Go to any grocery store, head to the cereal aisle, and look at the 10+ generic brands of Cocoa Puffs. Each one will have some little twist different from the others ( lower fat, lower calories, etc. ) but in the end, it's just a box of Cocoa Puffs.
Yep, that about sums it up...
Yes I believe the market is saturated at the moment. Especially in the Asian sector of the market, where they are pumping out those "dime a dozen" games like bunnies. All with the grand idea of making a quick buck with so called copy-cat games. ENOUGH!
I wish a developer would come along and take a chance on something different and unique, ya know role-playing doesn't always have to be set in a fantasy or sci-fi world. But unfortunately the people willing to try something innovative usually don't have the financial backing needed to make an A+ MMO.
I'm sure something will come along that captures are attention in the future.
Until then we just wait on the next big thing and subsequently get disappointed when it arrives.
I don't think the market is saturated, in fact I think the market is craving for new titles, but those titles, while not neccesarily have to be innovative, they have to be on par or better to the current leading products from multiple angles in order to become successful.
market is saturated of half-baked products that are not even on-par with current games released years ago. You need to give players the reason to abandon the games they invested years in, made all social connections, invested time to build good guilds and develop good structure. To make players abandon all that, the game has to offer all that the old game offers and significantly more. The fact that the older, established product had years to clean up and polish the expirience is a handicap yes, but it is like that with all new products entering any market. It doesnt matter that WOW for example had problems at launch, it is completely irrelevant, as any new game entering the market is not competing with WOW at launch, it is competing with WOW in 2008, with one expansion and years of polishing behind them - tough? - of course its tough, and thats why we don't see any of those haf-ass, half-baked products making even a dent in WOWs armor. It will be so untill someone finally gets their act together and launches a superior product.
Market is hungry the problem is no one so far was a cook good enough to make a filet mignon good enough to satisfy that hunger.
I agree, it would be nice to see some different MMO settings. But, with that said, what's stopping Sci Fi MMOs from being re-skinned WoW clones? Eve is good, Eve is different. Unfortunately, Eve is also relatively unpopular, meaning developers are probably more likely to swing toward the cookie cutter MMO template than the riskier 'hardcore' template.
As you'll see, EvE is right down there, below the likes of Dofus (I've never even heard of it).
So yes, Eve is unpopular, relative to WoW and the MMO genre as a whole. Games developers would take one look at that chart, see WoW striving to 10,000,000 subscribers and assume that that's what players want. This is why the market is currently saturated with WoW clones.
According to that chart Eve is the 7th most popular MMO. That isn't unpopular, and would be acceptable to many games developers. Again you are comparing to WoW. Which games have competed with WoW? None. Basically you are saying all MMOs but WoW are unpopular.
Is LotRO unpopular? I always hear about how well that has done. It has less subs than Eve, even with all the LotR legacy. The example of Eve gives me the opposite conclusion to you. Ie: doing something different can get subscribers, even by a fairly unknown devloper. And as I say, I don't play Eve.
Besides, what makes a good MMO? EVE Might not have as many subscribers, but according to polls the people who play EVE are happier with the game than WoW. That should tell you something.
It's not ALL about the money, it's also about making a game that people will enjoy for a long time. And for some devs, it's probably about making a game they can be proud of, and that's fun to play, not just a game that caters to the masses.
I agree, it would be nice to see some different MMO settings. But, with that said, what's stopping Sci Fi MMOs from being re-skinned WoW clones? Eve is good, Eve is different. Unfortunately, Eve is also relatively unpopular, meaning developers are probably more likely to swing toward the cookie cutter MMO template than the riskier 'hardcore' template.
As you'll see, EvE is right down there, below the likes of Dofus (I've never even heard of it).
So yes, Eve is unpopular, relative to WoW and the MMO genre as a whole. Games developers would take one look at that chart, see WoW striving to 10,000,000 subscribers and assume that that's what players want. This is why the market is currently saturated with WoW clones.
According to that chart Eve is the 7th most popular MMO. That isn't unpopular, and would be acceptable to many games developers. Again you are comparing to WoW. Which games have competed with WoW? None. Basically you are saying all MMOs but WoW are unpopular.
Is LotRO unpopular? I always hear about how well that has done. It has less subs than Eve, even with all the LotR legacy. The example of Eve gives me the opposite conclusion to you. Ie: doing something different can get subscribers, even by a fairly unknown devloper. And as I say, I don't play Eve.
7th out of 13. That's not great. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure CCP are perfectly content with their loyal, steady fan base. What I'm saying is that when new developers look at that chart, they'll assume that WoW works and people like it. They won't look at EvE and think 'wow, they have a relatively small yet loyal fanbase, let's clone EvE!'.
Well, some probably think that. It'll be easier to get funding for a project people believe in, and if it's modelled after a great success, it'll probably be easier to get investors to believe in it..
But hopefully, developers will look to EVE and see what a small Iceland-based company has actually managed to do. Who's to say that if a huge company put a lot of effort into making something like EVE, it wouldn't be an even better game than WoW?
Well, some probably think that. It'll be easier to get funding for a project people believe in, and if it's modelled after a great success, it'll probably be easier to get investors to believe in it..
But hopefully, developers will look to EVE and see what a small Iceland-based company has actually managed to do. Who's to say that if a huge company put a lot of effort into making something like EVE, it wouldn't be an even better game than WoW?
I completely agree - I just hope a company will have the guts to break the mould.
Originally posted by UltimateN00b Yes, it is saturated with EQ/WoW clones. You can only clone simplistic theme parks enough times until people start saying "This sucks compared to WoW/EQ, the games they are cloning."
Though there are areas that differentiate EQ(II) or WoW, there are only so many ways to reinvent the wheel and keep the mechanics fresh. Perhaps an issue is that Dev's are trying to meet the challenge of appealing to a wide range of game 'styles'. You also have to contend with the cafeteria mentality of players, some want a little of EQ, DAoC, AO, SWG, PvE, PvP, etc. mixed into their 'all in one WoW killer'. With the success of WoW investors and others may see this as the bench mark. Its not a mystery that there are millions of gamers out there console and PC respectively, the game designers, along with the investors all want a piece of that market.
The Old Timers Guild Laid back, not so serious, no drama. All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
There are a great many games "in development" than what the list shows.
Let's see from off the top of my head:
Green Monster Games has one codenamed Copernicus
BioWare
THQ has a warhammer 40k mmo in the works
CCP/White Wolf have world of darkness
Interplay (or whats left of it) retained the rights for a fallout mmo and have been building a team for it
NC Soft has a couple in development
Funcom already started working on a new IP
Spacetime Studios has one but they are having issues and laid off like half of their team
Mythos appears not to be completely dead
and that's just right off the top of my head, I am sure there are 10 more that I could think of if I really tried lol. This is one segment of the industry that won't be shrinking any time soon.
Why would investors want to invest in a market with too much competition. I don't think that the micro transaction games will decelerate too much because they often use the transactions as investments for building their gaming provider service. Only the major brands will thin out.
I not only think that the MMO market is saturated, I also think it's declining.
...And why is it declining? You now have what I call "hybrid games" that combine the best of conventional features with the best of MMOs. Games like Spore and Diablo III. These are games that allow people to play with others, while still giving players choices as to what features they will use or not, depending on preference. Plus they are cheap for the consumer. They are also easier and less costly to produce. They give players MMO-like options, plus options you can't get from MMOs.
MMOs were already heading in this direction with all the instancing, simplified gameplay, and fast-action twich combat. But the problem with MMOs is that they just cannot do things other games do well because of the limitations of having 1,000's of players who are expected to play exclusively on a common "massive" shared server cluster. You can't do cutscenes or cinematics. You have customer relations issues. You have limitations on modding, and no single player version.
I predict that the WoW killer won't even be an MMO in the true sense. It will be a peer-to-peer hybrid game like I described. It will be just as engaging as WoW. It will be cheaper than WoW. It will also solve a lot of WoW's problems by doing away with the thing that makes WoW an MMO: the centralized server. Instead, the WoW killer (and MMO killer) will base its multiplayer on a decentralized network of peer-to-peer groups like MySpace and Facebook.
This, I predict, is a good thing. The problem with MMOs right now is that the publishers are trying to rope people who don't like role playing games and shared worlds into $15 a month service contracts. Once these people discover that they can get what they want without the "Massive" part of MMO, the genre will be left to the hobbyists and role-players where it should be.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I agree. If we're speculating, I think it is quite a big possibility that MMOs will go that way. Not long ago I was thinking that in general you really are playing the game with 15-20 different people, 5 at the time most of the times. The rest is just there for the sake of so called world immersion. However there is a big price to pay for that, that is - to make everyone exist in the same space, it is almost impossible to make the world as immersive as let;s say single player - except some rather generic and loose lore driven quests, there is no story. Characters inside the worlds are not storytellers and do not actively influence the story. Nothing is definite, there is no destruction or death, or birth and building.
It is possible that someone will figure that they can not do it for 5000 people, but will be able to do it for 5 or 10. It is also quite possible that that will spawn a real next generation of MMOS in different shape, because then someone from the competition could figure - "well, lets do the same thing those guys did, but make ot for 15 people instead of 10" and so on and so on.
The market isn't saturated, but overwhlmed with clones. Look at WoW for example. MMOs were around for years before hand, but WoW deviated enough from the back-then standard of "normal" to become the huge success it was. I remember googling for MMOs when WoW was in early development, and thinking "meh, so it's another franchise being sucked in to the MMO world." I was proven wrong. It did a lot of things differently, new ideas and new concepts. It bloomed like no MMO before it. All we need is this to happen again. Some development studio to do something so familiar, yet so different.
The problem we face today is that carbon copy cookie cutter MMOs exist in such high numbers that it's hard to seperate the diamonds from the coal.
WoW succes is becouse of the already biggest fanbase they had, diablo- warcraft -starcraft.
They took alot from other mmo's already out there, put alot of featers into there game, with some little new things, make it very casual friendly with cartoon look, the mass loved it, and biggest THEMEPARK MMO was born at right moment.
Now a majority try same but its tolate and many suffer from this or fail.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
not many mmos are in development, because just about every well-known company is developing one, or has one already released. Notice how many indy companies are making MMOs now?
Playing: EVE Online Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2 KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
Comments
Yep, that about sums it up...
Yes I believe the market is saturated at the moment. Especially in the Asian sector of the market, where they are pumping out those "dime a dozen" games like bunnies. All with the grand idea of making a quick buck with so called copy-cat games. ENOUGH!
I wish a developer would come along and take a chance on something different and unique, ya know role-playing doesn't always have to be set in a fantasy or sci-fi world. But unfortunately the people willing to try something innovative usually don't have the financial backing needed to make an A+ MMO.
I'm sure something will come along that captures are attention in the future.
Until then we just wait on the next big thing and subsequently get disappointed when it arrives.
I don't think the market is saturated, in fact I think the market is craving for new titles, but those titles, while not neccesarily have to be innovative, they have to be on par or better to the current leading products from multiple angles in order to become successful.
market is saturated of half-baked products that are not even on-par with current games released years ago. You need to give players the reason to abandon the games they invested years in, made all social connections, invested time to build good guilds and develop good structure. To make players abandon all that, the game has to offer all that the old game offers and significantly more. The fact that the older, established product had years to clean up and polish the expirience is a handicap yes, but it is like that with all new products entering any market. It doesnt matter that WOW for example had problems at launch, it is completely irrelevant, as any new game entering the market is not competing with WOW at launch, it is competing with WOW in 2008, with one expansion and years of polishing behind them - tough? - of course its tough, and thats why we don't see any of those haf-ass, half-baked products making even a dent in WOWs armor. It will be so untill someone finally gets their act together and launches a superior product.
Market is hungry the problem is no one so far was a cook good enough to make a filet mignon good enough to satisfy that hunger.
Relative to what? WoW? Eve is not unpopular.
Well... yes. That was sort of my point.
Take a look at this chart:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
As you'll see, EvE is right down there, below the likes of Dofus (I've never even heard of it).
So yes, Eve is unpopular, relative to WoW and the MMO genre as a whole. Games developers would take one look at that chart, see WoW striving to 10,000,000 subscribers and assume that that's what players want. This is why the market is currently saturated with WoW clones.
According to that chart Eve is the 7th most popular MMO. That isn't unpopular, and would be acceptable to many games developers. Again you are comparing to WoW. Which games have competed with WoW? None. Basically you are saying all MMOs but WoW are unpopular.
Is LotRO unpopular? I always hear about how well that has done. It has less subs than Eve, even with all the LotR legacy. The example of Eve gives me the opposite conclusion to you. Ie: doing something different can get subscribers, even by a fairly unknown devloper. And as I say, I don't play Eve.
Besides, what makes a good MMO? EVE Might not have as many subscribers, but according to polls the people who play EVE are happier with the game than WoW. That should tell you something.
It's not ALL about the money, it's also about making a game that people will enjoy for a long time. And for some devs, it's probably about making a game they can be proud of, and that's fun to play, not just a game that caters to the masses.
Relative to what? WoW? Eve is not unpopular.
Well... yes. That was sort of my point.
Take a look at this chart:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
As you'll see, EvE is right down there, below the likes of Dofus (I've never even heard of it).
So yes, Eve is unpopular, relative to WoW and the MMO genre as a whole. Games developers would take one look at that chart, see WoW striving to 10,000,000 subscribers and assume that that's what players want. This is why the market is currently saturated with WoW clones.
According to that chart Eve is the 7th most popular MMO. That isn't unpopular, and would be acceptable to many games developers. Again you are comparing to WoW. Which games have competed with WoW? None. Basically you are saying all MMOs but WoW are unpopular.
Is LotRO unpopular? I always hear about how well that has done. It has less subs than Eve, even with all the LotR legacy. The example of Eve gives me the opposite conclusion to you. Ie: doing something different can get subscribers, even by a fairly unknown devloper. And as I say, I don't play Eve.
7th out of 13. That's not great. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure CCP are perfectly content with their loyal, steady fan base. What I'm saying is that when new developers look at that chart, they'll assume that WoW works and people like it. They won't look at EvE and think 'wow, they have a relatively small yet loyal fanbase, let's clone EvE!'.
Well, some probably think that. It'll be easier to get funding for a project people believe in, and if it's modelled after a great success, it'll probably be easier to get investors to believe in it..
But hopefully, developers will look to EVE and see what a small Iceland-based company has actually managed to do. Who's to say that if a huge company put a lot of effort into making something like EVE, it wouldn't be an even better game than WoW?
I completely agree - I just hope a company will have the guts to break the mould.
Though there are areas that differentiate EQ(II) or WoW, there are only so many ways to reinvent the wheel and keep the mechanics fresh. Perhaps an issue is that Dev's are trying to meet the challenge of appealing to a wide range of game 'styles'. You also have to contend with the cafeteria mentality of players, some want a little of EQ, DAoC, AO, SWG, PvE, PvP, etc. mixed into their 'all in one WoW killer'. With the success of WoW investors and others may see this as the bench mark. Its not a mystery that there are millions of gamers out there console and PC respectively, the game designers, along with the investors all want a piece of that market.
The Old Timers Guild
Laid back, not so serious, no drama.
All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
There are a great many games "in development" than what the list shows.
Let's see from off the top of my head:
and that's just right off the top of my head, I am sure there are 10 more that I could think of if I really tried lol. This is one segment of the industry that won't be shrinking any time soon.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
Why would investors want to invest in a market with too much competition. I don't think that the micro transaction games will decelerate too much because they often use the transactions as investments for building their gaming provider service. Only the major brands will thin out.
Way to many EQ clones out there.
I not only think that the MMO market is saturated, I also think it's declining.
...And why is it declining? You now have what I call "hybrid games" that combine the best of conventional features with the best of MMOs. Games like Spore and Diablo III. These are games that allow people to play with others, while still giving players choices as to what features they will use or not, depending on preference. Plus they are cheap for the consumer. They are also easier and less costly to produce. They give players MMO-like options, plus options you can't get from MMOs.
MMOs were already heading in this direction with all the instancing, simplified gameplay, and fast-action twich combat. But the problem with MMOs is that they just cannot do things other games do well because of the limitations of having 1,000's of players who are expected to play exclusively on a common "massive" shared server cluster. You can't do cutscenes or cinematics. You have customer relations issues. You have limitations on modding, and no single player version.
I predict that the WoW killer won't even be an MMO in the true sense. It will be a peer-to-peer hybrid game like I described. It will be just as engaging as WoW. It will be cheaper than WoW. It will also solve a lot of WoW's problems by doing away with the thing that makes WoW an MMO: the centralized server. Instead, the WoW killer (and MMO killer) will base its multiplayer on a decentralized network of peer-to-peer groups like MySpace and Facebook.
This, I predict, is a good thing. The problem with MMOs right now is that the publishers are trying to rope people who don't like role playing games and shared worlds into $15 a month service contracts. Once these people discover that they can get what they want without the "Massive" part of MMO, the genre will be left to the hobbyists and role-players where it should be.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I agree. If we're speculating, I think it is quite a big possibility that MMOs will go that way. Not long ago I was thinking that in general you really are playing the game with 15-20 different people, 5 at the time most of the times. The rest is just there for the sake of so called world immersion. However there is a big price to pay for that, that is - to make everyone exist in the same space, it is almost impossible to make the world as immersive as let;s say single player - except some rather generic and loose lore driven quests, there is no story. Characters inside the worlds are not storytellers and do not actively influence the story. Nothing is definite, there is no destruction or death, or birth and building.
It is possible that someone will figure that they can not do it for 5000 people, but will be able to do it for 5 or 10. It is also quite possible that that will spawn a real next generation of MMOS in different shape, because then someone from the competition could figure - "well, lets do the same thing those guys did, but make ot for 15 people instead of 10" and so on and so on.
WoW succes is becouse of the already biggest fanbase they had, diablo- warcraft -starcraft.
They took alot from other mmo's already out there, put alot of featers into there game, with some little new things, make it very casual friendly with cartoon look, the mass loved it, and biggest THEMEPARK MMO was born at right moment.
Now a majority try same but its tolate and many suffer from this or fail.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
WoW has also been marketed INSANELY well.
There's a reason even people who didn't even play normal computer games before now play WoW..
not many mmos are in development, because just about every well-known company is developing one, or has one already released. Notice how many indy companies are making MMOs now?
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -