I honestly don't really care what the monetization is - I've enjoyed B2P, sub, F2P, whatever type games. If I like it, I support it. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't mind paying something reasonable for my entertainment.
That being said, I will say that a box fee or sub is a barrier of entry for me - if I'm on the fence, I won't try it until I've had enough exposure to assure myself I'd probably have fun with it. If it's F2P - hell, it's just bandwidth and I'll try just about anything then.
I really liked @H0urg1ass 's post - that summed up just about everything enjoyable about MMOs. I recognize it's nigh-on impossible for any one title to satisfy all of them.
4. Get rid of the "Leet Loot Rulz" mentality. Combat should be skills centric not loot or twitch based.
What? This is the problem right here imo. You want another type of game. In the RPG genre you are playing a character not yourself. If you need to show off your leet twitch skills you don't need an RPG.
Ex: My mage is casting a fireball not me.
Actually, you've just highlighted a different problem entirely: you're basically saying that certain mechanics that you like are by definition part of the genre. If anyone disagrees with your preferences, you want them out of your genre, thus narrowing it.
That said, you're really only wanting to label things differently. A significant fraction of the best games defy pre-existing genres. I care if a game is fun, not whether or not it technically meets someone's definition of an MMORPG.
I dunno but if we go by Superdata you should probably be asking Riot games, the guys who made League of Legends, or are we talking about actual MMOs here?
Since you are stuck on trying to be negative on every single post.....here is a shiny Opal!
You literally started a thread that had a Superdata graph with MMO earnings and League of Legends at the top. It has the most money with the most players and then when I say to ask Riot games about your question in this thread about MMOs retaining players you dismiss it as negative.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
4. Get rid of the "Leet Loot Rulz" mentality. Combat should be skills centric not loot or twitch based.
What? This is the problem right here imo. You want another type of game. In the RPG genre you are playing a character not yourself. If you need to show off your leet twitch skills you don't need an RPG.
Ex: My mage is casting a fireball not me.
Actually, you've just highlighted a different problem entirely: you're basically saying that certain mechanics that you like are by definition part of the genre. If anyone disagrees with your preferences, you want them out of your genre, thus narrowing it.
That said, you're really only wanting to label things differently. A significant fraction of the best games defy pre-existing genres. I care if a game is fun, not whether or not it technically meets someone's definition of an MMORPG.
I am going by what I learned about RPGs since 1974. If you think you are playing yourself as that mage you are an idiot. Period.
If you are playing a game which the DM has setup you are playing a character that is YOURSELF, then you are playing a special case exception. But the I need to be leet is about EGO.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Very easy , and a glaring example .. Of what could have been .. Archeage .. Provides nearly everything needed ...... Except they included the invasive cashshop..
And i have said before and ill say it again Archeage , SUb only server with Cosmetic shop only , If XL games let Trion open one it would be packed in 8 hours , and they would need to add others asap , There other servers would become ghost towns ...
Archeage was garbage and I never even saw the cash shop, no way would I have considered paying for that game.....The problem we are facing is that the genre is dying, at least in PC mainly form.....I think the next big MMO is going to come in mobile format, simply because it wil lattract a much larger customerbase than the PC ones will...Unfortunately msot of us lose in this scenario but the days of that virtual world to explore and play for 5 years ended with WoW.
DMkano, you have always been a mouthpiece for the new, post sub, 'establishment'... But, sadly, that established 'new modern' way of thinking has killed this genre. You are the mouthpiece of the carpetbaggers that have trodden this genre into the ground for a quick profit and now wonder in mock surprise where it has all gone. I don't trust what you say, or put an ounce of credibility in any of your questions or statements.
I am not a mouthpiece for ANYTHING, whatever nicely labeled box you want to put me in - that's your own doing.
I am just addressing the current situation of how things are - as in reality of MMO monetization today.
Pure p2p is dead - it is completely unsustainable today in EVERY trial and study done by 3rd parties it was shown as a failing model longterm, unless subsidized by cash shop revenue stream.
Cash shops are here to stay.
Pure p2p is dead.
This is the hard truth, trusting me or not won't change this fact.
Futhermore, it was never sustainable. MMOs that didn't have add on sales were few and far between. Whether it was expansions (EQ, UO), additional box sales (UO, EVE, L2, AC), or cash shop (UO) there was always something augmenting revenue.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
it was a joke. Calm down hero. Besides someone posts the Superdata report every single month and has for a long time now. Yet you act like it is the first time you have seen it. Come on, as long as you have been on this site?
All joking aside and MMO semantics aside if League of Legends is pulling in the players and money it is shouldn't the top dog be the obvious place to start.
What do they monetize? What is the content release cycle? Marketing? Gameplay? Player retention rate? Player return rate? player spending habits? Etc...
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
DMkano, you have always been a mouthpiece for the new, post sub, 'establishment'... But, sadly, that established 'new modern' way of thinking has killed this genre. You are the mouthpiece of the carpetbaggers that have trodden this genre into the ground for a quick profit and now wonder in mock surprise where it has all gone. I don't trust what you say, or put an ounce of credibility in any of your questions or statements.
I am not a mouthpiece for ANYTHING, whatever nicely labeled box you want to put me in - that's your own doing.
I am just addressing the current situation of how things are - as in reality of MMO monetization today.
Pure p2p is dead - it is completely unsustainable today in EVERY trial and study done by 3rd parties it was shown as a failing model longterm, unless subsidized by cash shop revenue stream.
Cash shops are here to stay.
Pure p2p is dead.
This is the hard truth, trusting me or not won't change this fact.
For the most part, correct. WoW, EVE Online, and FFXIV are the only sustainable MMOG's left which are primarily funded by subscriptions. Even those three have cash shops with a few vanity and convenience items / services.
We live in a time where people constantly whine about $30 games being too expensive, and may God have mercy upon you if a game you sell for $49.99 has less than 30 hours of content, because the players sure as hell won't. So when you charge $15 / mo. straight up on top of a box price, you're expected to deliver the world in a nice gift basket every month. For many companies this just isn't possible, hence the shift to selling content and features piecemeal.
Purely P2P games are dead and gone. Outside of a trio of holdouts (barring extremely obscure niche games or MUDs which may be lurking about), the model just doesn't work for the vast majority of modern MMO gamers, especially since many of them are quite honestly too stupid to realize that F2P is costing them far more in the long run.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
Immersion, story, fluent gameplay, exquisite use of the word massively . Marketing. Funding the game with mobile games, mobas ect One thing I've noticed is the gameplay in modern games is just way too fast, for example combat. It might seems flashy and uber at first but is usually shallow like a jacuzzi. As an mmorpg player I'm interested in a big vast ocean to drown myself into. Many things about modern games are just too shallow and fast. Another example would be character developement.
Talking about games where thousands of players exist simultaneously in a single instance and mechanics related to such games.
The world needs to be dynamic with real permanent change caused by player actions. If they nail that aspect, new "content" creates itself. Developers would just need to make subtle adjustments to keep things moving along at a good pace.
NPCs need to have complex simulated lives with a real need for player help (i.e. "one of" quests) in response to current game events.
We should never see mobs spawn and they should behave like opportunist nomads.
Quests need to be long, complex and group focused. That's not to say that players can't solo (since this genre attracts a lot of lone wolves that will solo anyway) but they shouldn't be able to complete the quest by themselves - just contribute to it. What we should never have to see again is someone else doing the same exact shorty quest we just did as if we hadn't just completed it and fixed whatever the problem was.
In short, many of the better ideas that EQN had thanks mostly to Storybricks and Dave Mark.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
The game needs to be fun. If the game isn't fun, nothing else matters. And if the game is fun, a lot of flaws can be overlooked.
True, but I think that wont be enough to keep new players long term. I think it also need to surprise the players now and then. When the game is so predictable that the only thing you need to learn are a few specific boss mechanics you loose something.
And you can't really try to be another game, Wow and Lineage might have done great for many years but the thinking that the world is ready for a new Wow have failed again and again. Those games are already doing what they do well enough and beating them at their own game have proven close to impossible.
We need something that is different but still fun. Something that don't feel like we already played it 10 or 15 years. And one way or another that game needs to surprise us now and then and force us to learn new things instead of just offering more of the exact same. That isn't easy to make or we already had a few new huge MMOs since after 2004 (a few games like GW2, ESO and FFXIV have done pretty well but I wouldn't call any of them "huge").
There is no magic answer to this - if companies knew what this was - everyone would be following this formula. Certain things are obvious - like game polish - yes that's a must - and yes this is expensive. The real problem is - competition - the frequency of NEW "big name/quality" games being released on Steam/ consoles etc... is so high that even if you have a KILLER MMO - the players will leave to check out new Witcher or Skyrim, Fallout or Overwatch etc... No matter how awesome your game is - players will leave to check out these major releases. After players leave - many of them never come back - and over time - you just bleed players - this is again inevitable for majority of the games. Yes there are exceptions to this - but these are FEW and FAR between, the standard is - irreversible player decline over time. But retaining players above even 30% past the first several months has been a problem that nobody has been able to crack in a 100% surefire way yet. Instead of trying to solve this problem - IMO - the game companies have realized that it's probably much better to put out more "smaller" games - like 1 per year, than to spend 100+ mil dollars on a single game every 5 years. So it's just a different approach - they are not trying to keep the players for a long time - they know that many are gonna jump ship after 2-6 weeks - so they just put out games more frequently. Again instead of solving the HARD problem (like P vs NP, which is one of the hardest problems to crack) - game companies have adapted to reality of how people play games today, and are "retaining" players in a different way - by trying to have new releases more often. Bottom line - trying to solve this problem is probably just a waste of time and money - figuring out how to skirt around the problem and come up with creative ways of achieving the same thing (player numbers) - is probably a much smarter way to go about it from a pure business perspective (dollars spent).
I don't think releasing small crap clones helps anyone long term. I you don't want to put the work and money into a game you probably should pick another genre to maximize profit, collectible card games to mention one need a very limited investment to earn loads of cash.
People don't need to try driving a Trabant if they have a Cadilac, the reason people jump games all the time is that they are unhappy with the game they currently play. If you see almost everything the game have to offer in 3 weeks there is not really much reason to stay longer. There is more to it, if the game is fun enough people will stay longer even if it is predictable and offer little new but it is way harder to blow people away when you have little new to offer and a limited budget at that.
It is not a waste of money if you actually solve the problem. Blizzard made an insane amount of money on Wow and NC soft the same on Lineage. A lot of players for a long time mean an insane amount of money. But it is risky since if you fail it might kill your company unless you have a huge funding. Mythic is just one of the companies that died because it tried to gamble everything and failed.
But with the right ideas and a good crew you can rake in loads of cash for a long time.
People want to blame everything because they can not find a game to play.
WoW killed the genre
FTP killed the genre
Cash Shops killed the genre
Themepark killed the genre.
Those things kind of did kill the genre. WoW's success lead to themepark over saturation lead to cash shops and free to play which lead to a spiral of cash grabs, poor quality subsidized MMORPG and negative monetization gimmicks.
The world needs to be dynamic with real permanent change caused by player actions. If they nail that aspect, new "content" creates itself. Developers would just need to make subtle adjustments to keep things moving along at a good pace.
NPCs need to have complex simulated lives with a real need for player help (i.e. "one of" quests) in response to current game events.
We should never see mobs spawn and they should behave like opportunist nomads.
Quests need to be long, complex and group focused. That's not to say that players can't solo (since this genre attracts a lot of lone wolves that will solo anyway) but they shouldn't be able to complete the quest by themselves - just contribute to it. What we should never have to see again is someone else doing the same exact shorty quest we just did as if we hadn't just completed it and fixed whatever the problem was.
In short, many of the better ideas that EQN had thanks mostly to Storybricks and Dave Mark.
This would work - the problem is - nobody so far has been able to even come close to pulling this off.
The dynamic virtual world with intelligent NPCs who have complex simulated lives is something beyond the scope of ANY dev studio today.
I hope that this changes soon, as this would be a complete paradigm shift for MMOs as we know them.
The ideas that EQN and Storybricks had never even got to ALPHA stage as was revealed by ex-SOE/Daybreak devs - they were just ideas on paper. They never got to the point of even putting the AI to work in any sort of programatic fashion - so a single line of code was never even written for any of the advanced Storybricks AI within the scope of EQN period.
Yep.
Consider that for a second - it was just ideas on paper - it never even got close to being even considered seriously, because once they looked at the scope of it - they knew that it was simply far beyond something that could be delivered realistically. This is where the feature cutting mode went into overdrive - as ideas had to meet reality - and we know how it ended - so much was cut that there was nothing left and they scrapped the whole thing.
I think what's sad is that many who followed EQN still have this feeling that the original ideas presented with Storybricks were doable - turns out it was a pipe dream.
But having said all this - I'd love to actually see this happen someday in an actual playable MMO.
Dave Mark begs to differ:
“All of those things that were promised with the AI were true and deliverable. It was not vaporware. In fact, after leaving the project (something I did not want to do), I ended up going straight to ArenaNet (thanks to my dear friend Mike Lewis) and spent a year implementing much of the same architecture and design. Some of it was used in the Heart of Thorns expansion to GuildWars 2 — the rest was prototyped up for possible use in future ArenaNet titles. (Much of the reason that some things were not used is that they were too much of a departure from the established gameplay of the GuildWars 2 franchise.)”
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
The world needs to be dynamic with real permanent change caused by player actions. If they nail that aspect, new "content" creates itself. Developers would just need to make subtle adjustments to keep things moving along at a good pace.
NPCs need to have complex simulated lives with a real need for player help (i.e. "one of" quests) in response to current game events.
We should never see mobs spawn and they should behave like opportunist nomads.
Quests need to be long, complex and group focused. That's not to say that players can't solo (since this genre attracts a lot of lone wolves that will solo anyway) but they shouldn't be able to complete the quest by themselves - just contribute to it. What we should never have to see again is someone else doing the same exact shorty quest we just did as if we hadn't just completed it and fixed whatever the problem was.
In short, many of the better ideas that EQN had thanks mostly to Storybricks and Dave Mark.
This would work - the problem is - nobody so far has been able to even come close to pulling this off.
The dynamic virtual world with intelligent NPCs who have complex simulated lives is something beyond the scope of ANY dev studio today.
I hope that this changes soon, as this would be a complete paradigm shift for MMOs as we know them.
The ideas that EQN and Storybricks had never even got to ALPHA stage as was revealed by ex-SOE/Daybreak devs - they were just ideas on paper. They never got to the point of even putting the AI to work in any sort of programatic fashion - so a single line of code was never even written for any of the advanced Storybricks AI within the scope of EQN period.
Yep.
Consider that for a second - it was just ideas on paper - it never even got close to being even considered seriously, because once they looked at the scope of it - they knew that it was simply far beyond something that could be delivered realistically. This is where the feature cutting mode went into overdrive - as ideas had to meet reality - and we know how it ended - so much was cut that there was nothing left and they scrapped the whole thing.
I think what's sad is that many who followed EQN still have this feeling that the original ideas presented with Storybricks were doable - turns out it was a pipe dream.
But having said all this - I'd love to actually see this happen someday in an actual playable MMO.
Dave Mark begs to differ:
“All of those things that were promised with the AI were true and deliverable. It was not vaporware. In fact, after leaving the project (something I did not want to do), I ended up going straight to ArenaNet (thanks to my dear friend Mike Lewis) and spent a year implementing much of the same architecture and design. Some of it was used in the Heart of Thorns expansion to GuildWars 2 — the rest was prototyped up for possible use in future ArenaNet titles. (Much of the reason that some things were not used is that they were too much of a departure from the established gameplay of the GuildWars 2 franchise.)”
Not to get into a pissing match but other devs from EQN tell a completely different story.
Yeah I'm sure people say all kinds of shit. It was always the same at my workplace: many people with no clue were convinced they had all the answers.
But no need to see who can piss farthest when we can just check out Hero's Song in a month or so.
After Arenanet Dave went on to work with Smedley on Hero's Song. Many of these ideas are part of that game. You can check out the preview Bill did here.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
The world needs to be dynamic with real permanent change caused by player actions. If they nail that aspect, new "content" creates itself. Developers would just need to make subtle adjustments to keep things moving along at a good pace.
NPCs need to have complex simulated lives with a real need for player help (i.e. "one of" quests) in response to current game events.
We should never see mobs spawn and they should behave like opportunist nomads.
Quests need to be long, complex and group focused. That's not to say that players can't solo (since this genre attracts a lot of lone wolves that will solo anyway) but they shouldn't be able to complete the quest by themselves - just contribute to it. What we should never have to see again is someone else doing the same exact shorty quest we just did as if we hadn't just completed it and fixed whatever the problem was.
In short, many of the better ideas that EQN had thanks mostly to Storybricks and Dave Mark.
This would work - the problem is - nobody so far has been able to even come close to pulling this off.
The dynamic virtual world with intelligent NPCs who have complex simulated lives is something beyond the scope of ANY dev studio today.
I hope that this changes soon, as this would be a complete paradigm shift for MMOs as we know them.
The ideas that EQN and Storybricks had never even got to ALPHA stage as was revealed by ex-SOE/Daybreak devs - they were just ideas on paper. They never got to the point of even putting the AI to work in any sort of programatic fashion - so a single line of code was never even written for any of the advanced Storybricks AI within the scope of EQN period.
Yep.
Consider that for a second - it was just ideas on paper - it never even got close to being even considered seriously, because once they looked at the scope of it - they knew that it was simply far beyond something that could be delivered realistically. This is where the feature cutting mode went into overdrive - as ideas had to meet reality - and we know how it ended - so much was cut that there was nothing left and they scrapped the whole thing.
I think what's sad is that many who followed EQN still have this feeling that the original ideas presented with Storybricks were doable - turns out it was a pipe dream.
But having said all this - I'd love to actually see this happen someday in an actual playable MMO.
Dave Mark begs to differ:
“All of those things that were promised with the AI were true and deliverable. It was not vaporware. In fact, after leaving the project (something I did not want to do), I ended up going straight to ArenaNet (thanks to my dear friend Mike Lewis) and spent a year implementing much of the same architecture and design. Some of it was used in the Heart of Thorns expansion to GuildWars 2 — the rest was prototyped up for possible use in future ArenaNet titles. (Much of the reason that some things were not used is that they were too much of a departure from the established gameplay of the GuildWars 2 franchise.)”
Not to get into a pissing match but other devs from EQN tell a completely different story.
Yeah I'm sure people say all kinds of shit. It was always the same at my workplace: many people with no clue were convinced they had all the answers.
But no need to see who can piss farthest when we can just check out Hero's Song in a month or so.
After Arenanet Dave went on to work with Smedley on Hero's Song. Many of these ideas are part of that game. You can check out the preview Bill did here.
Heros song supports what 200 players?
The world generation is something that Dwarf Fortress has done since 2006. It's a variable script, it's not advanced AI that generates 1000's of years of history and NPCs.
How deep is the AI in game?- we'll see, my guess is that it's nowhere near what EQN pitched in terms of intelligent NPCs.
So again in terms of ideas and scope I don't see Heros Song coming even close.
Smaller scale, yes. But "a single line of code was never written"? Lol. Who knows, Dave Mark pops in here now and then maybe he'll see this and can address the no line of code comment.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Not every single element of an MMO needs to be unique. But the overall package needs to offer a something to the target audience that is better than anything else out there in a meaningful way. If you can get that, and not manage to ruin your game through another really horrible feature then you're golden.
I think the problem most games are missing is they are failing to set themselves apart in a way that is meaningful. Voice acting every quest is not all that meaningful. Changing the setting is rarely very meaningful. Making classes work slightly differently generally isn't meaningful enough.
The differences between WoW, Everquest 2, LotRO and SWTOR are not meaningful. The differences between WoW, EVE, Runescape, Crowfall, and Star Citizen are quite meaningful. Even the differences between WoW and ArcheAge are fairly meaningful.
You're talking about WoW which was an anomaly not reproducible by anyone (many have tried), not even Blizzard themselves. They tried with Project Titan and it didn't work out.
Right ideas and a good crew has been happening since WoW and the "raking in of cash for a long time" has not matched WoW (unless you are counting MOBAs which is en entirely different genre).
So clearly it takes more than right ideas and a good crew - again there is NO magic formula that will deliver what WoW did - because that had to do with so many additional variables like timing, state of the market etc... it's probably never going to happen quite like that again for a long time.
Look at the last 12 years - how many huge budget MMOs have been attempted - and how many of them have matched the massive success of WoW?
Consider Blizzard themselves - how come they haven't been able to match WoW with any of their other titles?
It's a moving target - the market and playerbase are constantly in flux - formulas that worked in 2004 don't work anymore today.
And considering that it takes years to make a AAA MMO - the target is the market and playerbase about 5 years into the future - which in our ever-accelerating world of fast change is A LOT harder to do now, than it was back in 2004 when WoW hit the market.
Really? The "right ideas" was doing about the same as everyone else?
You are certainly right that formulas that worked in 2004 don't work today but that is more or less the only thing people have tried.
Wow presented something the general gaming population never seen before in a competent way, that is what it takes to get a similar success. Trying to make an improved version of Wow will at best give you an average MMO because people already played loads of similar games and that wont blow anyones socks off.
So the question is if you can make a MMO that is so different from the games the average gamer played that it feels like an entirely different beast but still is very fun. You could remake something old better but I don't think UO, SWG or even AC have that in them. Or you could make something new and different, like Minecraft did for the single player sandbox (and I am not saying that you need to make a sandbox here).
I think that can be done.
The market is moving like it does because the current formula doesn't work anymore, MMOs similar to Wow will continue to dwindle because you can only do the same thing so long unless you work on football manager (Soccer fans seems far less easily bored). So the genre can slowly die or re-invent itself.
Now, the kickstarter games have potential, not maybe to take over after Wow but to figure out a new model someone like Blizz can perfect. Without EQ no Wow and without M59 no EQ. It is not unlikely MMOs will run very slowly for a bunch of years but massive games have a huge potential and sooner or later will someone figure out what players actually need (what players think they want rarely is the same thing).
There is no magic answer to this - if companies knew what this was - everyone would be following this formula. Certain things are obvious - like game polish - yes that's a must - and yes this is expensive. The real problem is - competition - the frequency of NEW "big name/quality" games being released on Steam/ consoles etc... is so high that even if you have a KILLER MMO - the players will leave to check out new Witcher or Skyrim, Fallout or Overwatch etc... No matter how awesome your game is - players will leave to check out these major releases. After players leave - many of them never come back - and over time - you just bleed players - this is again inevitable for majority of the games. Yes there are exceptions to this - but these are FEW and FAR between, the standard is - irreversible player decline over time. But retaining players above even 30% past the first several months has been a problem that nobody has been able to crack in a 100% surefire way yet. Instead of trying to solve this problem - IMO - the game companies have realized that it's probably much better to put out more "smaller" games - like 1 per year, than to spend 100+ mil dollars on a single game every 5 years. So it's just a different approach - they are not trying to keep the players for a long time - they know that many are gonna jump ship after 2-6 weeks - so they just put out games more frequently. Again instead of solving the HARD problem (like P vs NP, which is one of the hardest problems to crack) - game companies have adapted to reality of how people play games today, and are "retaining" players in a different way - by trying to have new releases more often. Bottom line - trying to solve this problem is probably just a waste of time and money - figuring out how to skirt around the problem and come up with creative ways of achieving the same thing (player numbers) - is probably a much smarter way to go about it from a pure business perspective (dollars spent).
I don't think releasing small crap clones helps anyone long term. I you don't want to put the work and money into a game you probably should pick another genre to maximize profit, collectible card games to mention one need a very limited investment to earn loads of cash.
People don't need to try driving a Trabant if they have a Cadilac, the reason people jump games all the time is that they are unhappy with the game they currently play. If you see almost everything the game have to offer in 3 weeks there is not really much reason to stay longer. There is more to it, if the game is fun enough people will stay longer even if it is predictable and offer little new but it is way harder to blow people away when you have little new to offer and a limited budget at that.
It is not a waste of money if you actually solve the problem. Blizzard made an insane amount of money on Wow and NC soft the same on Lineage. A lot of players for a long time mean an insane amount of money. But it is risky since if you fail it might kill your company unless you have a huge funding. Mythic is just one of the companies that died because it tried to gamble everything and failed.
But with the right ideas and a good crew you can rake in loads of cash for a long time.
You're talking about WoW which was an anomaly not reproducible by anyone (many have tried), not even Blizzard themselves. They tried with Project Titan and it didn't work out.
Right ideas and a good crew has been happening since WoW and the "raking in of cash for a long time" has not matched WoW (unless you are counting MOBAs which is en entirely different genre).
So clearly it takes more than right ideas and a good crew - again there is NO magic formula that will deliver what WoW did - because that had to do with so many additional variables like timing, state of the market etc... it's probably never going to happen quite like that again for a long time.
Look at the last 12 years - how many huge budget MMOs have been attempted - and how many of them have matched the massive success of WoW?
Consider Blizzard themselves - how come they haven't been able to match WoW with any of their other titles?
---------It's a moving target - the market and playerbase are constantly in flux - formulas that worked in 2004 don't work anymore today.---------
FF14 proves this statement to be false
And considering that it takes years to make a AAA MMO - the target is the market and playerbase about 5 years into the future - which in our ever-accelerating world of fast change is A LOT harder to do now, than it was back in 2004 when WoW hit the market.
Todays mmos are not made to last a long time, so the two months exodus should be expected. How to make retention seem like a really simple answer, but maybe a bit harder to get funded because it is riskier. Instead of making story content which is a fixed effort->playhours formula, the focus should be on gameplay using replayable systems and handing the control of the game experience to the player instead. This a very scary idea to the established professional gamedev person because it can fail, and it is also extremely hard work..not to mention unpredictable in terms of development time. Only very risk willing investors or players(crowdfunding) will put money into something like this, and that is why only indie studios are trying to make games like this; back in the early days of mmorpgs the budgets were lower so it was possible to make a mmorpg based on those principles. So, to make a mmo last, the developer needs to focus on gameplay and systems and not story content, simple no?
Also @DMKano about f2p being the only viable model today.. Yeah if you already started to think inside the box, it is easy to reach the same conclusions as the ones in the same box, but personally I believe there are ways to do monetization that does not include a shop, you just have to be a little creative. Although I kinda agree traditional 1 month that sub based is probably not a good idea, but even within the sub concept there is room for new ideas, and lets not forget running servers are not that big an expense anymore so even b2p of some kind could be profitable enough. The thing is by now I think it is pretty obvious that shops are not only monetization, they deeply effect the entire game and for a mmorpg especially that is very very bad - Maybe that shop generate x amount of more revenue, but you could also argue that having players stay longer would also generate a good amount..it is all a matter of choice and the right investors.
Comments
That being said, I will say that a box fee or sub is a barrier of entry for me - if I'm on the fence, I won't try it until I've had enough exposure to assure myself I'd probably have fun with it. If it's F2P - hell, it's just bandwidth and I'll try just about anything then.
I really liked @H0urg1ass 's post - that summed up just about everything enjoyable about MMOs. I recognize it's nigh-on impossible for any one title to satisfy all of them.
That said, you're really only wanting to label things differently. A significant fraction of the best games defy pre-existing genres. I care if a game is fun, not whether or not it technically meets someone's definition of an MMORPG.
"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/거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
WoW killed the genre
FTP killed the genre
Cash Shops killed the genre
Themepark killed the genre.
I am going by what I learned about RPGs since 1974. If you think you are playing yourself as that mage you are an idiot. Period.
If you are playing a game which the DM has setup you are playing a character that is YOURSELF, then you are playing a special case exception. But the I need to be leet is about EGO.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
1. Game has to be good
2. Gold Sellers, Bots, Hacks, Cheats have to be contained.
3. Keep the content coming
All joking aside and MMO semantics aside if League of Legends is pulling in the players and money it is shouldn't the top dog be the obvious place to start.
What do they monetize? What is the content release cycle? Marketing? Gameplay? Player retention rate? Player return rate? player spending habits? Etc...
"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/We live in a time where people constantly whine about $30 games being too expensive, and may God have mercy upon you if a game you sell for $49.99 has less than 30 hours of content, because the players sure as hell won't. So when you charge $15 / mo. straight up on top of a box price, you're expected to deliver the world in a nice gift basket every month. For many companies this just isn't possible, hence the shift to selling content and features piecemeal.
Purely P2P games are dead and gone. Outside of a trio of holdouts (barring extremely obscure niche games or MUDs which may be lurking about), the model just doesn't work for the vast majority of modern MMO gamers, especially since many of them are quite honestly too stupid to realize that F2P is costing them far more in the long run.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
They should go play Lemmings. That's one game they'll have no trouble identifying with.
~~ postlarval ~~
Funding the game with mobile games, mobas ect
One thing I've noticed is the gameplay in modern games is just way too fast, for example combat. It might seems flashy and uber at first but is usually shallow like a jacuzzi. As an mmorpg player I'm interested in a big vast ocean to drown myself into. Many things about modern games are just too shallow and fast. Another example would be character developement.
NPCs need to have complex simulated lives with a real need for player help (i.e. "one of" quests) in response to current game events.
We should never see mobs spawn and they should behave like opportunist nomads.
Quests need to be long, complex and group focused. That's not to say that players can't solo (since this genre attracts a lot of lone wolves that will solo anyway) but they shouldn't be able to complete the quest by themselves - just contribute to it. What we should never have to see again is someone else doing the same exact shorty quest we just did as if we hadn't just completed it and fixed whatever the problem was.
In short, many of the better ideas that EQN had thanks mostly to Storybricks and Dave Mark.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
And you can't really try to be another game, Wow and Lineage might have done great for many years but the thinking that the world is ready for a new Wow have failed again and again. Those games are already doing what they do well enough and beating them at their own game have proven close to impossible.
We need something that is different but still fun. Something that don't feel like we already played it 10 or 15 years. And one way or another that game needs to surprise us now and then and force us to learn new things instead of just offering more of the exact same. That isn't easy to make or we already had a few new huge MMOs since after 2004 (a few games like GW2, ESO and FFXIV have done pretty well but I wouldn't call any of them "huge").
People don't need to try driving a Trabant if they have a Cadilac, the reason people jump games all the time is that they are unhappy with the game they currently play. If you see almost everything the game have to offer in 3 weeks there is not really much reason to stay longer.
There is more to it, if the game is fun enough people will stay longer even if it is predictable and offer little new but it is way harder to blow people away when you have little new to offer and a limited budget at that.
It is not a waste of money if you actually solve the problem. Blizzard made an insane amount of money on Wow and NC soft the same on Lineage. A lot of players for a long time mean an insane amount of money. But it is risky since if you fail it might kill your company unless you have a huge funding. Mythic is just one of the companies that died because it tried to gamble everything and failed.
But with the right ideas and a good crew you can rake in loads of cash for a long time.
“All of those things that were promised with the AI were true and deliverable. It was not vaporware. In fact, after leaving the project (something I did not want to do), I ended up going straight to ArenaNet (thanks to my dear friend Mike Lewis) and spent a year implementing much of the same architecture and design. Some of it was used in the Heart of Thorns expansion to GuildWars 2 — the rest was prototyped up for possible use in future ArenaNet titles. (Much of the reason that some things were not used is that they were too much of a departure from the established gameplay of the GuildWars 2 franchise.)”
http://massivelyop.com/2016/03/15/david-mark-everquest-nexts-ai-was-not-vaporware/
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
But no need to see who can piss farthest when we can just check out Hero's Song in a month or so.
After Arenanet Dave went on to work with Smedley on Hero's Song. Many of these ideas are part of that game. You can check out the preview Bill did here.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I think the problem most games are missing is they are failing to set themselves apart in a way that is meaningful. Voice acting every quest is not all that meaningful. Changing the setting is rarely very meaningful. Making classes work slightly differently generally isn't meaningful enough.
The differences between WoW, Everquest 2, LotRO and SWTOR are not meaningful. The differences between WoW, EVE, Runescape, Crowfall, and Star Citizen are quite meaningful. Even the differences between WoW and ArcheAge are fairly meaningful.
You are certainly right that formulas that worked in 2004 don't work today but that is more or less the only thing people have tried.
Wow presented something the general gaming population never seen before in a competent way, that is what it takes to get a similar success. Trying to make an improved version of Wow will at best give you an average MMO because people already played loads of similar games and that wont blow anyones socks off.
So the question is if you can make a MMO that is so different from the games the average gamer played that it feels like an entirely different beast but still is very fun. You could remake something old better but I don't think UO, SWG or even AC have that in them. Or you could make something new and different, like Minecraft did for the single player sandbox (and I am not saying that you need to make a sandbox here).
I think that can be done.
The market is moving like it does because the current formula doesn't work anymore, MMOs similar to Wow will continue to dwindle because you can only do the same thing so long unless you work on football manager (Soccer fans seems far less easily bored). So the genre can slowly die or re-invent itself.
Now, the kickstarter games have potential, not maybe to take over after Wow but to figure out a new model someone like Blizz can perfect. Without EQ no Wow and without M59 no EQ. It is not unlikely MMOs will run very slowly for a bunch of years but massive games have a huge potential and sooner or later will someone figure out what players actually need (what players think they want rarely is the same thing).
How to make retention seem like a really simple answer, but maybe a bit harder to get funded because it is riskier. Instead of making story content which is a fixed effort->playhours formula, the focus should be on gameplay using replayable systems and handing the control of the game experience to the player instead.
This a very scary idea to the established professional gamedev person because it can fail, and it is also extremely hard work..not to mention unpredictable in terms of development time. Only very risk willing investors or players(crowdfunding) will put money into something like this, and that is why only indie studios are trying to make games like this; back in the early days of mmorpgs the budgets were lower so it was possible to make a mmorpg based on those principles.
So, to make a mmo last, the developer needs to focus on gameplay and systems and not story content, simple no?
Also @DMKano about f2p being the only viable model today.. Yeah if you already started to think inside the box, it is easy to reach the same conclusions as the ones in the same box, but personally I believe there are ways to do monetization that does not include a shop, you just have to be a little creative. Although I kinda agree traditional 1 month that sub based is probably not a good idea, but even within the sub concept there is room for new ideas, and lets not forget running servers are not that big an expense anymore so even b2p of some kind could be profitable enough.
The thing is by now I think it is pretty obvious that shops are not only monetization, they deeply effect the entire game and for a mmorpg especially that is very very bad - Maybe that shop generate x amount of more revenue, but you could also argue that having players stay longer would also generate a good amount..it is all a matter of choice and the right investors.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0