Like Smed has anything to tell anyone about business or MMOs: as president of SOE, he oversaw several consecutive years of layoffs and studio closings,
Who would know better what DOESN'T work than someone who has seen the direct result of WoW MMOs failing?
The evidence is clear as day that WoW clones don't work.
While I think his statement about WoW-style mmos is hilariously ironic in light of his casual philosophy, I do actually agree. For the first time in many years, there are no western themepark games announced. I'm sure a few slow burners are still working on them, but it seems to me the age of the indie is upon us. Soon as some of these kickstarters games begin launching and having success, its likely you will see investors back a larger variety of smaller projects instead of these mega themeparks.
Originally posted by Dullahan While I think his statement about WoW-style mmos is hilariously ironic in light of his casual philosophy, I do actually agree. For the first time in many years, there are no western themepark games announced. I'm sure a few slow burners are still working on them, but it seems to me the age of the indie is upon us. Soon as some of these kickstarters games begin launching and having success, its likely you will see investors back a larger variety of smaller projects instead of these mega themeparks.
nah .. it is more like the age of other types of online games. MOBAs are flourishing. Instanced e-sport pvp games are flourishing. Even some instanced pve games are doing well (Marvel Heroes, Warframe, Star conflict ....).
and I don't think indie can fully fund a good MMO .. that is just too expensive. The biggest two ... Elite Dangerous and Star Citizens, are not traditional MMOs .. they are more like new type of online games.
Some of the most sucessful MMOs from a business standpoint spent a fraction of what modern mmos cost, and they did so using grossly inferior technology which they often had to spend a lot of time and money building from scratch. Without all the fluff and advertisement, you are talking about a much smaller figure. I've heard quotes from two different people in the industry lately that both said between 10-20 million to make an mmorpg and that isn't beyond an indie company permitted they can draw enough attention and establish credibility.
Originally posted by ReallyNow10 I think I can speak for a lot of people on this site when I say if Smedley said it, it's probably a pretty sure thing.
althought .. it is pretty obvious that wow-style MMO has passed its time. In fact, i would say the old restricted shared world MMOs have past its time. Now they are basically all sort of different online games.
Originally posted by AnirethThe day of the WoW style game is over? Big news. Wildstar proved that over a year ago.
Wildstar?
LotRO proved it. And STO. And AoC. And Rift. And SWTOR. and all the other clones. This lesson was learned ages ago by everyone but publishers.
And still most of them were more profitable than old school "camp the monsters for hours" .Wildstar proved that people are not interested in a hardcore pve mmo with forced group raiding like "old school" players want - I played it until it was clear that they wanted to forced player into raids or premade pvp . The only competition smedley has in mmo world is paul barnett.
Originally posted by ReallyNow10 I think I can speak for a lot of people on this site when I say if Smedley said it, it's probably a pretty sure thing.
Because if there is one thing he is an expert on it is failure?
Originally posted by ReallyNow10 I think I can speak for a lot of people on this site when I say if Smedley said it, it's probably a pretty sure thing.
Because if there is one thing he is an expert on it is failure?
Well, the only failure is that he says it at least 5 years too late.
Though he did start EQN which was to be something completely new and different, so i guess cutting some slack is in order, but whole EQN is questionable and so on.
Dont really see whats big fuss about it, its really not something new, hes just stating the obvious.
Originally posted by nariusseldon Originally posted by FoomerangIf he would've said that six years ago, I'd be impressed. But this is the equivalent of predicting rain in the middle of a monsoon.
and some here thought that virtual world MMO is still the future of gaming. Now would that be equivalent of thinking they are in a drought in the middle of your monsoon? Hehe well I'm not as good at predicting the future as I am the past.
Clearly with all of his experience in the MMOSphere, he knows better than us.
Yes, John Smedley, the person who cost Sony $60 million in 2014.
That's the person who's going to tell us the future of MMO....there is a reason Sony sold SoE.
"Sony Misses Fiscal-Year Expectations, With Profits Down 88 Percent. It's game division lost $78 million, in part due to the cost of launching the new console hardware, but mainly as a result of a $60 million write-off from poor sales of Sony Online Entertainment software."
There will never be another big het. There are simply too many games and too many jaded players. Games will follow the cycle they have for the past decade or so. Big launches with big hype, a lot of players for the first 30 days or so then a complete exodus from the game and crying on the forums until the next big one is supposed to hit.
Attention span of gamers is zero these days and thats why these companies are making these shallow games that arent meant to be indepth or long lasting, just somethign to hold the attention span long enough for peopel to feel like they got their moneys worth.
Now if 90% of the games that exist now closed up completely and funneled their players back into the generic pool and someone released something that was semi revolutionary, or just decent then we might have another phenomenon but that is never going to happen.
So look forward to paid alphas, paid artwork, and pay before anything exists going forward because since one company can do it they all think they can. or just play the crap games coming out of Korea that people think will be playable just because they have a 'western' publisher.
MMOs are dead, best peopel can hope for are games that are solo but you play around other peopel and you might be able to sell crap to them.But even that is not a feature anymore for most games.
That is one ironic twist that might help MMOs if people completely abandon them go to stand alone games like Dragon Age, Skyrim types, Civs or whatever. Then as these fly by night and kick starter scams start failing then we might have some companies actually focus on something people want. But once again not likely.
or because WOW is declining and there is little market for the old style MMOs.
And hearthstone is highly successful and well reviewed. If you think making a fun game with microtransacction is freecing their fans ... then well, looks like millions of them don't mind being fleeced.
I think FFXIV is proof enough that the WOW style market still exists. It is the only successful MMORPG to be released, since WOW and happens to be based on WOW's game design.
We all know that Blizzard is not shy to post specific numbers if their game is doing well, but I have never seen anything specific about Hearthstone, except the 20 million registered accounts (meaningless number) posted a while back. Lately, Hearthstone has never been mentioned by itself and is always lumped together with other games.
Originally posted by hercules does not look good for eq next then
No it does not.
BTW I think Smedley's comments say far more about the state of play at Daybreak than they do about the industry.
In the future I expect that Daybreak Games will be releasing stuff for: Consoles, Mobile Devices and enabling VR. If you couple this with the agreement with the Project 1999 folks and the move to DLC content rather than expansions I think we will see Everquest and Everquest II moving closer and closer to sunset.
They also seem to be moving to smaller premises following the staff cut-backs which would indicate that they have no plans to take on more staff, even if the bottom line improves.
or because WOW is declining and there is little market for the old style MMOs.
And hearthstone is highly successful and well reviewed. If you think making a fun game with microtransacction is freecing their fans ... then well, looks like millions of them don't mind being fleeced.
I think FFXIV is proof enough that the WOW style market still exists. It is the only successful MMORPG to be released, since WOW and happens to be based on WOW's game design.
We all know that Blizzard is not shy to post specific numbers if their game is doing well, but I have never seen anything specific about Hearthstone, except the 20 million registered accounts (meaningless number) posted a while back. Lately, Hearthstone has never been mentioned by itself and is always lumped together with other games.
I guess that depends entirely on your definition of success. If you mean a game that actually managed to stabilize and grow its playerbase on a subscription model, that might be true though I'd say speculation at this point might be premature.
The recent charts show Hearthstone is still doing very well, but like you eluded to, Blizzard is the king of self praise. To this day they still pad their WoW subscription numbers when in reality, over 50% of them are actually on a Pay Per Play model and generate about 10% of their total revenue.
Honestly I look forward to our genre returning to the geeky roots we started with. I never had more fun than before MMORPG's became mainstream. Back when 200k was living high on the hog, because our niche market was just that small.
Saga of Lucimia is just yet another indy dev team trying to return us to our roots. While the game doesn't appeal to the vast majority of the current MMORPG market, that's ok! I'd rather see 200 mmorpgs that all cater to small niche audiences, and do what they do extremely well, than have 10-20 AAA mmo's trying to appeal to the mass market.
The day of the WoW style game is over? Big news. Wildstar proved that over a year ago.
Wildstar?
LotRO proved it. And STO. And AoC. And Rift. And SWTOR. and all the other clones. This lesson was learned ages ago by everyone but publishers.
I think LotRO made money so has Rift and SWTOR. Not sure why games that are still making money and people are playing them are considered failures . I do not think a game is a failure just because it cannot reach millions of players. Any game that makes money is successful. Any endeavour that brings a return and profit is considered normally as a success.
The day of the WoW style game is over? Big news. Wildstar proved that over a year ago.
Wildstar?
LotRO proved it. And STO. And AoC. And Rift. And SWTOR. and all the other clones. This lesson was learned ages ago by everyone but publishers.
I think LotRO made money so has Rift and SWTOR. Not sure why games that are still making money and people are playing them are considered failures . I do not think a game is a failure just because it cannot reach millions of players. Any game that makes money is successful. Any endeavour that brings a return and profit is considered normally as a success.
They are releasing the complete success that is Alganon on Steam.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
The day of the WoW style game is over? Big news. Wildstar proved that over a year ago.
Wildstar?
LotRO proved it. And STO. And AoC. And Rift. And SWTOR. and all the other clones. This lesson was learned ages ago by everyone but publishers.
I think LotRO made money so has Rift and SWTOR. Not sure why games that are still making money and people are playing them are considered failures . I do not think a game is a failure just because it cannot reach millions of players. Any game that makes money is successful. Any endeavour that brings a return and profit is considered normally as a success.
Yes, but being a success is not good enough whilst there are greater successes to be had...
If game A makes $1M profit, it is a success, because it generates a profit. However, everyone will praise game B because it makes $10M profit, even though it cost the same to make as game A.
The investors of game A will therefore be unhappy, because their money is not generating the better returns earned by investors in game B.
All large game development studios are public companies, and therefore are traded on the Stock Market. Investors reward those companies that post a growth in profits every year. They punish those that don't. Simply generating a profit is not good enough, it has to be an ever-growing profit...
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.
Smed do have a point, you can't just release a game today that is exactly like any game 10 years ago but with updated graphics.
The real problem here is that we don't exactly know how a new very successful MMO should be, I think any straight copy of another game will do poorly but the question is what would do great.
I am not so sure that Smeds H1Z1 and EQN have the right ideas, of course EQN might be great fun and a huge success but there are some alarm clock ringing for me about that one.
The kickstarter games seems mainly to focus on hardcore PvP (with some exceptions), but the problem is that it seems to mainly be a type of hardcore PvP we seen before and similar games never worked besides UO and Eve.
The genre need some new ideas and mechanics. However that needs some experiementing and the game that invent those mechanics doesn't neccesarily becomes the big one, someone with a better budget could copy it better so the risk is not only that your untried mechanics might not work, even if they does someone might steal them and get your success.
I think this is one of the reasons so few larger publishers are interested in making MMOs right now, they know they can't just copy whats already out there and they are afraid to go for a hail Mary.
Comments
Who would know better what DOESN'T work than someone who has seen the direct result of WoW MMOs failing?
The evidence is clear as day that WoW clones don't work.
Wildstar?
LotRO proved it. And STO. And AoC. And Rift. And SWTOR. and all the other clones. This lesson was learned ages ago by everyone but publishers.
nah .. it is more like the age of other types of online games. MOBAs are flourishing. Instanced e-sport pvp games are flourishing. Even some instanced pve games are doing well (Marvel Heroes, Warframe, Star conflict ....).
and I don't think indie can fully fund a good MMO .. that is just too expensive. The biggest two ... Elite Dangerous and Star Citizens, are not traditional MMOs .. they are more like new type of online games.
althought .. it is pretty obvious that wow-style MMO has passed its time. In fact, i would say the old restricted shared world MMOs have past its time. Now they are basically all sort of different online games.
And still most of them were more profitable than old school "camp the monsters for hours" .Wildstar proved that people are not interested in a hardcore pve mmo with forced group raiding like "old school" players want - I played it until it was clear that they wanted to forced player into raids or premade pvp . The only competition smedley has in mmo world is paul barnett.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Because if there is one thing he is an expert on it is failure?
Well, the only failure is that he says it at least 5 years too late.
Though he did start EQN which was to be something completely new and different, so i guess cutting some slack is in order, but whole EQN is questionable and so on.
Dont really see whats big fuss about it, its really not something new, hes just stating the obvious.
Hehe well I'm not as good at predicting the future as I am the past.
Yes, John Smedley, the person who cost Sony $60 million in 2014.
That's the person who's going to tell us the future of MMO....there is a reason Sony sold SoE.
"Sony Misses Fiscal-Year Expectations, With Profits Down 88 Percent. It's game division lost $78 million, in part due to the cost of launching the new console hardware, but mainly as a result of a $60 million write-off from poor sales of Sony Online Entertainment software."
http://recode.net/2014/05/14/sony-misses-fiscal-year-expectations-with-profits-down-88-percent/
There will never be another big het. There are simply too many games and too many jaded players. Games will follow the cycle they have for the past decade or so. Big launches with big hype, a lot of players for the first 30 days or so then a complete exodus from the game and crying on the forums until the next big one is supposed to hit.
Attention span of gamers is zero these days and thats why these companies are making these shallow games that arent meant to be indepth or long lasting, just somethign to hold the attention span long enough for peopel to feel like they got their moneys worth.
Now if 90% of the games that exist now closed up completely and funneled their players back into the generic pool and someone released something that was semi revolutionary, or just decent then we might have another phenomenon but that is never going to happen.
So look forward to paid alphas, paid artwork, and pay before anything exists going forward because since one company can do it they all think they can. or just play the crap games coming out of Korea that people think will be playable just because they have a 'western' publisher.
MMOs are dead, best peopel can hope for are games that are solo but you play around other peopel and you might be able to sell crap to them.But even that is not a feature anymore for most games.
That is one ironic twist that might help MMOs if people completely abandon them go to stand alone games like Dragon Age, Skyrim types, Civs or whatever. Then as these fly by night and kick starter scams start failing then we might have some companies actually focus on something people want. But once again not likely.
I think FFXIV is proof enough that the WOW style market still exists. It is the only successful MMORPG to be released, since WOW and happens to be based on WOW's game design.
We all know that Blizzard is not shy to post specific numbers if their game is doing well, but I have never seen anything specific about Hearthstone, except the 20 million registered accounts (meaningless number) posted a while back. Lately, Hearthstone has never been mentioned by itself and is always lumped together with other games.
No it does not.
BTW I think Smedley's comments say far more about the state of play at Daybreak than they do about the industry.
In the future I expect that Daybreak Games will be releasing stuff for: Consoles, Mobile Devices and enabling VR. If you couple this with the agreement with the Project 1999 folks and the move to DLC content rather than expansions I think we will see Everquest and Everquest II moving closer and closer to sunset.
They also seem to be moving to smaller premises following the staff cut-backs which would indicate that they have no plans to take on more staff, even if the bottom line improves.
I guess that depends entirely on your definition of success. If you mean a game that actually managed to stabilize and grow its playerbase on a subscription model, that might be true though I'd say speculation at this point might be premature.
The recent charts show Hearthstone is still doing very well, but like you eluded to, Blizzard is the king of self praise. To this day they still pad their WoW subscription numbers when in reality, over 50% of them are actually on a Pay Per Play model and generate about 10% of their total revenue.
The internet itself was still kind of geeky back then, which is why I think it will be hard for MMORPGs to go back to that. I agree, though—I miss it.
I think LotRO made money so has Rift and SWTOR. Not sure why games that are still making money and people are playing them are considered failures . I do not think a game is a failure just because it cannot reach millions of players. Any game that makes money is successful. Any endeavour that brings a return and profit is considered normally as a success.
They are releasing the complete success that is Alganon on Steam.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Yes, but being a success is not good enough whilst there are greater successes to be had...
If game A makes $1M profit, it is a success, because it generates a profit. However, everyone will praise game B because it makes $10M profit, even though it cost the same to make as game A.
The investors of game A will therefore be unhappy, because their money is not generating the better returns earned by investors in game B.
All large game development studios are public companies, and therefore are traded on the Stock Market. Investors reward those companies that post a growth in profits every year. They punish those that don't. Simply generating a profit is not good enough, it has to be an ever-growing profit...
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.
Smed do have a point, you can't just release a game today that is exactly like any game 10 years ago but with updated graphics.
The real problem here is that we don't exactly know how a new very successful MMO should be, I think any straight copy of another game will do poorly but the question is what would do great.
I am not so sure that Smeds H1Z1 and EQN have the right ideas, of course EQN might be great fun and a huge success but there are some alarm clock ringing for me about that one.
The kickstarter games seems mainly to focus on hardcore PvP (with some exceptions), but the problem is that it seems to mainly be a type of hardcore PvP we seen before and similar games never worked besides UO and Eve.
The genre need some new ideas and mechanics. However that needs some experiementing and the game that invent those mechanics doesn't neccesarily becomes the big one, someone with a better budget could copy it better so the risk is not only that your untried mechanics might not work, even if they does someone might steal them and get your success.
I think this is one of the reasons so few larger publishers are interested in making MMOs right now, they know they can't just copy whats already out there and they are afraid to go for a hail Mary.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.