Traditions, tourists and tigers
Posted by: Snafzg
On: Jan 11, 2010 at 12:30pm
So here's a random post about some random MMO thoughts I had in my head. I'm not actively subscribed to an MMO, nor am I playing any betas, trials, or F2P titles either. It's a bit strange that I still have MMOs on the brain but I guess you never really lose something that has been such a big part of your life. With that said, here we go.
Traditions, tourists, and tigers. I'm speaking of traditional MMO development, WoW tourists, and Asian Tigers specifically. The basic concepts I have floating around my head are that MMO traditions are changing, WoW tourists have an interesting effect on the industry, and Asian developers/investors might just be ahead of the curve. In my mind, these all come together in a weird sort of way.
Traditions
For many years, the MMO business model was exclusively subscription-based. The past couple years have shown the emergence of real-money-trading as a viable model. Subscription MMOs have proven to be the most lucrative money-maker for studios, but the catch is that you really need to maintain a subscription-base that is properly proportioned to your maintenance costs, new development costs, original development costs, and a few dozen other things.
Traditionally, most players have given slack to developers who release not-so-ready subcription-based products. Unfortunately for developers, this is changing due to a wide selection of competing subscription, F2P, or otherwise MMOs. Back in 2001 there were few quality MMOs with roughly 2.5M shared subscriptions between them. By 2008, there were roughly 16M active subs. The market is growing and so are expectations.
Many other traditions are breaking, but the ones I mentioned are sufficient to back up the rest of what I have to say.
WoW Tourists
What can be said about these unique and interesting creatures? They play WoW. They are legion. They are willing to give new MMOs a shot but almost always come home to roost. This has had a big effect on the Western MMO industry, which even now hasn't been able to mitigate against.
Tourists help build the hype for new MMOs and also add fuel to the wildfire of negativity that follows shortly after release. They boost closed beta signups. They bring open beta servers to their knees. Investors and developers alike see the WoW population base as a potential goldmine, which is falsely verified by their afforementioned engagement in the pre-release hype and beta processes. The developers try and fail to mimic the WoW success model, which dilutes the genre. But that's okay because many investors are scared to put "stock" in much else anyway.
WoW tourists aren't evil. Investors aren't evil. Developers aren't evil. They just mix together like oil, water... and rocks. Syncaine has an interesting thought on how they might finally blend.
Development Tigers
Making MMOs is risky business. They cost a lot of money, take a long time to build (even when they don't work as indended), and when released, are competing with more newer and established titles than ever before. Have the Asians figured it out?
Please correct me if I'm wrong as this is second-hand knowledge I'm about to pass along. Let's me explain it as it was explained to me.
In the West, subscription-based MMOs are developed basically as I have described above. In the East, however, many studios are taking a different path.
Instead of cramming as much content as possible into the release-ready version of the project, they scale way back. Instead of investing tens of millions into development and marketing, they scale way back. As a result, instead of taking 3-4 years to release an MMO, they crank them out much faster.
I believe the old saying goes, "Fast, cheap, good: pick two?"
It's an interesting concept. Even with Western MMOs, people complain about devouring content too quickly. They still whine about the quality. In fact, they even bitch about the development speed. If most people are going to complain, you might as well go with the fastest, cheapest option, right?
If a new title doesn't gain traction in the Asian market they simply nuke it. Oh well, at least it didn't cost much or waste too much of anyone's life developing it. If it does, however, they will invest more time and money into it. You can't make something cheaper or faster to develop after the fact. You can raise the quality though.
My assumption is that this would also allow them to try out wild and crazy design concepts without much repercussions for failure. I'm sure a lot of them totally bomb, but talk about a potential breeding ground for true innovation.
It should be mentioned that most of these titles are F2P with an RMT element. As a player, you may be bombarded with a shitstorm of... well, shit, but at least you can try it all for free. On the other hand, it would suck to really latch on to a title only to have the project dumped.
So how does this all fit together
I wondered to myself if we'd ever see that kind of development here in the West. MMOs developed the Asian way would be nearly tourism-proof. It might be riskier for the investor but the smaller budgets would be attractive. Developers could stretch their creative muscles and have more freedom to truly innovate. Players would have a greater variety of titles to choose from as well.
There are some negatives as well but it's definitely interesting to think about. For one, the MMO wall at your local game store will start to resemble the Wii wall with a huge amount of truly horrendous wastes of time and money.
I think it's more of the strategy of each individual development company. In general, any company who tries to put out something perfect right from the start is unlikely to succeed --- unless the developers are supremely awesome and know exactly what it takes to succeed. For other mortal developers, an incremental or evolutionary approach is better.
The WoW franchise is big. It's like Microsoft. It's foolish for a new & smaller company to try to compete with Microsoft head-on, where it is strongest. But think of Google. Google didn't try to steal all of Microsoft's pie all at once. If it did it would have failed. Google succeeded in its own niche, thus allowing it to build a foundation to blossom from.
I have been playing the Allods Online beta and it is a fun game, but so is Warhammer now that I am playing the Endless Trial. That game truly has changed a lot since last I played it.
Anyways, hope you're doing well and that the bathroom project got finished up good!
- Chris