One company to bind them all . . .

Cryomatrix

I know ideas are a dime-a-dozen. 

Do you think it would be a good idea (i am not in the software developmental field at all). 

But if Bethesda-Zenimax, Blizzard, NCsoft, and all the big game companies came together to make one huge MMO and they would share the cost. You'd have to have one company be the absolute unquestioned lead but use other resources to hash everything. 

It would be one MMO to rule them all, you'd have so many workers, you could create different servers with different types of features, PvP, non-PvP, "hard", "Easy", Pay2win, no cash shop, etc etc etc. 

I am sure it is a bad idea, but I wonder why other than the more parties involved the harder it is to agree on anything. 

Cryomatrix

Scorchien

impossible ........... if there is another word to describe that , That would lessen the chances of that happening other than Impossible , then use that word ..

TheScavenger

throwing more workers at a game doesn't make it better.

But in fact if too many people are working on it (all the different ideas, overlap/redundant jobs or and positions...) the game actually turns out to be worse than a game made by a small team

SEANMCAD

In advertising they start to teach how they get young people to become brand loyalists. It started around the era of Nike tennis shoes, its been very effective.

as a result young people tend to talk about more about their love of a company then they do their love of a game.

Iselin

Well the word on the street is that Apple is eyeing both Activision-Blizzard and EA for acquisition... you never know

Scorchien

Iselin said:

Well the word on the street is that Apple is eyeing both Activision-Blizzard and EA for acquisition... you never know

lol , i hope that happens .. my stock portfolio would PE all over itself

Nightlite

I really like the idea of being able to transfer progress between games.. but.. first response of IMPOSSIBLE sums this up rather well.

Loke666

A terrible idea, large companies like EA are already screwing things up badly enough.

Cryomatrix

By huge, I mean like all those companies together. Think of the following companies:

Blizzard
Bethesda-Zenimax
ArenaNet
NCsoft
EA

All agreeing on using one engine, they wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. You could have 5 x the number of employees doing artwork and programming etc. 

The point would be you could potentially mitigate the problem of feature creep, the advertising budget alone would get a lot of people into it. There would be so many well done features as you could have a huge number of people focus on crafting instead of the whole game. 

In addition, they would have the ability to make different servers cater to different types of players thus increasing their potential consumers. You could have a server with FFA PvP, different types of PvP, easy vs hard, with or without cash shop, pay2win, etc. It would be like combing 5 crappy soulless MMO's into one that can attract everyone. 

I think a low population harms a lot of mechanics and features in games, in this setup, you wouldn't have it. 

Now, i know it is impossible, but I think it would a good idea. 

Loke666

If someone with enough money would poach the talented people of those companies and get a good lead designer like Strain or Kaplan to lead it things would be different but having several large corps compromizing of the content would give us the most watered down MMO ever.

Octagon7711

Cryomatrix said:

I know ideas are a dime-a-dozen. 

Do you think it would be a good idea (i am not in the software developmental field at all). 

But if Bethesda-Zenimax, Blizzard, NCsoft, and all the big game companies came together to make one huge MMO and they would share the cost. You'd have to have one company be the absolute unquestioned lead but use other resources to hash everything. 

It would be one MMO to rule them all, you'd have so many workers, you could create different servers with different types of features, PvP, non-PvP, "hard", "Easy", Pay2win, no cash shop, etc etc etc. 

I am sure it is a bad idea, but I wonder why other than the more parties involved the harder it is to agree on anything. 

Cryomatrix

A one company monopoly means no competition so they can set what ever prices they want for the best AAA games.  Add all the cash shop stuff they want and pretty much not worry about the competition being cheaper or having better quality because there would be no major competition.  If an indie company came along and appeared to be on it's way to becoming a AAA, they could buy them out and continue the monopoly, like some big companies are doing today.

There goes variety because they decide what people want.

pantaro

NO! triple A mmo's need to go away or at least we dont need anymore new ones. they are the reason we have so much copy and paste World of Warcraft hot garbage we have now.

Forgrimm

There would be way too many people involved. Look at how many people are on the Warcraft dev team alone. Now imagine all other dev teams included.

Iselin

DMKano said:

9 women can't make a baby in a month.

Yeah but all it takes a man is 15 seconds.

Kyleran

I can see this vision working actually. Every company makes their own "world" but links it to the worlds created by the other companies using common, agreed upon standards.

Characters could be truly persistent,  freely moving through or living in the world (s) of their choice. 

Would fit very well with the concept of GamingAsAService and cloud based architecture could help facilitate this. 

Block chain tech, or distributed ledger systems could be used to track assets, virtual currency to trade between them all, you could actually live in such a universe, experience a wide variety of content. 

Cryomatrix

Interesting on Brook's law. 

I just think with pooling enough resources you could potentially put in many features. Then again, in my mind, I think if someone is working on a non-complex issue then adding manpower may help. 

Like 10 artists vs 100 artists, as long as they are just creating art and it is not complex work, it should be more helpful. 

I do think on design or coding, then Brook's law is likely true. I guess it depends on what type of work is scaleable. I'd think making art is scaleable, but coding and designing are not. 

These are interesting things to learn. 

Cryomatrix

Cryomatrix

Scorchien said:

Iselin said:

Well the word on the street is that Apple is eyeing both Activision-Blizzard and EA for acquisition... you never know

lol , i hope that happens .. my stock portfolio would PE all over itself

What does PE mean? Which one of these is it?

PE = Penile Erection/Ejaculation
PE = Pulmonary Embolism
PE = Profit Exponentially
PE = Perform Erotica
PE = Pulse Erratically
PE = Plunge Endlessly
PE = ?

Cryomatrix

winghaven1

Spoken like a novice gamer with no knowledge of how game development works. It's a saying in programming: "What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months." - Fred Brooks

More isn't always more.

Albatroes

Well the OP stated that he would like these companies to have a set standard they work within to keep the playing field "even" or "regulated" but something like that would have to become legal because companies always look for an "edge." I mean law is going at a snails pace already trying to regulate any form of online activity, let alone work on some form that it "deems" within reason that all companies should adhere to in particular regions. Maybe in a century or 2 when our future generations are spending 80% of their lives in pods with near constant VR will law catch up to some form of regulation across the board.

gervaise1

The concept behind "Brook's Law" was well known in "general" project management prior to 1975. And it still forms part of PM / Resource Management training - not necessarily called Brook's Law.

There can be some basic issues around increasing team size e.g. physical constraints especially on production lines say but fundamentally the idea is rooted in communication theory.

Probably worth saying up front that - in general - a team is usually considered more efficient. Having "to few" people working on a task can be sub-optimal.

However assuming that isn't the case its the if you whisper something in a person's ear and have them pass it on then if its a large room of people by the time it gets back to you the message will have been distorted. 

So the larger the team the more difficult the communication. Especially in "non-trivial" environments which is what you usually have with development. 

Up to a point however you can add "bodies" and do things quicker - although you will see diminishing returns if you take the steps to mitigate the increased communication difficulties. 

esc-joconnor

The problem with the companies you mentioned is they are all run by people who will take as much money as they can from their customers while providing as little as possible. Sure, par for the course for any business, but once a business becomes a monopoly you start getting ridiculous prices for crap service. No thanks.

acidblood

So, let’s see, what features would each of these companies want in an 'ultimate' MMO...

Blizzard - loot boxes, RNG, RNG, more RNG, real-money AH
Bethesda-Zenimax - DLC, DLC, more DLC, loot boxes
ArenaNet - cash shop
NCsoft - some P2W game from 2007
EA - loot boxes, loot boxes, more loot boxes, and P2W
SquareEnix - the most extremely detailed flower pot ever; nothing else matters

Yeah, I think I'll park my hopes with the likes of Pantheon, Ashes, CU, et al.

AAAMEOW

I don't think it works because different players like different types of mmorpg.  That is the reason everyone of us is scattered and playing different mmorpg.  

Loke666

Kyleran said:

I can see this vision working actually. Every company makes their own "world" but links it to the worlds created by the other companies using common, agreed upon standards.

Characters could be truly persistent,  freely moving through or living in the world (s) of their choice. 

Would fit very well with the concept of GamingAsAService and cloud based architecture could help facilitate this. 

Block chain tech, or distributed ledger systems could be used to track assets, virtual currency to trade between them all, you could actually live in such a universe, experience a wide variety of content. 

There are a few tiny problems there.

First of all: How would the payment work? Would you pay to get access to all worlds and split the profit or would you charge induvidually?

If you split the profit the more popular worlds creators would be upset. If you instead charge for each world some developers would make super easy worlds that throw money and loot on you which players then could use in other games according to your plan.

The only way it would happen is if a huge publisher would buy up all the companies involved (which might sould unlikely but to be fair would I have laughed if you would have said that a few publishers would rule the market in the future back in the '80s).

A larger publisher with many games like NC soft or PWE could do it with their games, that is certainly not unlikely.

Thge worst thing however is that then every single MMO would use more or less the exact same mechanics (and since it would be a compromize those mechanics would be rather bland). There would be few reasons to improve anything.

It sounds neat in theory but it just wouldn't work.

Iselin

A far more interesting idea would be like something in Ready Player One where there were many different worlds and each world was its own MMO.

Your character would go to one world or another and strength (level) would be the same in all of them although each would have its own abilities and theme.

Of course for that to happen a few of the publishers would need to get together and sell a one-access pass kind of thing. They could still have some competition by divvying some of the money based on where players actually spent time.

Maybe after Apple buys them all we'll see something like that

Loke666

Iselin said:

A far more interesting idea would be like something in Ready Player One where there were many different worlds and each world was its own MMO.

Your character would go to one world or another and strength (level) would be the same in all of them although each would have its own abilities and theme.

Of course for that to happen a few of the publishers would need to get together and sell a one-access pass kind of thing. They could still have some competition by divvying some of the money based on where players actually spent time.

Maybe after Apple buys them all we'll see something like that

It sounds more plausible but I think it would be hard to have more then 5 worlds.

You could have a base price for the game everyone share and then have a specific price for each world that go to the company that made it. So basegame + 1 world $65 ($8 to each company and $25 extra to the one that made that world) and then another $25 for each extra world. 

You would still need someone competent to sort out and balance things so one world wont be 10 times as profitable as the others, maybe based on how much loot and XP you average for an hours gameplay

Yes, it is actually possible and could even be very fun.