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The (Bleak) Future of MMORPGs
Gudrunix
Member Posts: 149
I realize the "MMORPG gaming has a bleak future" theme makes a regular appearance on this forum, but with the bankruptcy of 38 Studios, I think there are some ideas that need serious consideration. Very succinctly, here is what I think is worth considering.
Thesis: Ongoing failures and weakness in the MMORPG industry are due, not to bad management or other variables that can be controlled, but to the nature of the product. MMORPGs suffer from heavy network effects and high switching costs, as well as very large fixed costs, which combined mean it is an industry very likely to be dominated by one major game, with all other competitors either filling small niches, or (more likely) failing spectacularly. The cost of MMORPGs, and their reputations as expensive failures, will lead game companies to develop fewer MMORPGs, with MOBAs, MMOFPSs, and MMORTSs filling the gap.
So let me explain what some of that businesspeak means.
Network Effects: A product with a network effect is a product whose worth depends on how many other people use it. An operating system has a network effect; a graphics card does not. The more people that use your operating system, the more useful it is; but you get the same use out of a graphics card regardless of how many other people use the same one. A single-player game has very little network effect; an MMORPG has a huge network effect. In marketing, where goods have high network effects, it is highly likely that one product will soon come to dominate the industry, because the more people use that product, the more valuable it becomes.
Switching Costs: This is what it sounds like: the cost of switching from one product to another. The cost (in time and effort) of switching web browsers is relatively low; the cost (again, in time and effort) of switching operating systems is high. FPSs have very little switching cost - you can be fully up to speed in a new one in very short order, while MMORPGs have a huge switching cost, in terms of the time needed to get up to where other players are at (a month of heavy gaming, sometimes more). Again, this leads to the dominance of one product over the industry.
Fixed Costs: This is the minimum cost for getting a good out to market, regardless of how many units are sold. For a computer game, nearly all of the cost is fixed; in fact, MMORPGs are the rare exception of a game that requires a large variable cost (e.g., server maintenance and customer support). But as large as the variable costs are for MMORPGs, the fixed cost, of simply getting the game out to market, is absolutely huge - an order of magnitude, if not multiple orders of magnitude, larger than for other games. The staff required to get an MMORPG to market can be ten, or even a hundred, times the staff required to get a strategy or action game to market.
So, take an industry where it costs a huge amount to develop a game, and factor in that players are going to be very reluctant to switch games because of the risks involved (that their friends won't come over and join them) and the costs involved (weeks, even months, of getting up to speed), and what you have is an industry where there will be one game that owns the industry, and makes money hand over fist, while other game companies either fail or linger in the shadows with few players.
This can be seen perfectly clearly, because there is an industry where it is already the case: CCGs. The CCG industry is a one-game industry (OK, maybe two games, but even then, one clearly dominates); network effects, yes, switching costs, yes, high fixed costs, yes. Chances of anyone breaking MTG's death grip on the industry are low; and that has less to do with the quality of the product (which is high, if expensive) than it has to do with the simple structure of the industry.
Conclusion: Given all of the above, chances of anyone unseating World of Warcraft are low; but worse, chances of anyone pulling enough players away from World of Warcraft to simply be profitable on an ongoing basis - other than as a niche product keeping a small studio alive - are low. That means we are destined to see more failures, until game companies wise up and forget about trying to win the MMORPG lottery. The lottery numbers have already been pulled, and there's a winner, and it's Blizzard. Instead, game companies will start leaning toward genres where network effects and switching costs are lower, even if fixed costs are still a bit high - hence the increased popularity of MOBAs. Will other game companies be able to unseat League of Legends as the dominant MOBA? Probably not - but it is a whole lot easier to pull gamers away from LoL than it is to pry eight-year veterans away from WoW.
Comments
I think the whole Competing and unseating World of Warcraft is a horrible thing to think about while making your game. the NBA and NFL compete for viewers, as they are both sports, but you don't see the NBA putting on pads and allowing contact to make NFL viewers switch over.
It's that whole competing aspect that, imo, ruins games. BF3 and COD compete. COD is more popular so BF3 changes alot to compensate for its lack of CoDness. Every mmo that has tried to compete with WoW did so with a copy past design. Which makes sense, but it wont bring the long term revenue. WoW got popular with a little luck and great design early on.
Every publisher looks at World of warcraft and says i want that. Millions paying 15 a month! Which they will never ever get. No one is going to be able to attract that many players and Publishers/Devs need to realize that and just make games. Not cater to every single person in the spectrum.
You're looking at it the wrong way Jay.
MMO's are football, FPS's are basketball. They aren't competing, you're right.
However, WoW is the NFL--Anything else attempting to make headway would be the UFL, or the Canadian league. They do have to put on pads, and have a contact sport just to be considered remotely close to the NFL. They are directly attempting to take the NFL's customers, because lets face it--most people only have the time to dedicate to one football league each season, whereas people like me enjoy a little bit of both NFL and NBA from time to time. I don't, however, watch any CFL games in November, because I'm so balls deep in the NFL season.
So in other words... Don't try to beat Disneyland at their own game but make a specialized park like Magic Mountain that has big, fast, scary roller coasters that Disneyland does not.
The NBA and the NFL do compete for viewers, but it's a straight-up competition: viewers can switch channels at any time. That does make it a competitive market, where multiple companies can compete on an ongoing basis. MMORPGs aren't like that, people don't switch quickly, they make a huge investment into one game and are very reluctant to switch. Like operating systems, it is a winner-take-all market where one company is going to absolutely dominate.
I agree with your conclusion, that it is a mistake for publishers to think that they can capture part of the MMORPG market. Only a small number of MMORPG players are up for grabs, so to speak (although many of the people on this forum are in that category). Most - the 10 million or so active WoW subscribers - are not going to switch, and that's not going to change any time soon. Developers have to realize that they are not competing with WoW, because they can't, WoW subscribers are not going to switch - they are competing for the attentions of a small number of highly disaffected MMORPG gamers who are between games. But they don't realize that, and then they dump huge amounts of money into a MMORPG thinking "if we can only get a quarter of WoW subscribers to switch we will make it big", then they have extremely disappointing subscriber numbers, then they fail, spectacularly. Sooner or later, they are simply going to give up trying.
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Still waiting for said "businesspeak"...sorry.
You make several good points but there are more reasons why MMO's fail. Mainly, imo, the concept of MMO's... With every new MMO released I expect it to be something new, when in reality, I'm just fooling myself. All the features of an MMO has been done before.
Sure there are some new MMO's that has one or two feature that isn't an exact copy of some other game I've already played but the variation of said feature isn't exciting enough to keep me playing for more than a month or two.
I'm currently playing Tera and I'm already getting tired of because despite being a "groundbreaking new game" it really isn't... It's easy for me to say that all has been done but I definately think that MMO's need some new ideas for it to work.
I think a better analogy is social networking sites. You can always leave a theme park and go to another one, and it doesn't matter if there are fewer people at the new one - in fact, it arguably makes the experience more enjoyable. But if you sign up for a new social networking site that no one else is signed up with, what's the point?
I would never, ever, invest in a social networking site for one simple reason: Facebook owns the market. It used to be competitive before any one company was dominant, but now, it's not, Facebook is the social networking market, and until Facebook goes bankrupt or starts charging for access, nobody is going to make any headway against it. A few niche sites like LinkedIn will survive by catering to a very select need. Other companies may as well pack up and leave the market and find something else to work on.
It is not just about building a different theme of theme park, it is about getting out of the business altogether. The only MMO games that I see as having a future are those whose gameplay is completely different from the standard MMORPG model. I can see something like End of Nations as having a future, because there are a lot of players who strongly prefer RTS-style gameplay over RPG-style gameplay (ditto with FPS-style gameplay). But even relatively well-developed MMORPGs like Rift are never going to take off, simply because what they are offering is so close to what WoW offers, so why should a long-time WoW vet give up years of investment in the game, for something that is more or less the same game, only with far fewer players?
MMORPGs have a great future.....
Sadly what people are calling MMORPGs these days are not what they claim to be.....
An MMORPG needs:
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
There is no reason really for mmos to cost too much...(specially if you start small and build a player base)
One of my favorite mmos endlessages was basically made by 2 guys, I know it couldnt compete with WoW ,but come on 2 guys!
Own, Mine, Defend, Attack, 24/7
Do you have an example of a developer that is trying to be or beat MTG, LoL or WoW? Your wall of text seems to be based on that being a pursued goal, but i haven't seen anything to support that being the case.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The glaring problem with your thesis is that it contradicts reality.
However high the costs of switching from one game to another are, people do it all the time. Most of the regulars on this site have probably switched from one MMORPG to another several times. I'll bet that a large fraction (easily more than half, possibly more than 90%) of WoW accounts do not have an active subscription today.
However high the fixed costs of entry into the MMORPG market are, new MMORPGs still launch all the time--even big budget ones. We're not far removed from the launch of SWTOR and TERA, while GW2 and TSW are coming soon.
The network effect is much weaker than you think it is. If a game doesn't have enough players to fill a server, then yeah, that's a big problem. But once you get the critical mass needed to fill a few servers, adding still more players doesn't bring much benefit to each individual player.
Well, part of my original post was to make the point that it isn't about design decisions or business management decisions - blaming the failure of the latest MMORPG on bad management has become a common theme, but I don't completely believe it. It's just the nature of the industry - one game is going to dominate it, and that one game is going to be very difficult to compete with, good management or bad, and that's just the way it is.
I totally agree at the lack of originality in MMORPGs - we keep getting told how ground-breaking and original the latest entry will be, but then it's mashing key shortcuts for abilities while you repetitively grind mobs from level 1 to level 50 so you can raid dungeons for gear. That's not original. There are a few truly original games out there, like EVE Online, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: it's been all D&D/Everquest clones for the last fifteen years. I will believe that they are serious about originality when they drop character levels or hit points, or let the player control more than one character and a pet.
The only real way to compete is to design a completely original type of game - not just to try and make a slightly more original D&D/Everquest clone. The game companies that have been successful over the last few years are those who have invested in an entirely new game type - e.g., Riot with MOBAs. The best decision a game company management could make would be to give up on MMORPG clones and move into a whole new market, either one that is currently growing, like MOBAs, or one with completely untapped potential, like MMORTSs.
You're kinda stuck in the mentality that if you can't be the biggest, you cant be successful/profitable/popular/etc.
There are plenty of successful social networking sites and none of them, to the best of my knowledge, have any interst in even trying to unseat FB from its throne. Here's a few:
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
WOW has the throng because 80% of gamers started with it and yes given the last 10yrs it is the best MMO to come out. It is good now, hell no! But the only MMOs better than WOW was pre-WOW MMOs and most gamers where not gaming at that time.
So unless a company makes a true MMORPG again you will not de-throng WOW, but I will say this if I spent 200Million Making a MMO it would have been the best MMO in history.
Very good point. To a good degree, WoW has been a gateway into MMOs, due to its popularity and low barrier to entry in both technical and gameplay aspects. After their 6-9 month stint in WoW, many players go on to explore other MMOs to see what they offer.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
It sounds like you want something that shakes up the development ecosystem - a way for lots of small developers to contribute and compete over different minigames/components of a shared world.
I look at the thriving modder community for Minecraft and wonder how an MMO could be constructed as a platform for 3rd-party minigames. It's not easy since you can't really trust third party code (from both a security point of view and a consistency point of view).
You'd have to come up with an almost java-like environment, where 3rd party developers write the add-ons in a language that runs within a self-contained virtual machine with firm rules about how it is allowed to interact with the game world and with the player's UI.
Well put, but I still disagree.
First off, the community here is 0.1% of the MMORPG market, if that. We are not at all representative. I would say 90% of MMORPG players are World of Warcraft players, and I would not at all be surprised if as many as half of those have never played another MMORPG for more than a month. Just look at the numbers - 10 million for WoW, but very few other MMORPGs have ever broken a million subscribers, even for just a month - most are lucky to have a 100k subscribers. This is a one-game market, even if there is a small but vocal community who try out a lot of different games.
Where are all the former WoW players? Playing Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Diablo 3, or something that's not an MMORPG, that's where. They aren't playing WAR, or Vanguard, or Rift, that's for sure - just look at their subscription numbers.
Yes, new MMORPGs launch all the time. And they fail all the time. They get decent numbers by PC game standards - but abysmal numbers by WoW standards, and nowhere near enough to cover the massive costs. That means we are working our way through a wave of big MMORPG releases, but after this, it's going to be tiny studio F2P releases, because the big studios will see MMORPGs as big, expensive mistakes to be avoided at all costs. Mythic is all but out of the MMORPG business - how many more times will SOE get burned before they give up?
Your point on network effects is a good one - yes, they really only need to fill up one server to have an active game environment. But the larger picture is the guild issue - many players are loyal to their guilds, and guilds compete with each other for both players and progression, so the issue is not just of filling up servers, but getting guilds to move over. And the history so far has been that it has been very difficult to get the largest and most influential guilds to leave WoW. The biggest moves by guilds in recent years have not been to competing MMORPGs - they have been to MOBAs, and specifically League of Legends. That alone says something about the futility of trying to convince MMORPG players to switch over.
It was a nice post but I would say that this point has already been proven wrong repeatedly.
How many people rushed to buy SW:TOR? How many tried Warhammer? Star Trek online? Age of Conan? And so on.
People aren't reluctant to jump into new games. In fact, I would say it's just the opposite, people are too eager to try new games. So eager that they buy games even if they suspect they won't like them or maybe they let themselves get caught up in the hype or whatever.
Anyway, the problem for new mmorpgs isn't that people refuse to switch games; it's that after people have switched to the new game the new game fails to hold them. We could argue why if you want but there is no doubt that it's true.
Your numbers are wildly wrong. First, scroll up to the top of the page. For me, it says "Members:1,606,678" The number will probably be a little bigger by the time you see it. That's more than 10% of the active WoW players by itself.
The number of subscribers to SWTOR alone is more than 10% that of WoW. The number of players of Aion is probably at least 10% that of WoW, considering how popular the game is in South Korea. Same with Lineage 2. That's likely also true of Jade Dynasty, even if most of its players are in China. Guild Wars doesn't give active player numbers, but 7 million and some odd boxes sold is a lot. Besides, 100k players here, 200k players there, 50k at that other game, and so forth sure adds up when multiplied by dozens of games. WoW probably doesn't even have a majority of the MMORPG market today, let alone 90% of it.
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If high entry costs are a problem, that won't lead to lots of new entrants that fail. It will lead to few or no new entrants. Lots of new entrants, most of which fail, are what you'd expect if high entry costs aren't a new problem. For an example where high entry costs are a bigger issue, when was the most recent new car company that you can think of?
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Guild loyalty is part of switching costs, not some new networking scaling feature.
Sure. Back at the height of MTG's popularity, virtually every board and card game company in existence was trying to beat them at their own game. There were so many Magic competitors, you would be hard-pressed to put a comprehensive list together: Call of Cthulhu, Illuminati, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on and on. How many of those are still around? The CCG market is down to pretty much two or three: Magic, and Yu-gi-oh or Pokemon. SJG and FFG kept several titles alive (Illuminati, Call of Cthulhu), but only by converting them to a fixed-card format. So a whole lot of companies jumped into the CCG business, and only a few survived, with Magic's hold on the industry never being seriously challenged.
The situation is more or less the same with LoL. League has several million players, while its competitors, despite a new one coming out seemingly every week, not picking up more than a few players here or there. The casualty list currently includes Demigod and Heroes of Newerth, but I am sure that many upcoming competitors will soon join that list. I will say that LoL's position is not absolutely certain, and that they could get surpassed by an especially strong competitor, but I think that is increasingly unlikely.
As for WoW: not many game companies are going to come out and say that they are trying to compete with WoW and attract WoW players, but that has very obviously been the hope as one fantasy-themed WoW clone after another has come from the game studios. I know enough about business to be confident that private meetings with potential investors involved slides showing how many "MMORPG gamers" - translation, WoW subscribers - there are out there, with the implication that if only some of them could be convinced to subscribe to the new game, they could make huge amounts of money. What they didn't say is that it may be easier to convince a casual computer user to switch from Windows to Linux than it is to convince an eight-year WoW veteran to switch to anything else.
Look at MMOs that have been out more than five years, and you will find WoW, with I don't know how many servers full of players - more than a hundred? - and below them, a long list of games that have either been shut down or are down to a few thinly-populated servers. That tells you everything about the industry you need to know.
Yes, I would like to see something that shakes up the ecosystem - modding is a good idea, but it doesn't have to be the only one. Minecraft and Terraria should have been big hints as to how large a market there is for original game play, but game companies have not gotten the clue.
Look, I am, more or less, with the rest of the community here in seeing the promise of MMORPGs, and having some fond memories of having played them in the past, but being very discontent with the current offerings. But I see the core problem being that developers, and investors, and gamers, seem to so often have the same mentality: if only we could build a better MMORPG, we could get people to move over from WoW.
What I'm trying to say is that that's the wrong mentality. It's just not going to happen. Players will try other games for a month or so, but they have made such a huge investment into WoW, and so many of their friends are still there, that very few will permanently switch over.
Instead, game companies just need to move in a whole new direction. What direction? I don't know - but looking at what hasn't worked is a start, as would be looking at what some of the surprisingly successful (non-MMORPG) independent games have done.
OK, good point. Yes, players are willing to try new games. But ultimately, they don't stay; and I think the reasons I highlighted are part of that.
One way of thinking about it is to realize that the investment the player has made in World of Warcraft is always there, waiting for the player to return to it. That means that, for a new game to pull a player away from WoW, it has to be better by such a huge margin that the player is willing to give up on all that progression, and to have to learn a new game from scratch, to leave behind their friends, etc.
So, players will flirt with a new game for a month, but they won't file divorce papers with WoW. That's the reality, and that's what we've seen over and over - a rush of new players for a new game for a month or so, then they quietly go back home to Azeroth. And that's going to keep happening, until players tire of MMORPGs altogether and look for something different - and what I am saying is that computer game companies should forget about trying to compete head-to-head with WoW and be looking for that something different, the place that gamers will end up when they have tired of MMORPGs altogether.
I think that actually LESS mmorpg's due to many devs shifting to MOBA's or CORPG like Vindictus or MMORTS / MMOFPS games could actually be GOOD for mmorpg's in LONG RUN.
Mmorpg market imho is oversaturated and investors 'best case scenarios' every is more or less secretly wishing for their game are too big.
I would far more prevent a 30-50 mln $ mmorpg that would cut costs on voice overs, cinematics and marketting and focus on gameplay and making massive virtual world experience than 60 mln $ up to 200-300 mln$ (Swtor)behemots mmorpg's we have today that try win massive WoW like crowds and doing games that are some bizzare design torn up between single player, co-op and mmo experience in result being no good at any.
MMORPG genre folding down + going back to roots + reinventing actually could be good.
At least for me.
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Because mainstream mmorpg's are trying to pull off big WoW numbers & companies investing ridiculous amount of moneys into them - they want huge player numbers.
In order to that they make mmorpg experience extremly conveniant, easy, filled with automatic mechanics + cutting down on community systems & mechanics they LACK STAYING POWER.