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MMOs are DEAD
Magiknight
Member CommonPosts: 782
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Magiknight
Member CommonPosts: 782
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Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
The article says they are dying because there are so many. One generic one after the next. A few to choose from would be nice.
Not this again...
It makes it dying.
I guess no one took the time to read the article.....The guy is correct, with all of those multiple of choices out there, I find my self only playing one right now while dabbling with another one...so that makes 2 out of all those "mmo's" that peak my interest.
How many are you currently playing? Like actually playing and not just jumping on for an hour at a time?
If thats the case, then I guess cars, food, music, and art is dying since there is so much variety. I mean, this one article writer says so, so it must be true...
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
another one of these?
from another writer with no new ideas to write about and rehashing old NEWS?
I could almost predict that " pc gaming is dying " or another " mmorpg's are dying " new thread will pop up soon.
No..I read it right, and I figured you might be one of the few that would be playing more than one, as in really playing. I knew he didn't mean that mmo's as a whole are dying off, just the more traditional ones, being replaced by fast food type "mmo's". You know, some thing that most people would not bother putting effort into. Or zooming to end level for the end game and content...
Yes. This is a known thing called "the long tail".
It's been seen in almost everything. MMOs are no different.
Raph Koster explains it: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/05/29/mmo-long-tails/
Once upon a time....
I've made a thread like this in the past. I think most mmo fans do at some point. See you on the other side
Is this some sort of bizarre irony?
The long tail theory indicates that it will become more and more profitable to cater to smaller and smaller niche audiences... yet the OP is crying about MMOs dieing because he thinks all modern MMOs are the same.... most likely because his particular niche is not being catered to.
Raph Koster: "But there’s even more to it than that. You see, as long as the network as a whole continues to grow, then a rising tide lifts all boats. The tail chunk slowly gets taller and longer. Even niche games start to grow. But if there are no niches — meaning, the games on offer are all pretty similar to one another — then the growth of the network can be capped. In effect, too many DikuMUD clones limits the total population of MMO players. People gravitate to the shiniest best one, and the tail starts to die off. The winner takes all, effectively monopolizing the audience."
That monopoly is effectively WoW. But I think it's stagnated beyond that point and the whole is slowly dropping off. In it's place are some variety of multi-player games taking the flow of players out of the MMO scene.
Once upon a time....
The author of that article seems to have trouble holding on to an actual point. He also seems to forget his opening point somewhere mid article.
The entire thing sums up to logic based around the stance that: 'MMOs are dying because too many of the same big budget clones are being made, and may be dead because those same big budget clones aren't being made anymore'
Seriously? Yes MMO are changing, and yes MMOs as we have grown to know them may be largely gone, but that's not exactly the same as dead. There are two aspects of that article that actually hold water.
1) The standard formula needs to change. (and to a large extent it IS changing)
2) Funding for western MMOs is drying up. (Which is a bad sign true)
On the first point, this is mostly an indicator of change in the genre. The MMOs of tomorrow probably won't look the same as those of the past 10 years. The change is needed, we've just been plugging our ears and putting it off. Some may hate it, but it's no less necessary.
On the second point, this isn't just an indication of MMOs. Flagpole projects in general are lowering in number. This is true of a lot of games, movies, etc. That doesn't mean we are done seeing blockbuster hits. It just means that the bubble has bursted. We were making way too many of them, and way too many that were sub-par. When you ride that high to the peak of a bubble, everything on the way down seems like 'we're doomed!'. Not so, it's the natural course of how these sorts of things go.
You can have endless progression and funding. The party has to stop at some point, and someone's gotta take care of the mess.
it's funny that you chose the 4 most cookie cutter genres of blatant homogenization to refute the OP's post that, due to massive reincarnation of the exact same thing, clearly it means the genre is fully fledged and functional and in no way sitting on a bubble waiting to be popped.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/HEH...Good one..^^
Homogenized =/= dead. In all 4 cases you still have custom / creative works that break the mold. What you're describing is the natural progression ALL creative mediums go through throughout history.
Whenever a new medium is created, it gains in popularity. When there's enough interest, it becomes profitable. When it becomes profitable, business / industry starts getting involved / interested. Once that happens, you have people who try and formulize what's successful. It's a contradiction in many ways, but it's what businesses do. You don't maintain profits by primarily taking uncalculated risks. However, you need to take risks if you want to get an edge.
Which is why typically smaller / independant interests who can afford the risks and need the edge do so, and more established / larger parties typically don't. Cars have custom builders and shows, food has countless independent restaurants / chefs / recipes / etc., music has self-published artists, and traditional art has independent shows / exhibits / etc. Yes, they are all dominated by old-hat business ventures, but they've been around long enough & popular enough to warrant such. It doesn't stop the people in those perspective industries from getting around that aspect of each one, and as a result each of those have evolved over time.
Saying mmo's are dead is purely based on the perspective of the gamer. I for one think that it is dead, but only because the mmo's I loved back in the day are either gone or have changed so drastically to try to stay relevant that they aren't fun anymore.
So for me, and me alone, I find the mmo genre to be dead as a doornail.
Playing: Smite, Marvel Heroes
Played: Nexus:Kingdom of the Winds, Everquest, DAoC, Everquest 2, WoW, Matrix Online, Vangaurd, SWG, DDO, EVE, Fallen Earth, LoTRo, CoX, Champions Online, WAR, Darkfall, Mortal Online, Guild Wars, Rift, Tera, Aion, AoC, Gods and Heroes, DCUO, FF14, TSW, SWTOR, GW2, Wildstar, ESO, ArcheAge
Waiting On: Nothing. Mmorpg's are dead.
It's one thing to quote Raph Koster it's another thing to demonstrate you actually understand the long tail theory. Have you really thought it through? The mid section of the graph is actually far more healthy than it was in the 2006 graph shown in Koster's article.
However, for a game to cater to a very small niche in the tail it's also got to be made for a very small amount of money, and that's what most niche players refuse to accept. Most bitter vets are not bitter that there are no niche games aimed at them, they're bitter that no big budget MMOs being made to cater to their little niche.
Not dead, just sleeping. give it 2 years or so and we'll start to see some interesting new games come out. We are moving back into the land where niche games are king, just like the late 90's and early 00's. A few years of niche will happen and then once something is found tat works well we will see another game pop up like wow. It will probably be blizzard too... They canned Titan so they could sit back and take notes I'm sure.
Nail. On. Head.
I consider myself one of those vets (I was recently shit on for self proclaiming this in the title of a post), but not so much bitter.
Sure, I'd love to have my cake and eat it too. I'd love to have tens of millions of dollars spent on a highly polished, content-laden game full of the sandbox greatness that I yearn for.
Do I think that is a reasonable set of expectations for developers and investors? HELL NO.
What my community niche can't really seem to accept is that those games we loved so much were bug-riddled, time-sink laden and often times broken; yet we managed to have a blast anyway because they offered tools to let us create our own content.
If SWG (the apex of a lifetime of gaming, personally speaking, therefore my example) launched today in a modern-day-equivalent state that it was launched as back in '03, we'd shit a BRICK. The battlegrounds were broken, the login system was completely unprepared for player numbers, some classes were essentially useless and/or broken, and the general level of polish was laughable. We'd never get passed all of that today. Our standards have been raised by the very games we lament for the supposed destruction of the genre. That's not even mentioning what the rest of the community would do to the game online, as they entered the genre later, they always had a choice to abandon such ridiculousness for a more polished product.
We, the part of the community that self-identifies as jaded vets, have to start to realize that this is all about money. No one is going to put up the amount of money that would be required to make a game that would satisfy our niche. This is due to the simple fact that WE ARE A NICHE. If you honestly believe that our "2nd Coming" MMO would come along and convert all of these newer (almost) lobby-style MMO game players to our preferred playstyle, YOU ARE DELUDING YOURSELF.
So what is it going to be? Do we want the features that gave us the freedom to enjoy our games the way we used to, or do we want oodles and oodles of developed content and polish?
We can't have both, not anytime soon.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
"The mid section of the graph is actually far more healthy than it was in the 2006 graph shown in Koster's article."
Can you list some game examples to show what you mean here?
Once upon a time....