Who DOES Blizzard need to fear?

[Venkman]

EA.

I don't care who's actually building it, because they never do either.

So this is why you think Warhammer is doomed too? EA?

I've never felt W40k was doomed. This followed your reply to Soln about Spore. It's that I was referring to. W40k is coming from a company that did most of the work before EA bought them.

And to clarify my issue with Spore: it's way-beyond-the-looking-glass out there. Even the Sims and Sims 2 were just logical extensions of SimCity when the demographic that actually played SimCity was understood and given a more appropriate game. Spore is a cool dream. But even assuming it launches with a Blizzard-level of polish, it's still straight out wierd, and therefore has a higher hurdle in communication to the gamer base. And I don't base this on Wright. I base this on the much older concept of Atriarch, which'll likely never launch but introduced itself much the same way in 2000.

Spore is a completely open ended system. There's no recognizable humanoid foundation from which to spawn. There's no cohesive recognizable narrative. It's a pure 3D community building exercise without the machinima engine that Second Life has become. It's a blowout of the momentary experiences offered in Black & White but in a business model requiring years of retention.

Awesome idea, and will probably be polished. But its challenges are everywhere.

[Cheddar]

When I was first made CCO of SOE, one of the first emails I wrote was one that said "Someone is going to make an uberDiku spending more than anyone imagined, with top notch story and art and experience design taken from their expertise in other arenas, and eat everyone's lunch. We should be looking for alternate markets altogether."

This is, by far, the single greatest quote ever made by you.  May we use it against you in further discussions?

[WindupAtheist]

There's no doubt that I picked up the volume; However, I REALLY picked it up after I left SOE, not when WoW came along.

When I was first made CCO of SOE, one of the first emails I wrote was one that said "Someone is going to make an uberDiku spending more than anyone imagined, with top notch story and art and experience design taken from their expertise in other arenas, and eat everyone's lunch. We should be looking for alternate markets altogether."

But damnit, you're not supposed to go make MyCokeMusicSpace or whatever.  You're supposed to make a damned Koster "virtual world" game, minus the new-genre mistakes of UO and the straightjacketing IP and SOE fucked-uppedness of SWG.  I want a newer and better UO where everything works right, and if you don't make it, nobody else ever will.  It wouldn't be a game that made huge numbers, but I bet it would perform consistently for a long damned time.  Look how long UO has hung on.

[Cheddar]

There's no doubt that words

But damnit, you're not supposed to go make MyCokeMusicSpace or whatever.  You're supposed to make a damned Koster "virtual world" game, minus the new-genre mistakes of UO and the straightjacketing IP and SOE fucked-uppedness of SWG.  I want a newer and better UO where everything works right, and if you don't make it, nobody else ever will.  It wouldn't be a game that made huge numbers, but I bet it would perform consistently for a long damned time.  Look how long UO has hung on.

Isn't that what he has been doing, and pretty much where he is heading?  Maybe I am misunderstanding his posts lately.  I never claimed to be the smart.

[WindupAtheist]

Your mastery of the quote function proves it...

[Trippy]

and Warhammer isn't THAT valuable of an IP.  Even the Warhammer fans I know of are annoyed that the game isn't based on 40k.

America = 40k
Europe = Fantasy.

You're polling the wrong userbase.

Agreed. Local polls doesn't count no matter how large is your circle of friends, but I don't know personally a single human that prefers 40k over fantasy Warhammer. In fact, I don't know a single human that doesn't think 40k is a pile of crap.

I prefer 40K over Fantasy.

[Venkman]

But damnit, you're not supposed to go make MyCokeMusicSpace or whatever.  You're supposed to make a damned Koster "virtual world" game, minus the new-genre mistakes of UO and the straightjacketing IP and SOE fucked-uppedness of SWG

Why do you assume that can't be the same thing? Because it doesn't have "Britannia 2.0" emblazoned on it, or something else?

As an aside, remember just how frickin' long ago UO was envisioned and everything that has come since. Shit, even broadband wasn't that ubiquitous. And nobody new dink about "wi-fi". Using the term "it was a different world" about the mid-90s doesn't even barely come close to doing justice.

I know you don't give a shit. Just had to get it off my chest.

[Kageru]

My hope is that MMORPG's of the scale of WoW are just a transition phase. While the idea of "5 million online!" is sexy most people play in far more limited social circles. Indeed I believe the figure is most people play WoW solo? Meanwhile the massive investment required to support it means high subscriptions, massively complex servers in dedicated hosting facilities and content that must be "stretched" to keep people online even when the content creation can't come close to keeping up.

Ideally I'd like to see the characters kept in a global server but the games hosted in a local trusted server (pretty much a requirement for a fair FPS massive game). That way virtual communities, such as guilds, would become the more permanent social element spanning a variety of games. There would be a flow between games based on interest and which game is "stale" and which has new content. This would also allow a variety of games to co-exist, rather than the current model which encourages people to flow to the behemoth because "that's where all the people are".

The console games could potentially do this, since the model suits them much better. The next generation are all internet enabled, probably capable of hosting a 5 person group (the game logic), and in theory both servers and client could be secured.

[Venkman]

In a sense we're seeing the rise of this in other quarters. Guild Wars for example only uses persistent spaces for social and commerce needs. Everything else is small boutique adventure environments with people invited there (or sent to their own unique separate instance of it).

NWN 1.0 and soon NWN 2.0 do a bit more of what you're talking about. The key is creating the persistent space everyone goes to first. After that, social convention can take over and shunt people where they need to go. The problem with NWN 1.0 persistent worlds (quilt worlds where zones were hosted on individual computers but connected through code) is that so few people knew where to start. NWN 2.0 will have the same problem unless there's more centralized support for announcing the front door to persistent world quilts.

[Daeven]

I prefer 40K over Fantasy.

Heretic. Now go impale yourself on a $50 plastic tank.

[stray]

Who cares if 40k or Fantasy is better? Mythic is being half assed about WH Fantasy anyways. That should be the real point of argument.

[Morat20]

And to clarify my issue with Spore: it's way-beyond-the-looking-glass out there. Even the Sims and Sims 2 were just logical extensions of SimCity when the demographic that actually played SimCity was understood and given a more appropriate game. Spore is a cool dream. But even assuming it launches with a Blizzard-level of polish, it's still straight out wierd, and therefore has a higher hurdle in communication to the gamer base. And I don't base this on Wright. I base this on the much older concept of Atriarch, which'll likely never launch but introduced itself much the same way in 2000.

Spore is a completely open ended system. There's no recognizable humanoid foundation from which to spawn. There's no cohesive recognizable narrative. It's a pure 3D community building exercise without the machinima engine that Second Life has become. It's a blowout of the momentary experiences offered in Black & White but in a business model requiring years of retention.

Awesome idea, and will probably be polished. But its challenges are everywhere.

I don't know what to make of Spore. I'm fully fanboy about it, but that's because Spore is everything I've always wanted in a game. EVER. It's the sort of experience I play games for. (I feel the same way about genetic programming -- it's that kind of cool shit that made me want to be a programmer in the first place).  However, I am keenly aware that I am not most gamers.

On the other hand, Katamari Damancy doesn't look at all like it's something that people would want to play -- yet it's fun as hell.

I don't know if Spore's going to be an easy sell -- but what I suspect will make or break it is the UI. If the interface is as smooth, intuitive, and powerful as Wright claims (assuming gameplay is good) -- the game will be up there as one of the all time biggies. I won't call it a WoW breaker, but it'll make big damn waves in an industry that's gotten a bit stagnant. 

[Trippy]

I prefer 40K over Fantasy.

Heretic. Now go impale yourself on a $50 plastic tank.

I only have a Rhino, is that okay?

[Trouble]

Fear itself.

[ahoythematey]

I still want to play Atriarch.

[Slyfeind]

But. But. It works in Asiaaaa!!!! And cel phone games!!! They all work in Asia!!!! We should be looking to Asiaaaa for inspiration!!!

I've heard/read a less sarcastic version of that so many times...And if Asia is where dev houses are looking for inspiration for the American market, God help us all.

I think it's more like this: "Let's look to Asia for inspiration for online gaming, then sell online games to Asia." Like Asia said "Let's look to America for inspiration for cars, then sell cars to America." Yeah, God help us all because that means more Space Cowboy and Flyff and Hello Kitty Island Adventure, but oh well.

EQ and UO will be around long after our grandchildren have passed away, so we can always go home to them every year around Christmas time. Holy fuck that was an awful metaphor. I'll leave it there because I like making myself look stupid.

[Venkman]

I won't call it a WoW breaker, but it'll make big damn waves in an industry that's gotten a bit stagnant. 

Yea, I really have no idea how good or no Spore will do. I just think it has lots of challenges ahead.

I'm mostly curious about whether it becomes a big game with big numbers or just one of those critically-acclaimed sandboxy worlds everyone talks about but nobody really plays. Like Second Life (almost a million account holders but only 25k actually paying anything for it with a peak concurrency of about 10k).

[Soln]

we're speculating on sutff -- here's my morning prediction

as more games and virtual worlds enter the market, gamers, as opposed to grazers (MyCokeMusicSpace kids), are going to be turned off more and more by the giganto popular titles.  Or those designs which dumb themselves down in the attempt to have millions of regs.  Gamers prefer communities, even if they want to destroy them.  Can you have a community in a title with 100k's of concurrent subs?  The people who empahsize that a game needs millions of subs or concurrent users are only professionals with a deep, deep bias towards advertising.  Yes subscriptions are great, but realistically they know the more eyeballs and box purchases they can get the better they are, since advertising is a much easier business (you're taking someone else's money and they have the risk). 

Who gives a shit if a title has millions of subs?  I never saw pre-WoW people that anxious about L2 or whatever that had millions of active wonks.  If the future is more and diffierent VW games then I don't see huge sub counts as an important criteria, because you can sustain a business much better with a loyal community than temporary grazers running through and posting spoilers and teh h8 everywhere.  UO, DAoC, ATiTD, bloody EVE and SWG -- YES, SWG -- are alll surviving well with obviously <1M communities.   

And Spore will surprise us because the combination of personalization + P2P + persistence + competition will run big numbers with new entrants and WoW burnouts.

[schild]

and Warhammer isn't THAT valuable of an IP. Even the Warhammer fans I know of are annoyed that the game isn't based on 40k.

America = 40k
Europe = Fantasy.

You're polling the wrong userbase.

Agreed. Local polls doesn't count no matter how large is your circle of friends, but I don't know personally a single human that prefers 40k over fantasy Warhammer. In fact, I don't know a single human that doesn't think 40k is a pile of crap.

I prefer 40K over Fantasy.

I also prefer 40k over fantasy. Always have.

[Tale]

My hope is that MMORPG's of the scale of WoW are just a transition phase. While the idea of "5 million online!" is sexy most people play in far more limited social circles.

At the current "7 million online!", I doubt they care :)

[Venkman]

Who gives a shit if a title has millions of subs?

Exactly. There's no community of 7 million people anyway. It's more like a vague thousand per faction per server, further broken down by guilds and alliances. I'd say the average community is no more than the Dunbar number really, since that seems to be how things evolve anyway. Yes, I know there are folks here in communities of hundreds and stuff. I consider those the exception to the rule. Instancing does not require a community of thousands, making the only connection between some groups on servers the economy itself.

However I think WoW has millions because it got millions to a good game that resonates with many cultures. Lineage 2 absolutely does not have that same global appeal. Nor does/will Maplestory. Being big is not an attraction. Being big and good is though.

[Malathor]

When I was first made CCO of SOE, one of the first emails I wrote was one that said "Someone is going to make an uberDiku spending more than anyone imagined, with top notch story and art and experience design taken from their expertise in other arenas, and eat everyone's lunch. We should be looking for alternate markets altogether."

SWG could, and should, have been that uberDiku.

[tkinnun0]

When I was first made CCO of SOE, one of the first emails I wrote was one that said "Someone is going to make an uberDiku spending more than anyone imagined, with top notch story and art and experience design taken from their expertise in other arenas, and eat everyone's lunch. We should be looking for alternate markets altogether."

This is, by far, the single greatest quote ever made by you.  May we use it against you in further discussions?

Now imagine a boss from Twentieth Century Fox or other Hollywood studio saying that.

[WindupAtheist]

I just think people are off-base predicting the demise or diminishment of a business model that has done nothing but pick up steam.  Subscription-based games are the past, the present, and the future for any sort of forseeable timeframe.  Some may be huge and expensive and require millions of subs to get by.  Others may be small and perfectly capable of turning a profit with fifty-thousand subs.    But the emergence of anything else as a serious competitor to this business model is so far off on the horizon that it's like trying to guess who'll be President in 2032.

[stray]

Guild Wars has done fine for itself. Even while flopping in Korea, it has sold something like 2 million boxes (last I checked.....I don't know about the new expansion). And that's still in the mmorpg sphere, which is already "niche" to begin with.

[Margalis]

The problem with subscription models is that people will only subscribe to so many games at once. That moves the industry towards a few mega-games taking all the money. And it has already been moving that way for a while now.

IMO the future of subscription models is in content aggregators like Station Pass, especially as more games come out that are subscription based but are not games you play 20 hours a week for 2 years.

I thnk someone paying $10 a month for PSO, $5 a month for Planetside, $15 for WOW and $5 for CokeMusicMyspace is going to quickly feel nickle and dimed. Paying $15, $25 or $30 for some aggregation for those is going to be more pallatable, especially if that option allows you do to things like keep characters in all games forever without accoutns being deactivated.

StationPass would be a huge hit if SOE had more games worth playing and the games existed on different levels on time commitment. The problem I see with it now is that StationPass basically amounts to:

Choose an EQ (new or old) + Planetside.

[MahrinSkel]

Are PotBS's devs being realistic? There is probably a decent sized market for a more "virtual world" MMORPG, and it's a new genre -- if they're shooting for 300k users, they're being optimistic but reasonable. (Depending on the game's actual quality). If they're aiming at million+, they're deluded.

On the other hand, their 150k to 300k "virtual world" users will stick until they turn the damn lights off.

I've talked to the Burning Sea guys.  Without sharing details I shouldn't, there's not the slightest notion or need of dethroning WoW.

--Dave

[Venkman]

Gotta realize that very few companies would even need to try and dethrone WoW. Only those that absolutely need to brag about subscription numbers need worry about Blizzard. Everyone else is free to identify a sub-niche group of players, grab a few hundred thousand of them, and do just fine.

If they're making a subscriptions-based game.

[Jayce]

The problem with subscription models is that people will only subscribe to so many games at once. That moves the industry towards a few mega-games taking all the money. And it has already been moving that way for a while now.

You talk as if it's a zero-sum, finite-pie sort of game, but it's not.  There are always people entering the genre, leaving it, switching around inside of it, having multiple accounts one place or subscribing to 2-3 different ones.  Or letting their sub keep going even though they don't login for a year.

There are so many variables, I think you can't make any assumptions based on average behavior of a defined number of people.

[Kageru]

My hope is that MMORPG's of the scale of WoW are just a transition phase. While the idea of "5 million online!" is sexy most people play in far more limited social circles.

At the current "7 million online!", I doubt they care :)

Actually I was more talking from the gamers point of view. WoW's 7 million subscribers doesn't really seem to have translated into all that much more content (read, benefit). And in practice I play on a single server (2-4k people?) and in reality spend most of the time gaming with my guildmates (30-50 people, soon to be reduced by the new raid limits).

I don't think the distributed model will happen on the PC though. Since the platform is so incredibly hackable the game must be entirely hosted on company servers. A game where you download to your console, and host 3-4 of your friends, sounds possible with the next gen consoles.

[MahrinSkel]

FWIW, Eve's offline skill gain seems to be the best device for keeping inactive players paying that I've ever seen.  At least a dozen guys in my corp alone who are not playing right now, but log in every once in a while to change their skill training.

--Dave

[Venkman]

I totally agree. The only system that even comes close would be UO's old house decay system, or, in a lighter sense, SWG's vendors (log in, update vendor, log out to play something fun). Eve's is the best one though because the purpose is entirely about further character customization, something everyone needs in that game and craves by default anyway.

I've never questioned why CCP requires people log in to update their skill learning 

[Big Gulp]

If I'm Blizz I wouldn't want to lose 250K folks.

Blizzard just banned 70,000 accounts for gold farming/cheating.  They did it without blinking.  For most MMO's that'd be the majority of their playerbase.

[Margalis]

But at the same time they know most of those accounts will just be re-opened. Banning gold farmers is never a big loss because they just create new accounts.

[Numtini]

Ban 5000 people that buy gold and you'd do a lot better. I imagine it's quite lucrative for Bliz. Ban the accounts and you then get the box sales. Plus you get approval from your playerbase for doing it. I certainly have nice feelings for Bliz whenever I see one of these announcements.