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A Look into MMO GamingRecently, the games
industry has seen the birth of a brand new commercial game genre.
The massively multi-player online game.
Although online games are nothing new, these games allowed
thousands and thousands of players to play with and against each other
in huge worlds. They have
become very popular in a short space of time, and the more successful
ones have hundreds of thousands of players paying a subscription fee
each month in order to continue playing. Unlike single
player games, which tend to provide a set objective which is reached
within a certain number of play hours (ranging from around 10-15, up to
60 or 70), MMO games tend to just place the player in the world, and
allow him or her to experience it as they wish.
It is extremely common to find that players have spent well in
excess of 500 hours playing any particular character, and during this
time they gather a group of friends and attachment to their character.
This means that giving up or changing to an alternative game,
resulting in the loss of that character, is something that is difficult
to do. This has obvious benefits to the publisher of the game as the
longer the game goes on, the more the player gets hooked in, and
therefore the subscription money keeps rolling in. Unfortunately,
this business model also has a number of disadvantages for the publisher
and, with the number of MMO games in development (in excess of 70 at
last count), it is my belief that these disadvantages are going to cost
a lot of publishers a lot of money. Brief Commercial Advantages of MMO
Games
Title may
sell for two years plus, with each person paying an additional fee each
month in order to continue playing – if the game is successful, this
means that each person is paying a far larger amount of money for the
game than a standard title. Product is
not static. By this I mean
that improvements and alterations can be done after launch.
This allows the products position in the market to be protected
and improved after release – something that is very difficult to do
with traditional games. Improved
loyalty. In a single player
game, the player plays for a short period of time, but then goes to find
an alternative title. However,
in MMO games, the time required to play means that players become less
willing to leave your game for a rival product.
When you have spent 500 hours on a character, throwing it away
and starting again is much less appealing.
Therefore once you have a player hooked, it is much easier to
keep them, even if a superior title comes along.
However, this can also be a disadvantage as it is more difficult
to prise players away from competing games.
In the end, the market will support a much smaller number of MMO
subscription games than single player, or free online ones. Brief Commercial Disadvantages of
MMO Games
The title
requires an enormous amount of after sales support, in the form of
customer services, costs of running the servers, renting bandwidth,
after release development team etc etc.
In some of these cases, large amounts of capitol is required up
front, before the success of the product is known. This type of
project is enormously expensive to develop.
With everyone playing the same game world, the amount of money
required to provide a world of a suitable size and variety is massive
– far bigger than a traditional single player game. Monetary
return is slow. Unlike a
normal boxed game, sales of MMORPG’s are traditionally much lower than
for boxed products (Everquest, probably the biggest game of it’s type
at the moment, is reported to have sold in the region of 400,000 units
– not a great number for such a big title).
This is offset by the much higher cost per person (a typical
charge of $10 per month, which comes straight to the publisher means
that each player can end up paying in excess of $150 for the title).
This means that the money returns are spread over a much longer
term than for a boxed product, which usually does most of it’s sales
over a very short period – probably one to two months.
A developer or publisher MUST be able to finance itself through
this period. MMO Games in the future
Although the
future of the MMO game looks very rosy from a player point of view,
there are a number of issues that I feel pose a very real danger which
could lead to financial trouble for a number of developers.
Although I feel that the MMO genre is a very important one, the
way in which they are viewed is going to have to change in order for
companies to take advantage of the new market. Launch
MMO games
have already changed appreciably in the last few years.
What constitutes an acceptable launch is completely different –
the buggy and content light launches that were fine 4 or so years ago
are now, quite rightly, heavily criticised, and I believe that more than
one MMO game has struggled recently simply for not reaching expectations
upon release. In the
future, I believe that the initial launch for MMO games will become more
and more important. People
will expect to sit down to a bug free and fun game from day one, and
will not be willing to pay for the “beta test” experience.
Effectively, the release standard will have to be far closer to
the release standard of a single player game. This will
have an enormous impact on MMO development.
In the past, games have been released 6 months to a year to
early, and been heavily financed by early adopters, but this trend is
already under threat – the difficulties that games like WWII Online
and Anarchy Online have shown that people will no longer support this
practise, and it is becoming increasingly hard to recover from that.
And it’s going to get worse.
Games coming out with major issues still to be resolved will fall
by the wayside. Many publishers seem to feel they need to compare themselves
with other titles at launch, instead of where they are now.
The amount of times I have heard “well, compared to Everquest/
Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online at launch…” is incredible, and is
just an attempt to put off consumers for another underdeveloped product.
The increasingly competitive nature of the market will mean that
launch has to be done right. Delivery
The current
trend for distribution of a MMO title is as a full price product,
complete with one month’s free playtime.
Although there is little inherently wrong in such a system from a
publishers point of view, I believe it will have to change.
The value for a publisher in a MMO game is in hooking the player
in, and keeping them there for a sustained period of time.
In order to do this as effectively as possible, I think the
industry will shift towards a free distribution of the client, but no,
or a very small amount of, free play time.
This will be especially important in the future as more and more
of the potential market is playing an existing subscriber game, and
therefore publishers have to tempt people away.
The less costly the initial fee, the more likely players will
give it a try. Older MMO
games are already doing this now, and I think as time goes on, even new
ones should look at this route. Duration
In my view,
probably the biggest change in MMO games in the future will be in
product duration. The holy
grail being chased by many publishers is the concept of a game
effectively selling hundreds of thousands of units each month for
several years. Games such
as Everquest, Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online have all achieved this
to varying degrees, and there are a lot of people looking at this and
wanting a slice of the cake. However,
this only works well when there are few games on the market.
If you like MMO games, there isn’t a lot of choice or variety,
and therefore even if you aren’t overly enamoured with your current
game for whatever reasons, the hooks of your character, friends etc tend
to be stronger than changing for another, very similar product. In the
future, there will be so many different titles coming out, that I
believe the amount of time spent on any one will be severely reduced.
There will be the odd exception, but I think in the main, most
people won’t play a MMO game for much more than 3 months or so before
moving on to something else. As
soon as you get a little bored with your current game, there will always
be alternatives – either in different genres, or similar ones.
This will have an incredible effect on the MMO industry. Games will
have to be cheaper to create. MMO
games are incredibly expensive to develop, and tend to take a good while
to make their money back. The
fact that they make money at all is based around the subscription model,
but several months, or even years, can pass before a product breaks
even. If games have a much shorter shelf life, only two things can
make up for it. Significantly
higher subscriptions, or lower budgets.
A game with a subscription of $30 or more each month is likely to
struggle when the majority are around $10, so lower budgets are probably
the result. This will be
partially offset by the required game size and scope. Content Creation
The
conflicting pressures on MMO games will mean that changes will have to
be made in order to keep interest up.
If the average time that people play a MMO game is going to go
down, other ideas will have to be introduced to try and keep people in
without massively increasing budgets. The main
problem with content is that it is expensive to produce if quality is
high, and in the main the content is poor when compared to a single
player game. This is only
logical if you compare money spent.
A single player game can have a budget in excess of £2 million,
and deliver about 20 hours of entertainment.
A cost of around £100k per hour of player enjoyment.
MMO games are trying to deliver up to 50 times more entertainment
for maybe a budget 5 or 6 times bigger.
Even with economies of scale, and other benefits, it is difficult
to deliver an equally enthralling experience.
This is an overly simplistic way of looking at such development
as it ignores a large number of issues,
but it certainly shows a potential problem. In order to
gain the maximum content for lower cost, the key is to make the content
more player driven. Games
such as Dark Ages of Camelot have taken a step in that direction, with
player actions having a certain relevance in the wider world (especially
more recently, where access to a particular dungeon is dependant upon
PvP actions), and games will do this more and more as it is effectively
“cheap” content. The
ideal situation for a developer is that the players take their world,
and create their own fun within and beyond the hardcoded areas.
In order to truly benefit from this, games, and game worlds, will
have to be designed and built with this in mind.
If this is done well, then after release development can be kept
significantly smaller, fixing bugs and other problems as opposed to
trying to generate new content. Content Style
Most MMO games require a great time commitment before the player is capable of actually doing “the fun stuff”. Many of them require hour upon hour of tediously attacking bats, rats, dogs etc to get the player’s character abilities up so they can go off and explore or do most of the other interesting things. Whilst this was a reasonable practise with little competition, the numbers of games coming out mean that the creators will have to pull the players into the worlds much quicker, providing good, starting character entertainment. Most developers understand the principles of placing some of your most entertaining moments near the start of the game, as that’s what gets them interested, but MMO games have tended to completely ignore this. This aim to
reduce the tedium in the early parts of MMO games also has to be pushed
through the rest of the product. Many
games at the moment feature
large periods of tedium waiting for health/ energy/ stamina etc to go up
so you can do things, or require large periods of time to be invested
looking for other suitable people before you can actually enjoy
yourself. In the
future, it will be much easier to jump on to an MMO game and play for
half an hour. This won’t
mean that MMO games lack the “deeper” areas of play where a large
amount of time is required, but successful games will have to feature
more.
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