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Market saturation..
infidelix
Member Posts: 57
With the most recent releases of MMO's, the MMO's on the horizon, and WoW; I gotta wonder....is the market over saturated? Argue hard-core v. care bear all you want, but the MMO per capita...are there enough players (i.e paying subs) to support all the games that have been released ( no matter the state of release) and the games yet to be release in the near future?
Comments
Well, there will always be games that will have to close down because they will flop. But it is the same thing if you live in a democracy.
So, no, there will always be games that will flop. But off course the market can hold many small or a few big games, it all depends. It is a lot of money in a MMO even if most cost a lot of cash to develop. $15 a month in a few years is a lot more than any regular game get's.
The actual costs of running the servers and patch is far fron $15 bucks a month so if you just can get your game running, even if you only have quite a few number of paying customers, you still will get in good cash. On the other hand if you sell bad in the start and are out with a lot of cash life will be tough and the whole company might go down the drain.
But the big question is: Can they keep on making us pay those monthly bucks in the future? The F2P games are actually becoming better, and Guildwars 2 is coming soon as the first true MMO where you just pay for the game when you buy it (Yeah, GW was like that too but it was a CORPG, it was very instanced. GW2 will have an open world and it will look great).
You bring up a good point I didn't think of, a further splintering of the video game market. FPS v. MMO. where does this lead us?
All the mediocre MMO's need to band together and make something good.
I feel that there are more then enough gamers in the MMO market to support a game, and even make it thrive. WoW is effectively showing that to us, and other games like City of Heroes and EVE to a lesser extent. The problem is that alot of games do badly and go under because they're either not very good, or are too similar to WoW itself.
The market, as I see it, is oversaturated with Medieval Fantasy MMORPGs, which is a throng that WoW leads by a healthy margin, upon a pile of money and content that no game could hope to match without years of effort, tons of dollars put in, and some brilliant people sterring the project. Really, releasing another WoW-like Fantasy MMORPG at this stage, or even one with a passing resemblence to it, is horrible business sense.
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Playing: Nothing
Played: Champions Online, CoX, STO, PSO, WoW, lots of free-to-play crap
Looking Forward To: DC Universe Online, Blade and Soul
I don't think the market is over saturated with MMORPG's...
IMHO, it is over saturated with poorly made / launched FANTASY MMORPG's. AoC, Vanguard, Fury and a dozen others.
Also it is over saturated with WoW / EQ look alikes. LotRs & WAR immediately pops to mind. Uninspired and uncreative gameplay that frankly has already been done better.
May be i am alone with my opinion, but it is clear to me, that PvP and MMORP,as a game genre are completely kicks off each other. Without begin a long argumentation, here are some points to think about:
- Character development is a key feature in the MMORPG games. It offers the feeling of constant improvement of your toon, getting stronger and stronger, being able to enter higher and higher lvl zones, defeating higher and higher lvl monsters. Character improvement consist different elements, such as XP gain and clvl advance, itemization which opens up the possibility of trading, questing, raiding for gear, etc. All these mean, that MMORPG requres time to invest, and time wasted on them must be rewarded. If an MMORPG uses free PvP, people can't be on the same equal base, they can't enter the fight with equal chances. Those, who have played more, have better gear, more money, higher lvl character. And this DOES affect pvp. You like it or not, that is if an MMORPG has open and free PvP.
- In the last years, mmo market realized, that the mayority of players want PvP. They want the possibility to be better than others, to kill other players, who are noobs, and want to demonstrate they überness. A massive amount of players left FPS games, since mmo or mmo like games (i. e. Guild Wars) can offer the FPS features to them. These people demanding a combat system, what they already learned in FPS games, they want to use their personal gaming SKILL in the mmo PvP scenarios. They want instant actions, and don't want to be handicapped because of lack of invested gametime. Of course, you, my friend, who read this post, are not this type of player, but beleive me, they are a lot.
- Nowadays, when a firm decide to introduce a new MMORP, it has to choose a path BEFORE any steps is done through the development process. One path leads to a classic style game with deep PvE content lot of game developing and programming work, and a realively small expected gaming community. The other leads to a PvP game with the aim of offering equality and class balance for the masses and therefore the lack of the classic MMo feature, like itemization and character development.
Gaius
I do agree withyou that it is very hard to make a game that are trying to keep both the PvP and PvE players happy. And actually it might be better if a game focused on one of these 2 aspects.
A PvP focused game which was a a hybrid between a MMO and a FPS might be really good for many people. And a PvE based game with a lot of work on character development and crafting can be equally strong.
I also personally feels that the MMO market are focusing to much on stuff and to litle on character development. It should really be the charcter in focus, every character should be almost unique both in looks and skills. In most games today the focus is more about gear.
I think that World of Warcraft saved the MMO genre.
When so many online games today gets released prematurely with many bugs and they lose a substantial amount of their subscriber base they can't say: "hey, online games are dead, no one wants to play them" because World of Warcraft's number of subscribers would prove them wrong every time.
Developers have just been too lazy to release their MMO in a finished and bug free kind of state.
And no, I don't think that the market for online games has become saturated because it has been growing steadily with each passing year.
EQ2 is the best old style mmorp currently on the market. Wow might be not bad, and certainly popular.
Gaius
Edit oooops.
ignore me
Good topic. I agree with you that too many games are out there for us to ever have that experience we had in the early days of Everquest. The old world player base is divided amongst all of the games out there. Anyone know of any large rpg groups that are situated in the real-world? At least in that sense newsletters could be sent to members of the group for inter-game communications(rather than people losing contact with each other all together).
The easy mode (wow style, so to speak) mmos are oversaturated, the more intellectual and/or "hardcore" ones are totally undersaturated (the few that tried pretty much failed at or prior to release).
Some of the upcoming mmos will change the stats slightly, but really, there's been in fact way to many of the simplistic ones over the last few years. The publisher's market analysts need to start getting a clue heh.