Even with it's problems( most have been iron out now though) Vanguard was probably the last of the old time MMO's in the west but we must not forget Age Of Wulin which is a really progressive mmo. You also have ArcheAge but some feature or fluff seem to get under westerners skins.
IMO if Age Of Wulin would of been made by a western dev team the OP and many in the west would be shouting from the roof tops.
The game has some features never seen in any mmo to date.
I think it will be games like Black Desert , indie mmo's and perhaps Brads new project that brings back that spark.
Of course this is just my opinion.
Thing is their are some great single player RPG on the way as well.
As an EQ vet i really can't see EQN bring it back but i would like to be proven wrong.
Why do so many people quote Vanguard here lately? Even if you fixed all the bugs, it was just a reskinned EQ with few new wrinkles. Even at release it was at best a very mediocre game. Anyone thinking Brad is going to resurrect the genre has rocks upstairs. Brad would not know what an old school MMO was if it hit him in the face. If you funded his new game you have delusion issues.
I do not agree that MMO's are going downhill. There is kind of a lull in the storm atm. The problem with the genre is there is a huge pile of mediocre crap coming out of the far east right now that is distorting everyone's viewpoint. Everyday another one pops up on this forum giving away cheap item shop junk, but they are all copies of each other with few distinguishing differences.
One of those eastern studios is going to step back and attempt to do something else besides a grind it out, item shop game. Graphic artists and coders are quite cheap over there right now.
I really am not sure that any studio in the west can get the funding needed to do anything decent atm unless one of the large studios like Blizzard or EA accidentally strikes gold with some unknown genius.
This article puts it beautifully, I wholeheartedly agree. They should write it MMOrpG because the RP part of it has been cast aside. The huge sales numbers will be trotted out as proof that games now are awesome, but as someone else said, it's because the market is flooded with people who never liked RPGs to begin with and the dopey game producers have obliged with a giant case of the Byzantine sickness.
There's nothing left. There's nothing you can get in this genre that a more specialized game or program can't do better.
The only thing that an MMORPG can offer that other games can't is a truly living, breathing world, and none of the big players other than CCP and maybe SOE with EQN seems to be much interested in that right now. The key to the older MMOs was that the developers made the world, and the players and community shaped the game. Nowadays, too many players see MMOs as disposable entertainment that the devs are supposed to bend over backwards to feed to the players and heaven forbid requiring any kind of dependence on other players. Until the pendulum of the market swings back to the original concept where the players have as much impact as the devs, the genre will continue to slump, since the financial success we're seeing right now is not based on solid ground, but the caprice and whims of the fickle "its popular today" crowd; when we see a return to a player driven focus rather than dev driven focus, the only major selling point that this genre has over all the others, it will surge back for a while before slumping again when we get another glut of cheap knockoffs of the games that prove to be a success. I don't konw that I would call what we are seeing right now a decline, but it's defintely at the very least a plateau with very little upward growth since the f2p market got saturated.
Leveling is no longer a magical experience your driven to perform, it is merely viewed as a barrier holding you back from doing what you actually want to do and that is chill with your friends who are already geared and level capped. (SOE and Blizzard know this and that's why we have instant lvl 90's now)
3-4 hour raids are a thing of the past as gamers age and have other responsibilities. End game events should not take any more than 1 hour to complete.
Technology will continue to evolve what can be done and it has already it's just no one is doing anything with it.
---- I think an RTS/MMORPG hybrid like a Kingdom Under Fire mmorpg with rts elements is a step in the right direction, and I have heard SOE talking about smart AI, well how smart are they? Thier virtual brains are going to get better and better.
Graphics will continue to get better, platforms have became better.
The Genre is growing in population, but the genre is evolving into a more casual one. You can fight and fight and fight it, but the truth is casual is where it's at. Now that many more people will have a machine capable of playing mmorpgs on, Im looking for the population to continue to grow and the games to be more tailored to someone who has an hour of time to kill.
Let's look at 2014
- Player housing is going to hit every game
- EQNext landmark - probably the only thing that really is dfferent that what we have been doing for the past ten years, not that player creations havent been around, but not in this fashion and with the tools players will be given.
- Smart AI has been spoken of in EQNExt (2015 game though perhaps we find out more this year)
- ESO is nothing new but maybe fun nevertheless
- Wildstar - pretty much a new twist on WoW with fresh servers
- SOTA - offline play in an mmorpg?
- The Repopulation and Star Citizen - I don't know anything new they are bringing to the table maybe someone can shed some light here.
- DayZ though not an mmorpg - continues to be an example of outside of the box thinking and perhpas inspires other devlopers.
Now try and explain a modern MMORPG. You kill stuff so you get levels, so you can kill more stuff, and then get to the highest level so you can just do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until you eventually get bored.
This seems to be a popular theme through the thread so I'll take a crack at it as well. First, I like how Metallica puts it, simple and to the point, "Boredom sets into a boring mind". Stop being boring and doing boring things.
Second, your summary description of gaming didn't start with fist gen mmos. It's been in rpgs since they existed. Very few rpgs don't have some sort of core murderous design feature. The earliest major systems all had this: D&D, Rolemaster, and to a lesser extent Traveller/MegaTraveller. It was carried on through the DIKU and Rogulikes and still persists. My point is this isn't a stagnation from first gen mmos to the present iteration; it's always been there. So what is YOUR point? It feels like you didn't do your homework and the article was mostly intended to stir up the rabble-rousing boring "I'm bored" demographic.
In short. If you're bored, then boo hoo. That's your problem and that applies to everything in life from gaming, to fishing, to sports, art, music, movies, theatre, work, and home.
Is that all you did in rpgs? Particularly pen and paper rpgs? If so that was just as shallow an experience and you would be right, but the blame the victim bit about Making it Fun has little to do with this subject. By that argument there should be no criticism of anything because its your responsibility to make it fun or shut up. There is no need to discuss MMOs if you are talking about life issues, so let's just skip that and get back to the games
MMOs have stagnated into copies of the experience with the emphasis being continually placed on combat only.
-Abilities on the bar become fewer and focused only on combat.
-Crafting and other activities dumbed down and completely subborned to the Combat Player's activities.
-Worlds are smaller. mobs placed in a line for you to encounter from the activity disbursement drone.
-Gear grinds to make you able to fight the next tier of mobs, who will give the next tier so you can fight the next tier of mobs, etc.
-Classes and abilities designed only around their combat balance and nothing else.
If you were right Vanguard and EvE Online would be the two most popular MMORPGs, and the subscription model would still be the de facto standard.
So, you're not...
Only thing in decline is my patience for the flame-bait "journalism" on this site.
I guess you are writing to your intended audience, the rose colored glasses / teary-eyed nostalgia chasers who seem to overpopulate this site.
If you said music and television were in decline, I'd agree with you, as almost everything out there sucks.
But MMORPGs? I am a firm believer that there is a game out there that caters to EVERYONE, not one game for everyone but a game for each person's tastes so to speak.
Kind of sucks that most of the ones that cater to the MMORPG.com bandwagon are so poor quality, barely or not AAA products.
Vote with your wallets, just like the rest of the genre has done over the past 10+ years leading us to this current GOLDEN AGE, and go vote (pay) for EvE or Vanguard or drop money into Repopulation, Star Citizen, Pantheon, try and snag a Chinese/Russian client for Archeage, etc. etc.
Just stop bitching, please!
LOL, sorry, who's bitching? No need to get emotional over this.
Anywho, great article. Enjoyed the read.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
I'd like to know how a genre that goes up in population and up in profit every year is in decline ? Driving towards a cliff ...maybe. But till to actually goes off that's just an opinion.
What I notice most about the genre is how much stock people put into forums. This is what everyone thinks, and everyone is somehow represented by what you read here......really ?
The market is evolving to represent what people are willing to pay for. That leaves a lot of people out. They are bored with what the genre has to offer and they are VERY vocal about it. Nothing about the actual numbers indicates they are a majority representing what " most" people want. The complaint department is full of people who are unhappy with what they bought...that doesn't mean the store is as well.
When a poll on this site has 200 votes and people can sit back saying see the evidence is in ...this is what people want! you have to wonder about someones math skills. 400 million people play " mmos" and 200 votes on a notoriously negative troll site tell you "most" people think this ?
As much as you want to believe profits are up, they aren't, about 3 financial statements from the 3 largest companies proves it. The industry itself even admits to the declination of MMOs, but please keep living this fantasy world that everything is ok and "peachy keen", what's next you going to say "its not the games its YOU" excuse? lol yeah....ok.
Market by Segment in 2013
Consoles remain the highest revenue generating platform, with $30.6 billion (-1% y-o-y) equal to 43% of global games revenues. This includes all DLC spend and business-to-consumer second-hand trade. Traditional PC gaming (downloads and boxed) contracts slightly to $6.0 billion (-7% y-o-y), but this is offset by 14% year-on-year growth for MMO games, totaling $14.9 billion. Game revenues generated by tablet and smartphones will gross 18% of the global games market, surpassing $12bn, which is roughly double the amount spent on games for handheld consoles.
Leveling is no longer a magical experience your driven to perform, it is merely viewed as a barrier holding you back from doing what you actually want to do and that is chill with your friends who are already geared and level capped. (SOE and Blizzard know this and that's why we have instant lvl 90's now)
3-4 hour raids are a thing of the past as gamers age and have other responsibilities. End game events should not take any more than 1 hour to complete.
Technology will continue to evolve what can be done and it has already it's just no one is doing anything with it.
The Genre is growing in population, but the genre is evolving into a more casual one. You can fight and fight and fight it, but the truth is casual is where it's at. Now that many more people will have a machine capable of playing mmorpgs on, Im looking for the population to continue to grow and the games to be more tailored to someone who has an hour of time to kill.
Good summary and you can't really expect people who are not in that target market (which isn't close to 100% of gamers) to just shut up and pretend they're happy with it. Games have changes a lot from what we like and while some people seem to take the attitude that all change is good progress most people realize that sometimes change actually ends up ruining something that some people at least like.
I'm excited that more niche games are coming out thanks to crowdfunding and if some of those succeed you will see less complaining but as long as all we have to choose from is minor variations on what the quoted post outlined above a lot of people are going to be unserved and unhappy.
The mantra gets repeated so often on this forum (and others like it) that people start to believe it's true despite the lack of compelling evidence to back it up. After witnessing genres that actually were in decline over the years, the argument holds very little weight for me. I've seen the faucet get turned off for adventure games, turn-based tactical/strategy games, flight & space sims, and the decline was inarguable. Instead we have more MMO devs, more big publishers, more games, more players, more money being made.
One of the best indicators for MMOs being fine is that you have developers unabashedly making games that both cater to the mainstream and run counter to it at the same time, all throwing big money behind it. I mean, look at the breadth of recent releases and those to come with TSW, GW2, Neverwinter, Wildstar, ESO, ArcheAge, EQL/N.
Originally posted by Rockniss The Genre is growing in population, but the genre is evolving into a more casual one. You can fight and fight and fight it, but the truth is casual is where it's at. Now that many more people will have a machine capable of playing mmorpgs on, Im looking for the population to continue to grow and the games to be more tailored to someone who has an hour of time to kill.
The problem is that MMOs don't really offer anything in that department that can't be matched or surpassed by other genres. The strength and uniqueness of EQ or UO was precisely the opposite; it wasn't a quick 1 hour session before moving on, it was a long term investment in the character and the world. Even if the current bubble of large growth doesn't burst, it's going to to be very hard to grow much further without at least a few more companies returning to supporting the more niche worlds and concepts that defined the earlier MMOs.
When I started playing MMORPG's I had a vision for a genre that would expand to become true virtual worlds that a player could live and adventure in. The lure of the genre for me was the amount of freedom to do things in a game and coexist with other real players at the same time. I envisioned that MMORPG's would expand upon that theme. Instead of being able to do more I feel like more-or-less I can only do the same stuff I was able to do over a decade ago (in some cases, sadly it's less than I used to be able to do). Perhaps my vision for the future of the genre was mistaken but that's just why I got into them. I don't play MMORPG's anymore and don't see myself doing so in the near future either. Great article and right on point.
Consoles remain the highest revenue generating platform, with $30.6 billion (-1% y-o-y) equal to 43% of global games revenues. This includes all DLC spend and business-to-consumer second-hand trade. Traditional PC gaming (downloads and boxed) contracts slightly to $6.0 billion (-7% y-o-y), but this is offset by 14% year-on-year growth for MMO games, totaling $14.9 billion. Game revenues generated by tablet and smartphones will gross 18% of the global games market, surpassing $12bn, which is roughly double the amount spent on games for handheld consoles.
The user and all related content has been deleted.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
I'd like to know how a genre that goes up in population and up in profit every year is in decline ? Driving towards a cliff ...maybe. But till to actually goes off that's just an opinion.
What I notice most about the genre is how much stock people put into forums. This is what everyone thinks, and everyone is somehow represented by what you read here......really ?
The market is evolving to represent what people are willing to pay for. That leaves a lot of people out. They are bored with what the genre has to offer and they are VERY vocal about it. Nothing about the actual numbers indicates they are a majority representing what " most" people want. The complaint department is full of people who are unhappy with what they bought...that doesn't mean the store is as well.
When a poll on this site has 200 votes and people can sit back saying see the evidence is in ...this is what people want! you have to wonder about someones math skills. 400 million people play " mmos" and 200 votes on a notoriously negative troll site tell you "most" people think this ?
As much as you want to believe profits are up, they aren't, about 3 financial statements from the 3 largest companies proves it. The industry itself even admits to the declination of MMOs, but please keep living this fantasy world that everything is ok and "peachy keen", what's next you going to say "its not the games its YOU" excuse? lol yeah....ok.
Market by Segment in 2013
Consoles remain the highest revenue generating platform, with $30.6 billion (-1% y-o-y) equal to 43% of global games revenues. This includes all DLC spend and business-to-consumer second-hand trade. Traditional PC gaming (downloads and boxed) contracts slightly to $6.0 billion (-7% y-o-y), but this is offset by 14% year-on-year growth for MMO games, totaling $14.9 billion. Game revenues generated by tablet and smartphones will gross 18% of the global games market, surpassing $12bn, which is roughly double the amount spent on games for handheld consoles.
It may be right, more and more people have access to computers, phones with internet, etc... The question I have is, they do not show you what they are calling a "MMO". As I have recently posted, nearly everything that more than one person can play is starting to be called mmos it feels like. The term has become so watered down that it doesn't mean much. Was Farmville in there as a mmo? It fits the new description of mmo, but the point is, if you keep expanding what a mmo is, sure it will 'grow'.
I wont get into how mindless and un-mmo a lot of these things are imo, like Farmville, so if that is a lot of the growth, then great for the people making them....Just doesn't mean much to me in the end, as I care about more traditional mmos.
I remember excitedly explaining the premise of these types of games to friends and family, defining them as alternative world's where you can become a warrior, or a wizard, or a bear murderer....Now try and explain a modern MMORPG. You kill stuff so you get levels, so you can kill more stuff, and then get to the highest level so you can just do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until you eventually get bored.
This part of the article struck a nerve with me. How can you not see that it is you who is in decline from the genre, not the other way around? You can still be all those things you excitedly explained in today's mmos. But you no longer find excitement in it so its the game's fault? My advice is to be a warrior, or whatever you want and stop worrying about the quests and the raids.
I was in a similar rut as you where I preoccupied myself with what the devs are doing and where they are taking my character. I forgot why I started playing these types of games in the first place. But now, I got it back and I'm enjoying myself as much as I ever did.
The problem is that we went from taking clunky broken games and making them work with our RP roots, to armchair developers who demand immersion or bust.
Yep I'm one of the old fags... I played a lot of Ultima online when I thought that it has its limitations and quirks but that's the begining. New games will build upon that foudation with better 3D graphis more interactive worlds rich rpg like quest lines with multiple outcomes, bigger worlds. While visiuals obviously stepped forward everthing else seemed to go backwards. I don't think that anyone afterwards tried to pick up the torch of creating the living worlds and evolve mmo beside just expanding it.
Finally I thought World of Warcraft is going to be it... It was great they have done thigs exceptionaly well but to my surprise npcs were still displaying me sheets of text... my quests were to pick x of y out of z corpses. Crafting was so underwhelming made me cry. In UO I was prospector scouting mountains with the tools searchig for rare ore deposit analysing % contents of ore around mountain wall.
In WoW I was doing TSP alogrytm between mineral nodes poping out of nowhere on their spawn points.
That's just tip of the iceberg... while WoW became huge beyond belief picking out good stuff all around from different concepts. Other developers decided to pick a thing from wow and build whole game around it. How underwhelming that is everyone here already knows.
I agree with the author that MMORPG is on decline in truth there never was many games of this genre that were on the rise. After mmo infancy we are only with three notable MMO games.
On pole position is WoW which sriked milions showing that hey you can make this genre shine like a star with enough polishing... first ever AAA mmo in my book.
Guildwars who didn't save a cent on putting tones of effort to actually do things differently often better than WoW.
Last but not least EVE Online because Sci-Fi niche isn't all that small and that's probably only living breathing (suprisingly all that in vacum) world. It actually has economy not auction house, crafters not farm bots, good boys and bad boys (pirates!). You go to a bar and chat with a guy about parts for your space ship.
Nowadays only little breeze like The Secretworld which is original in the way that instead of making assumption that player is brainless monkey that's here to spoon feed him some excitement and fake achivements. It does the darnest thing! challenges player braincells in many aspects... puts a quests before you that you will get stuck at and have to do darnest thing resarch... actualy learn something.
Also Neverwinter first solid action rpg that actualy adds some good old fun to the stagnant boring combat mechanics of mmos and all this for free.
With mmos I suggest to stick to good ones... it's a waste of time to ride a hype wave to another brick wall. Don't be a marketing puppet.
Against my dreams MMO rather expands than evolves it's still better than diminishng and dumbing down that FPS suffers from.
Are claiming I have no point? The technologies is available, hell it was in 1969 but we are not going to work in jet packs in 2014. Nor do we have virtual worlds with ecosystems in MMOs. There certainly is an expectation of where technology will take us and how fast we will get there. Sometimes it meets expectation - slip differential sometimes it don''t.
Remember that businesses making games take a couple years to react to trends. it takes a lot less time to write an angry post about samey MMOS than it does to develop and release a non- samey MMO. this was especially the case in the late 2000s when it was easier to finance a samey wowclone because business investors who knew squat about MMOs wanted to catch lightning in a bottle a la wow.
now, we are about to see the first crop of games from the post- samey wow era released.
in other words the complaints that fans of the genre have been voicing for the past 3/4decade will finally be addressed with games like star citizen, repop, the 2 EQN games, Camelot, etc.
2014 and 15 will likely be watershed years in mmo history much like 2003 and 2004 were.
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Put your money where your mouths are. And realize that this isn't about giving Brad money, its about making enough noise so that other companies can realize that we are a viable fanbase to make in depth mmo RPG's for.
Otherwise you are just spitting hot wind and do not complain when we are still getting these fast food, soon to be console primary mmos.
I honestly hope many of you take the time to look at the big picture of what that kickstarter represents.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
The user and all related content has been deleted.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Comments
Why do so many people quote Vanguard here lately? Even if you fixed all the bugs, it was just a reskinned EQ with few new wrinkles. Even at release it was at best a very mediocre game. Anyone thinking Brad is going to resurrect the genre has rocks upstairs. Brad would not know what an old school MMO was if it hit him in the face. If you funded his new game you have delusion issues.
I do not agree that MMO's are going downhill. There is kind of a lull in the storm atm. The problem with the genre is there is a huge pile of mediocre crap coming out of the far east right now that is distorting everyone's viewpoint. Everyday another one pops up on this forum giving away cheap item shop junk, but they are all copies of each other with few distinguishing differences.
One of those eastern studios is going to step back and attempt to do something else besides a grind it out, item shop game. Graphic artists and coders are quite cheap over there right now.
I really am not sure that any studio in the west can get the funding needed to do anything decent atm unless one of the large studios like Blizzard or EA accidentally strikes gold with some unknown genius.
Get ready for the hate mail lol.
This article puts it beautifully, I wholeheartedly agree. They should write it MMOrpG because the RP part of it has been cast aside. The huge sales numbers will be trotted out as proof that games now are awesome, but as someone else said, it's because the market is flooded with people who never liked RPGs to begin with and the dopey game producers have obliged with a giant case of the Byzantine sickness.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
The only thing that an MMORPG can offer that other games can't is a truly living, breathing world, and none of the big players other than CCP and maybe SOE with EQN seems to be much interested in that right now. The key to the older MMOs was that the developers made the world, and the players and community shaped the game. Nowadays, too many players see MMOs as disposable entertainment that the devs are supposed to bend over backwards to feed to the players and heaven forbid requiring any kind of dependence on other players. Until the pendulum of the market swings back to the original concept where the players have as much impact as the devs, the genre will continue to slump, since the financial success we're seeing right now is not based on solid ground, but the caprice and whims of the fickle "its popular today" crowd; when we see a return to a player driven focus rather than dev driven focus, the only major selling point that this genre has over all the others, it will surge back for a while before slumping again when we get another glut of cheap knockoffs of the games that prove to be a success. I don't konw that I would call what we are seeing right now a decline, but it's defintely at the very least a plateau with very little upward growth since the f2p market got saturated.
Leveling is no longer a magical experience your driven to perform, it is merely viewed as a barrier holding you back from doing what you actually want to do and that is chill with your friends who are already geared and level capped. (SOE and Blizzard know this and that's why we have instant lvl 90's now)
3-4 hour raids are a thing of the past as gamers age and have other responsibilities. End game events should not take any more than 1 hour to complete.
Technology will continue to evolve what can be done and it has already it's just no one is doing anything with it.
---- I think an RTS/MMORPG hybrid like a Kingdom Under Fire mmorpg with rts elements is a step in the right direction, and I have heard SOE talking about smart AI, well how smart are they? Thier virtual brains are going to get better and better.
Graphics will continue to get better, platforms have became better.
The Genre is growing in population, but the genre is evolving into a more casual one. You can fight and fight and fight it, but the truth is casual is where it's at. Now that many more people will have a machine capable of playing mmorpgs on, Im looking for the population to continue to grow and the games to be more tailored to someone who has an hour of time to kill.
Let's look at 2014
- Player housing is going to hit every game
- EQNext landmark - probably the only thing that really is dfferent that what we have been doing for the past ten years, not that player creations havent been around, but not in this fashion and with the tools players will be given.
- Smart AI has been spoken of in EQNExt (2015 game though perhaps we find out more this year)
- ESO is nothing new but maybe fun nevertheless
- Wildstar - pretty much a new twist on WoW with fresh servers
- SOTA - offline play in an mmorpg?
- The Repopulation and Star Citizen - I don't know anything new they are bringing to the table maybe someone can shed some light here.
- DayZ though not an mmorpg - continues to be an example of outside of the box thinking and perhpas inspires other devlopers.
Is that all you did in rpgs? Particularly pen and paper rpgs? If so that was just as shallow an experience and you would be right, but the blame the victim bit about Making it Fun has little to do with this subject. By that argument there should be no criticism of anything because its your responsibility to make it fun or shut up. There is no need to discuss MMOs if you are talking about life issues, so let's just skip that and get back to the games
MMOs have stagnated into copies of the experience with the emphasis being continually placed on combat only.
-Abilities on the bar become fewer and focused only on combat.
-Crafting and other activities dumbed down and completely subborned to the Combat Player's activities.
-Worlds are smaller. mobs placed in a line for you to encounter from the activity disbursement drone.
-Gear grinds to make you able to fight the next tier of mobs, who will give the next tier so you can fight the next tier of mobs, etc.
-Classes and abilities designed only around their combat balance and nothing else.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
LOL, sorry, who's bitching? No need to get emotional over this.
Anywho, great article. Enjoyed the read.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Market by Segment in 2013
Consoles remain the highest revenue generating platform, with $30.6 billion (-1% y-o-y) equal to 43% of global games revenues. This includes all DLC spend and business-to-consumer second-hand trade. Traditional PC gaming (downloads and boxed) contracts slightly to $6.0 billion (-7% y-o-y), but this is offset by 14% year-on-year growth for MMO games, totaling $14.9 billion. Game revenues generated by tablet and smartphones will gross 18% of the global games market, surpassing $12bn, which is roughly double the amount spent on games for handheld consoles.
Read more at http://www.newzoo.com/press-releases/newzoo-announces-new-report-and-projects-global-games-market-to-grow-6-to-70-4bn-in-2013/#hP49r7qRPuLeAZ5c.99
So.... you were saying ?
Good summary and you can't really expect people who are not in that target market (which isn't close to 100% of gamers) to just shut up and pretend they're happy with it. Games have changes a lot from what we like and while some people seem to take the attitude that all change is good progress most people realize that sometimes change actually ends up ruining something that some people at least like.
I'm excited that more niche games are coming out thanks to crowdfunding and if some of those succeed you will see less complaining but as long as all we have to choose from is minor variations on what the quoted post outlined above a lot of people are going to be unserved and unhappy.
The mantra gets repeated so often on this forum (and others like it) that people start to believe it's true despite the lack of compelling evidence to back it up. After witnessing genres that actually were in decline over the years, the argument holds very little weight for me. I've seen the faucet get turned off for adventure games, turn-based tactical/strategy games, flight & space sims, and the decline was inarguable. Instead we have more MMO devs, more big publishers, more games, more players, more money being made.
One of the best indicators for MMOs being fine is that you have developers unabashedly making games that both cater to the mainstream and run counter to it at the same time, all throwing big money behind it. I mean, look at the breadth of recent releases and those to come with TSW, GW2, Neverwinter, Wildstar, ESO, ArcheAge, EQL/N.
The problem is that MMOs don't really offer anything in that department that can't be matched or surpassed by other genres. The strength and uniqueness of EQ or UO was precisely the opposite; it wasn't a quick 1 hour session before moving on, it was a long term investment in the character and the world. Even if the current bubble of large growth doesn't burst, it's going to to be very hard to grow much further without at least a few more companies returning to supporting the more niche worlds and concepts that defined the earlier MMOs.
Artificial Gills: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread992866/pg1
Limited slip differentials exist in pretty much all cars, and so do air bags and they actually save lives.
You can rent water jet packs: http://www.jetpackamerica.com/
I can't see what that little light thing is.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I think the article was about mmorpgs. I know Blizzard isn't making what it was back in 2009. Idk about the rest of the mmorpg developers.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
It may be right, more and more people have access to computers, phones with internet, etc... The question I have is, they do not show you what they are calling a "MMO". As I have recently posted, nearly everything that more than one person can play is starting to be called mmos it feels like. The term has become so watered down that it doesn't mean much. Was Farmville in there as a mmo? It fits the new description of mmo, but the point is, if you keep expanding what a mmo is, sure it will 'grow'.
I wont get into how mindless and un-mmo a lot of these things are imo, like Farmville, so if that is a lot of the growth, then great for the people making them....Just doesn't mean much to me in the end, as I care about more traditional mmos.
This part of the article struck a nerve with me. How can you not see that it is you who is in decline from the genre, not the other way around? You can still be all those things you excitedly explained in today's mmos. But you no longer find excitement in it so its the game's fault? My advice is to be a warrior, or whatever you want and stop worrying about the quests and the raids.
I was in a similar rut as you where I preoccupied myself with what the devs are doing and where they are taking my character. I forgot why I started playing these types of games in the first place. But now, I got it back and I'm enjoying myself as much as I ever did.
The problem is that we went from taking clunky broken games and making them work with our RP roots, to armchair developers who demand immersion or bust.
Nice to be able to agree with an article here for the first in a long time
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
Are claiming I have no point? The technologies is available, hell it was in 1969 but we are not going to work in jet packs in 2014. Nor do we have virtual worlds with ecosystems in MMOs. There certainly is an expectation of where technology will take us and how fast we will get there. Sometimes it meets expectation - slip differential sometimes it don''t.
Remember that businesses making games take a couple years to react to trends. it takes a lot less time to write an angry post about samey MMOS than it does to develop and release a non- samey MMO. this was especially the case in the late 2000s when it was easier to finance a samey wowclone because business investors who knew squat about MMOs wanted to catch lightning in a bottle a la wow.
now, we are about to see the first crop of games from the post- samey wow era released.
in other words the complaints that fans of the genre have been voicing for the past 3/4decade will finally be addressed with games like star citizen, repop, the 2 EQN games, Camelot, etc.
2014 and 15 will likely be watershed years in mmo history much like 2003 and 2004 were.
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Dwight D Eisenhower
My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.
Henry Rollins
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1588672538/pantheon-rise-of-the-fallen/comments
Put your money where your mouths are. And realize that this isn't about giving Brad money, its about making enough noise so that other companies can realize that we are a viable fanbase to make in depth mmo RPG's for.
Otherwise you are just spitting hot wind and do not complain when we are still getting these fast food, soon to be console primary mmos.
I honestly hope many of you take the time to look at the big picture of what that kickstarter represents.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.