Lots of virtual worlds will fail

Æthelred

They do love to spout off at the GDC! There was a panel at the conference today on the hot topic of online worlds and some developers had interesting things to say.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6431207.stm

Mark Jacobs of Electronic Arts wrote:

"We are going to have so many failures it is going to be unbelievable. There is going to be a lot of corpses, rubble all over the place. There is so much dumb money. Mass media is coming in and saying we want to be just like WoW."

Rob Pardo, head of game design at Blizzard wrote:

"Because of WoW and dumb money and big publisher pressure there will be a lot of corpses."

Raph Koster, former head of Star Wars Galaxies wrote:

"Viacom has launched three MMOs and nobody noticed. Anybody who is not watching how big media is moving into this space is missing a major major story. We are about to see a truly massive explosion in the quantity of online worlds of various types."

Daniel James, chief executive of Three Rings wrote:

"You are about to see, and this is happening already in Asia, many different kinds of games that are massively multiplayer and less based on role-playing games. This medium is going to destroy TV - and it's going to happen in short term."

Big words my friends! Does TV have much to fear? I don't think so. If Sims Online can't succeed, then I don't think any of these other offerings are going to draw in a mass-market audience. The technical barrier of entry is probably still too high. Sony's Home might familiarise more people with the concept though - is it going to be built in to the PS3 eventually?

The BBC know what they're talking about of course: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/CBBC-World/

Couscous

I agree there will be a lot of dead MMOs. Look at all of the ones out now that barely have any players.

SimBen

TV is already dead, and it wasn't killed by videogames OR the Internet, but by DVDs.

ED!

TV is hardly dead. I mean really folks.

Six

Worlds fail me.

Mitsuhide

titmouse wrote: »

I agree there will be a lot of dead MMOs. Look at all of the ones out now that barely have any players.

Especially that one Korean one, umm, ATD Raycrash or something? That was awesome,but there was only like, 4 people on at a time, and they were all playing in a single game together. Ouch.

Of course, that was the beta, so maybe there's more people.

corcorigan

TV and MMO have different functions, or should anyway. If a game can allow you to slump there and not think for an hour, then it's not much of a game.

Fireflash

Oh it's obvious a lot of MMO's are going to crash and burn. Everybody wants a piece of the WoW pie yet they seem to ignore the fact that most players will not play more than 1 or 2 MMO's at a time. They simply demand too much of a time investment.

Lewisham

Sims Online didn't succeed because it wasn't the Sims. It was too much MMO for it's audience to handle.

I think the problem is that we define an "online world" in a time-sucking, persistent space. World of Warcraft is an online world. Second Life is an online world.

Halo 2 is not an online world, but it does contain what actually does define an online world: community. If there is no community; you're just playing a single-player game online.

The problem is that a normal person can only support one MMO at a time (and that's pushing it if you've got a partner) if you're going to define games that way. They print money because the subscription costs, if you hit it even relatively big, can put your profit margin through the roof. But there can only be a couple of these guys, as we have seen.

Publishers need to realise that actually, microtransactions and online play can work with "normal" games, and you can make a fair chunk of change that way instead.

I don't think Mark Kern is right in the article: "It will be really hard to tell what is and what isn't an MMO. There will be a lot of experiments in convergence between social networking and MMOs." And who is paying for this? Running an MMO is an order of magnitude more expensive than a website. If you charge your customers; you aren't going to get many.

The MMO space is fundamentally broken. Too much time and money investment is necessary on both sides for it to function.

cloudeagle

Define "virtual world."

But if we're talking MMOs, then yeah, it's pretty obvious given the vast amount of player time they suck up and the subscription that any given person can only really dedicate themselves to one at a time. So more MMOs will fail than succeed.

Lewisham

cloudeagle wrote: »

Define "virtual world."

But if we're talking MMOs, then yeah, it's pretty obvious given the vast amount of player time they suck up and the subscription that any given person can only really dedicate themselves to one at a time. So more MMOs will fail than succeed.

I just did define "virtual world"

At least, in this context.

Target Practice

Serious question: Does any MMO out today other than WoW have over, say, a million users?

At a guess, I would think maybe City of Heroes and FFXI do, and possibly the original Everquest still.

Couscous

Target Practice wrote: »

Serious question: Does any MMO out today other than WoW have over, say, a million users?

At a guess, I would think maybe City of Heroes and FFXI do, and possibly the original Everquest still.

City of Heroes is pretty small.

Target Practice

titmouse wrote: »

Target Practice wrote: »

Serious question: Does any MMO out today other than WoW have over, say, a million users?

At a guess, I would think maybe City of Heroes and FFXI do, and possibly the original Everquest still.

City of Heroes is pretty small.

Is it? I don't really keep up with MMOs. I just kinda figured because all the internet geeks talk about it a lot...

...then again, Internet geeks also talk about comic books and chmod jokes.

SweetdaddyG

I reckon Playstation Home will be massive


(Shame no one will have bought a PS3 to see it...)

Lewisham

People don't publish the data unless they're doing well.

Not even the Daedalus Project (which, IMHO, is the most authoritative source on MMO data) has any comparisons.

DoctorArch

November 2006 issue of PC Gamer stated on the cover that Guild Wars had 2 million players.

But Guild Wars is a different type of MMO than WOW

Zombiemambo

Archgarth wrote: »

November 2006 issue of PC Gamer stated on the cover that Guild Wars had 2 million players.

But Guild Wars is a different type of MMO than WOW

Yeah, the kind of MMO that's missing one 'M'.

Captain K

SixkillerNYC wrote: »

Worlds fail me.

I LOL'ed

Captain K

Target Practice wrote: »

Serious question: Does any MMO out today other than WoW have over, say, a million users?

According to http://www.mmogchart.com/ the only MMOs other than WoW with over a million subscribers are Lineage and Lineage 2.


I don't think this site tracks every game you could concievably call an MMO, though.



EDIT: Oh, and it only goes up to July '06. Not the best info anymore.

narv107

Target Practice wrote: »

titmouse wrote: »

Target Practice wrote: »

Serious question: Does any MMO out today other than WoW have over, say, a million users?

At a guess, I would think maybe City of Heroes and FFXI do, and possibly the original Everquest still.

City of Heroes is pretty small.

Is it? I don't really keep up with MMOs. I just kinda figured because all the internet geeks talk about it a lot...

...then again, Internet geeks also talk about comic books and chmod jokes.

Other than WoW most games have a couple hundred thousand players at most.

Jensen

I don't know that I would say TV is dead, I would say that TV as we know it is dying and heading for a change. DVD's, DVR, the internet. I know a lot of people who follow TV shows religiously, but I know very few of them that watch those TV shows on the night they air, or the time, or even on their actual TV sets. It's always burned to a DVD, picked up over Bittorrent, or recorded on to a DVR and played at convenience sans commercials. I'm no expert, and these are just observations, but I'd say couple the above with other media outlets that are ever increasing in popularity and we may have, not a death but a necessary evolution of what TV is in order to survive.