MMORPGs, not worth making...

thexrated

...unless you are a large studio with good financial backing.

It is probably a better idea to focus on a single player RPG prior to even trying to create MMOs.

The main problems I see with the creation of  MMO today (please add more problems):

- brutal and vocal fanbase that will slaughter you, it is very unlikely that you can meet their expectations

- the market is dominated by few major companies

- no room for pioneers anymore, missed the boat

- developement time is long, 4+ years

- development and marketing cost is significant

- hardware and customer support cost a lot

- finding investors will be a lot harder now

 

With a smaller single player title a small studio can create name and refine their development process. To name few companies that have succeed with their RPGs:

- CD Projekt RED STUDIO with The Witcher

- Piranha Bytes  with Gothic

- Ascaron with Sacred

In order to create a relatively successful single player title a small studio would have to show some ability, but would not face as brutal marketplace. The Witcher in particular showed that a good title can succeed. In MMO arena, only small studio that has succeed in a long time was CCP with EVE and that was probably more due to their time to the market - if the game launched today, as it was back then, it would most likely to be lynched to death before it ever got any chances to succeed.

What do you guys think?

Zlayer77

I think you are partially right, lack of finacial backing migth sink an MMO before it even gets a chans to set sail. But the Lack of good Ideas is the real villan behind why so many companies try and fail in this market.

Even with good finacial backing games like WAR and AOC have failed to meet expectations. Warhammer is an exellent example how bad ideas and miss reading your player base can lead to disaster.

My personal belief is that the industry needs some fresh thinking. Many studios have like the movie buissness run out of creativ material. And are now running remakes of what hase come before. In Hollywood we have seen remakes, effect films and cross overs from Comics and games become more and more frequent. Doing english remakes of original japanes films is also something that has started to happend in the last few years. This makes it evident that good storytelling in todays movie market is hard to find. Sadly the biggest effect or explosion is setting tone. Same can be said about the gaming Industry, technicaly it has advance light years from the games of the late 80s and early 90s. But concept vise and story vise they haven't done any leaps at all. I think the reason for this is that the old pioneers were visionaries, They had a creative skill more like artists. Todays developers are Technicaly skilled but they lack the soul that makes the imagination run wild. Sadly the music industry has gone the same way.......

What we need are fresh Ideas and cooler concepts, Developers needs to take some risk and go for unconvetional things or we are gona be stuck in this treadmill for many years to come...

Dark_raver

do new titles offer free trials of any sort?

i think alot of people think why would i change a game and pay for another when it will be likely a clone not worth playing

so maybe a free trial is 1 key for succes

popular games:

wow (offers 14 day free trial)

eq2 (offer 14 day free trial)

uo offers (14 day free trial)

gw ( offers free pvp)

besides that you can choose alot of ftp games

 

im not sure those trials are still active but atleast they had those

 

 

Jimmy_Scythe

Originally posted by thexrated


...unless you are a large studio with good financial backing.
It is probably a better idea to focus on a single player RPG prior to even trying to create MMOs.
They actually cost about the same in terms of man power and time to develop. Single player RPGs were some of the first games to require 5+ lead times back when most other genres only took a year or two to create.
The main problems I see with the creation of  MMO today (please add more problems):
- brutal and vocal fanbase that will slaughter you, it is very unlikely that you can meet their expectations
This right here is what's killing the MMORPG market. It happened to flight sims, it happened to traditional wargames, it is happening right now with MMORPGs. This is the main reason why I won't open a custom private server or MUD. Being the developer or admin of an MMO is a thankless job that is way more trouble than it's worth.
- the market is dominated by few major companies
You do realize that you don't have to dominate in order to be successful, right? You just have to turn a profit. A small company can actually make a wider profit margin, and generate profit sooner, than larger company even if they are making less and have a smaller subscription base. Runescape, Club Penguin, Sociolotron, all were made by small companies on a shoestring budget and all of them are making money. You don't hear as much about them, except maybe Runscape, but they're doing' just fine.
- no room for pioneers anymore, missed the boat
There's always room for originality. But the bigger the budget, the less likely you're going to find it. This is why the indie scene is getting so much attention lately. Since they have small, often times nonexistent, budgets, they take less of a risk by being original. Games like Passage, Today I Die and Everyday Shooter are very much outside the mainstream, but since the developers of these games contributed nothing but their time and effort, there was no real risk to speak of.
If you want original, you're going to have to look to smaller projects like Love or Golemizer. No, they aren't as flashy as Mass Effect, but there are a lot of us that will still give them a try and more than enough people that will reward the developer's efforts with cash.
- developement time is long, 4+ years
With MMORPGs, development is never finished. Unlike single player games, You are constantly squashing bugs and making changes to the game as long as the game is running. The initial dev time can be shortened by using third party tools like Torque or Ogre 3D, but it isn't like indie developers haven't spent five or more years on a single project before.
- development and marketing cost is significant
If you're only looking to fill a small niche, then you don't really need anything other than word of mouth. Private servers rely entirely on word of mouth and are usually funded by donations, yet they seem to keep the doors open. Then again, most private servers can only host about 1500 players concurrently, so they can stay running on a population that wouldn't be feasible for a AAA title. An indie MMO would be run almost exactly like a private server, so they bear keeping in mind.
- hardware and customer support cost a lot
Keep the hardware spec low and a lot of this goes away. Run the game client in a browser and you'll be almost completely off the hook.
- finding investors will be a lot harder now
This is why an indie MMO developer would have to work on their project part time. It's not impossible. And when you look at shitty web games like Neo Pets or Adventure Quest, you'll notice that they're still doing well finacially even though they were obviously zero budget games made by one person. Although Neo Pets has gotten a lot bigger since MTV bought it....

 

I agree with your points when it comes to triple A titles, but indie development is a completely different ball game. The numbers that are too small for big budget, triple A games are astronomically profitable for small, zero budget indie games. After all, there are probably more people playing Mafia Wars on Facebook than Call of Duty 4.

tupodawg999

What jimmy_scythe said plus:

Seems to me the financially safest route for a developer would be to look for an 11/20 situation made up of two scores combined: one score out of ten in niche appeal and one score out of ten in content, bugs and polish.

For example, an MMO space sim with PvP has a niche score of 10/10 by which I mean there's a potential market of people who really, really want a game like that. This group may will put up with a score of 1/10 in bugs, content and polish (for a while) because the combined score is 11/20. It's the same with something like Darkfall - (though whether they'll be able to do an Eve, who knows). If a company delivers a game for a 10/10 niche which is 1/10 on bugs,content and polish, on the sort of investment that low sub numbers could pay for, and then gradually pushes up their bugs,content, polish score to 2/10 then they'll pull in people who are 9/10 on that niche and etc.

I think any type of game that has a 10/10 niche score will probably always hit a numbers glass ceiling at some point because any type of gameplay that has fans extreme enough to put up with 1/10 polish will also have extreme anti-fans. It's a chalk and cheese thing. The biggest subscriber numbers will come from sitting right in the middle of the mainstream and appealing outwards but that means competing with WoW from day one. But any company who starts out by following the niche route can then use the profit they make to branch out. They wouldn't even neccessarily have to branch out that far - you could make clones of Eve that were fantasy, mad max, mech or fallout style without changing the design much and soak up more niche players.

WAR I think picked the potentially very profitable RvR niche but seemed to lose their nerve a bit and compromised too much on the the PvE side trying to please the middle ground. They'd have been better off making a game that was perfect for the ex-DaoC crowd and then used the profit to subsidise the development of a Warhammer themed WoW clone (imo).

So... pick a niche and focus on giving that niche exactly what they want. There's gold in the hills, not in the valley with the gorilla.

"brutal and vocal fanbase that will slaughter you, it is very unlikely that you can meet their expectations"

There's some truth in this but a lot of it is self-inflicted through trying to please everyone when pleasing everyone is IMPOSSIBLE.

Also the most damaging anti-game trolls are non-troll people who feel they have a justified cause - so companies that lie, cheat or decieve are foolish as well as morally wrong because in the long-term no amount of paid publicity can defeat negative word of mouth and non-troll people who feel they have cause will never stop whereas normal trolls will eventually move on.