General Discussion

Here is blog post made by Mark Jacobs of Mythic.

Although I am not voting for everyone to play WAR. And it succes should come from quality , not compassion. But the message is clear and very real. In last 4 years all what we seen was landslide
of horrible failures of AAA MMOs.

2008 , AOC allready failed. What will happen if WAR fails ?

How hard blow will it be for game industry and what will be the consequences for us gamers ?

Read on...

What does WAR’s success or failure mean for the MMORPG market?
Posted on September 3, 2008 by Mark Jacobs

So, in an interview with MTV, I said that it was important for the MMORPG market for WAR to succeed. Of course, this point has been taken a bit out of context by a few people (no shock there) who seem to think I’m a bit full of myself or a way too proud of WAR. Actually, neither is true. My point regarding WAR’s importance to the MMORPG market is based on a number of things:

1) Since WoW’s launch, no new Western, subscription-based MMORPG has sustained a population of 500K subscribers. While their exact numbers aren’t known, both LoTRO and AoC have failed to hit that mark. And as anyone who knows anything about MMORPGs could tell you, the one thing you don’t keep secret if you are doing well is your monthly subscription numbers.

2) Since WoW’s initial launch the market has seen a number of high priced properties crater spectacularly as well a number of MMORPG studios shut their doors. While back in the day, 100K monthly subs would have been seen as quite a success, if you are spending 50M or more on a game all in, 100K doesn’t quite cut it. Even 250K subs (30M gross + box sales for let’s say 10M in profit pre-tax), doesn’t look great to investors when you are spending 50M or more on a game and have continued high expenditures for updates, xpacks, etc. and lots of new competitors coming online.

3) With the increased competition of free-to-do-almost-nothing-fun games and other models, there’s a lot of chatter in the investment community about whether high-end, subscription-based MMORPGs are a good investment. As I said during a panel at GDC, there was a lot of very dumb money in this space (Hey, let’s give 25M to guys who know nothing about MMORPGs and sometimes nothing about online games other than they played them. What could possibly go wrong with that?) and that I thought the money would start to leave this space once some of the games I expected to tank did just that. The money guys run very, very hot and cold and right now, they are getting on their winter coats.

4) AoC’s apparent rapid loss of subscribers is encouraging talk that today’s players won’t stick with new MMORPGs very long any more. Now, I think this is total b.s. as I think today’s players will happily stick with great games (WoW) but won’t stick with mediocre or poor games. Thanks to WoW though, the bar has been raised so that games that might have been considered good/great 5 years ago are not considered that way by the players any more. This is no different than in Hollywood when a breakthrough movie raises the bar for the competition (think about the race for the best special effects in Sci-fi films).

5) Mythic is being backed on WAR by EA’s money and distribution system on one hand and by a fantastic license on the other hand. This leads to increased expectations and demands from the players.

6) This is the 3rd MMORPG that Mythic has worked on. While we have lost some experienced people from our DAoC days, we are still one of, if not the, most experienced MMORPG teams, especially in dog years.

7) Since 1997, you can count on two hands the number of MMORPGs that have held on to more than 200K monthly paying subs for any substantial period of time. OTOH, you would need all the fingers and toes of a baseball team to keep track of the MMORPGS that have failed to maintain that number and/or even launch. C’mon kids, you can try this experiment at home, no plastic bag required! Count all the MMORPGS since 1997 that have had great numbers and then think of all the abysmal failures. Not only have we had lots of failures to launch, we’ve had failures that set a new bar for failures.

So, knowing all this, why do I think that WAR is so important to the MMORPG market? Well :

1) If WAR fails, we won’t have the excuse (as some devs have had) of not having the money or the license.

2) If WAR fails, investors will rapidly look to other business models for MMORPGs especially ones that require less of an investment and development cycle to bring to market. We may be coming very close to the tipping point where investors have seen far too many games fail on release and even more of them fail to even launch for them to be comfortable investing large sums in this market. They will prefer to invest in safer things, like large-scale, cold fusion reactors.

3) If WAR fails, players will see yet again another MMORPG fail to live up to its promise. Given the high expectations and tremendous pre-sales we are getting, the fall will be that much harder to take. One of the problems of having high expectations for a game is that if you fail, the fall will be much longer and will hurt that much more when you hit pavement.

4) If WAR fails, publishers will be even less inclined to take on Blizzard whether it’s WoW or their next MMO. This will drive more developers out of the market and fewer AAA, subscription-base MMORPGs will start. Just look at how few MMORPGs are in development at studios (as opposed to getting outside financing) today. Does anyone really think that if WAR is a failure that this will increase the number of MMORPGs in development? If you think so and you happen to have a few spare million, I’d love to sell you some oceanfront property I own in Idaho.

OTOH, if WAR succeeds:

1) Investors will flock back into the market. Investors don’t mind taking chances if there is a decent chance of success and if WAR can break the 1M barrier in terms of monthly subs, investors will get excited about making lots money in this space.

2) The whole “Only Blizzard can do it” mentality will go away. The deeply ironic thing about this is that after DAoC was a success publishers/investors said over and over again, “If Mythic can do it, anybody can!” Nothing but love right back at ya baby!

3) The subscription model will be validated (again) to be alive and well in North America and Europe. This model has been pronounced dead more times than Kenny has been killed in South Park (well, maybe not but I love to get a South Park reference in there, I loved that show).

4) Publishers will be willing to take more chances in this space again.

Now, the same would have held true for AoC or any other MMORPG that has come out in the last 3 years. Unfortunately, only LoTRO can be considered any sort of success and even then it didn’t come close to WoW’s numbers (despite a license which in the past has been referred to as a license to print money). I’ve been making online games forever and I want this space to be hugely successful and continue to expand. However, if we developers can’t create games that people not only want to play at launch but play and pay for at least six months, then we are failing at our jobs and we deserve whatever happens to us as do our games.

Ego talking? Nope, just cold hard facts.

Mark
 

Dude thats easy,

It means the end of the traditional, big name,  grind based monthly subscription based MMORPG.

No one is going to invest in making these things anymore. It's as simple as that.

Aside from whats in the cooker now and maybe a few more "daring" ventures...you are looking at the end of this type of game and an evolution to the casual, free to play as is already happening.

Originally posted by Torak

Dude thats easy,

It means the end of the traditional, big name,  grind based monthly subscription based MMORPG.

No one is going to invest in making these things anymore. It's as simple as that.

Aside from whats in the cooker now and maybe a few more "daring" ventures...you are looking at the end of this type of game and an evolution to the casual, free to play as is already happening.

 

Hmmm

Good point there mate

After i read this i am holding my fingers crosset even tighter as i did before for WAR, if it fails it would mean the end of quality mmos and even more trash will be thrown at us, i just hope that WAR will be a big hit and everyone will want a piece of the cake and try something new.

The only other game that has the chance to change the mmos scene is GW2, fingers crosset there to.

Hmmm good post there by Mark.

I plan to play WAR, but more importantly I think the industry as a whole needs a good shot in the arm.  Too many spectacular failures are scaring away the money and the innovation and are hurting MMOs as a whole. 

If it fails it also means that many people will think the PvP centric model in subsciption based MMOs is not as viable and use that as an excuse to further design games around PvE with PvP as an afterthought following WoW's lead. 

If it succeeds many more people may find this model viable and start designing more PvP oriented games with less PvE and more PvP alternative levelling/content as its core.  I for one would like to see a game that continues patching and adds additional PvP content patches to allow continued progression and interest, like territorial control and large scale battle environments.

The problem with these big companies are... they dont listen to the players, you can tell none of these jerk offs even attempt to find out what the players want in a game. They stilll think in console terms, where you only have ot please few hundread people... once...  They odnt seem to realize that they need to please a couple hundred thousand people... constantly.

They keep releasing these so called MMOs as if they are monthly game releases, create it, package it, ship it out and start on teh next project. The fact that tehy finish each project with one foot in and the other foot in their next assignment shows. Products rare always rushed, and the dev teams are always cut down to the core just after launch, lettting players know they have no inteniton of maintaining the game just milking the name.

I miss the days when gamers made games, now it just seems like a bunch of computer saavy programmers make games and they make it for the money, not because they enjoy it. Because if they enjoyed games that means they play games, that measn they interact with the general commninty in the games the play, that means they know for a fact, that half the shit they plan on doing will fail on launch because the fanbase following your game has been chanting it on a community forum somewhere.

If warhammer fails, it probably means the end of MMOs ofr north american devolopers.. and good riddance, bash asian MMOs all you want, at least they are doing a good enough job making marginally orginal storylines. I think the announcement of that fucking buffy the vampire game was the last straw breaking, these vampiric name sucking route publishers are going with is down right sicking.

I guess gne are the days of getting a bunch of writers in one room and creating a new fucking concept.

This is not me bashing vampire games, i would welcome a vampire game, but why buffy, who limit yourselves to such a bullshit story line, wheny ou can start form scratch and do whatever the hell you want. Call it creatures of the night or some shit and have all the nightmare ghouls in there. Everytime these companies opt to follow an existing lore they willingly handcuff themselves with their hands behind their back Because all lore no matter how well written, falls prewritten rules, you dont have the freedom you would have, the freedom you NEED to make real MMos off of them.