f13.net

Interesting interview with Mark Jacob's (http://gamasutra.com/features/20060728/sheffield_01.shtml)


The full interview is worth a read as he covers quite a few topics including Asia and how funding was raised for DAoC.

Say what you want about Mark Jacobs, but he gives good interviews. He knows how to push the right buttons get get nerdsters in a fervor.

Yeah he does. I met him at an E3 a few years ago and immediately noticed that his experience with the smaller pay to play MUD's that Mythic ran prior to DAoC gave him a lot more insight and credibility when speaking about the genre. And he's a good, measured speaker.

Too bad he's about to become EA's new whipping boy unless he cashes out. If he's as smart as you say, Cashing Out is the way to go. Mythic was a private company, Jacobs is gonna be RICH.

I'm betting that he's stuck there for at least a year or two to make it look like Mythic actually still exists. Once that's over he can go buy a castle and EA can proceed to assimilate whatever is left.

By assimilate I assume you mean "dismantle," right?

Mythic actually getting the go-ahead to explore a UO2 would be the last sign.  That's one property that's destined to produce only tears and resume filler.

I wouldn't care about a Mythic UO2.  It would just be some faggoty class-based realm PVP pile.

They say the third time's the charm...

... and they'd need a charm to stop EA from canceling their efforts again.

It must have been terrifying for those working for Mythic to have visited the Ultima Online development offices to find only the dry, withered husks of the previous team within.

As opposed to some faggoty EQ-clone pile that pukes at EA can come up with?

What?

Fixed that for you.

I dunno, I have to partially agree with WUA on this one.  Part of UO's appeal has always been its open sandboxy nature.  The lack of levels, the omission of "factions" or "sides" in favor of true player politics, the skills and the overall combat mechanics.   I can't see Mythic making a sequel along those lines.  Instead it'd be a level-based, pvp-pve mix whose politics are as deep as;  "you fight with these guys because you rolled the same side."

Are you saying that's what you'd want from a UO sequel?

Not sure I'd assume Mythic would do an EQ clone just because they did that previously with DAoC. It's not like their team has been exactly the same since the earliest days of Mark's efforts in games that predated that. And he's particularly aware that doing yet another EQ clone is absolutely not going to do anything for EA in the face of the WoW juggernaut.

Would UO2 be sandboxy in nature? I have no idea. But there's still a lot of things to try in this genre, and with the almost unassailable position of WoW, it's almost a requirement to think differently if you want to break beyond niche-subscriptions. And for a company like EA, breaking beyond that niche is the price of entry for new games I would imagine.

It's all speculation, but my opinion of the direction they'd take things is based on their experience, and the direction they've taken their other projects.

They also lack Raph's vision - which IMO is needed for something that sandboxy. Just don't let the man RUN the project.  :-D

I don't think EA has the financial courage to try something beyond niche. An MMO with a $20 million or greater budget would get micro-managed to death. I imagine that EA execs are more concerned about NOT doing another Sims Online versus trying to hit even an EQ2.  When avoiding losses has a greater mindshare than trying to succeed, innovation is the first to die.

Basically it comes down to my thinking that future Mythic products will look like past Mythic products, and Sinij posting infantile BS because his butthole is still bleeding from UO design decisions made six years ago.

Don't get me wrong, original UO had many things right and I'd love to see updated version of it, minus griefers and whiny trammies, just as it was in 99. Thing is I don't think current degeneration of EA developers would be allowed anything anywhere nearly that ambitious, and even if they were they would likely to miserably fail. Lets face it, almost all reasons original UO was fun were not designed or planned and at large flukes.

I don't know how many of you played DAOC when it first came out, but I would hardly call it a "faggoty ass EQ clone."  I played from the first day of release, for about 4 months.  Considering EQ is simply a graphical MUD, I don't know why they get all they credit for innovation anyway.  But not every game can be a revolution.  That said, DAOC had some pretty nice evolutionary features.  I remember thinking how cool it was that I could tint my armor.  RvR combat was a cool concept.  It wasn't quite as cool in practice, but it was a nice idea that hadn't been done in a major MMO up to that point.

The problem with DAOC is that they didn't have enough content.  I was one of the first people to max level on my server, and we started a little elite guild, but it slowly deteriorated because there was simply nothing to do but raid the barrows over and over.  And there was no good loot in there to boot. So we really had no objective but to RVR constantly, which was fine, except there was no objective or reward system in place there either.  It was just killing for the sake of killing, which doesn't hold interest so well when it is in a structured environment like RVR combat. 

One final thought: I think they could have staved off this problem a little while to buy themselves some time if they had made it actually possible to overpower a Realm's border castle, and invade a realm.  THAT would have been very cool, and given people somehting to strive for.

I see this becoming the conventional wisdom around here, but I really disagree with it.  People here said exactly the same thing about EverQuest.  WoW's success is a sign that huge swaths of people really like to play diku (which should not suprise anybody, since that style of gameplay dominated MMOGs, MUDs, CRPGS, and pen-and-paper).  There is plenty of space for new diku games to make a shitload of money.  Sure, you can't make "WoW But Worse" and expect to thrive, but if you keep the core gameplay and change a few things, there is plenty of market for you.  There are a ton of people who don't care for WoW's art style.  Or want a non-fantasy game.  Or a little less PvP.  Or a little more PvP.  Or want a house.  Or want more grouping.  Or want more soloing.   Or are just plain kind of tired of WoW and/or out of content in WoW (you'd have to time your release to avoid WoW's expansion, of course).  You do that well, and you make money.

I think it really boils down to wishful thinking.  It takes a lot of self-delusion to watch diku, which has dominated the genre basically from its inception, gobble up bigger and bigger shares of the market eventually culminating in a single, well-made diku game utterly dominating the entire landscape and say "that's a sign that non-diku games are about to assplode onto the scene!"

I guarantee that if WoW had flopped, the exact same people spouting this line now would be saying "WoW flopped, that's a sign that non-diku games are about to assplode onto the scene!"

QFT.  The Revolution isn't happening.  They'll keep making MMOs a little bit more polished, a little bit shinier, a little bit better. 

No one will make a Diku-mud game as successful as WoW because no one has the financial resources to do so, even EA. It isn't that they don't have the talent, it's that they don't have the money.

Oh, and no one has that kind of license either, at least not for a PC MMOG. Consoles are a whole other business, if anyone can ever figure out how to do it besides Squeenix.

I don't think they can call anything "UO2" anymore. They've had, what, two or three failed "UO2"s already. It's a cursed moniker and should only be mentioned on moonless nights using deep whispers.

I'm hoping the smaller houses are looking to EVE to see what can be done with a dedicated and long-term vision (and team), persistance, and a willingness to push a game in different direction -- to exploit the niche.

One of the things that pisses me off so much about SOE is that the Station Pass is a good idea -- one unified fee to play a variety of MMORPGs. The problem is half or more of it is barely supported shit.

Yep, dikus dominate the genre, have for awhile and likely will for awhile. No harm in that. It's a relatively easy and proven formula to follow, perfect for the business 101 crowd to exploit by slapping licenses on it. Blizzard will not be the last to take a strong IP and wrap it over the same core game system.

So I'm certainly not saying it's going away. And I'm not saying it's dominance as a game system is going to be assailed. Beyond the game mechanic itself is the secondary income companies can enjoy through item sales. They go hand in hand with that sort of game system.

What I am saying is that the diversity in this genre cannot be ignored. And, the "conventional wisdom" you talk about is those trying not to be ignorant. It's easy to talk about success. It's around us all. But to just write off the genre as a series of game mechanic clones misses the dozens of games that are not.

Are they less relevant because they don't have 7 digits in their posted subscription base? Maybe to those who only look at the genre from one perspective. But there's plenty of companies making a good living offering different experiences to less players. When you consider just how old this genre is (read: not), it's easy to see that the established rules of today are perpetuated by those who, eight years ago, weren't likely even playing.

Do you think the players eight years from now will be the same as those who are here today?

People tend to over-generalize for a couple of data points.

WoW really doesn't say much about Diku games vs non Diku games. There isn't a sandbox game at all comparable to WoW in terms of polish, production value, etc.

It's a big mistake to say that WoW means Dikus are really popular, or that the Diku market is saturated, or that fantasy is where it's at, or anything like that. EQ2 is a Diku game with a fantasy setting after all. So is Horizons.

WoW is a single data point. With that in mind, clearly being Diku and being fantasy are not what made WOW so successful, because there are plenty of other Diku games that are fantasy that do 1/100th as well. WOW doesn't really say much about anything other than that WOW is really fucking popular.

Wrong.  If WoW was shit it wouldn't have the subscriber base it does.  WoW is the best Diku game out right now, that's relatively indisputable.  That says a lot about the diku model.

'Best' is a relative thing. If popularity defined 'best', we'd all be listening to Britney Spears now, wouldn't we?

I'd largely agree with that except, I believe fantasy does appear to be "where it's at" mostly for the single reason quoted below.


I think it's slightly more complicated than above, due to players having certain set ideas about firing guns with the mouse and yet despite all the fantasy mmorpg's, we are still open to new ideas on swinging a sword.  My FPS gameplay key bindings in any new game are immediately changed to the same as when I played Quake.

I'm also going to link to these recent figures by Universal McCann (http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623035), not because I think they are surprising or even accurate but just because it's nice to see someone other than SB quoting figures.

Just to be clear, I think it important we all agree that "diku" as we use it pertains to a specific type of game experience, not necessarily the underlying infrastructure that diku really is. Even though all of the "diku" games are built very differently, it's what the experiences are about where the parallels are drawn.

As is FFXI (a different form of fantasy though it is), as is DAoC, as was, of course, EQ1. GW is arguably built upon the same foundation as well. L2 as well.

Add up all of the subscribers for these titles. Then add up all of those in the virtual-lifestyle/non-diku experiences. Even before WoW and GW threw numbers beyond the million-mark, this sort of game has dominated the genre.

That's why people, gamers and developers alike, assume this sort of game experience to be most popular. It's now about WoW. That only opened peoples eyes to just how many more gamers could be drawn into this type of game.

We're not?

Yes.

I think that in 2014 there are going to be eighteen million people grinding for dings in World of Starcraft II, while Puzzle Pirates III plugs away with 50k subscribers and you and Raph and other people talk about it as if it's somehow relevant.  Meanwhile UO will have finally shut down, and I'll be playing on a freeshard once the community for them isn't 95% people who want to relive 1998 for a week.  Schild will have gone bald, while Righ & Signe will have adopted a lovable multiethnic gaggle of orphans from around the world.  SirBruce will have been elected to Congress.  Every once in a while we'll all post on F13 about how terrible it was that Sinij died in a case of autoerotic asphyxiation gone terribly wrong.  Also, there'll be Thunderdome.

Welcome to the future.

If you don't think Puzzle Pirates is relevant for its success, you really do belong in UO.

I just have to point out that those figures tend to leave out titles like CyWorld and Habbo Hotel, which change the balance more than a little.

SirBrucing AHOY!


You said "But there's still a lot of things to try in this genre, and with the almost unassailable position of WoW, it's almost a requirement to think differently if you want to break beyond niche-subscriptions."

That's what I disagree with.  If that's not what you meant to say or I misread you, then this is another in a long line of disagreements over nothing that make the Internet turn 'round.


You used to be so nice, what happened?


Again, I'm not writing any games off but man are you ever pounding the straw out of that man, big fella (I was never nice)!


Yes, I think a game’s "subscription base" is kind of relevant when I am responding to someone saying companies need to do something different than diku in order to "break beyond niche subscriptions." 


No shit.  What those games prove is that you can make profitable niche games that are non-diku.  What they don’t prove is that it is now basically impossible to make a non-niche diku game because WoW represents the end of 8-30+ years of history. 

They also don’t prove that it is even possible to make a non-niche, non-diku game.  I think it is, but it sure as hell isn’t going to be called UO2.  It’ll be called Sims Online (We Really Tried This Time) or Animal Crossing VII or Desperate Housewives Online.   


We have different opinions of when the genre started.  Dungeons & Dragons was released in 1974.  Akalabeth in 1980.  DikuMud in 1991.  Ding-grats-lewt for 30+ years and still ruling the roost.


I think people playing games with orcs, elves, spaceships or lightsabers in them 8 years from now will be a lot like people who are playing games with orcs, elves, spaceships or lightsabers in them right now.  I think the major games in this genre will be vastly improved, but still fundamentally about ding-grats-lewt.  I think that major entertainment companies will be willing to spend a lot of money to make high-quality products now that they’ve seen the absurd return on investment possibilities.  I think there will also be niche products around, much like the niche products available today, similarly improved with iteration.

I think there will also be a lot people playing massively multiplayer online games with names like, at the risk of repeating myself, Sims, Animal Crossing or Desperate Housewives.  They will probably have some ding-grats-lewt aspects and some sandbox aspects, but will mostly be giant virtual chatrooms.

You SB'd yourself! I think you just disproved the notion that two objects can't exist in the same space or something...

The part we disagree on, I think, is the perception that iterating the classic formula is just as easy now as it was when EQ first did it.

And I meant to use "ignorant" in the purest sence of the word: the "conventional wisdom" I think you were referring to is the standard 5 or so MMORPGs that exist on the lists of many people in these sorts of forums. That isn't to say they're not interested in knowing just how many games there are that offer a technically comparable experience. Rather, because those games don't specifically target players such as us, they can easily fall below the radar.

What I was referring to in that comment was the various different experiences to be had being offered through completely different business models built on technically very different foundations. Very few companies are actually hand-building custom graphics engines to fill with $60mil+ of content and quests. They're working in Flash. They're using fast-loading zone-based methodologies. They're not focusing on offering just a one-trick pony games that ends with just two different endlessly-repeatable experiences. And some are not collecting a monthly fee. They're in different segments of the market not targeting lummies and those that have followed.

This, to me, is because of two different reasons, equally important:

Who?

Who can do what Blizzard has done (deliver a content-complete diku around the world)? They spent easily three times what EQ2 did, and at the time, that was said to be a record. Outside of EA, you're talking different industries. Thus, the biggest budget games we can expect in the next few years are more likely to come in the form of those near-advergaming experiences like what James Cameron is working on than it will come from, say, Codemasters. I'd wager big bucks that the Hollywood-funded MMOs will be very different from WoW. Why? Next bullet.

What?

The type of experience. WoW succeeded in attracting more players than almost any other MMO (though the numbers get tricky in Asia because they're not technically monthly subscribers for the most part). But they're mostly the same type of player. Consider how iterative the debates are about the game. It's all the same type of stuff we've been arguing since Kunark.

WoW's success is based on a lot of factors not just about the game, like the growth of broadband, the increasing raw computing power, Blizzard's rockstar image, the Warcraft brand, critical worldwide partnerships, all sorts of things that open doors other companies could not to broaden the delivery of a game mechanic a decade old. So does the whole world want diku? Are there 10million more people who need just a tweak off of WoW to give the next game a chance in larger droves?

If you look beyond this genre, to the tens of millions of gamers not here, to the 30mil or so who've bought GTA, the 20mil or so who bought Sims, the tens of millions in places like RealArcade and the hundreds of millions who don't want to spend hours a day playing just one type of gaming experience, my answer is, no, the whole world does not want diku. And these other companies not iterating diku are attempting to capitalize on this.

We've been here before. Generally the establishment gets capped by a highly polished derivative title that ends evolution along a specific path (as happened in RTS, space sims and FPS). What then happened, with the inevitable diminishing interest, was innovation to tweak things to grab back the bored and broaden the appeal beyond them. Basic business survival, with some success and some not (like, RTS success, space sim not). Such I believe is happening in MMORPGs now. They are defined by what WoW has refined to a T, in a way nobody else can.

The future requires new thinking or we're just talking about account cannabalization.

This does sound familiar, back from the days when SWG launched to little fanfare and EQ was determined king/best. But the genre, collectively, is wiser. The cap that EQ presented was based on a very limited awareness of other ways of doing things (the nice form of "ignorance" again :) ). Nowadays? We know more.

The reason I depart from subscription base in this regard is because many companies already are. I firmly believe the future is not in locking players into a longish-term relationship with a flat fee. Ironically, some estimate the average account held in WoW is 14 months. That's more of an indication that there's a buttload of players on their first-ever MMORPG than that WoW is fundamentally more sticky. What happens when WoW is old? If we use the similar experience of EQ as a guide, the average length of account will quickly drop (maybe by '08) to six months. Meanwhile, compare to the stickiness of worldy-games, or sites that offer many games and a common community/microeconomy (Neopets). The relationship is longer because the momentary requirements are lighter. There's basically less reason to even become burned out.

To grab mindshare, companies need alternative methods to get players and keep them need to be explored. The free-to-play/microtransaction model is not very noticable in the U.S. because people are fixated on WoW. But it's a more appealing model than the typical subscription, for a lot of reasons for both player and company alike.

The roots of the genre arguably go all the way back to Celtic lore :) (or the first multiplayer game which, iirc, was Space War from MIT in the 60s). The question of 8 years out comes from me dating the genre back to the origination of the term "MMORPG".

I break down generations by player expectation. At this point, yea, they'll come to these games expecting ding-gratz-lewtz because that's the most pervasive form of gaming in this space. But just as there were mechanics beyond D&D that were appealing to a different audiences, there are mechanics here for those who want more than the same thing with different skins. For them there are companies that are appropriately smaller offering appropriately more targeted experience.

As to the future, here's why I think it'll be different.

The genre will be mainstream within two years. It's amazing how many companies are coming into this from way outside the establishment. They're not going to target the WoW player though, because to do that is beyond most companies, or at least beyond their willingness. As I said above, it's because they're expanding the genre into the not-diku-player, as has happened in the past. This is the core of Blue Ocean Strategy, the idea that a company does not have to try and compete with the establishment if they can execute something that changes the rules.

We agree it won't be UO. To me it probably will be based on a strong brand or established IP extended into this space in some form, made relevant to what can happen here rather than what happens in WoW.

(http://www.f13.net/grief/thegoggles.jpg)

The previous page would have been improved by another dozen uses of the word "genre", I get the feeling you just weren't trying.

I'll have a shiny chart from the office of Congressman Woodcock to prove it isn't!

But really, I'm entirely sick of hearing about the "relevance" and "importance" of a bunch of shit that either doesn't cost money or has a 0.0001% marketshare.  All is lost.  The genre is ruined.  Now wail with lament, then kneel down and suck the Diku.

Why bother reading the thread then? You have your UO. There's no reason you gotta like everything that's ever slapped with the "mmo" letters to it.

WUA: Just because you aren't in to it doesn't mean it is ilirelevant. PP has been expanding rapidly since it started using RMT.  While I wouldn't compare it to WoW just yet, it easy draw comparisons to small games like UO.

I'm not really sure if this is a rerail or a derail, but I found this picture on my hard disk today:

(http://yegolev.com/images/ultima_worlds_online.jpg)

Compare Puzzle Pirates success vs. the budget required to create it, and then use the same ratio for Blizzard's budget and its success. I'd not be surprised if the percentages weren't too far off.

For investors, it's all about ROI. If they invest $1,000 and make $100,000, that's a goddamn good ROI. Blizzard invested anywhere between $60-$80 million if reports are to be believed. It takes a lot more money and time to get a good ROI on that.

Of course, Blizzard's probably made those numbers, but they are the medium's abberation, not its average.

 :-o

That would so sell.  My wife might even play it.

And then I would hate you eternally for ever bringing it up.

I like the show but I wouldn't play.  Angry Housewives Online, however....

Well my version of the game would be unlimited PvP with permadeath.  Just like the show!

Don't kid us.  You'd play the beta if offered.

Exactly.

For the developer/publisher though, it's also about brand-building. Blizzard smartly leveraged the brand they pretty much always have. This makes it easier to extend, if done the right way of course (unfortunate for EQ, for example). As a result of the success of WoW, it's now even easier to introduce a new Warcraft project, in whatever form that is.

Big huge hits become a form of advertising by themselves. So there's ROI on the individual experience, very important for the momentary involvement of VC. But then there's the longterm benefits that are very relevant to companies with some age and which would like to have some more of it.

That looks better than WoW!

Damn you EA (and a small damn you to Ubiq for whatever issues caused the project to overrun its budget)!

Well, it's about both.  Tarnation had a much, much greater RoI (151,738%) than ET (a mere 3,675 %) did.  But ET's worldwide gross of nearly $800 million (compared to Tarnation's $662,000 gross) kind of takes the shine off that. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.html 


Let's pretend that WoW's 3 million+ Asian customers pay exactly nothing in monthly fees.  Let's further pretend that every single WoW box was given away for free, and that no expansions will ever be released.  In fact, let's assume that the only income WoW will ever generate is monthly fees from its ~3.5M Western customers.  That's still a gross of over SIX. HUNDRED. MILLION. DOLLARS. A. YEAR.  You can talk about how much it costs to run the servers all you want, but there is no "probably" about whether or not WoW has been profitable. 

You don't need to come anywhere close to WoW's level of success to make money, and a lot of it, making a D&D-Akalabeth-Diku-EQ-WoW style game.  Drop $50 million on a game, get ONE TWENTIETH of WoW's 6M+ customer base for a few years, and you will make a shitload of money.  And if you do a decent job, you'll get a lot more than that.  The $100M MMO will be commonplace, and it will be very, very profitable. 

That's why I disagree with new f13 conventional wisdom that it's impossible to make a shitload of cash making diku-style games so every MMO designer better innovate and make Ultima Bane Whamdoodle Galaxies III ASAP or else Rob Pardo will drag them to the nearest high school and shove them in a locker while he fucks your wife and loots your bank account.  It's just wishful thinking from people who would rather see Ultima Bane Whamdoodle Galaxies III than D&D-Akalabeth-Diku-EQ-WoW MMCMXVIII on their store shelf next Christmas. 

Ding-grats-loot has made shitloads of money and utterly dominated the RPG landscape for over 30 years, and it isn't gonna stop because of WoW.  WoW just showed how much more money you can make when you release a product that actually seems like it may have been made by a company employing real, live adults rather than something that plays like you bought it in a plastic baggie from a high school kid.

I'll bet somebody beats WoW's 6.5 million customer figure within the next 5 years.  It might be World of Starcraft or some other game but it won't matter to Blizzard as WoW's going to break 10 million with the expansion.

(Or I might be mad).

And I never said it wasn't profitable. But how many companies can afford to put $100 million into an MMOG? Not very many. Sony can't, not with the losses on the PS3. EA will not, because Mythic is the only dev stable they have that could even come close to producing a not suck level MMOG. Microsoft has shown a complete lack of faith in anything MMOG, such that no group since Turbine has released an MMOG. Asheron's Call 2 will do that a company. Who else is there that can leverage that kind of money? Ubisoft? Not with the Shadowbane cornholing still fresh in their minds.


But that's not what WoW did. WoW didn't just release a stable product (and I disagree that they released that) with high production values. They released a stable product with high production values, low system requirements of one of the most successful PC game franchise brands of all fucking time. You cannot underestimate just how much of the Warcraft brand contributed to its initial success. And in MMOG's and any community-based games, initial success breeds long-term success. 3 million people play it on release, that's probably 6-10 million people who hear from their friends and acquaintances just how much ass WoW kicks. If only 1 quarter of that extra 6-10 million people buy a box and subscribe, you have WoW numbers.

But what other brand can garner that kind of attention? Final Fantasy? Nope, it did well, but not WoW numbers. Star Wars? We've been there. You tell me what brand is going to draw in those kinds of numbers to a PC game. Other than Diablo or Starcraft, I don't see one in this day and age. Not Oblivion, not Ultima, not Might and Magic. Not Quake, not Unreal, Dungeons and Dragons.

No, fantasy-based Diku won't stop with WoW, but it won't get WoW numbers, and sooner or later investors won't invest in clones that don't make WoW numbers. Investors may not know shit about games, but they know about market saturation.

I'm going to dreamland here for a sec.

Let's say EA:

• Decides to spend $50mil on an MMORPG. Not unheard of for them to spend near that on not-MMOGs.
• Decides to let Mythic handle it in the sort of autonomous-relationship/show-me-just-the-numbers way VUG handles Blizzard.
• Gives them carte blanche to develop and test the hell out of it at their own pace.
• Gives them the best programmers, most talented artists and most open-minded producers money can buy.
• Leverages worldwide distribution and hosting partners
• Spends twice that on advertising

Now as I said, this is total dreamworld, but is the parameters by which Blizzard was successful. The missing components are that Mythic doesn't have the rockstar presence beyond the borders of this genre that Blizzard does (though EA could make up for that with enough marketing) and they don't necessarily have a strong IP.

Or maybe they do?

Ultima predates just about everything, but that's less important than what it is. Unlike Generic_License, unlike Generic_ForgottonTomorrow_Movie and unlike a brand that's already defined strongly in a completely different genre ill-suited for migration to persistent world space, Ultima is a game system and strong lore with a strong core following, whether those people are playing UO, grew up with it, or haven't played since Ultima VI.

Is it as strong as Warcraft? No. It started to wane around the time Warcraft first started taking off as an IP to build RTS sequels/expansion packs around, due in no small part to the lackluster marketing support behind the already-dated graphics. So there's basically an entire generation of gamers that skipped over it, like what'll soon become of the Everquest brand unless SOE does some real magic.

But given the past, it would be easier for EA to resurrect the elements of Ultima that contributed so well with its popularity and bring it to the mainstream than to create yet-another-IP. They get the mainstream, no doubt there. But they haven't yet found a way to not alienate large parts of the current playerbase. Mythic could help them there.

And remember, this is the company backing Spore. Will Wright alone probably couldn't pull off that endeavor alone (like those folks at Atriarch). I have my doubts it'll come out anytime soon, nor that it'll work as currently promised. But being backed by EA to create such a fundamentally different game in this age of diku is very telling. For one of the few companies that could out-Blizzard Blizzard, they choose to throw their weight behind a completely different experience.

They're perhaps not even interested in taking on WoW directly. That's what a company would need to do for today.

For tomorrow though? For where things are headed? I'm thinking they're seeing the potential for massive personalization/customization, again, not for us, but for those that follow. If you follow macrotrends at all, you'd see that's directly in line with what today's teens (tomorrow's all-nighters) want. WoW capped the need for this generation of players. Very well too.

Haem, my point is that you don't need WoW numbers to make a lot of money even if you spend a lot on the game.  Not even close.   That's why I disagree with the "WoW killed diku, all companies must now radically innovate or fail" logic.  You don't need to get anywhere remotely close to that many subscribers to make lots of money with an expensive, evolutionary, well-made diku.


How many $100M+ movies are shat out every damn summer?  If watching Vivendi turn $50-80 million into a goddamn billion dollars a year, every year with no end in sight hasn't gotten companies with real, live money (read: not PC gaming companies) interested in the MMO market, I'll eat my hat.  Fuck SoE, Sony Pictures should be the one figuring out how they can climb aboard this gravy train.


Great brand + diku = unbelievable success.  Most valuable brand from here to galaxies far, far away + non-diku = lolgg.  Where's that investment money heading again?  {Yes, this is a cheapshot and not a real argument}  On a more serious note, there are other brands out there.  More importantly, I think you are wildly over-estimating branding as a factor in WoW's success.  Brands may get people to try the game, but brands don't get them to send in 15 bucks every month for two years.  Hell, a lot of brands don't even get people to try the game (DDO).  SWG didn't get nearly as many people to try their product as WoW.  I submit that your conclusion, that this proves that "Warcraft" is a shitload more valuable as a brand than "Star Wars" is the wrong one to draw; instead, I take it as evidence that branding isn't the main reason for WoW's success.  Word-of-mouth was huge, and mutually-reinforced with their (brilliant) polished, NDA-free, beta-as-advertisement strategy.  Finally, even if you are right and WoW's success is largely due to branding, it has introduced over 10 million people to the genre, each of whom has a mouth and the internet and is now conditioned to pay money on a monthly basis for ding-grats-lewt and willing to spread that Gospel far and wide.    


I wouldn't be shocked if no one game ever got those numbers again, but the group as a whole will keep getting bigger.  And again, your claim that it's not worth investing in a diku unless it makes WoW-numbers is just crazy.  You spend WoW money, you only get 1/10th WoW's success, and you are still sitting atop a giant pile of money.

There'll be plenty of space in a few years for ten or so million-player-plus-each games, each of which burns out after a few years and is replaced with a new one.  That's a ginormous, expensive diku launched every quarter or so forever.  A lot like the movie industry.

There will also be smaller, lower production RPG games with lower subscriber bases.  And, of course, the ultra-glossy, 30 million player Desparate Housewives Online, which ABC will have spent a half-billion dollars or so developing.  And some billion-player porn game with giant boobs and animal parts everywhere.  And WUA playing UO with three other guys.

It's not that Warcraft itself is a huge brand. It's a few things together:

• It's a brand built upon the foundation of a game. There's a zillion brands out there. How many come with the built-in audience of gamers? Even Star Wars didn't do that because a lot of the games with that name just weren't that great. And SWG itself did not at all benefit from the much-more-Star Warsy KOTOR launching in the same year.
  
• "Blizzard" is a brand name too. Strong with the gamers they are.
• Diablo to RPGs of the day as Warcraft to RTSes of the day gave way to expectations of WoW to MMORPGs of the day.

Oh, and they made fun game.

But this is just one factor, a line item in my list above.

Does that mean SW + Diku = Huge? Not by itself. You cannot ignore the other critical success factors, the big ass budget to deliver content completion to the last level the autonomy to test endlessly, the rockstar image of the studio.

Suppose, given all these success factors in place already, Blizzard chose to launch a virtual lifestyle experience where combat and raiding was just one part. Do you think they'd have been any less successful?

(I ask, but I don't think they'd have been capable of doing that. Their history is polish, not invention).

I think this is key.  I was going to post about it earlier but didn't have time, and Darniaq beat me to it.

If you look at the history of games (not just MMO games) based after movie, TV, book, or other properties (Journey, anyone?) you find that they are rarely ever hits, and if they are, it's not because of their similarity to the source material, but rather because of their own special charms.  An observational experience just doesn't directly map to an interactive one with the current tech (wow, that sounded beardy).

As allways, my 2 coppers. Blizzard has a history of making polished games. Starcraft, warcraft are and were defining games in there gender. So gamers are gonna pay attention when blizzard does a mmorpg. And they did. Word of mouth and a healthy advertising budget later and by the way the game is polished, together, and the art is warcraft if you know the title. And there you are. But storeys, histories in computer gaming are every where. Will you sign up for "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" the mmorpg? If Sony did it? OK , if Blizzard did it? If an unknown indy did it? Did that make a difference to you? Do you begin to understand what the buzz about blizzard is now?

It's like you put a thin film of diarrhea on your screen and then traced out your post with a silkscreen heat transfer.

I've been doing a lot of research in this area for the last few months and sorry Haemish but El Gallo speaks the truth.

WoW is a wake up call not just to other video game companies but to all of Vivendi's (the parent Vivendi, not Vivendi Games) media competitors and other media companies. Sure, games is still a small fraction of Vivendi's overall revenues (about 1/8 of their music business in 2005) but it's their fastest growing business thanks to WoW, and they provide a disproportionate amount of profit relative to their revenue thanks to the high margins of WoW (in 2005 VG's profit was 1/2 that of music but again with only 1/8 the revenue).

Yes making a game like WoW is an expensive endeavour but saying a company like EA which made over $800 million in profit from 2004 - 2005 can't afford to do that when VUG, which was struggling so bad that rumors were circulating that they were going to be sold off, could is just silly. Also the cost to make WoW is somewhat deceptive since that figure includes the cost of setting up servers and the live operations in the US and Korea and possibly Europe as well. In other words the amount of money spent making the actual game is quite a bit less than the figures you see bandied about. It's unclear if the $25 million figure for EQ2 is just the game development cost or includes the launch costs, and if even it does SOE had the advantage that they already had the infrastructure in place to operate an MMORPG from their other games.

And I know hearing this makes steam come out of schild's ears but money is pouring into online game development and will only accelerate, at least here in the West. Top tier VCs like Benchmark Capital are making serious investments in online gaming (e.g. Linden Labs) and are fighting amongst themselves to invest in the most promising online development studios (Note to any developers reading this thinking about starting their own online game development studio: now would be a good time to do so assuming you have a proven track record).

Sure making MMOGs is still a huge risk but look at all the money being invested in Web Bubble 2.0 (or "Wubble 2.0" if you like) where the exit strategy for the vast majority of those companies is to hope and pray they get acquired for a ridiculous sum of money before anybody figures out they don't have a sustainable business model. In this deja vu bubble environment investing in online gaming seems like a much safer bet than investing in yet another Wubble 2.0 company.

I can't speak for Haemish, but we seem to be agreeing on some stuff lately, so I thought I'd hop in and clarify the point about EA.

It's not that EA can't do it. It's that they haven't proven willing to do it. Look at the breadth of their library, the realms they operate in, their strong console presentation, their established (and refined) development pipeline.

Further, look at EA's MMO infrastructure. SOE they are not (which even SOE wasn't, but they've spent the last few years seriously upgrading their infrastructure it seems, with all in their library likely contributing to the cost of doing so). They can't just take the UO operations and throw a new game at it. We cannot discount the cost of developing an MMO infrastructure from the cost of making an MMO when the company does not have one already set up. Meanwhile, on WoW, how much of Battle.net was able to actually be used in a persistent world where, at any given time, a zone could have as many as 100-150 separate avatars in it, sometimes all at the IF AH? We'll probably never know how much of the 50/62/75 mil numbers touted went to creating the infrastructure, just as we may never know exactly how much in licensing revenue they collect from The9. But that's still buckets of cash other companies either don't have or are disinclined to leverage on just a single experience.

Two words need to be added to that:

IN ASIA

If you look at the west, WOW is an incremental success. EQ roughly doubled UOs subs. And WOW has what? Tripled EQ's subs in the western market? It's Asia that's brought the insane previously unthinkable numbers. Final Fantasy didn't have that because they have a Japanese presence, but not so much a pan-Asian one.

I think they have over 3 million accounts in the West, which would put them at something like 8x EQ's Western subs. 

Don't have a link for that figure, but the fact that WoW broke the million-sub mark just in Europe back in January http://www.blizzard.com/press/060119.shtml and the million mark in North America in August of 2005 http://www.blizzard.com/press/050829-wow.shtml suggests that it is probably not far off the mark.
 

Yes I agree -- EA is incredibly risk averse.

Basically, none. B.Net is just a simplistic chat service with basic match making services. Games are actually run peer-to-peer (actually one peer is selected as the "host" but that can switch if people get disconnected) with only a "heartbeat" signal being sent back to the B.Net servers. In other words B.Net games are not played using dedicated servers like they are for your typical FPS or for an MMORPG.

Split out separately by territory, WoW's numbers aren't that unthinkable except for their NA + Europe numbers which are much higher than what had previously been obtained (closer to 5x - 6x than 8x but you get the idea). In Korea they are not #1 and neither are they in China (NetEase's Fantasy Westward Journey holds that distinction). WoW is, however, the first really successful international MMORPG, hence their eye-popping numbers.

Really good discussion, but I had to jump in again. :)


Not necessarily. First, you're demanding 300,000k sustained subscribers. Not many games can show that.

At 300k, recoupment of $50m is a slog. Let's be generous and say you got all 300k instantly, and kept them the whole time. Box sales at a $30 wholesale will recoup $9m. Subs at $15/mo and (being generous here for a company able to afford a $50m spend!) a 50% profit margin means 18 solid months of recoupment.

But in practice, you figure differently; there's a curve you need to model in. If we're talking peak of 300k subs, it's going to be longer than 18 months. It'll shaped by your acquisition rate and your average customer retention lifespan. A $50m title is almost certainly an "open big" title, which means it acquires its customers primarily at the front end. For ease of modeling, let's say it gets them all in the first few months (it falls off on a log scale normally). They then last whatever the lifespan is. So the simplest model says "get all 300k in month 1, then they last 18 months."

This is an issue because you also need to figure in your retention times. Retention on successive MMO experiences seems to fall, perhaps because people who've been through it before grow bored of the new title more quickly. Unless you can count on bringing in a lot of new folks into your particular $50m title, I'd be very worried about demanding an 18 month subscriber lifespan. Nobody can say with a straight face they have 18 month lifespans. Let's say instead we're talking 6 months. So you need to move 900k units in a sustained fashion.

(Actually, there's a percentage that never signs up even though they buy the box, and there's a percentage of "day 1 churn" and a percentage of conversion churn... so if you sell 300k boxes and you do great by industry standards, let's say you only lose 15% of purchasers in the first month... so you actually need to have sold 345k, and you made a bit over $1m doing so. Anyway, this all complicates this too much, so let's drop it out, but be aware we're simplifying the model hugely).

OK, so at 6 month lifespans, we now have to sell 900,000 boxes. This is... hard. For an MMO. I only know of a handful that have accomplished it, and it took a LONG time to do so in all cases except WoW. if you do it, though, you've made back over half your money already.

Oh, we have to pay taxes. :P

Oh, and a $50m game can look at probably a $10m marketing spend. Consider it "insurance."

Then we need to worry about whether or not something else comes along before the 18 months are up.

Lastly, you need to worry about company finances. Odds are pretty good that if it's a company that spends $50m, it is going to want profitability within one fiscal year.

Anyway, all this just to show that there's assumptions that come with doing a $50m game. It's not at all a sure bet. There's  a lot of risk. Does it still make sense for the right pockets, IP, and game? Sure. But that's going to be a very unusual combination. The opportunity cost of $50m... well, you could make a couple of next gen games instead, set the unit sale threshold lower, recoup sooner but not have ongoing revenue. Or you could make ten MMOs that are $10m apiece and target smaller markets that are more easily mined.

----

On the WoW brand power... Jayce is right. Sure, KOTOR did great, but not on the strength of the SW brand alone. For every KOTOR there are multiple Jedi Power Battles. Blizzard and Warcraft have incredible brand power (and impulse purchase power) that very few things in the game industry can match, and they are almost all homegrown brands, not media IPs: Mario, Zelda, GTA, and so on.

---

Trippy is also right that WoW is a massive wakeup call. It's earning "major media brand" style money, which means major media companies are looking (plenty of them have called me, so believe me, I know). But I can also tell you that by and large, they don't want to pony up $50m either. They have spreadsheets and can do the math just fine. Darniaq is correct to say that what the newcomers want is economics not like WoW but like Habbo Hotel, Runescape, or CyWorld. Small investments, millions of users, smaller revenue per head, viral growth.

When the Diku apocalypse comes, UO having eventually gone off into the sunset, I'll be off on a freeshard somewhere having fun with a few other anachronistic cranks who hate good graphics.  Meanwhile everyone else will be trying to play a new generation of megabucks dingratzletwz games brought to you by the folks behind XXX: State of the Union and The Grudge.

All things considered, I am content with my lot.

Or like NeoPets which Viacom bought last year for $160 million.

Yes. As I said earlier, NeoPets is effectively an MMOG already, but without the clean integrated graphical client (it's all a bunch of web pages and minigames, tied together with community and a commercial economy). It's kinda halfway between XBLA and Puzzle Pirates (and I use that as an example because the minigames in NeoPets are all very different.

And again, I never said that all dikus from now on were doomed to absolute failure without innovation. What I said was that Dikus are not going to compete with WoW at all for marketspace and if they do, they'll get killed, and limp along for years. Obviously, there are still people that will pay for new-ku, and yes, you can be profitable doing it even in this day and age. But I believe you'll be more profitable with less budget if you skip the fantasy diku paradigm altogether and give us something new. LOTRO will prove this, because it won't get the numbers it needs and will limp along for at least a year making as small a profit as DDO. Which may be just fine with Turbine, and may be just fine for other companies, but it won't unseat WoW and neither will anything else non-Blizzard.


Movies are different. They just are. It's a much more "mature" market, there's already an asston of companies with enough money to bankroll 3 and 4 $100M+ movies a year, as well as a robust distribution system AND a secondary market in DVD sales. MMOG's have 1 maybe 1 1/2 real distribution systems which are woefully underperforming (the 1/2 being online distribution), and there are very very few companies with the money to put even 1 $100M game out a year, especially one that requires a hefty monthly overhead that an MMOG requires.


Right, that's where the $100M+ budget comes from. You have to spend that in development to make sure the game is stable, which is what WoW had on top of the killer PC game brand. If you just have a great brand and shitty execution because you don't want to spend the money on a year-long beta, you get SWG's initial numbers (solid 300k) and then declining subs. WoW has done the opposite, and they did so by investing money in stability, which they got mostly right. Don't underestimate the low system requirements as well, which you later example (DDO) did not have.


It IS the reason for the initial success. And once you got the punters roped in, not having an engine or server that shit itself every 6 hours kept people in the game, and they built the word-of-mouth. Success bred success. It's long-term success was a combination of a successful brand which got ASSTONS of initial box sales, and stability which kept them in the game and drew more people in through word-of-mouth. The stability part was what cost them so much money and time.


But they aren't going to do it if the game is just WoW with less suck, because there isn't a lot of suck or frustration points in WoW, at least not when compared to say EQ1. What else are you going to add to the WoW-diku formula that will distinguish a game from WoW? A great brand won't be enough (and there are damn few decent enough brands to do it), and stability won't be enough because the WoW customer has already seen that. More content? MUCH more expensive.


You can't spend WoW money and get 1/10th the success, because anyone willing to spend WoW money wants WoW numbers. You'll either have to do WoW-level quality on half the budget or less or you do something different.

Yep, you have media companies looking at WoW's success. But I can guaran-damn-tee you that they aren't looking to make the next WoW. Why should they? They understand flooding the market in a particular genre. Movie companies don't put out 7 different action movies on one release date, because they know the action movie fanbase would be spread among those 7 movies. They even shift release dates when they see something that might be a big competitor moving into their release space.

The media companies won't give a shit about making the next diku fantasy hack and slash fest. And they won't want a 5-year profit path, they want it on next year's balance sheets. These people are mostly too savvy to piss away the kind of money MMOG's have traditionally done on missed release dates and shaky programming.

A perfectly functioning SWG would still not have been the experience the vast majority of foks attracted by the "SW" name would have expected though. And when I say "perfectly functioning", I'm talking about the combat system as envisioned wrapped within SimBeru. Even with stability, the core concept itself is arguably niche (by comparison to the very not-niche nature of the license).

Besides, as I said earlier, the value of the "Warcraft" brand is to gamers, whereas the value of the SW name is to movie goers and maybe some EU followers. Given the rather lackluster series of SW games that have come over time, KOTOR was the exception.

I largely agree with you about WoW, as you know, but there is more either they or someone with an equivalenty relevant-to-gamers strong brand could add:

• Personalization of character. WoW feels positively Eastern in the amount of customization one can expect without spending time on loot drops.
• Personalization of space. Housing. Mock if you want, but adding housing to an already massive success is going to contribute a lot to retention. And retention is one of the biggest problems in diku-inspired games. Focusing on more of the same generally means a steadily narrowing playerbase.
  
• Relevant PvP. Not just another loot ladder, but actual zone control, with relevant fluctuations in resources that enter and exit the market.
• True world changing events based on narrative story arcs, not just server-wide grinds.
• Truly different gaming experiences within. Not just raiding and, err, PvP raiding, but real different games, something like Puzzle Pirates with tens of millions of dollars thrown at it to tie together the metaphor and make  the games make sense in the totality of the experience.

Now, I don't think WoW itself needs any of these. But if another company came along with a new or resurrected IP that resonates well (which, to me, could actually be "Ultima") and in addition to focusing on stability and content-completion through the last level (as Blizzard did) added the above?

Blizzard proved it was possible to launch stable and content complete. They needed an asston of money to do it. Other companies can too. They'd just need even more, to make themselves relevant in that "hey, we got stuff WoW don't" sorta way :)

None of this is new. Many of us were saying the same thing when DAoC launched. "Hey look, EQ1 done right!"

I think you just summed up the problem with strong IP in the MMORPG market right there: It sets expectations. Look, Star Wars is serious big IP. But what games have REALLY been good games using Star Wars IP? A handful of FPSs (DF2: Jedi Knight being the only truly exceptional one), a single RPG (KOTOR), one decent RTS, one weird-ass console-like games (Battlefront)....and a zillion instances of crap. What's the main market for Star Wars? It's a fucking movie. A trilogy. It's not a game. It's not a genre of game. It's something else entirely.

But everyone knows it, people shelled out billions for the movies, so it's got to make a popular mainstream game -- but what sort? FPS? RPG? RTS? MMORPG? Who the fuck knows? It was popular as a movie. Was it the action? The plot? The comedy? The characters? The universe? How does that translate out into a game -- into finding what sort of game (or MMORPG) it should be?

It doesn't. It doesn't give you jack shit. In fact, the entire history of Star Wars games says online one thing: People like the well-designed and fun ones, which sell well in any genre, and don't like the shitty, boring ones. But that's true of every goddamn game ever, regardless of IP.

That's the problem with using existant (and non-game) IP: It straightjackets expectations. It gamers want "the game" to be as good as "The book" or "the movie", and it makes developers either slack off trusting in the IP rather than their product, or go nuts trying to get ALL the fans who are ALSO gamers -- even though I've never seen ANYTHING that indicates Star Wars fans are more likely to be FPS fans as opposed to RTS fans.

It's stupid as shit, but SWG did it and LOTRO is doing it. (DDO at least had the excuse that MMORPGs were attempts to translate PnP concepts to videogames). And they'll fucking do it with Harry Potter Online, and Stargate Online, and whatever the fuck else they're doing.

Blizzard made it work because Warcraft was a fucking game to begin with. Their "mainstream appeal" was already gamers. Not movie-goers or book-readers or what-the-fuck-ever.

What makes WoW successful has more to do with the professionalism of the brand than the brand itself.  In other words, the reputation of the Blizzard team.

They could make a MMO out of any theme at all, and it would do as well, I think. 

Maybe it was the brand that drew some people in the beginning.  It's the continuing professionalism that keeps people playing.  By that I mean, relatively bug-free, stable servers (although that's been their biggest challenge), not making the mistakes other devs have made (like nerfing classes), plenty of content, and so on. 

They are making money but they are spending it too, and it shows.

Xanthippe, that's like saying that "it has more to do witht he brand than the brand." The execution and polish and professionalism are a HUGE part of the Blizzard brand identity. Arguably most of it. If you had to check off items that identify the Blizzard brand, they'd be

- polish
- quality
- multiplayer
- "*craft"
- a certain sense of humor

I don't think an MMO out of "any theme at all" would do as well (even if it's Blizzard, an MMO about slugs and snot will fare poorly), but I agree that the theme is merely a modifier on whatever the brand is.

So what we've agreed on is the amazing notion that gamers play fun games, and fun games tend to sell better than crappy games, and that "3rd Party IP" does not magically make a game "fun".

Next up, world hunger! :)

Seriously -- that's the basics people keep coming back to. It's not Diku versus VW, or Real-time Strategy versus FPS -- it's good, well designed, fun games versus poorly designed, rushed, and unfun games. Third party IP is immaterial, except as advertising -- it might get your game more PR than independent IP, but in the end your game sinks or swims on it's own, regardless of IP.

Blizzard's reputation for quality and fun made WoW successful far more than their Warcraft lore did.

So the question is: When will game designers (and their producers) accept that licensed IP is little more than a bit of extra marketing buzz? That there's no point in marketing to "Harry Potter fans" or "Star Wars fans" because you're selling a game, not an IP. Someone already SOLD that IP -- it's where the fans came from. If the first Harry Potter movie had been shit and lost money, there wouldn't have been anymore Harry Potter films (at least not for a long time) -- but Rowlings would have continued selling trillions of Harry Potter books.

Lord of the Rings didn't make a bazillion dollars and get those Oscar awards because of Tolkien's IP -- nor did more than a tiny percentage of the theater seats get filled by "Tolkien fans". They were damn good movies -- that's why people watched them.

Too many licensed IP games (and LucasArts is notoriously bad about this) are the equivilant of the damn D&D movie -- you count on the name (the IP) to sell boxes or fill theaters, and figure you'll make your money on the saps who'll try it just on the strength of the name. That might work for movies (although not as well these days), and maybe for games where you make you profit on one-time box sales -- but MMORPG profit models don't really allow for a bunch of idiot fans to snap up the box, hate it, and never play it again.

I think too much emphasis is being put on the warcraft theme. Reality is there's a whole bunch of gamers who are of the "I'll buy anything by Blizzard" mentality. Blizzard just has a reputation of delivering fun, polished games. Hell, it's widely known that they'll cut a game they don't think will be a roaring success. When DAoC was announced I wasn't thrilled, same for SWG, same for just about every other game. But when WoW was announced? For sure I had to check it out, it's by Blizzard.

But I don't think brand is necessary to build success like that of WoW. The brand would have hastened the process, but in the end you have to rely on word of mouth to get those kind of numbers. If I was making the next big MMOG I'd throw a whole bunch of $$ into advertising, make sure to hype it up a fair bit right into the lauch of a beta-as-advertising phase. If you have enough beta numbers you can get a pretty good coverage into the sites/communities people frequent and get a solid baseof people interested in your game. With that you can hopefully launch with enough people to reach critical mass (lets face it, a lot of people wont even touch somthing until it has reached a certain popularity to begin with) and let word of mouth ride those subs up. Then the advertising again. I can see brand name making the critical mass phases easier to hit, but I don't see it being a make or break deal.

That's why few say it's only the "Warcraft" thing. It's more the Warcraft-from-Blizzard-because-they-derivate-very-well-at-a-genres-peak thing.

Exactly. I go with anything in the X-Wing v Tie Fighter series, DF2, KOTOR and Rogue Squadron for the N64 (haven't played Empires at War, but it sounds like it has some fans). Otherwise, the promise of the IP hasn't consistently been delivered against. This hasn't diminished the marketability of the IP itself of course, but it has lowered the expectations of that IP being delivered in video games.

Our work here is done.

;)

Let me try to simplify it.

Good brands get the customer's attention, and will more than likely at least give the player/detergent buyer/movie goer more incentive to buy or try a branded product than a product with no brand.

In the case of games, the only way to try is to buy for the most part, especially with MMOG's. Betas are not a sure proposition for a player, so they often have to buy the game, which generates some money. If they are more likely to buy a branded product than an unbranded one, MMOG developers have already won half the battle.

Star Wars fans interested in online games are more likely to buy a Star Wars online game than a non-Star Wars game, for example.

That's what a brand gets you. It gets your game first tasters.

If you develop it well (Blizzard), you get people subscribed, and those subscribers will want to play with their friends since the nature of MMOG's is one of colloboration. If you develop it shitty (SOE), you get people cancelling subscriptions, never paying for subscriptions, and you get those first tasters to tell their friends that the game isn't really worth the money.

Brands get you attention, solid gameplay gets you customers. Stability gets you returning customers. For MMOG's or really any multiplayer game, returning customers get you more customers (success breeds success) through word of mouth. Without that initial attention, i.e. without a solid brand, you have to spend more money on marketing to get the same effect as just having a solid brand.

Warcraft/Blizzard being a solid brand among GAMERS means that Blizzard could probably have spent nothing on marketing and still gotten SWG numbers or better.

Almost 2 years from release, Blizzard isn't succeeded on their brand alone, while SWG has only their brand on which to build success.

I think this is the next milestone key.  D&L tried to touch it, but I don't think they executed well.  If I could ski down the slopes ourside of Ironforge, or take a ship and fight ship to ship (hello UO) outside of Booty Bay, or hell, just find a tavern to have a good fist fight at (hello Age of Conan) I would have options outside the standard xp sack grind.  Hell, I enjoyed taking my Rogue to higher level zones in my herb hunting sessions almost as much as PvP.  Challenge and allowing a player to think outside the damn box is nice.

Exactly. For reference I look to Club Penguin, a game I keep bringing up because while it's not for any of us here, the concepts within are  relevant. The events within there (and others of the same ilk) are truly different gaming experiences, and more self-consistent with the theme than Puzzle Pirates (a game which tries the same thing). The winnings from these events are money and trophies which contribute to the house-decoration/increasing fund.

Meanwhile, WoW doesn't offer any sort of experience customization outside of climbing the gear ladder (in PvE or PvP). Everything ties directly to whether you are actively playing the game or not. No matter how many weddings, funerals and level 1 Gnome crawls there are, you're eventually forced back into the same linear experience. It's a game enjoyed by many, but honestly, I find very little "massive" about it, beyond the economy.

There's other ways to advance characters in this genre that doesn't require grinding XP and fighting loot tables. The next stage for the genre imho will come when a big company takes the concepts from these indies, wraps it in a clever IP, still retains the fun group-compelled stuff that keeps a large majority of players happy, and integrates the traditional features that retain them for longer than the diku keeps them interested.

You left off all the Larry Holland X-Wing/Tie Fighter games and Lego Star Wars (okay not a great game but fun for the kids).

Edit: bah, missed Darniaq's reply

You're right.  I was confusing brand with lore.  What I meant so say was what Morat20 said


Blizzard's rep drew the first half-million to buy the box, but the successive millions were drawn by the continuing of that shining reputation - which has yet to tarnish.

I won't buy games that come out that are based upon movies no matter how much I like the movie.  Because they're usually just shit slapped together to make a buck, and it shows.

Blizzard has set a new standard for mmogs, and nobody's going to expect less now for the $15/month.

There is a lot to be learned in that Lego Star Wars.  My 5 year old son can't read, but he is completely addicted to that game and knows everything there is to know about the series, the characters, etc.  He rattles off character names that I really didn't even know about.

"Hey, is that R2D2?"
"No DAD! That is R4!!!"
"Alright!  Calm down!"

He wouldn't be such a fan of the lore without that game turning him into a Star Wars geek.

I really think outside the discussion of the power of Blizzard's brand, good management and a track record of executing well, the fact they had a substantial "online service" ready to go and eventually able to match their demand is also a critical factor. 

It's pretty obvious, but some companies can't afford success.  MMO's are first and foremost networked games that not only require basic transport and storage, but backend services and toolsets to enable the fixing and addition of new content and transactions (including billing).  Small companies that can't think 360 degrees of what building out and running an MMO will take will always be impaired.  Not because they're not good or don't have good ideas or good people, but the sheer scale of being able to support tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of transactions a day is just not realistic for them.  As Raph indicated, the cost is not just in the "dev" to build and design the MMO, but the floorspace and lease costs of all that pipe and gear.  And those customer touches (help, billing etc.)

... the cost of leasing, the amortization on all those capital assets... it's just hard to put your head around.  Yeah you can run a small service like I do with some friends with Playerep, but if you want paying customers and scale it's an other league of cost and service you're going to have to prepare for.  /obvious_off

Soln, I agree with the general thoughts in your post. However, I disagree with the notion that Blizzard had a well-established infrastructure and pipeline to deliver content and develop new ones.

A few GDPs-of-small-nations later, they're still using that crappy torrent-stream thing for patching. I thanked God every time a new patch came that I had continued to maintain my Fileplanet sub. That's where I ended up getting my patches most times. This is for the successful game of the West.

Plus, the frequency they develop new content lags way behind SOE. That's not saying WoW is worse or anything. It's just that compared to EQ2, WoW hasn't grown much at all since launch, except for BGs and the Honor Point system.

I think they represent the best example of all of a company that is still very much in learning mode. It's just that they now can afford to hire all of M.I.T. to teach them.

I'm going to agree with your agreement.   :-D   But when I said infrastructure I also definitely meant to include all the business processes and partnerships and basic abilities needed to manage customers and assets (capital, IP or other).  Small shops just have a much harder climb.  Which is why I really believe a lot of MMO or related VW providers can't afford big success early on.   Yes, Blizzard still uses a text protocol  (le gasp!).  It sucks.  Yes their uptime and stability since launch have sometimes been appalling, but it's getting better.  I'm not defending them, I just can't get my mind off of the staggering size of money and complexity needed to run that level of network and backend support.  Millions of customers guys.

The best analogy for Blizzard is AOL.  People hated AOL for bringing the unwashed masses on the Internet.  Same for Blizz with newbs to MMO's.  People hated AOL for defining a certain design of browsers and way of being on the Internet (really really big OS overlay browseremailchat thingy).  Same for Blizz with MMO design.  And how  are they also similar?  They have two of the largest consumer online services and infrastructures (pipe, hw and customer backend) out there.  Yes Google is Google, but it has no payment or billing or CS infrastructure.  So, getting to the scale of having 300k subs like Raph talks about is a really hard climb from a business and operating point of view.   And let's be frank -- who's going to tolerate playing a game with a small provider that can't guarantee them good uptime?  exactly.  That's why I feel a solid infrastructure is another must-have if you want to be in the MMO biz.  And that's also why EA through Pogo (and they also maintain AOL Games) has a better chance with running UO and EA to approach a Blizzard scale than anyone else out there (not including NCSoft, Webzen, SOE, and some probable Korean companies).  My two cents have expired.

Reasonable people would obviously have agreed to disagree ages ago, but this is f13 so SPAM AHOY:


There are over six million people subscribing to WoW right now.  If a development team cannot, several years later, take a comparable development budget and make a diku style MMOG that will, at an absolute minimum, average 300k users over a 2-3 year period, I think there is one and only one explanation: that development team utterly and completely sucks.  This is the source of most of our disagreement on this issue.

I completely understand your points about other expenses, but there are also other sources of revenue (many of which Blizzard eschews, like EQ1's very frequent expansions and EQ2's very frequent "adventure packs").  I also agree that we are vastly oversimplifying the model and that you need to sell more than 300k boxes to have 300k subscribers (just like WoW had to sell over 6 million boxes to have their 6 million subs).

How much has Vanguard spent thus far?  Is McQuaid lying when he says he doesn't even need an EQ1-level subscription base to make money off the game?


I just don't think it requires an unusual combination.  If you assemble talented people who can make entertaining content and spend the money to do it right, there are more than enough customers out there for you.  This RPG model has been dominant for 30+ years and WoW shows that it is more popular than ever.

Sure, Blizzard's brand helps a lot.  No, you are probably not gonna get 7 million customers without it; not with your first game anyway.  But you don't need to be anywhere close to that universe to make a lot of money.  Aim for a half million (less than 1/12th of WoW!), know that you'll be plenty profitable at half that, and hope for double.  And at the same time (if you can't leech a valuable, albeit non-gaming brand) build up your brand so that when you release "gameII" you'll be expecting, not hoping, for a million subs. 

Look at DreamWorks.  "Disney" is one of the most valuable brands in the world, and certainly the strongest "family animated movie" brand by a longshot.  Stronger in that domain than Blizzard is in this one, I'd say.  In 2001, Disney put out two animated feature films (Recess and Atlantis) within a 4-month period.  DreamWorks, without much of a reputation in that area, released an animated family movie between those two release dates.  Not just animated and family-oriented, but fantasy-themed (complete with ogres and fairy godmothers) and full of riffs on various fairy tales to boot.  That's the absolute core of Disney's brand.  Shrek did more than all right at the box office.

Now, that's just one data point, and there are differences between the industries (the reason I used an example wedged between two other releases was to strengthen the anology, but it's certainly far from perfect).  But the basic idea is applicable.  The Shrek team took the basic Disney movie model, tweaked it with its own sense of humor and art style, spent the money to have solid production values, and made lots of money despite not having much of a brand.

I don't see why the same thing can't be done in the MMOG market.  Take the basic model, get a talented team to tweak the model with its own sense of style, spend the money to do it right and voila.  After all, that's what Blizzard itself did.

Unless the real answer is that Blizzard employs people who are vastly, vastly more talented than anyone else in the industry.  I doubt that is true.  Even if it is, they can be lured away.  Or, now that WoW has shown everyone how much money can be made in the field, talented people from other entertainment fields will be lured to gaming.  It'd be interesting to see what kind of gameworld a team from Disney, Pixar or DreamWorks could put together.  Now that WoW has showed them that they would not have to take too much of a pay cut to do it, perhaps someday we will.



LOTRO flopping won't prove anything aside from the fact that Turbine sucks at making games.


WoW + (insert one or more of the following: a different content addition/content quality ratio, Sci Fi, mythological, semi-historical, high fantasy, bigger boobs, smaller boobs, more elves, no elves, all elves, more pvp, less pvp, no pvp, more steamtech, no steamtech, houses, more brown, less brown, more American, more Korean, more European, broadband only, and above all shinier, shinier, shinier and newer, newer, newer). 


Nah.  The fact that WoW will get 5,000% ROI on its $50-100m doesn't mean other companies will say "no way" when offered the chance to make 500% ROI on their $50-100m.  Money is money.  Did 20th Century Fox say "sorry George Lucas, don't make Episode One.  I know it'll make back 5x what it costs to produce, but Titanic cost a similar amount and it made back 10x those costs so we've decided to never again make a big-budget movie unless we are positive it will make as much money as Titanic."  It's just not rational. (We may, of course, wish 20thCF said that or different reasons).

Anyway, we’ll see what the landscape looks like in a few years.  I think there is lots and lots and lots of money still to be made with good, old-fashioned, content-intensive diku games with high production values.  The same people here who are spouting the “WoW’s success means the industry should move away from diku” would be spouting “WoW’s failure means the industry should move away from diku” if WoW failed, because they were the same people who spout “the industry should move away from diku” all day, every day, since 1999 or earlier.

SOE and Lucasarts spent more money on SWG than anyone had previously in MMOG's, so they spent Blizzard-money comparitively. They got the success of a DAoC, but not of WoW. Neither has been happy with the success of SWG, because it wasn't as big as the biggest MMOG at the time.

People who spend WoW-dollars want WoW-results, not success but not as good success. These people don't understand that SWG failed because it sucked, they understand that they put in X to get Y and instead got Y/X. It's only going to take a few MMOG's to release with the WoW paradigm and WoW numbers before they realize doing something like WoW with WoW's budget isn't going to get them WoW numbers before they tell the developers to do something that distinguishes themselves from WoW.

Comic book movies hit it big, until some crappy/mediocre ones came out, and all of a sudden, the comic book movies being made are following a different formula.

Can we go back to the game about slugs and snot?  Is beta announced yet, Raph?  Unless there is raiding content needed to get access to rare snot then my uber-guild are moving to Seed.

I am pretty sure the high score for spend prior to WoW was held by Sims Online.

You know, I never understood that game. I've played the Sims and Sims 2, and enjoyed them (mostly for house building, admittedly) and I know several Sims junkies -- but not one of them showed the slighest shred of interest in The Sims Online.

I'm not sure what convinced them it was a fit for the Massively Multiplayer niche. I don't think many people played it in a way that was conducive to that. Sharing houses, neighborhoods, skins, items -- yeah. But I just don't see what the "Massively Multiplayer" aspect offers to the Sims game. What it enhances.

I think that certainly, since WOW, it's become easier; the total pool of active MMOG players has risen quite a lot. But I think it's a stretch to say "therefore anyone who can't hit 300k sustained sucks." That would mean that almost everyone until now sucks. And that's just not the case. Leaving aside the many instances of talented teams and good products that haven't hit due to the vagaries of the market (it does happen that good product fails to hit, after all), there's still a market curve here that we need to acknowledge. No matter what, over time there's going to naturally be a curve of sizes, and established titles are going to matter a lot, and there will always be titles down in the tail.

When I've graphed userbases by territory, I've always found a powerlaw curve in operation. Assuming WoW stays at its current figures, there's only room for maybe 1 or 2 other 300k titles in the marketplace until the whole curve goes up. Most likely, it'll be one 600k title.


I have no idea what he's spent, and there definitely are other sources of revenue -- expansion packs is a big source because of the box profits, as well as extending the subscriber lifespan, of course. Particularly if you can cut out the retailer from the equation, to get a higher margin.

You can always make money at a smaller userbase -- it's a question of time to recoup, is all. MMOs are unusual for the games biz in that way -- as long as you can run them at a profit month to month by reducing burn rate, you are just about guaranteed to recoup someday and go into the black.


Aiming for half a million with a subscriber-and-box-copy model is a very ambitious target. Selling a half a million of a PC title is a significant achievement. Getting the distribution for a half million requires deep pockets and huge buzz. Take a look at these console sales figures for the month of January to get a better perspective on typical sales:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87212&page=1&pp=50

Keep in mind console moves a lot more than PC does.

Or look at July, where the #1 title, NCAA Football 07 moved less than a million units on all platforms combined.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=113958



Don't get me wrong, it can be done. But let's not underestimate the effort that went into something like Shrek, either. Aside from its estimated $60m budget, there's all the investment that went into Katzenberg and Dreamworks; a bit of a dream team there.

But basically, it feels like you're saying "having a hit is easy, just get a talented team and spend the money." And the entertainment biz just doesn't work that way.

No, it doesn't. Even on the creative side -- your idea has to be good. It has to have large appeal (IE: You can't make the movie YOU want to see if there's only 100 other guys who would really love it, and it's got a 40 mill price tag.). And in the process of making it, you end up making compromises on your original vision in order to actually complete it.

Maybe some scenes just can't be feasibly shot (or game mechanics just aren't workable with today's tech), maybe an actor dies mid-shoot,  or a money-guy with enough pull nixes your idea, or you get bought out and they force radical changes on you.

Even if it all goes well, at the end of the day you're forced to make a zillion up close and tiny visions that might all add up to a finished product that is utterly unlike what you first had in mind.

I can see having a glorious game idea, having plenty of financial backing -- and still turning up a crappy game at the end of it. Maybe you were forcing the technology. Maybe you got so wrapped up in details you started sandbagging the concept and it all fell apart when you came to play it. Maybe you were the only real market for your game in the first place.

I can't even fathom that. It wasn't even MMP, just I think it was 20 people online at once?

Each house had a max capacity of 16 (which was one of its major flaws) but each "city" could hold many houses.

Thought it was the 25mil of EQ2?

Nah, “almost everyone” has too two caveats to avoid admitting suckage :-P  First, “almost everone” didn’t get to spend Blizzard money.  As you (correct me if I am being uncharitable) said several times, one of the main reasons so many aspects of SWG were lacking is that you didn’t have enough money or time to refine the game through iteration.  So, there’s an out for everyone right there.  Second, “almost everyone” didn’t get to release their game after WoW.  Blizzard utterly exploded this market.  The fact that everyone else failed to do that doesn’t mean they suck; it wasn’t an easy thing to do.  However now – after that Blizzard has blown this enormous door open and all anyone else has to do is walk through that door without tripping on the threshold and falling flat on their face – yes, if you can’t average 300k sustained, you do indeed suck.

But, yeah, I am a bit concerned about how many worthwhile games we can get out of the current crowd of MMO designers.  That’s why I hope WoW’s tremendous success draws talented people from other entertainment media (especially movies) to MMOs.  If gaming is no longer seen as a bit of a backwater in the entertainment world, more top-notch talent should flow there.  (This is based on my assumption that many of the world’s A+ animators and computer graphics people go to ILM/Disney/Pixar/Weta/etc. right now, because it is more profitable and they get to play with bigger budgets and better toys).


This is interesting stuff, and I’d like to hear more about it.  I’d also like to hear why you think the future will continue to be like the past in this area.  Distributions that existed when games were struggling to hit a critical mass of subscribers just to survive may not be relevant to an era where the cup runneth over (and over and over and over).


I don’t think making a hit is easy.  I just don’t think a game that has one fifteenth the subscriber base of WoW is a hit.  It isn’t.  It’s a gnat.  Just a very profitable one.

SirBrucing aside, I hope you (the plural you) can understand my resistance to the new conventional wisdom here, which basically goes “See what Blizzard did?  How they made a polished diku-style game with solid gameplay and a distinctive, appealing look and feel?  The game they spent $50m or so to make that is now grossing something on the order of a billion dollars a year?  You know, one of the most profitable ventures in the history of entertainment?  Well, that game right there, there is an important lesson everyone should draw from it.  And that lesson is this: you should not try to do what those guys did.  Run away from that model; run away as fast and far as you can.  Because, you see, this game that turned $50m into a billion per year is absolute, undeniable proof that there isn’t any money in diku MMOGs, so you need to do something radically different than WoW if you are interested in making any money in this genre.  Diku is dead, it’s time to innovate or die!”

Possible?  I suppose, but just barely so.  On its face, it just seems like an utterly insane argument to me.  It certainly is a claim so extraordinary that I’d need to see equally extraordinary proof to believe it, and I don’t think I have.

It’ll be interesting to see what the next few years bring.

I believe the first graphs I did along these lines are in my Small Worlds talk: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/smallworlds.html

To back up for a bit: network effects dictate a particular curve to the distribution of things. For example, the largest city in the world is always exactly x times the size of the second-largest, and has been so since we started recording data. So it's not the otal size, it's the ratio between positions on the chart that stays pretty static. When it shifts, it tends to shift towards monopoly because of the network effects -- people go where their friends are, and when it's abig enough group, it tilts everyone into the one choice.

Different data sets will have different curves. I found power law distributions in the sales of retail games, in the populations of MMOs, in the populations of servers on MMOs, and so on. Power law distributions are everywhere, and tend to survive drastic changes in the marketplace rather well, because they represent ratios, not net figures.

Upon the release of a new game, the thing to realize is that the shape of the curve is pretty fixed; it can be changed, but generally not quickly. So when a new game is added, it usually displaces other games, and the total area under the curve goes up. If you have games at 1000, 500, and 250, and add a new game, you will likely get games at 1200, 600, 300, and 150. The other games shift around to accomodate the shape of the curve. Kinks in the curve are temporary affairs that resolve themselves over time.

Pre-WoW, what we saw was a fairly regular curve. Trumping EQ required a truly large figure -- you had to get 800k just on the basis of Western subs. Now, we have WoW followed by Runescape, Habbo, and so on down the chain (again, counting Western audiences only here). The game that "beats" WoW will likely need to be at around 6m in Europe and North America. The next slot down is to take Runescape's position, and so on.


Well, at that point we're discussing the economics of the Long Tail and all that jazz. Don't get me wrong, the rise of WoW is a tide that floats all boats for sure. It pulls up the curve as a whole. But again, given the shape of population distributions, we will see that the average game will be a gnat, just like the average movie is a gnat and the average record is a gnat and the average book is a gnat.


Well, it's about ROI, and it's about competitive positioning, and it's about what size market you are shooting for. A few hackneyed business world truisms go into the conventional wisdom you're citing:

- Don't go up against a market leader unless you can outspend them and trump them.
- Chase after new markets, rather than fighting for scraps of a maxed out one.
- Try to me a market leader, not a follower.
- A market full of imitators ceases to grow.

I agree that there's a viable strategy to be had in bottomfeeding off of the folks who bounced of of WoW; people will be looking for something "like WoW but without the level 60 game play shift" and "like WoW, but with more/less PvP" and "like WoW but with vampires" and the like. Carving out those niches can lead to profitable businesses, certainly. But you'll always be in the shadow of WoW, similarly to how the previous games were in the shadow of EverQuest. It is also tougher to differentiate yourself, because you'll be caught in a market of ever-decreasing margins and rising costs, precisely because everyone will be so similar.

That's why so many are chasing "blue oceans" instead, going tfor something radically different: they want to grow the market into virgin territory, chasing users nobody else has. That's how Runescape became the second most popular MMORPG in the West.

Except that's never been my argument. My argument has been that unless you do diku as well as Blizzard, you have NO CHANCE. And even if you do diku as well as Blizzard, you still have little chance to make Blizzard money because you aren't Blizzard. Just like EQ was a perfect storm of coincidences (first "true" 3d MMOG at a time when 3D cards were just becoming standard in computers and just when UO was losing so many subs because of the perception of out-of-control PKers), Blizzard was a perfect storm of coincidences (Blizzard money to take their time with development, Blizzard's name being the most likely computer game company to garner mass appeal regardless of what the product was, Warcraft being a very successful brand). And no one else has all of those qualities combined.

So why spend money trying to compete with Blizzard when no one really has all those qualities in one place?

Sure, you might get 100k to 200k subscribers, but it won't be Blizzard money. And even if the company wants to try to out-Blizzard Blizzard and has the financial resources to do it, there are no brands big enough among computer gamers to match up to Blizzard. Thus, instead of throwing good money over bad to get mediocre profits, do something different (but well) and hope to get at least the mediocre profits if not more because you'll be providing something different for the people who will eventually tired of DikuCraft.