Yesterday’s entry got me thinking once again about how big an MMO really needs to be in order to be a success. I’ve never been one to think that because a game is “profitable” then it must be a success. If your MMO lived for 6 months and you paid your debtors and made a  few bucks you’re still a failure in my book. MMOs, from the business side that I view them, are all about long-term monthly revenue.  This bring me to my point for today: MMOs do not belong in the hands of large developers. MMOs (Typically. Ignore Blizzard.) aren’t good business for publicly traded companies with big overhead costs, shareholders, etc. MMOs are good business for small to midsize teams — single, autonomous companies.
Here are a few easily observed trends in today’s MMO market.
- As MMOs have grown more popular, the games themselves have become relatively worse.
- The bigger the MMO developer, Â the worse the MMO.
- 250k subscribers means the game will shut down soon.
The trend I’ll focus on is the last one. When did something like 250,000 subscribers become a bad thing? When did 100,000? The answer goes back to my point earlier — when the companies became too large and their interests too great. 100k subscribers can be $1.5 million in monthly recurring revenue. 250k subs is $3.75 million. I work for a relatively small company right now with < 50 employees making much, much less than that each month. As the marketing director I oversee everything from product development to customer acquisition, and my budget is so frustratingly small that I have to squeeze blood from a stone every single month. Give me a budget based on $3.75 million a month and I can work miracles the likes of which you’ve never seen.
Our current predicament really boils down to MMOs becoming too big for their own good. Despite being very, very lucrative and successful, MMOs aren’t a product or an industry capable of sustaining large publishers of the McMMO model. MMOs belong in the hands of smaller companies where a little goes a long way, and the “little” suddenly becomes a lot. Will we ever beat back the hungry money grabbers in suits? Probably not for a while, but when MMOs sink so low that they suddenly become less appealing, we’ll see a reboot. That’s just simple economics.
Yup. It all goes back to needing to see a major crash happen as far as MMOs go. Ideally there would even be a big press release officially declaring the MMO market dead. Strangely enough that’s what it probably will take for there to be good MMOs again.
One thing I’ve never understood about MMOs is how come they started taking so much time and costing so much to develop? DAoC only took 18 months and 2.5 million to develop. Some of these games are now blowing tens of millions or even over 100 million and taking 5+ years to develop, if they ever actually launch. Granted, I don’t know a thing about coding, but it just seems ridiculous to me that any development project should take more than two years. And unless your game makes use of some break through cutting edge technology, or actually reaches through the screen and wipes your ass for you, I don’t see why it should take tens of millions of dollars to make. Maybe I am just showing my complete lack of understanding of the gaming industry, but that is how I see it.
It seems to me, that if you can keep your development costs at a reasonable level and you have a decent product, it should not be that hard to recoup your investment and be profitable.
I agree, but this shift comes with an adjustment of expectations on the player side, as well. I doubt you need me to point it out, but these projects don’t (only) cost so much to develop because the developers are targeting a huge audience. they target a huge audience because they cost so much to develop *at the bar most game players have come to expect.*
I’m not even talking about the game actually being good, just hitting the immediately perceivable technology benchmarks we’ve grown accustomed to: complex lighting and shadows, models for everything based on high-poly sculpting, blended animations that interact with environments, etc. and of course a robust engine capable of gracefully handling a drastic range of players in the hugest (and often seamless) game worlds of any genre. Our technology makes all these things possible, but I can tell you that it doesn’t make them easier or faster (or cheaper) to execute. it’s a major challenge in the industry as a whole, and it hits mmorpgs the absolute worst.
it’s easy enough to see this phenomenon, just as it’s easy enough to see its solution in the burgeoning market of “indie” games, almost all of which adopt severe restrictions on their art, magnitude and functionality in order to actually make the things on a manageable budget. some contextualize these things better than others. I absolutely love the art styles some of these teams have come up with.
anyway, I’m not nay-saying your premise at all. I’ve been hoping it would go this way for years, so that I might find myself a targeted audience once again. I guess my point is just that the adjustment of expectations is a very real hurdle that needs to be crossed and maybe that’s a concept worth delving into.
I’m not advocating settling for crap, of course, least of all in the quality department. but nor can we turn our noses up at something because it “looks like it was made a decade ago.” smaller audiences and smaller budgets mean compromises for us all.
Without a doubt the expectations are increased based on today’s technological demands. I still do not believe that a game has to be the most beautiful game out there to do well, though. I don’t think we need 50 million budgets with voice actors, cutting edge tech, etc. And the adjustment of expectations is indeed real, but why adjust the game to meet the expectations of millions when an MMO can have 250k subs and be a wild success.
Dev expectations need to match the expectations of players. If a dev spends hundreds of millions of dollars on a game, then they prob expect millions of subs.
I think a big problem can also be traced to game design. The whole concept of “zone levels” in essence makes these areas obsolete once a player out-levels them. This is why I believe a more open-ended skill based game, with open world housing and random spawns could thrive and make the whole world relevant. If developers can design a game where the whole world remains relevant throughout the entirety of a game, that would solve the problem of development waste. Could be easier said then done, but if successfully pulled off imagine the capabilities.
@Balthazar:
Thanks for asking that question as I have wondered similar things regarding game development.
While having more/higher definition art assets would seemingly require more man hours to code, evolution of technology systems can have the opposite effect and make previously intensive tasks relatively manageable.
As an analogy to molecular research, a few decades ago people were receiving Ph.D.’s for sequencing a gene, whereas now one can send it off and get the same results in a day or so.
Is the benefit of evolving technology regarding computer systems for development of games offset by a concurrent even higher coding demand of modern videogames?
I think it is important to point out that this seems to just be a trend in the entertainment industry, period.
Motion pictures went from being amazing feats of engineering that awed and inspired audiences for decades to being the stuff Hollywood shoves out the factory doors in an endless heap these days. Current movies take millions to create and rarely even recoup that investment. And the saddest part? Most of them are just “okay”.
I consider myself an avid movie-buff. I see most films in the theatre if they look at all appealing. I walk out of those at the end saying to myself, “Yea, that movie was alright.” Rarely if ever do I think, “Wow! That blew my mind! I should watch that again right now!”
This is what MMOs are now. I think this is simply something we need to consider as being the norm from now on. Every once in a while there will be an MMO diamond-in-the-rough, just like in movies… but there is going to be a LOT of “rough” in between.
What you are describing sounds to me like the rough pattern in about any industry. Small companies live and die by their customer service. Fullfilling customer expectations, catering to their needs, building loyalty thru good product and after-sell service, these are the keys of survival of many small companies. At some point during growth, it stops being about that. It about protecting the brand, pleasing the shareholders, having good looking books so to speak. The customer ? Hopefully he’s captive now and won’t go anywhere, if not just have a range of by-products and by-services to patch the original low quality product.
Well, that’s what we see in our side of the world. I’ve heard about different business behaviors in other parts of the world.
While not an mmo payday 2 is a great example of a niche market.
They filled a niche with payday 1 and made no compromises on how they wanted their squeal to be.
Graphics where not the best and it did not have the most features at the start.
But they made what they and their fans of payday 1 wanted.
Result? they broke even on preorders alone.
And ever since they are raking in money from game sales and dlc content.
They must be drowning in profit.
I agree with you Keen a steady source of revenue from 250k,100k or 50k? subscribers should be plenty to corner a niche market and expand into something bigger.
Eve online started small and they are still around these days.
@Balthazar
The art bottleneck is insane.
Past a certain point the amount of time it takes to author and test art starts to be logarithmic instead of linear. The more things you toss on screen, and the more ways you toss it on screen, the more things that can and will go wrong. Not to mention all the problems which come with just making sure an asset works in multiple resolutions with all sorts of levels of detail turned on or off. I’ve seen art pipelines where a single asset isn’t measured in days, or weeks, but months.
Art gets downright weird too. A modern UI can take years to design. Think of all the beta screenshots you’ve seen with placeholder UIs on a project that’s been in development for 3+ years. For something which if it does it’s job right, you shouldn’t even think about.
Art is the reason the biggest feature Epic talked up for Unreal 4 wasn’t polygons or cool effects, but authoring tools. Yeah, they showed those things in the big splashy videos we watched, but they spent and continue to spend a massive amount of time talking about the shortened development pipeline for art. Valve announced Source 2 at GDC. The first thing Gabe Newell mentioned in any interview was the ways it made authoring content easier, the fact it’ll be free was second. The low low cost of free was an afterthought, icing on the cake.
I do not have a problem with the size of companies, I have a problem with companies that have to answer to shareholders. I work for an airline and we are dealing with this right now as well. You can not make decisions that are best for the customer. You have to make decisions that make the most amount of money tomorrow. Then you need to come up with something that will make even more money the next day. This is why you see games go F2P. It is a quick cash grab to make investors happy. It’s not good for the game or for customers but it is good for the shareholders.