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porovaara
Member Posts: 48
I played WoW. I played FFXI. I played MuDs. Moos. Zenmoo woohoo.
I've played nearly every MMO that has been listed on this site in the past
6 months.
There was one standout, Spellborn, but that seems doomed to die due
to the general incompetence shown in this whole genre of games. Spellborn's
early game is great, I'd love to pay to play to get it going. But we can't.
Hellgate. Terrible launch. Roper didn't get MMO yet, notice in an interview
how he says they were just going to recreate battle.net type functionality.
Flagship got it. Unfortunately too late and a game that was bad at launch,
but *great* at the end is gone.
All of us have little snippets like this. There's tons of amazing content and
ideas out there being created that none of us will ever see because of the
brain dead management trying to become the next blizzard. These MMO
companies build their fabulous games and then come to the game industry
and ask how to launch? The game industry itself is a joke, look how easily
it is dominated by the top 3 or 4 producers. These aren't the people you should
be asking for advice.
Why not? Because they think in their own worlds! So you end up with servers
split all over the world, confusing agreements on who can play with who,
multiple codebases and unhappy players.
Stop thinking so big. You don't have to take over the world. You don't have to
dethrone WoW. Build, coddle, and nurture a loyal paying player base. You
don't need 11Million users, when 20k will pay all the bills and allow you to
expand into the future. Be realistic on the business end.
We want to give you money.
But you keep failing.
Comments
Signed. Now all we need is for the developers to see it and "get it". Well said.
It is normaly not the companies, but the investors and the playerbase who both have unrealisted expectation of games. Take Darkfall, it is a ninch games, but even before anyone seen anything poeple complain about it and praise it to the heavens putting pressure on the devs. The players expect to much and the everything Tasos is saying is being interpetated 100 times in a many ways.
Now take Wurm Online, with is a game pretty much like Darkfall (gameplay wise, graphichs and the way it works are differend, but on a basic level it is the same). There is no such pressure. The small dev team created a basic game without to much in it and are slowly expanding from there. No one had expectation from the game before release and no one spreaded any hate.
Poeple however want and some might even expect Darkfall to be the "next" WoW killer (With treu, can be blamed on Tasos aswell). This game needs to be damn good and have a lot of feature when released (Again there fault) to survive it first few months. I personly believe Tasos had to use big words like this (or any company with good plans for an MMO for that matter) to create dollars signs in the eyes of the investors. If you use words like WoW killer poeple see big numbers.
If he told them the game will release small, with a player base of 10k and grow from there to be a decend or maybe even a good game. He would have never got the investments. It is not that I agree with it, but it seems to get some investments, MMO devs have to overreach (even a main stream game like WAR, it atleast look like MJ did that) to get the support they needed to make the game.
I don't think that Darkfall could ever be a WoW killer for one simple reason. Full player looting. In fact, I don't think any sensible person would honestly think Darkfall a WoW killer. But of course that's outside of the point.
See here's the question. Can you develop a good enough world for 20k people to play in without a massive investment? And when I say massive, heck, I mean just a few hundred thousand, not the millions it generally takes to make decent size mmo. I mean, how the heck are you going to get financing to start the project? You've gotta convince these 20k people to play your game and pay for it, so you've gotta have compelling gameplay, well designed replayability, and a good sized world. That takes lots of time, lots of devs, and lots of money. You don't just "make a mmo" from scratch with sweat equity. You need lots of sweat equity from lots of people, and people have to feed their families and pay the bills.
In the end, I think you have to think big. Maybe not WoW big, but at least 200k+ population to create a meaningful and polished mmo. 20k just doesn't cut it from my perspective. It would take too long to break even with such a small population given the investment.
WAR is doing what you say. 300k subs fun for people that are into it. A well done game. You can get to max level without ever doing one quest. (if you are on the right server)
It is a nice change of pace.
Are they profitable? I don't know. Is it one of the reasons EA just let go 11% of its work force? I don't know.
wheres my money? :P
EvE online started small and grow, Wurms Online started small and grew (Still has less then 20K subs I quess), A Tale in the Dessert, etc , etc, etc. Many ninch games out there started small and have a solid game, with is still fun for a small group of poeple and from there they grow.
I do not believe companies need to think 200k big. Look at WAR, it has 300k subs and had an investment of 100 million pumped into it. Now I do not believe you need that much money, but you really need a big investment to get a MMO with is good enough to handle and have 200k of players from start. This is duable for mainstream games, but not for ninch games like Darkfall, like Wurms Online, etc.
EvE Online should be an example to developers of a ninch game. Now I dislike the game, but the dev team has created a good game and shows it is possible to have a somewhat smaller investment and create a game with can be profiteble. However they still "only" have 100k of subs (With would translate into 1.500.000 a month!) with is a lot for a ninch game.
Signed. Now all we need is for the developers to see it and "get it". Well said.
agreed
So...
... what's up devs?
Honestly, I think devs need to go back to basics. They are thinking so big that they are doomed to fail.
How many people would like to see a well developed game with moderate content on release, that promised nothing more at release, that was well designed, mostly bug free, performance optimized etc. etc.
Then fairly regular content added in as it goes along rather than promising to shoot the moon and exploding at the launch pad instead.
Basically, I think devs should go back to making the core game, without a bunch of extravagant promises( though I'd expect them to have some awesome ideas that they keep hush hush.)
So..if they could deliver the base game with enough content for the first 2-3 months in a FINISHED state...they'd have that two to three months to add in some more content without having to work double overtime to fix what never should have been borked to begin with.
Seriously, if they created the game with this mindset, placing hooks in for future content, expansion etc and so on, they could probably have a much better game in the end.
The problem is that the devs make a game they think we want, not a game them themselves would love to play.
When a game like that comes out it usually becomes big because then the devs can focus on the stuff most MMO devs forget: Fun factor.
The size of the world and how many features a game have doesn't matter if the game is fun to play.
If there is one game that dare trying to be totally different from all other mmo's outthere then its Darkfall.
But it only get's HATE from most mmoers.
Its invested with ex-themepark players who register on Darkfall forums and only thing they do is try get it dumb down so its more like WoW WTF:(
But luckely devs airnt listend to much so i still have hope it will succeed for hardcore.
And this has nothing to with you eather like Darkfall gameplay or not, its something all should embrace it and hope it succeed, you dont have to play it but a mmo thats not a EQ clone is always good for whole MMO business no matter if you like the game or not.
But the massive themepark fanbase just want all fail accept EQ clones bah:(
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
If there is one game that dare trying to be totally different from all other mmo's outthere then its Darkfall.
But it only get's HATE from most mmoers.
Its invested with ex-themepark players who register on Darkfall forums and only thing they do is try get it dumb down so its more like WoW WTF:(
But luckely devs airnt listend to much so i still have hope it will succeed for hardcore.
And this has nothing to with you eather like Darkfall gameplay or not, its something all should embrace it and hope it succeed, you dont have to play it but a mmo thats not a EQ clone is always good for whole MMO business no matter if you like the game or not.
But the massive themepark fanbase just want all fail accept EQ clones bah:(
Meh, it gets hate from most MMORPG.com forum going MMOers. Alot of people that regularly play these games never click the forum button to begin with.
I do agree with the OP though. It seems that all these fancy doohickies that are promised are just extra fluff that ends up broken. Sort of like going to buy a car. You can go to the place that has dudes in gorilla suits jumping around and all these loud colored signs or you can hit up the professional looking well kept dealer. I personally prefer the well kept professional place. The gorilla suits might attract more people to them but they don't keep them there because places like that have crappy/shady service.
Where is my sleek, no frills MMO? One with a solid, professional base?
It's gotten to the point where some MMOs have been reduced to little more than success dispensers. Don't think. Don't challenge yourself. Do as little as possible... but still be rewarded for it. Yeah.. *that's* fun.
-- WSIMike
This is the sign of the movie business plague, VERY few dare to make that new thinking movie and even less are able to generate the money. In the end you get an investor movie with Paris hilton and Adam Sandler, with the same old story he losses her because he's so busy with whatever and in the end he shows that he really loves her and they hook up again. Pathetic and worthless but people still pay to see Adam Sandlers latest shit. People still pay in the hopes of the mmorpg being good because it seemed like it on the trailers, what they fail to see is that its another one of those overhyped pieces of shit.
EvE online started small and grow, Wurms Online started small and grew (Still has less then 20K subs I quess), A Tale in the Dessert, etc , etc, etc. Many ninch games out there started small and have a solid game, with is still fun for a small group of poeple and from there they grow.
I do not believe companies need to think 200k big. Look at WAR, it has 300k subs and had an investment of 100 million pumped into it. Now I do not believe you need that much money, but you really need a big investment to get a MMO with is good enough to handle and have 200k of players from start. This is duable for mainstream games, but not for ninch games like Darkfall, like Wurms Online, etc.
EvE Online should be an example to developers of a ninch game. Now I dislike the game, but the dev team has created a good game and shows it is possible to have a somewhat smaller investment and create a game with can be profiteble. However they still "only" have 100k of subs (With would translate into 1.500.000 a month!) with is a lot for a ninch game.
EVE has a little over 250k subs. Pretty big difference. lol Still, your point stands. Niche games that are made -for their niche- and don't try to appeal to a larger crowd, can be successful.
I still play Shadowbane. The community isn't big but it's stable and it's really fun for me.
Just to give some idea of the real numbers involved here:
$180 --- $15 monthly fee for 12 months.
$4,500,000 --- 25k * $15 a month from paying customers.
Now that isn't big a number when you are thinking about games right?
But how many employees could that actually be? I live in San Francisco
so I'd say pretty much a worst case scenario for paying game devs. And
taking today's market into the picture... and the crazy assumption that we'd
structure our game company just as we would a company building or
selling some real widgets.
How do you divide up that pie?
Well you have your business side operations, which are things like the
ceo or manager, someone for hr, accounting, perhaps legal, marketing
could be two or three. Basically you end up with a 7-10 person group.
The ceo might make a cool 230k in this size group but the other seven
left would average around 75k per year. So this block that costs us
755k... oops not so fast, in Cali the cost per salaried employee can be
about 10-15% more per year because of the benefits package. Let's
call it 12. So let's call it 820k.
Where does that leave us? 3.6 mil to go!
Well you gotta put all these people somewhere. That's gonna cost you.
And you are going to have to pay for your colo fees to house the
servers, bandwidth. Being a startup, making a game you probably don't
spring for the most posh accomodations so let's try and get something
for around 20-25k a month (4500 sq ft or so?) Oh crap now you need at
least one facilities guy... and someone at the ffront desk, that's another
120k. And Power? Office contectivity? Well we are looking at 350k for
the ofice lease and keeping it juiced and another 125k for the two
more employees.
3.1 Milion left, but we have our business block in place... more or less
you can fiddle the number up or down it all just mindsplay. But now
we need creative staff, modelers, level designers, people in the lead
of each of these groups. Is that even possible?
Yes.. That 3.1 millon we have is a pretty large number. Salaries have
tanked here quite a bit so your lead dev is going to be pulling 90k,
with a ton under him making 70-85 depending on skillsets. The creative
folk get gipped as usual, but hey, Acadamy of Art San Francisco? I dunno!
65k or there abouts. You have sound guys, 75k, you have at least one
systems guy for the office 80k and one or two for the colo 70/100.
There is happy Russians in QA 80k/80k... etc...
The point is after getting the basic building blocks in place you have
enough money left with ONLY 25k paying customers to comfortably
support a development, support and creative staff of 25-30.
I don't know how familiar many of you are with game projects, but that's
a pretty reasonable size for a big flagship release once every three
quarters or so.
So tell me again, how do these companies fail over and over? They aren't
run like businesses or are trying to have it all when they simply need to
focus on their (hopefully) great and innnovative new take on the genre.
The real question is. Are you making the game to make THAT game or making
the game to make money?
MMORPG.com should do a community project..
Through a lot of debate and voting and whatnot, design an MMORPG that will classify as 'The Best MMORPG for Anyone and Everyone'
Then submit the plans to an MMO company with a clue... like Turbine or something.
Do MMORPG take in much more money that games you buy in the shops? Do MMORPG outdo games from the shops in terms of gameplay angles such as Fallout 3? What MMORPG competes with Fallout 3 or is it just worth it to have a chat box in your game? What MMORPG with more than 100 computer characters is not set in a Lord of the Rings type world? Like it or lump it, does Lord of the Rings fantasy and heavy metal music grow alongside Terry Pratchett and or sci-fi in the real world type fantasy with Thumping House music? If so, where is the Terry Pratchett games? Where is the "This sci-fi grew in my house" grenre on MMORPG? Plenty of fiction on those lines.
I'm new here, and therefore apologise in advance if I'm going over stuff that's been said before.
With MMO development, I completely agree that there have been some major failings last year. Trouble is, it's getting more and more expensive to develop an MMO, which means that the cost of failure becomes even higher. As a result, publishers are less likely to want to take risks, and developers are kinda hamstrung by that. It's why we're seeing publishers hunt for franchises that they can turn into MMOs, like Stargate, Star Wars, Star Trek and others. Sure, you've got talented developers behind the scenes who have a fair idea on how to make an an MMO, and you've got genre-savvy fans who can weigh up the pros and cons of one bag of game mechanics against another, but to the average joe punter all he's going to care about is waving round his lightsaber in front of a few of his friends.
If we really want developers to be innovative, to listen to us as fans of the genre and to develop games that we as niche groups want to play, a couple of things have to happen. Firstly, the cost of development has to come down. This might be in terms of backend infrastructure, like using A7's, Google's or MS's cloud computing platofrms to host realms instead of trying to do it all from scratch every time a new title is started. It might be in terms of engine development, but there's not a huge amount of middleware out there that does the fancy client-server orchestration stuff or the subscriber management stuff. It might be in terms of art direction, going for a lower polygon stylised approach (SW:TOR, WoW) instead of gritty realism (AoC) and use it to build simpler models, textures and so on with the idea being that you have many simple models instead of fewer complex ones. This is no certainty though - NCSoft are having trouble even though they're pretty much set up for churning out MMOs, although Aion may yet turn the tide for them.
Cheaper development costs and better middleware mean a couple of things - prototyping a game requires fewer people and can be done in shorter timescales. It means publishers take less of a risk - they can see what's being put together but take less of a hit to their pocket if it all falls apart. It also should mean that the average subscription cost could come down, meaning that for what you pay now for one sub, you might be able to pick up two in the future and thereby support more MMOs.
Secondly, developers need to stop thinking in terms of a WoW killer. Blizzard knows what it is doing, and does it very well. They set the barrier to entry very low in order to keep the number of possible subscribers as wide as possible. They have a huge operation supporting them and have the flexibility to ensure that the player experience is as polished as possible. Going up against them in the fantasy, mass market area is close to poinless at the moment, as the game is unlikely to pull in market share. LOTRO and WAR, even though they're great games, haven't hit the subscription numbers that they could have done as a result. It's why were seing the switch towards the comic or sci-fi concepts now, as it's the easiest way for developers to put clear water between their product and WoW. If they focus on just developing a great and unique game instead of taking market share from Blizzard, they'll do a lot better.
Thirdly, and finally, we need longer betas. Game mechanics are crucial in an MMO - you need to make sure that what you're making is something that people will play for months or years, not the 30 hours that a traditional RPG needs. Developers need to see closed betas as part of the process that allows them to refine, develop and test mechanics. Misusing a beta as a final bugcheck for a month or so before release is a huge gamble, as it means that if you're releasing a crap game, all you generate is negative publicity. Also, developers need to be willing to listen to feedback from their players and respond to it. That might mean having clued up and empowered community managers that invove themselves with the players, rather than acting as PR droids.
So there you have it, three ways for making cheaper, beter MMOs. But like I said, most of this has probably been done to death before. If I'm rehashing old ground, I'm sorry.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
Gaz, If EVE online runs for five years with players in the thousands, talk about developing the capability does cut nothing. I have not touched World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings, why? Wheres the rest of it? I am well over the quota mate. Highly intelligent. I do not wish to exlude Carmethius the Most High of the Enschestrian Empire but I do not want to see him if his nemisis are not Gerneral Ecubar the Soldier and Chewbaca the Space Captain and if I don't see Bob the Baker and Jim the Janitor when I get home, my fantasy is shattered. The tune of Elite English. Terry Pratchett is ultimate at producing wizardry and magic in connection to the real world. I see not one ring of his twenty bestsellers on the MMORPG scene. I am suspicious that Stargate Worlds may take on this genuine continuous game genre but thats not a whole pile so far.
In cyber fantasy why can't the girls keep more their knickers on (final fantastic?) nobody complains (who is going to say a complainer of knickers showing is anything but a prude? not all girls will wave their knickers in a world unless something becomes open across the whole world, sorry, even in fantasy, some stuff is just not real across the whole board. same coin... what young man buys manga porn? if girls have cute-only games, boys can have not-cute games, or can they? nope only in EVE online where the only asses are in the spaceships)
For me Crysis is in the same puddle. They tout it as the most signifigant gaming technology for a long time and time to come. They make graphics superb. They base it around a little mono-style island in the Pacific, the deck of a boat, and a black as night mono-style inside of a space ship. Changing environments (yes even after two months gameplay) and funky little button controls (twiddle everything, why not? Play for months you want to do something
).
Although it may be crap, If Stargate Worlds varies in the way the series does you are all plumbed out and Free-To-Play with an angry mob chasing you.
Well said - and if I may add to it.
Stop opening a game with 100+ servers and only have around 1k loggin into each server. You might think that you have a total oof 200k player base but after 2 weeks of a player running around and not seeing ANYONE - I can guarantee you that they will leave.
Concentrate on perhaps 20-40 servers MAX, yes, the first day is going to have a big queue time but at least those people who log on are going to be interacting - and trust me, although you whine about a 40min queue time, once you are in the game, you don't think about it anymore.
BUILD from there.. don't open up 100+ server only to slowly drop the servers and while you doing that, you would have lost players.. I pay for MMO.. not single player.