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General: Farmville Killed Gaming, V-Worlds, Dogs
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
The battle lines are being drawn between “social games” and traditional gaming, and the rhetoric is getting bloody. Today, MMORPG.com columnnist Scott Jennings takes a look at the issue.
Looking back at my wrapup of 2009, it does seem as though, three months in, we’re in danger of repeating ourselves. After all, we have Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick asserting his particular brand of fear and loathing with one of his most popular studios, and now it seems the talk of GDC 2010 was… Farmville. Specifically, how metrics-driven game design (such as what Farmville uses) will destroy fun as we know it.
"You want to make an intrinsically interesting game," he said of game designers at large. "[When] you add extrinsic motivators to make your game better, if these studies do apply to games, you're destroying intrinsic motivation to play your game."
"The game industry used to use no metrics whatsoever," he continued. "Everything was gut and by the seat of our pants. Then metrics came around, and [now] we're addicted to metrics. If I change a value of my purple hat, fourteen more people buy it, and we think we're totally in the zone."
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Haven't played farmville. Never heard of it til today. Looked it up - it's a free to play flash game tied to facebook that allows you to buy crap with real dollars to ... farm. Farming? Really?
Just goes to show you - you can sell anything on the internet - even virtual seeds. The question is - how much money is this game really making, and is it legitimate? Without real revenue numbers, there's no way to decide if this is even an issue. Farmville's charity drive raised $321,000 by selling a sweet potato seed. Wow's charity drive raised $1.1 million by selling a virtual pet. Farmville makes nothing if people don't buy crap regularly. Wow makes $15 per month per subscriber even if people don't play. MMO's aren't going anywhere.
I disagree. Publishers want money. What happened when Diablo was a huge success? Everyone started making Diablo clones. What happened when WoW was a huge success? Everyone started to make WoW clones. Were those clones ever as good as the original? Not in my opinion. That doesn't change the fact that a lot of people made money off "the latest hype". Publishers are notorious for being momentum chasers, not momentum changers. Publishers see this new social gaming thing, and think its the net big thing. Do they understand it? I doubt it. They didn't understand why Diablo was fun, or why one couldn't copy WoW.
We will see a major slowdown in MMO development as everyone chases the social gaming revenue. I'd like to think this whole thing is a fad that only housewives, and people bored at work play. That's not going to change the fact publishers, you know the guys with the cash who make the decisions, will now be chasing this new fad for awhile. Clearly, trying to make a copy of WoW hasn't worked out so well for these guys. Right, Koster?
The biggest mistake a mmo developer could make right now would be trying to model farmville. MMO players for the most part already have boring repetitive task that they (legally or no) spend real world money on. What mmo players want isn't more boring repetitive task they want an escape from their boring ass lives, they want to have an adventure. When a mmo developer finally gets this then they will see 80 million players.
This sword here at my side dont act the way it should
Keeps calling me its master, but I feel like its slave
Hauling me faster and faster to an early, early grave
And it howls! it howls like hell!
What a bunch of sour grapes by the devs! So Farmville gets however many millions of non-mmo playing people to play a sorta-mmo, and all they can do is complain? Morons!
(Just wait until WoW introduces farming.)
I'm not a fan of Farmville, but I know people who are. In truth, most of them (that I know personally) aren't gamers. They're watchers, people who like to be entertained by movies or another person playing a game they can enjoy. With games like Farmville and the combined social site of Facebook, these watchers can not only appreciate the pretty colors and actions of an avatar, but can 'wet their toes' by 'playing' the game via simple clicks and, as simply as that, reap the rewards.
So are games like Farmville and Mafia Wars wrong? I say no, but they do not appeal to me at all. They're catering to a different market, consumers who may one day see the large virtual worlds out there and realize they're ready to try something bigger. Who knows. I'm very keen to see how things pan out in the next decade.
so one more decade of even low quality products so ppl who dont give a damn about the genre can be happy and we the "founders" will wander aimlessy =(
DNA computing come save us all =/
now: GW2 (11 80s).
Dark Souls 2.
future: Mount&Blade 2 BannerLord.
"Bro, do your even fractal?"
Recommends: Guild Wars 2, Dark Souls, Mount&Blade: Warband, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
There is no "war" between social games and regular console or MMO's imo. I play Castle age, happy Island, vampire wars, and Starfleet commander on the facebook in the morning, but its only for about 10-20 min tops. Console and MMO's give me far more depth and content than the social games by far. The social games are fun and quick yes but dont equal the satisfaction of console or MMO gaming. Bottom line.
(BBBBBBWWWWWAAAHHHHH gives double plunger salute to Tudors Show!)
All my opinions are just that..opinions. If you like my opinions..coolness.If you dont like my opinion....I really dont care.
Playing: ESO, WOT, Smite, and Marvel Heroes
@ Kenaoshi
Not necessarily. I think this could do a favor for the game industry as a whole. Not without some teeth-gnashing, of course, but as I said in my first post, these player-watchers may come to want more than games like Farmville have to offer. They may seek out the world that we know and love, and it will be the task of developers to model games that bring the 'new' generation of gamers up to par with what we are used to. It may mean a period of games that are between games like Farmville and AAA titles, but that's the nature of change.
You build, then rebuild, sometimes from scratch.
Not enough people made Diablo clones. I mean there were only a couple AAA Diablo clones, Titan Quest and Dungeon Siege. Diablo is actually a good model for a social game, with the random-statted item drops. Random interval reward systems are even more addictive than fixed interval reward systems like Farmville uses. Also, progresswars would be a better game if you got a random amount of XP per click instead. :P
BattleAxe, Zynga (makers of Farmville) are gearing up to IPO, for over a billion dollar valuation, say the rumors. They make a LOT of money, and Farmville is insanely profitable. (Also, they have done more than one charity drive, and have raised millions of dollars). You need to Google a bit more deeply.
Brostyn, I think we already saw that slowdown in MMO development. There are very few big ones from major publishers these days.
Storm-Dragon, the reason MMO devs need to model on Farmville is simple -- turns out that's what more players want. From a pure pragmatic point of view, the mass market has arrived and it turns out we're not going to persuade them to love dragons and robots. Not to mention that the social bonding techniques that the social games use are something that MMO designers should be paying careful attention to.
Astara, WoW may not introduce farming, but I have to point out that SWG;s resource harvesting is exactly like Farmville's farming just more complex.
TJKazmark, some of the social gamers may cross the divide, but I suspect it'll be fewer. I would expect the MMOs to incorportate aspects of the social game designs first, as you say in post #9.
Kenaoshi, Core gamers will be unhappy, I suspect.
They already are -- this is part of the same overall current as the Wii and the like.
RavingRabbid, there is no war expect for the war for investment dollars. That war shapes what makes it to players' hands.
Reddotmist, plenty of people made Diablo clones. Cloning #1 is a risky technique if you don't have the budget to do it well, though. It's worth pointing out that Zynga made a very polished Diablo clone for Facebook. It died a miserable death and they yanked it.
Yeah, this.
I play both Mafia Wars and Cafe World on my Facebook every day, but that's only for just a few minutes each at a time. They're time wasters, and give some variety to the whole Facebook experience. They're the equivalent of playing Minesweeper or Solitaire on your computer at work to make the day go by faster. That's about it. On the other hand, if I want a more in-depth gaming experience, I'll fire up a game console or my PC and log into an MMO.
I really don't understand all the hand-wringing and whining about games like Farmville. They're social games that attract people who wouldn't otherwise play games. They enhance the Facebook experience, which is good. None of that means that they're going to replace MMO's or kill all gaming as we know it. It's just a different facet of gaming.
Yeah, this.
I play both Mafia Wars and Cafe World on my Facebook every day, but that's only for just a few minutes each at a time. They're time wasters, and give some variety to the whole Facebook experience. They're the equivalent of playing Minesweeper or Solitaire on your computer at work to make the day go by faster. That's about it. On the other hand, if I want a more in-depth gaming experience, I'll fire up a game console or my PC and log into an MMO.
I really don't understand all the hand-wringing and whining about games like Farmville. They're social games that attract people who wouldn't otherwise play games. They enhance the Facebook experience, which is good. None of that means that they're going to replace MMO's or kill all gaming as we know it. It's just a different facet of gaming.
I think that's probably true from a player's point of view, but the war isn't over players and where they spend their time. The war, if there is one, is over money. Obviously, games need money in order to be made. With the success of social games like Farmville, which can be made at a literal fraction of the cost of making a AAA title, more and more investors are looking toward that side of the market.
Think about it this way: If you could make a pile of money by either a) investing a lot and taking a large risk or b) investing a little and taking a much smaller risk, which one are you going to do?
So, do virtual worlds have something to fear from the success of Facebook and other social games? Of course they do. it's not that people are afraid no one's going to play the AAA games, it's the fear that no one's going to fund the AAA games.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Not enough people made Diablo clones. I mean there were only a couple AAA Diablo clones, Titan Quest and Dungeon Siege. Diablo is actually a good model for a social game, with the random-statted item drops. Random interval reward systems are even more addictive than fixed interval reward systems like Farmville uses. Also, progresswars would be a better game if you got a random amount of XP per click instead. :P
Are you forgetting Nox, Sacred(2), Torchlight, Divinity(3), Darkstone, Fate, etc. Granted some of those were fun games, but still complete Diablo Knock-offs.
I get that. And I understand the fear from a business point of view. However, I think past history is on the side of folks who aren't freaked out yet by the more social games.
The success of UO and EQ brought more developers into the MMO genre, including Blizzard. World of Warcraft's success in turn brought everyone else in for their own piece of the pie. Some of those games have succeeded, most have not. Social games like Farmville are no different. Anyone can shovel a cheap, easy browser-based game out the door to try and make a quick buck, and I'm sure a lot of developers will. However, there's also such a thing as market saturation. The same folks playing Farmville and Mafia Wars could look at any glut of new social games and wonder why they should bother when they're already playing a similar game on Facebook.
At some point, the market will be so flooded with cheap browser-based games that folks will want something with more depth instead, and the pendulum will swing back. I'm not quite ready to buy the idea that no one will fund the AAA games to focus on Farmville clones. I think there's room for both, and I suspect the market will see it that way as well.
I have to run out but will simply say this: THIS is the kind of (high) quality, in-depth article mmorpg.com has to aim to release on a consistent basis. We will read more than a 1,000 words if it isn't merely unresearched and unsubstantiated ranting. A great read and I look forward to adding a comment or two once I have some free time.
WoW's success did not bring anyone else in for their own piece of the pie. Since WoW launched, no MMOs have done any better than any of the MMOs pre-WoW. And there have been less of them per year. WoW didn't expand the market except for WoW. (More copies sold, but in terms of subs, WoW just recaptures everyone).
WoW's success did not bring anyone else in for their own piece of the pie. Since WoW launched, no MMOs have done any better than any of the MMOs pre-WoW. And there have been less of them per year. WoW didn't expand the market except for WoW. (More copies sold, but in terms of subs, WoW just recaptures everyone).
Even if you discount F2P games, LOTRO and Aion have both done better than pre-WoW MMOs in terms of subscription numbers.
It is growth only in the sense that there are more ways to get money out of making games.
I have been playing games since before 3D, before color even (jumpman rocked on that green text monitor we had). For a while there was real growth, with technologies improving and new immersive gaming coming out. There was wolfenstein and Doom which ushered in a new age of gaming. Followed by Descent and Duke Nukem 3D which explored further into 3D. I played many shooters for a while (Quake, Heretic etc.) and they were all more advanced but kind of the same game.
I remember when we first got nintendo and thought it was amazing. I remember when Mario Kart first appeared. I remember thinking no game could surprise me anymore and then Half-Life came around. The characters actually followed you with their eyes and head when talking to you. The game actually scared you and you never knew what would be around the next corner. It was amazing.
I remember playing The Realm and being amazed that all those other characters walking around were other people, I remember being excited when UO was getting ready to release because it was even more amazing then The Realm. I remember finding a virtual 3D chat room way back then (amazing how the majority of chat rooms and forums are still just text and login names when 3D virtual chat rooms were invented something like a decade ago).
I remember playing Battlefield for the first time and thinking the concpet of people on foot, people in tanks, in planes, in jeeps all at the same time was amazing.
But in the last ~10 years it's slowly become more disturbing. First there was Halo on the Xbox. Nothing about this game was original or new. I mean come on it was even a space marine in green armor (Doom). But because it was released on console, all of the people who thought playing console games were cool but playing PC games made you a dork suddenly found the FPS genre and thought Halo was the most amazing game in all of history. These same people had no idea of the amazing games before this and how much better most of them were. Thus the Halo franchise, an extremely unoriginal franchise, became one of the best ever.
WoW came along and did nothing new with MMOs, not a single solitary thing. But all the people who thought playing regular games like Warcraft was cool but playing MMOs was for nerds suddenly decided to try the genre. Instantly they all though the most amazing game had ever been created, oh and how amazing and new and original it was! They had no idea how every concept in WoW had been lifted from another type of game. And thus the best selling MMO of all time was born.
Web games started to show up, and a company made a little game called bejeweled. Suddenly people who though gaming on a PC or console was ridiculous or just for kids found out that gaming can be fun. Bejeweled rocketed to one of the best selling games ever.
Web games where you built up land, or had armies, or had gangs, and you had turns and could click on adds or use money to advance your stuff had been around for a long long time. But suddenly a company decided to tie one into face book. Suddenly all these face book users who though wasting time in progressive web games was for nerds thought casual web "gaming" was the coolest thing, and SO ORIGINAL!!! Suddenly farmville becomes the most profitable game around.
Every time you dumb down gaming, or completely copy games that have always exsited but put them in a new media or technology people go nuts and "discover" gaming. All this does is encourage the industry to not be original, not create new things, not challenge the market or their players. It does encourage copying and dumbing down and allowing people to spend much more money on the same product. Gaming is dying, and has been for a while and it's only getting worse and worse. Real games will be rare in the future and it will be sad.
But it's how this country rolls now a days, we're in a "milk your customers of every last cent while giving them less" age. Hopefully it turns around but it seems almost too profitable to ever change.
Sorry I didn't plan on it becoming that long of a post, but this issue does bother me.
WoW's success did not bring anyone else in for their own piece of the pie.
Sure it did. Not in terms of success, but rather in terms of people aiming for their own game to capture the market.
Farmville and all these other social games are the same way. They're successful, so now everyone else will want to try their own hand at a cheap, easy browser-based game. Some will do well, most will not, just like the MMO market.
I think the answer is no, and it is because the entertainment industry investors are addicted to "big hits." It is the same reason that they use predictable returns from romantic comedies to invest in more ambitious and risky mega-blockbusters. Or on TV, for several decades the model was to use the steady predictable income from children's shows, daytime soaps, etc to spend on big budget prime time shows that failed most of the time.
I think the revenue model of "social gaming" is a fad, just like arcades used to be, just like music games (rock band, etc) a few years ago. Right now these little facebook games are new and novelty, and that's why masses of non-gamers play them, but very soon the market will get saturated and the novelty will decline. In the early days of arcades (pac-man) you would get non-gamer types playing a few rounds, just to see the world's latest novelty. But as the 80s pressed on the games did not change much and so the novelty evaporated, leaving only 'hardcore' gamers behind in the arcade.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
I'm an old fan of online games, but this "war" between social gaming and other gaming really doesn't exist. They mostly attract different people for different reasons.
And WoW's supposed market dominance is of course, overstated. I was an original WoW tester, and I couldn't stand it for more than 6 months.
Great write up as usual , Scott
So anyway.
As I see it. What happened to games is the same thing that happened in whole area of entertainment art.
What happened is that online games had started small. Catering first to game enthusiasts , roleplayers.
And than it grew and slowly started catering to the masses (thanks to WOW mainly).
So It changed to fit simple tastes of the masses.
But the original crowd of game enthusiasts didnt disapear. They are smaller but not in numbers. Statistically, because they are part of bigger group now.
So there is still market for GOOD GAMES, real games. Its just have to learn it will not make 20 million subscribers in a week.
The real lesson here is
We are ALTERNATIVE SCENE NOW.
Companies have to understand that. And stop trying to please or get the simpleton masses.
If you make game for a real gamer. Make it on smaller budget and with real complicated advanced gameplay.
If you make game for simpleton masses.
Well... just make Farmville 2
I haven't seen any numbers for Aion subscribers broken out by territory. Does it have millions in NA/Europe?
LOTRO's what, a million or so?
That really is not "rising tide for everyone" sorts of results. Better, but 2-3x improvement in 7-8 years?
More telling, only two examples?
"It was easier ten years ago... when you'd just ship a great product and the users pay you up front," [Pacific Crest analyst Evan] Wilson says. "Those days are over."
From there, he raises a controversial question: "How important is game development when you have poor quality free social games generating these kinds of numbers?"
Media companies only care about daily average uniques, Wilson continues. "The industry has been moving in that direction rapidly and it's accelerating and it's scary," he adds. "It is a big, big issue when some of the leading social gaming companies can get over 20 million players on a game in nine days," he adds -- even the best AAA titles can't pull those numbers."
What is more of a threat to 'quality games' is people who start making whatever type of game gets the bigger market share, rather than the type of game they love that appeals to different (smaller) niches of players.
Not every genre of game can attract 20 million people. If that number of players becomes the requirement for a game to be called a 'success' in the future by publishers and investors, then we'll have a real problem on our hands, but it won't be the fault of Farmville.
Fantastic article for sure
What are the chances that this "war" could end up being good for the genre? Over the last few years we the gamer have been inundated with sub par, incomplete, and often just plain terrible games because MMOs are big money so everyone wants a piece of the pie. I don't think many people will argue with me in saying that the market is oversaturated and with garbage none the less.
From a consumer standpoint, if a large portion of that investor money began to shift in the direction of quick return social games, and the money that is left is scarce it will force developers to step it up a notch in order to compete for the money that is left. While this could be bad for a lot of game development companies, I think in some respects the MMO gamer might win in that we start to see a better quality product in the long term and less AoCs, Anarchy Onlines, Tabula Rasas etc. and AAA titles could be based on the game itself rather than the fact that they have a $100 million budget like every other game out their.
Its going to be harder for indie companies like AV and MH and Hi-Rez to compete, but competition is good.