Too much politics. Let’s talk games. The eggheads at Terranova (Hi, Guys!) have been discussing this Forbes article about City of Heroes, which Forbes terms an ‘out of nowhere hit’. Fair enough. The most interesting part of the article, at least to me, was this:

Lewis spent $2.5 million of his own money, plus loans of $4.5 million from his distributor, the U.S. arm of South Korea game company NCsoft, to create City of Heroes. NCsoft is spending another $18 million a year to market and operate the game and provide customer support.

$7 million to develop a game may seem like a lot, but we’ve been hearing a lot of people fret publically that its impossible to make an MMO on the cheap anymore, and prices will go up even from the $20 million that SWG is rumored to have cost, and $30 million that TSO is rumored to have cost, that the complexities of the genre and the featuresets players expect are going to make those prices go out of control. Even if you say that some of that $18 million needs to be added to the $7 million for launch day to compare apples to apples, this is just not true.

City of Heroes is successful largely because it’s so simple. The article is very illuminating here:

By late 2002, however, the Cryptic game was 18 months behind schedule, plagued with ineffective code and joyless, fussy play. Lewis dropped out of UCLA and went to work to solve the delays. He found chaos and complexity. Developers weren’t documenting what they were doing, and many were doting on their own pet projects, adding more powers, fights and plot lines. So Lewis fired his childhood pal, Dakan, sending him off to write a Heroes comic book, and named himself chief executive in early 2003. He began making the game far simpler.

Does City of Heroes have problems? Most certainly. Could it use a little more depth? No question. But fundamentally, City of Heroes is successful now (as is another, slightly older ‘out of nowhere hit’ that cost even less to make and was even more successful) BECAUSE they realized their own limitations, and therefore had to focus on fun, core gameplay and building the technology to support that fun, core gameplay.

When I was at Origin, there was a lot of hubris and arrogance, and I certainly was not immune myself. The general opinion of many Originites was: “We ‘re Origin! EA shouldn’t be pushing back on design, they should just be signing checks!” Cryptic probably didn’t have that luxury, nor did Mythic or even pre-acquisition Wolfpack. We all had to keep the paychecks coming. All three game designs shrunk, and became more focused as a result. They became better and more competitive as a result. When you can’t compete on number of features, you have to focus on making sure the features you DO get done stand out.

As a developer, I am very thankful for the success of City of Heroes. After other high profile MMOs turned out to stumble out of the gate and be percieved as failures, there was a whispering campaign among those who had the money that, perhaps, MMOs were dead. That they were too expensive and too risky to make. That only market leaders with percieved infinite pockets (Everquest II and Worlds of Warcraft) should even try. It was becoming harder and harder for small companies and design teams within big companies to get an MMO off the ground.

This phase of existence reminds me a lot of, oh, 1997. The RPG genre was dying. A good RPG hadn’t been seen in what seemed like forever. Reviewers reviewed what RPGs that did come out with relative disdain – they were too complex, too full of themselves, too buggy, and too unfocused. Then Diablo came out, and the conventional wisdom was rewritten on RPGS.

It may turn out that City of Heroes, not WoW or EQ2, will turn out to be the game that rewrote the book on MMOs.