sinking a lot faster than it already is and that would do a world of good for the MMO Genre. It would hopefully stop the sea of copycats trying to cash in on WoW and we might have a good deal more variety in the MMO field with companies willing to risk going in different directions rather than to make a quick buck by being the next WoW clone.
Kingdom of Knights - Community Manager
Alright, I've had this suspicion for a while now, but more than likely you're just an elaborate troll. You just can't be for real. No one is this naive or this ignorant. Worst thing is, if you are not a troll, you are willfully ignorant: You've made up a narrative and then proceed to find "evidence" for that narrative. You discard the rest.
It is very sad that this might be just an outburst of someone who thinks his niche is not served. Yeah, those companies are evil and greedy. Whatever makes you sleep at night.
Kudos on being one of the better trolls here tho. It was just the right mix of facts and faulty logic. Likely you will not be caught.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Might be annoying to you but it is practical. That way there is no need to quote entire unrelated, irrelevant wall of text and I can address the points you were making.
Never implied anything like that. Just took an example of the boards since you have issue to accept the real state of the market as an indicator of customer demand. They both show the same - forum posters asking for standard subset of features, most successful games are "copying" each other and their features.
I think there is no need to elaborate more on topic...
It makes no differnce, MMO is continuously developing project. The only difference between pre-release and release is whether you are already charging for your product or not(leaving paid betas aside).
1) EVE at release in 2003 was graphically the most advanced MMO on the market.
2) In 2008 the game went through massive complete GFX overhaul.
3) The game is constantly being graphically updated.
CCP was always concerd about graphics and how the game looks.
This is a prime example how you make up stuff without any basis on reality.
From different point of view, yet again it favours my argument:
If a game could be made up from scratch by 50 employees, and post release the game needs 300 employees to keep up the pace, it assumes that even sandbox needs lots of resources for content development.
With that, I stopped reading your wall of text, it's mostly not relevant to anything what was said, you just...talk...sorry.