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Why did MMOs become about the money and numbers?
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To deny that any company, good or bad, is NOT out for money is such an ignorant idea, just accept that MONEY is the INCENTIVE for anyone in this world today that drives them. 99.9% people don't do what they do because money wasn't involved in some shape or form, how else would anyone live. Even the best games' whole intentions from the start was for money, even if they do deliver on quality. It's not a, do I give up quality for money thing....quality (perceived by the greater majority) LEADS to MONEY.
Every company is looking to provide quality games, some pull it off, others don't and thats how every industry works on a very basic level folks. So yeah these "companies/developers aren't/are in it for the money" idea is a load of garbage and if it wasn't for incentives like money, developers/companies wouldn't be striving for quality. Just because you don't perceive quality in the genre in its current state, doesn't mean the companies out there aren't trying.
This thread title is somewhat ironic because it implies that in some given point in time, that MMO's were for some reason, not about money when in fact they were. Remind yourself why you work and do what you do and the developers/companies/artists etc. are also being driven by very similar incentives and in order to acquire that incentive, it requires good work. It works hand in hand, its not two forces that are colliding against each other, its quite the opposite.
Regardless of whatever hyperbole the OP might've used, the question is why are MMO companies currently MORE obsessed with maximizing profits than they are with delivering good games. It IS a sliding scale after all. Just because the world's smallest indie developer is interested in making a profit, doesn't mean they're AS interested as Blizzard or EA or whoever else. So some companies will put more of an effort on delivering a game they've envisioned and other companies will compromise their game in any way just to increase profits.
I then clarified my statement, there is a difference.
Yes they knew there was a market for online games, people had been playing them for years before UO. Various f2p, pay per hour and muds were available for a very long time.
You say there priority was to make the game UO. You haven't shown any evidcence thats supports your view, only opinion based on your experience.
I say there priority was to make the game UO in a way that would appeal to the biggest group of gamers they were aware of. I haven't given any evidence that supports my view, only opinion based on my experience.
You say don't see any evidence to suggest that they decided on the features or principles of the game based on any kind of notion of appealing to as many people as possible the way that games nowadays seem to be.
I say I don't see any evidence to show that they were only interested in making the game they wanted regardless of it's appeal. I'm saying you don't see any evidence of it because that was their goal right from the start right from day one when Origin was selling the games idea to their bosses at EA.
Some games now claim to be everything to everbody. Others are more targeted. I say the old games were exactly the same way however they only knew about 1 or 2 groups.
I have stated why I think that over and over and over again. Here it is again just for you, "Origin and EA are for profit companies. We believe most companies realize they get the most money be delivering a good product, and if the product (no matter how good it is) fails to deliver expected results, or even good results the product will change because profit is the primary reason for the products existence."
Wow absolutely had an effect.
Your statement: Because it seems to me your argument of "game companies are the same they ever were" has to deny that the success of WoW has had a negative (or any) impact on the genre's ability to innovate. It seems totally reasonable to me to believe that companies saw the success of WoW and thought they could make easy, safe money by trying to duplicate WoW as much as possible. What's wrong with this line of thinking?
This is a straw man argument that is only made to look like the orginial argument.
The argument was did UO make the game just to make a game they wanted or were they trying to appeal to the widest possible audience.
The argument is not about a game companies ability to innovate. That is a seperate argument although it is done for the same reason, tryign to make a game for the biggest possible audience. Game companies can still innovate (and many do/did/are/will) and appeal to the widest possible audience, while others will just copy.
edit - anyway this argument is pointless so I'm out. You enjoy your delusions. I'll enjoy mine.
Well see what I'm getting at is that there's some preconceived notion that theres certain MMO devs/companies that aren't in it for the money and want to deliver quality and that there are others that aren't. The WHOLE point of my post was that every company is looking to maximize their profits and every company wants to create high quality games. That is the goal of every MMO developed/being developed/will be developed.
You don't go into anything and be like..."Hey I feel like releasing a low quality MMO this time.." It's ridiculous to think they are somehow able to perceive quality physically in their game, pick it out and say "well this costs too much, can't have that..." So this perception of a "compromise" is purely imagined, IMO of course, and too easy to use to justify, in a non MMO developer's/businessman's life, as a reason that the MMO genre is in a decline (a belief some here carry).
Who's the authority saying that company A just compromised this game in lieu of more money, at the expense of the customer they are trying to serve in the first place. That doesn't make sense or help them reach their goals at all. Every organization ideally exists to provide their best quality products/services out to people in the interest of PROFITs. PROFIT's are an incentive for QUALITY, not opposite forces colliding together. Not sure how much simpler I can make my point.
A: SOE had no choice in the NGE, it was something they were told to do by George Lucas.
B: They didn't turn it into a "SWTOR". SWTOR wasn't even on the drawing board back when the NGE occurred. If anything, it was an attempt to be more like WoW.
you clarified it while also saying you weren't asking me to prove a negative.
You can say that, but the developers themselves word for word disagree with you. Raph Koster and Starr Long themselves time and time again throughout that video talk about how none of this had been done before. Were there MUDs and text-based games and things? Sure. But that's totally different from what they were doing, and they agree with me.
Why do you think that? See I have reasons to think the things I do. Raph Koster has spoken at length about the reasons they did the things they did in UO. He talks a lot about simulation and roleplaying and what would NATURALLY be the best design choice. I've never heard him mention anything like "we did this because we were trying to bring in new players." I can totally believe that they did this to some degree... as I've said this is a sliding scale. No company is made up ENTIRELY of people who ONLY care about money and not the game, and I doubt there are many companies who have ZERO interest in making money. Our point is that over the past 10 - 15 years the genre has become MORE about making money and less about making good games. Do you disagree with that?
Yeah you say that but you don't say why. Also, see above. The point isn't they had literally zero interest in making money or had zero interest in people playing their game. It's an MMO, it's supposed to be about playing with other players. But that's different from tailoring your entire game to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Surely you can see that, yes?
And I say that discussion rarely even took place because there was no data to go on. It was unknown territory. The early UO devs made the game they wanted to and compromised only where they had to based on EA's decrees. We want more of those kinds of devs and less of the kinds of devs that make the same old themepark with a different skin.
Wait wait wait. So you think because a company is designed to make money, and ONE of the ways to make money is to deliver a good product, that means... what exactly? There are a lot of ways to make money... sometimes you can be a breath of fresh air in a market that's oversaturated with WoW clones and sometimes you're just the WoW clone. This is an extremely fallacious argument. Sometimes bad products make money. Your argument doesn't work.
You have claimed that game companies are the same now as they ever were. Was this the original argument? I don't really remember at this point but it IS a claim you're making and you made it as a direct response to the point we're trying to drive home which is that game companies are NOT the same. They've become MORE about making money and LESS about making good games, as I've said a number of times.
So instead of just calling it a straw man (which by the way it isn't), why don't you try to answer it? IF you think that game companies are the same now as they were before, then how do you explain the rift that WoW created? Obviously there are MANY "WoW clones" which by definition are not innovative, they're less likely to be made by passionate developers (considering they're stealing ideas from another game) and they're obviously merely trying to cash in on WoW's success. They don't offer anything new to the community or at least not as much as if they made a game themselves. This is the problem we've been talking about forever. This is the shift from innovation and towards free money.
Those are two extremes. In reality it was probably almost entirely wanting to make the game they had envisioned and the fact that they believed it would appeal to enough people was how they sold it to their investors at the time.
Yeah, except there are more copy cats now than before. Are there some companies still making games for the sake of making good games? Yeah, probably. But are you really trying to deny that the market is over-saturated with themeparks that don't offer anything special? And if you don't deny that, how can you disagree with us who want a resurgence of passionate developers making games they love, not just games that are trying to cash in on proven successes?
It's very easy: MMOs became about money and numbers when the business entered the same industry model as Hollywood. When you spend a hundred million dollars developing and marketing a game, you HAVE to be focused on money and numbers. Sure, the new Lone Ranger movie made $230 million......but it COST more than $250 million to make. And that, in the business world, is a clear Epic Fail. New A-list MMOs are in that trap now. So insanely expensive to make and market that unless it's an absolute blockbuster, it's chalked up as a fail.
Sure, we the players might consider a game to be a rousing success, fun to play and worth the price, but since MMOs became big business, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is fast-return profit, which means the game has to make back the development costs almost immediately, which means the only thing corporate pays attention to is money and numbers.
I agree with you and that's one of the reasons I shudder when I hear people talk about graphics in MMO's. People have made the case that MMO's cost a lot to make and so they HAVE to water down the gameplay to appeal to as many people as possible to make back their investment. When in reality our standards of what an MMO should look like are probably at least a little inflated by companies focusing on them and other more expensive features and content instead of on the relatively cheap stuff like having a complex and deep system/concept to your game.
Lol, they water down the gameplay because they have hundreds of thousands of players playing under the same environment. You aren't ever going to get gameplay on par with single player anythings, but what MMO's lack in gameplay (compared to single players) they make up for group dynamics/coordination etc. If you are looking for pure in depth game play, you chose the wrong genre. This is about fitting everyone under one roof.
And by what logic are you even connecting cheap to developing complex/deep systems and concepts. That is probably one of the greater challenges of every MMO, obviously you must have better ideas in attaining this level and ensuring thousands of people can play together within a singular environment. I have no idea how you can associate cheap with complexity when it should be the other way around due to development times.
This post has been a fairly enlightened post on people's perceptions of reality and what they think can and can't be acquired properly. Resources have a limit especially human ones.
The short answer to the OP is this: Because people do not work for free!!!
Everyone needs to eat, everyone wants to live in some form of shelter, those with skills expect to not just eat but eat good food and not just survive but to "live well".
As to the original argument that EA was not out for the money back in the days of UO you are sadly mistaken. Even then the company was known as one of the worst places to work for. It was all about production. Way back when my roommate was a graphical artist and did some work in the gaming industry in Austin Texas and he knew a few people that worked over at EA and other places. It has always been about the money and will always be about the money.
The only argument that ever took place was the question: What is the best way to make money - creative potentially non mainstream titles that might become a big hit - or production type mainstream titles guarenteed to bring in a given amount of revenue based off of known market data.
The only people who ever did free work were those trying to impress an established company in order to get a paid job.
Oh dear... no.... Are you joking? I just want to thank you for supporting basically everything I've been trying to claim about the current state of the MMO genre. As a general rule, the larger the playerbase, the more watered down the gameplay has to be. That's why myself and others are hoping for smaller, more targeted games.
Fitting everyone under one roof is EXACTLY the problem with MMO's nowadays.
Yes I'm saying that spending time and resources on developing the game's systems is more cost effective than developing the aesthetics like graphics and animations. It's cheap in a relative sense of course. By the way, I'm not counting the cost of human capital in the sense that it would take a smart and innovative person to come up with deep and complex mechanics in their game. I don't think just anybody off the street could design a successful MMO. But look at the game like The Repopulation. They have an incredibly in-depth siege system and also a very in-depth crafting/harvesting system. It's a relatively small scale project and it's still WAY MORE in-depth and complex than AAA games like TERA, WoW, Rift, etc. Why? Because developing complex systems is cheaper than developing high quality aesthetics.
And you're MMO project accounting credentials are where again? First of all Repopulation isn't even out so you don't even know if the system even works on a "Massive" scale. Getting a complex system to work AND accounting for thousands of players interactions working together is a lot more complicated and difficult to put together than making something look good. There's millions of artists out there that can draw/model very well and if complex systems were in fact as cost efficient as you say, big name MMO companies wouldn't have a hard time developing one in the first place. The assumption here is that people think of complex systems and merely slap it into the software and that's just not how well developed projects work.
The development of ideas and turning them into "reality" is very pricey and I don't see where your logic is presented anywhere in your posts presenting how exactly is creating complex systems actually cheaper than creating aesthetics? You provided zero supporting argument for that and that's the big hole in your argument. Its based on an assumption that relies on that idea to be actually true when in fact you can't prove or disprove it yet alone even quantify it unless you knew how many people and man hours were spent on either side, which I'm sure development companies do know. All I know is complex gameplay accounting for large amounts of people interacting together in some shape or form is a lot harder than creating concepts and art.
So I have two supporting arguments in regards to why your assumption is wrong. If it was as economical as you say, big name MMO's would have no problem implementing them and that the amount of resources spent on gameplay development could equal if not exceed the cost of aesthetics. If big complex ideas actually weren't costly, those little sandbox MMO companies wouldn't be struggling today either.
1) Big budget MMO's may not have complex systems because complex systems won't bring in the masses. That's kind of the point... they're dumbed down.
2) Your other point is just not even coherent. If developing complex ideas weren't costly, small sandbox MMO companies wouldn't be struggling? Why are you making that connection? Just because designing abstract behind-the-scenes stuff like how crafting works or siege mechanics, or harvesting, or skill progression, etc is CHEAPER than aesthetics and other typical big-budget items like giant raid bosses and crap like that doesn't mean it doesn't cost any time and money at all. This is just a complete non sequitur.
Anyway, the reason I say it's cheaper to create complex and in-depth systems than it is to create high quality aesthetics and "content" is because many of the smaller games do indeed rely on things like that. It seems like AAA graphics/aesthetics are a hallmark of big budget games, and deep complex systems is a hallmark of the smaller games. You don't think so?
Of course companies try to make a good product but they also try to milk them as well. DA and DA2 are the perfect example of trying something new, really putting some effort into a game and then for the sequel cutting costs and releasing a sub par game. A game that they knew would sell well because of the title's name.
I mentioned before that is very difficult to judge the intent of gaming companies, but when it comes to certain titles you can see a pattern. They tend to be the big name ones.
The branding of titles that are released each year are another example of this, yes its a good formula because that's what made it a great title in the first place. But when you move from a couple of sequels to the one (or more) a year release cycle you start to sell a brand not a quality game.
While genres like FPS and MMO's can last for decades, individual titles which do so become derivative, repetitive and dull. The most important thing is shortness of the cycle. To take an entertainment industry example, James Bond films are still fantastic films, but if we had one released every year, I am no sure we would be so appreciative of them. The very act of branding and pumping titles out is part of what makes them so repetitive.
That does not mean it's cheaper.
Greedy capitalist MMO developers! Yes, how dare they try to make money off us poor players. We all know that money is evil!
How can they live it that? I'd say the only way they can ever redeem themselves and clear their conscience is to develop truly free to play MMOs. I mean no cash shops, no box sales, just completely free
It's an indication. If the MMO's that cost a lot are the MMO's with AAA graphics and aesthetics and the MMO's that don't cost as much are the ones without those things but typically deeper and more complex rules and systems, that seems to be evidence for what I'm saying.
I'm a staunch capitalist and part of free market capitalism is people voting with their wallets and voicing their opinion. Game companies are allowed to do whatever they want, and we're allowed to point out when we think they're being greedy.
...the increasing slide toward feudalist-corporate-fascism in society.
There have always been relatively expensive but bad games. This isn't anything new.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
There have always been relatively expensive but bad games. This isn't anything new.
do you think it's particularly bad right now? It seems to me the majority of MMOs today are often disappointing.It isn't. It would only apply if there were complex MMOs made for lower costs than mainstream MMOs.
Which isn't a case.
Only "AAA" complex game on the market is EVE, and the costs to get it where it currently is, are on par or even higher when compared to equal "AAA" title, ie. such as SWTOR.
What you are missing in your equatation is a scale. Complex or PVP oriented games can be made smaller, not cheaper tho.