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Why MMOs Fail: A Look At Why Some Games Failed To Break Into The Genre | MMORPG.com
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Why MMOs Fail: A Look At Why Some Games Failed To Break Into The Genre | MMORPG.com
Many MMOs have come and gone over the years. Kanishka takes a look at why MMOs fail, specifically honing in on two of the biggest ones in recent memory.
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I also think it misses the biggest issues:
1. Content can not keep up to the rapid/rabid pace of consumption. What used to be considered a massive world is now conquered in a fraction of the time. Walkthroughs and quest solutions are posted before games even LAUNCH. It is far easier to consume than to create.
2. Economy. Games today are built around monetization concepts as opposed to gameplay. I am also going to include good old 1st and 3rd party RMT in here. Botting and farming have both now grown to an incredible level of functionality made simple by technology. How do you have an in game economy when someone can swipe a credit card to buy items right from the company store? How do you have an in game economy when there are bot-swarms farming every harvestable component and posting them for sale on a market/auction?
3. Hacking/exploiting and cheating are rampant. It used to be a tiny percent of folks that would do this and it was "taboo". Now it's everywhere.
So.. at the end of the day you cannot sustainably harvest or even craft when competing against bots(or wallet warriors), you cannot fight fairly because of cheating, and you can blow through PvE content at an accelerated pace.
That's clearly a formula for failure.
Unfortunately, identifying these issues is much simpler than finding solutions.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
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"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
As a level 1, I don't want to be bombarded with crafting quests, class quests, story quests, open quests, world quests, PvP quests, zone quests, faction quests, etc. and I also don't want to run out of the city for the first time, get smashed by some bored basement dweller and have whatever crappy loot and cash I had taken.
There is a happy medium that most developers seem to avoid.
It doesn't help that loot tables, class progression and skill options have gotten shallow, boring and predictable. If players do want complication in an MMO, I think it's in the category of class progression and growth. Everyone wearing the same tier of "mage" or "barbarian" set armor with the same basic skills and abilities is horrible. The games that did a good job on loot, classes, skills, character progression and gear and generally the ones that have lasted.
On a personal note, I absolutely hate the Asian art style in a lot of new games.
I don't want a sword that's 2x bigger than my character.
I don't want to look like a member of a K-Pop group.
I don't want ridiculously ornate plate armor with feathers and spikes and every color of the rainbow.
I don't want a caster with eight layers of clothes including a robe covered by a waistcoat that's covered by another waistcoat with a long duster jacket that's covered by a cloak, all of which have huge lapels... all topped off with a giant floppy pimp hat with a western style belt buckle on it.
I don't want to look like a gay sailor, metrosexual butler at a German nightclub or slutty maid.
I just want to look like a personalized version of a classic mage or paladin or cleric or whatever.
In other words, make games like Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, etc
Tabula Rasa's biggest problem was surely that they tried to switch horses mid race, going from fantasy to the less popular genre of science fiction. Making such widescale changes causes huge problems as it has in New world recently and it is very difficult to recover from them.
Talking of SF you will notice that was Wildstar's gig as well, so that is worth mentioning as Sf does not do as well in MMOs, though to me Wildstar's issues were harder to pin down and form a definitive opinion.
Of the four over arching reasons he gives, well I don't agree with excessive grind but I do with dividing the player base though I am not sure about his conclusions there, while certainly lack of originality has been a problem I don't see it as key as he does. Finally he mentions the importance listening to the games community which is spot on but fails to mention that a studio needs to know when not to listen as well, both sides of that coin are key.
mmorpg junkie since 1999
game was destined to fail from the beginning.
Extremely troubled development with incompetent and temperamental leads.
Definitely showed in the final game as well. Pretty much every aspect of the entire game was buggy as hell.
What made the attunement quests that the article talked about so difficult was that they were very buggy and most times could not be completed.
5. Signing a publishing deal with AGS.
Joking aside, I think there is a much better example to study than those mentioned in the article: Firefall. You could probably cover a whole stable of MMO failures just by examining Firefall's story. The mismanagement of the studio and the game should be a required reading for any game executive - from how not to manage (any) company, to how not to lead (any) team, to how not to develop (any) game, to how not to develop an MMO, to how not to launch (57 times) an MMO, to so much more.
Honestly, sometimes it feels like Kern's real objective was to create a definitive collection of all possible scary stories for aspiring game devs. And then he exceeded his own expectations.
I think the kind of grind matter greatly.
Sure, the endgame was a bit flat. A PvP progression system and legitimizing the pirate faction a bit more would have been nice, but the game as a whole is pretty solid. People quit playing it because the developer was all over the place in every bad way possible.
The same might be said for Shroud of the Avatar.
Second is how the game itself is handled.
Third is how engaging the gameplay loop is.
If these three check out, I would play the game, if not, they can forget about me. I can play for a few minutes or an hour, but when I realize it's not to my liking, I will quit and never come back.
I have to disagree the grind in L2 was so tedious to this day its probably the hardest grind in any game and droves of players left because of it. The ones that stayed were because of the rivalrys between guilds/alliances players were heavily invested in the competition. I was in one the the top 2 guilds on sieghardt and we hated each other. However not one player that I can remember ever said "Hey this grind is great" We all hated it.
I don't have all the answers, but I believe a solution to the first issue of content could be resolved by incorporating a player-made content generator. For example, City of Heroes had a way for players to make their own quests/mission chains. If a game allowed/rewarded players for creating content, as well as for participating in the player made content, I believe the problem of lack of content could be alleviated until the devs can introduce another expansion/patch in more content.
For the second issue, there really is no way to solve this. Someone let slip that there be gold in them hills, so to speak, and predatory monetization practices garner lots of money. If you want companies to move away from cash shop economies, how are devs/companies going to make money to continue support for the game? Most people don't want to pay a subscription fee.
The third issue, I think companies should take a stronger stance against hackers/cheaters but..again, if a company is profitable, and lots of their profits come from hackers/cheaters, why would they get rid of their cash cow?
Overpromise, and under deliver.
Call it either the Brad McQuaid path, or the Funcom path....
Provide incentives for content that manages to make it live (waive sub fees for X months or similar), and maybe even more if the content becomes popular among players. Players love having a hand in their favorite games. Create a ruleset that allows them to do so and benefits your studio. Cool idea.
OP never played Everquest, EVE, WoW, Lineage... etc..
It tried to grab the hardcore raiders which it didn't. Can't remember how many people didn't do the unlocks but joined raids anyway to find out after making the raid wait for 30+ mins that they couldn't actually get in.
Not to mention the absurd 40 man content. Anyone who has ever led a raid can tell you trying to get 40 people doing what they are suppose to do at the same time is not fun at all. It's like trying to herd cats into a bath tub.
They tried to push an update cadence that no studio could keep. Then they pushed out stuff that was half done to try to keep that cadence going. I mean stuff like mobs placeholder names, quest with no names, etc...
People love to say it was the pvp that did the game in but in reality the pvp crowd was a small portion of the already smaller playerbase and it isn't what killed the game.
There are numerous other things that led to it specific downfall, but it feels like devs never learn from their mistakes and make them over and over with new companies doing the same things.
What is even worse is it was a fun game that had one of the best housing designs I have ever seen in a game.
This was what was supposed to happen with Kingdoms of Amalur. We got a few small continents to play around in, somewhat of a foundation for a real combat system, lots of introductory stories and a world that COULD be expanded as a result of it's own basic concepts.
Sadly, well, Kurt Schilling.
On one hand I do agree with this approach because there is absolutely some expectation of having a degree of single-player options in an MMO world. ESO and FF14 are both MMOs with a strong berth of single-player content, with lots of content to be challenged by those seeking a multiplayer, more sociable experience as well. FF14 does, currently, have a lot of "forced grouping" at the beginning due to the original expectations of the game and I would argue that Delves along with Public Dungeons in ESO do require a bit more brain work that overworld content - especially if a player is unfamiliar with TES combat let alone ESO's unique brand of it.
On the other hand, I am a bit of a traditionalist. My first MMO was Everquest when I was 12, I rolled a Halfling paladin and made a bunch of friends as I leveled up precisely because I could only explore so much solo. And exploring is fun, but fighting WHILE you explore is even better. Finally getting that set of Small Bronze Armor after so much hardship and finding a good magical weapon after ransacking Runnyeye or other dungeons felt great. I sort of expect the sociability and open ended up exploration to take something of a front seat, which aside from ESO I don't feel too many other MMOs actually capture nowadays.
Another poster pointed out that due to online websites, strategy guides, and Public Test Realms people very rarely get that exploratory experience anymore. All of the content is mapped out before it even reaches the hands of players and the Devs are continuously using the players as a "free QA team". This is equally infuriating in situations like with Everquest 2 where the devs do PTR and Beta Buy-Ins but they NEVER listen to the feedback and the same problems in Beta/PTR occur at launch as well.
Beating the dead horse, they don't make actual mmorpgs anymore, now they are mostly story driven rpg within some amount of shared environment. You are not actually playing a role of your choosing (mmorpg), but rather a tightly controlled designed experience by the developer.
So we see all these attempts at trying to make a type of game (mmorpg), that there just isn't the audience for, and then having to put in stuff that the majority wants in order to sell that game, moving it further away from being an actual mmorpg - So much by now that there is only a small resemblence of mmorpg in modern "mmos".
Players who would enjoy a mmorpg (a limited audience), don't get what they want because no one still deliver that; and at the same time the non mmorpg audience gets this wierd mix of some gameplay&features they like and some they don't, all wrapped up inside this pseudo mmorpg concept that they not really want to bother with.
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Obviously, there are many other specific reasons for various games failing. For wildstar it could be something like.. Don't make an ultra hardcore game concept with a style that kinda make fun of itself as a game-genre.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
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When you look at games they are putting in the bulk of the PVE content after the fact usually many years later. Sometimes this will save the MMO sometimes its too late. Maybe they should be starting with this content on Day 1. The old games had deep systems on Day 1. Now days we get MMO lite systems on day 1.
Remember that commercial "wheres the beef"?
Sick and tired of devs doing the bait and switch of we will start as a PVP game then try bait PVE players in with adding PVE lite content later and wonder why they fail. MMO's need deep PVE systems, other genres do pure PVP better. I am not saying they cant have some side PVP but many of those players want PVE systems also.
Thats why players are abandoning these games, they are all surface fluff. Too worried about things nobody even cares about and missing the meat and potatoes for MMORPG stuff.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
By becoming so predominant, progression kills other interesting aspects of a game and turns into an horrible chore.
But failure is not always financial. A game can be successful financially but still being a failure in the fun department.
So if it's not fun why people would stay? Well, MMOs and some other multiplayer games found the recipe a long time ago:
- progression (is addictive and is the main leverage)
- a projection of narcissism over the digital character (doll playing)
- everything social/ bragging rights/ friendly chat discussion / guild drama / and so on ...
- meaningless achievements
A good example of a financially successful collection of chores disguised as a game is BDO. Well, this one adds "eye candy" to the list, and it should not be underestimated.