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Saturation of the MMO Market
Itix
Member Posts: 9
With the release of many new games the MMO market stands to face a potential saturation. Unlike their single player counterparts MMO's need to maintain a substantial player base in order to make a profit, they can't just sell boxes. Due to the high investment needed to develop a MMO a large amount of game failures brought about by an overly spread subscriber base stands to stiffle the growth of the mmo industry.
The biggest threat to a new MMO is not maintaining a high enough playbase to pay for game upkeep and to create a profit. A declining population in an MMO is devastating due to the fact that even more players quit solely due to lack of population.
Lets look at the current popular MMO's WoW, LOTRO, EVE, AoC, WAR, FFXI, EQ2, Free Realms and many more. Out of that list WoW holds the vast majority, it isnt even a contest. Those 10 million WoW subsribers make up the majority of the MMO playerbase, this is obvious when you look back at how many other games had to resort to several merges just to stay afloat.
Now Lets look at a brief list of upcoming titles
Aion, Fallen Earth, Earthrise, Champions Online, DC Universe, Mortal Online, FFXVI, Jumpgate evolution, STO, SW: TOR
As most of you know this is just a small sampling of the upcoming games and doesnt include many of the f2p games that draw many subscribers.
WIth all these releases it just makes me wonder how these games plan to make a profit. There are plenty of people who are content with the MMO's they are currently playing(People still play EQ and UO). It is also highly doubtful there is a large enough influx of players to sustain the population of all of these games. If just half of the WoW players stay where they are it doesn't leave too many players to go around to an excessive amount of titles.
I just have this feeling that all these new games are going to dilute the industry to point in which many games fail. When prospective investors look into an industry and see many expensive titles going bankrupt it makes them think twice about putting money into new projects and all that does is stifle the growth of the industry.
Any thoughts on this topic?
P.S. I apologize for any lack of clarity this was written at 2 am proably not the best decision
Comments
The more games with more quality the merrier.. Just look at the big picture, in the end it only helps the genre as a whole to grow.
The real issue is when there is a saturation of BAD games, like the asian gridnfests fp2.. those are bad.
Good quality mmos, no matter how many there are, if they are good. Is a good thing.. see my math lol?
And believe me, this games if they are good, they will make profit,
alot of young kids are getting into mmos everyday, they just need a good game to motivate them
If you watch The Karate Kid backwards it's about this karate champ that just kinda slowly becomes a pussy and ends up moving back to Jersey
Zorn, you did it again. Borderline troll.
This very naive/extremist post assumes that those previously mentioned games are targeted exactly for the same MMO crowd that WoW has. Copies of WoW? -Hardly. It is an insult to those developers.
World is not black and white nor is it linear in the scale between the multiple extremes. There's plenty of people to play different shades of gray, green and blue. If a WoW clone would rise up in the near future (and that would be a very close copy of WoW by my definition), the players would simply play the best clone. Rest would continue to play the games they like. Games that are not red but maybe even purple or yellow.
The genre is quite rich in diversity. There's no sense in fitting all the games in a line between points A and B.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
There really are too many MMOG's coming out. I'm sure many of them will fail. Out of the ones that survive we will likely have a lot of diversity. From that diversity we'll have sub-genres. Each sub-genre will probably build its own market and have its own inter-competition between MMOG's in that sub-genre.
Pretty soon you won't just be a MMOG fan. You'll have to be more specific about what sub-genre you prefer. The trend has already started, but its only a matter of time before each sub-genre gets its own acronyms and lingo to further seperate them from the others. You'll feel like an idiot if you don't know acrynyms like PAFPSCPVPMMORPG which obviously means Post Apocalypse First Person Shooter Crafting Player Versus Player Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
The market can only be saturated when there are too many QUALITY MMO's out there, this is far from the case right now. Sure there are lots of MMOs being made (not really more so then other genre games which still turn out nice products with all their saturation) but most of then will quickly be discovered as poor products and they will go away within a couple years after every effort to save them has been exhausted.
I would expect to see more MMOs fail within 2 years then we've ever seen before, with so many more options out there now when people aren't happy with something in a game they can more easily jump ship to a new one. Unlike when there was only 3 MMOs so they were all successfull since there weren't any others you could go to (and they were all polished and high quality for the time they were made).
But it will still be a long time before we hit a point where there are so many quality MMOs that keep players interested so that there aren't enough players to spread around. I would expect some other major form of gaming would start popping up at the same time.
MMOs need time to develop after release, and only the strongest and the fittest will survive(or make big profits)
Competition in MMOs will benefit the end users, us.
Another off-shoot of having many MMOs, is that producers, in an attempt to gain player subs will add new features and innovation to their products, again we the end user will benefit from this.
And lastly with high competition between quality products the monthly sub should drop. Meaning cheaper gaming for us or we can afford to sub to more games. This is yet to happen, I think cos there are still not enough quality games out at the moment..........
This genre hasn't even begun to tap the potential market available.
Persistent online worlds are the future of all entertainment.
The problem is, MMOs lack innovation. Since nearly ten years, quests can be broke down to:
-kill x of y
-bring x to y, fetch x from y
-talk to x
-gather x of y
It's boring, it's repetitive, it lacks dynamic. I don't know why developers care that less about content. I guess, the developement of an MMO works like this: "Hey, we need a new profitable MMO. We need ZOMG-graphics. Guys write an ubaaaar graphics engine. " a few years later: " ok. it's time to start with the netcode." a few month before launch: "damn. we have no content. add the standard quests." a few month after launch: "we need some pvp. add some arenas and ranks to grind."
The only variation a player gets are the different PvP systems, but in most MMOs, PvP is just a useless appendage withouth real influence on the game itself.
I don't think the market is saturated. Imho people are just bored to get the same old meal on different dishes. Devs and Publisher throw around with words like "new","innovative","next gen", "mmo 2.0", but in the end you have to kill 20 rats to level up.
some people thought the mmo market was saturated before WOW existed
Flood of games, too few players cause change in online realm
www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/02/19/flood_of_games_too_few_players_cause_change_in_online_realm/
the mmo market hasnt been tapped yet for the variety it could offer
EQ2 fan sites