The AAA games industry has hysterically overreacted to the failure of anyone to capture the lightning in the bottle that World of Warcraft. It’s weird – AAA studios seem completely and totally oblivious to the fact that EverQuest was quite successful with – what, 450K subs max? WoW at the time, if you recall, stated they merely needed to match EQ to be successful. Analysts at the time used to say stuff like ‘there might only be 600K to 1M MMO players in the world – how could WoW and EQ2 possible coexist?’ Even then, the breakout success of games like Lineage in Asia suggested that something could come along and blow the doors off of things.
Going back through my blog in the mid-aughts, people forget both how slow WoW’s roll to 12M actually was, and also how stunning most observers thought it was at every major milestone. I remember when they hit 1M and were clearly still on the uptick, a lot of people discovered the need to recalibrate their definition of success. As one example, Star Wars: Galaxies (which launched about a year prior) went from being considered a solid and respectable success at 250K subs to one that the corporate overlords apparently figured needed a disastrous reboot in the form of the ‘New Game Experience’. Because WoW recalibrated what success SHOULD look like for a major MMO.
And so everyone spent money assuming they’d land THOSE numbers, and then had to settle with lesser success — this seems to be true of WildStar, SWTOR and Elder Scrolls, all of whom had numbers that (I suspect) stabilized at places a lot closer to EQ’s order of magnitude than WoW’s. This is still nothing to sneeze at – SWTOR was still a money printing machine when I left, thanks largely to the F2P conversion.
All of this comes to mind when reading this fascinating article about the fall of THQ. The whole thing is an awesome read, and it seems clear to me that the real fall of THQ was centered upon being built upon a core market that just evaporated out from under them – basically, their business model of making licensed (mostly) kids games for consoles didn’t survive the 360 console transition, as most of their audience was gravitating to mobile and tablets instead of consoles. The article talks at length about how they realized too late that they needed to shift to more ‘core’ games, and how parts of their company never mentally made that jump of where they needed to be.
That being said, there’s a full chapter talking about how the Warhammer 40K project was a key part of bankrupting the company. Largely because they insisted on spending big. It’s hard to believe that, just a year or two before WoW went live, Shadowbane shipped with a dev team of, I dunno, 30 people. Yes, that’s probably TOO small in this day and age, but if you calibrate your expectations, there’s still plenty of money to be made.
It seems like the AAAs have all fled that space. There are still plenty of people who have faith in it though — they’re the MMO greybeards who know that there’s gold at the end of that Rainbow, and most of them are chasing the money on Kickstarter rather than go through AAAs. The next generation of MMOs appears to be Shards Online by some Mythic Alumni, Shroud of the Avatar by Richard Garriott and some Origin alumni, Pathfinder Online by Goblinworks, and Camelot Unchained by Mark Jacobs and some other Mythic Alumni. It will be a smaller, humbler generation than any since the EQ/UO/AC days. But of the AAAs stay gunshy, there could be a jackpot there waiting for one of them to hit.
Because, let’s face it, MMOs offer something that other genres don’t. The community. The relatively well-policed gaming environment. The persistence. The idea of burning down a guild’s castle in a raid with 100 other people. That dream will always be powerful, it will always be evocative, and it will always excite the imagination.
“But of the AAAs stay gunshy, there could be a jackpot there waiting for one of them to hit.”
Oh man if that turns out as you predict, that could end up setting the pattern for MMO development for decades to come. It would be:
-AAA companies ignore the genre; it’s too niche/not profitable enough
-due to a convergence of timing, luck and just the right appeal, someone hits the jackpot (WoW)
-AAA companies go batshit crazy trying to replicate the success of the one hit wonder
-years later, when it becomes apparent that nobody can (regardless of how much they invest in it), AAA interest drops off; it’s just not profitable enough for their wonky expectations
-a bunch of smaller companies bring out MMOs with more realistic expectations over a number of years
-due to timing, luck and just the right appeal, one of them suddenly hits the jackpot and becomes the next WoW
-AAA companies take notice; try to replicate and horn in on the success of the New WoW
-and the cycle continues…
Sounds like the pork cycle (though there are other explanations for such).
Two things strike me from reading through this piece.
The first is the unrealistic expectation of thinking success has to be defined by raking in higher numbers than the current number 1 (World of Warcraft for most western mmo players), despite a market that is increasingly saturated with a changing subscription model. And the even more absurd expectation that this can be achieved in the first phase of release. Is this a holdover from regular games where the initial launch will see the big numbers?
This leads onto the second and that is the reliance on an established Intellectual Property to boost initial sales from the existing player base and fans. While it may have that initial impact and a fanbase to promote it in the early days does it come at too higher cost to sustain in the long run? As a fan and player of SWTOR I can look forward to a day where the servers are shut down because of legal requirements (not retaining the IP rights) rather than lack of players.
An in house IP, with less expectations on it can have the room to breathe, to grow its fan base at a sustainable rate and retain control over its content and lifespan.
It was a shame to see CCP pull the plug on the World of Darkness MMO, as they had already secured the long term rights by buying White Wolf, and seemed to have plenty of development tools for fleshing out the game.
Although Vampire: the Masquerade has always felt to me a better game played with fewer people, starting to take in all the products released for it started to turn it into a Super-hero game with fangs.
Having spent time on the New Bremmen chat rooms (the online MUD supported at one time by White Wolf) I can’t help but feel the core player base of WoD want to remain alone and brood Heathcliffe like on the edge of a storm wrought skyscraper.
Maybe Kickstarters are the future, removing the pressure on a publishing house to put the money up front and showing potential customer interest. I suspect even that can be a hazardous path as access to early development seems to be a given perk and that means a lot of information will be out about the game (both good and bad) before it hits the point of general release.
I would include Elite:Dangerous in the next wave of MMOs, maybe not in the traditional fantasy quickbar format, but with a persistent evolving environment that all players will share. Partly funded by Kickstarter, the developers have the luxury of it being a known IP with David Braben still at the helm.
Elite: Dangerous, along with things like DayZ are absolutely part of the next wave of the MMO-ish space. While they are very, very different from anything like a traditional MMO or MUD, they have that same persistent multiplayer appeal. It won’t be enough for some MMO players, because they’re largely about the solo experience with occasional encounters with other players. If you want to play as a party, they don’t support that like a traditional MMO does. But it does reach into areas left untapped by the bigger WoW-chasers.
Minecraft and it’s clones are another area where persistent multiplayer is thriving.
It will be interesting to see how well Elite: Dangerous does. It has retained the old ‘box price’ as an entry requirement and also has vanity items (paint schemes for ships) on the store for those with cash burning a hole in their pockets.
General release was on the 16th and it is a game that doesn’t really feel the need to explain what you should be doing. Maybe the devs feel that is an area the community will fill in, you see enough ‘playthrough’ clips on You Tube for other games. But with the simulation aspect and getting dropped into a vast galaxy the start can be a bit daunting.
With the intention to role out additional content as well in the form of expansion packs (if you invested early enough you could take advantage of an expansion pass – all future expansions free) being able to walk about the space ship, make landfall on planets and then go walkabout are first on the list.
The devs have also stated they understand players are interested in multi-player ships and will consider it for future content.
They have a single persistent galaxy in which the actions of players (both solo players and open world) contribute to the emergent properties. Although being so vast in scale it will be interesting to see if players focus on destabilising a few systems at a time or spread themselves so thin their effects are absorbed by the background NPC activities.
I know this is somewhat of topic but your article reminds me the debacle of Spacebase DF-9. This « early access » game needed to generate sales as numerous as Prison Architect to be deemed a success. Problem is, PA is one of the greatest success in early access, PA was updated more frequently than DF9 and the updates were more feature packed in PA despite being already pretty playable for a while. Beside, PA didn’t need early access to succeed.
If you need to have more sales than the most successful competitor, you either need to create a vastly superior product and understand why the competition succeed, or seriously rethink your plans.
But a key difference between THQ and Double Fine was that THQ were desperate, DF seem to be incompetent and/or malicious.
*off topic
I really think the success of WoW was highly dependant on the Development Team not being a traditional MMO team. All of the projects you mentioned have greybeards at the helm. They could go for a niche/hardcore type game and plan for surviving at 250K but I think they’re still blinded by dollar signs. You could create another Shadowbane, with all the similar mechanics and trappings of the original, but it will never have 12MM subscribers.
WoW didn’t expect 12MM subscribers. They were hoping to reach EQ’s peak number after a full year. Also keep in mind, Warcraft was Blizzard least popular franchise at the time. It was a gamble at getting 500K users to sustain the game.
AAAs being gun shy at new MMOs after the flood of post WoW games makes me think that games is starting to act like the film industry when it comes to middling budgets.
http://flavorwire.com/492985/how-the-death-of-mid-budget-cinema-left-a-generation-of-iconic-filmmakers-mia/view-all
Why take a middling risk for a small reward when you can produce a yearly Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Madden, etc, or drop pennies in indies and hope you strike minecraft?
Blizzard may not have had a lot of experienced MMO devs, but they were heavy MMO players. You don’t copy existing games so closely without having some pretty intimate knowledge.
The real reason Blizzard succeeded was because of the Blizzard name. They had a ready fanbase to try any game, and the reputation and funds to make sure they could put the trademarked Blizzard polish on the game. Most games that tried to cash on on WoW’s success soon after didn’t have a decade plus of reputation to bank on, so they could not do nearly as well. By the time the companies that did have that history build their massive MMOs, I think a lot of MMO players just got too jaded.
That’s my no-consulting-fee take on the matter.
The hole in the donut that the article describes has been gradually filled in over time in the games space. Independent developers such as InXile, Double Fine, Frictional, Klei and Robot are continuing to do big-deal business, sometimes with other people’s IP, with publishing partners that make sense to them, though increasingly, they’re having to go to Kickstarter for big chunks of their initial capital — but that’s not all the capital they raise. John Waters wisely doesn’t want to risk the shirt on his back to get the films he wants to make, made. But I bet if he wanted to, he could Kickstart a movie.
It’s not just former Mythic people working on Camelot Unchained. 😉
I think these smaller groups have a better chance, because the threshold for success is lower. Too many of the triple-A companies thought they could get WoW-sized profitability rather than going more modest and trying to grow.
I’ve said on my blog that niche games are going to be the future. We’ll see if I’m right. 🙂
Idle Animation is the secret to WOW’s success. No, seriously. So many MMOs do things better than WOW, but have craptastic idle animations. Runner Up: WOW’s jumping animations. Blizzard is so good at animations–like Pixar good.
And there was me thinking it was the /flirt /silly commands 😉
but /flirt /silly are over 20 years old (rc; irc; mud; mush; moo). I say that fully aware you were being funny.
I’ve played just about every MOO. I was big into StarWars, StarTrek, and Elfquest mush(es). I’ve quit many MOO’s for having animations so bad they made me wish I was playing a txt-based mush. Lord of the Rings Online comes to mind. Some of the worst “jump” animations ever.
*EDIT: mmo
**EDIT: I do love me some “moo” too. (master of orion.)
I was indeed being a little tongue in cheek. I remember the various /flirt and /silly from the various races in WoW being a high point of my playing time.
You have something with the animations. One of the reasons I still log into SWTOR despite having played through each class twice for the advanced classes, is that the animation and aesthetics of the game just strike the right note for me, and allow me to overlook aspects where I would have liked more freedom.
Massive MOOII flashback :O never got around to the third instalment, but remember a lot of fun in designing killer ships in Masters of Orion II 🙂
SWTOR has excellent animation(s)!
Remember the first time you overclicked units in “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans?” I mean Blizzard’s entire Empire was built on idle-polish. Every time I get a new Companion-Pet in WOW, I pop a cold one and go “screensaver” mode. “Rock Biter (sp?)” is one of the craziest pets in WOW… spotlights for eyes, tunnel-digger for a mouth, and a smoke-stack arse. I could watch it for hours.
I’m not saying this is the only thing that makes WOW successful, I’m saying WOW wouldn’t be as successful without this level of polish.
What do you think of Blizzard considering a system for trading in game WoW gold for subscription time, and vice versa?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/12/blizzard-considering-gold-for-game-time-trades-in-world-of-warcraft/
The timeline in the article is mildly inaccurate. Dark Millennium wasn’t canned until after the uDraw fiasco; at the point that uDraw PS/XBox was released, Vigil was still hiring fairly aggressively for Dark Millennium. (Including, for example, someone to run tech ops and build platforms for the game, ahem.) That changed rapidly once it was clear that uDraws sitting in a warehouse was no way to generate cash flow, but in the fall of 2011 there was still going to be an MMO.