Can niche MMOs work?

FomaldehydeJim · July 2015

The thread is specifically about MMOs, as niche single player games can and do work on a regular basis.

I saw a comment in the Crowfall sub-forum stating that it was a niche game (and by implication dismissing anyone who did not belong to that niche from showing an interest or holding an opinion on said game). I immediately thought of another relatively recent niche release, namely Wildstar, which appealed to a "hardcore" crowd. Now don't get me wrong, I personally don't think that "hardcore" was the problem with Wildstar, I think it had many other fundamental design issues that resulted in the well documented decline, but that is another thread. There are other FFA PVP niche games that have suffered a similar decline.

This led me to wonder:

Can a genre that largely relies upon a healthy population, and enough features to maintain that healthy population for a significant period of time, really operate within a small niche market?

Does targeting a niche market result in such a limited budget and limited features that the game is inevitably feature-light and unpolished?

Do we have to accept that for a game to have longevity, polish, varied content, customization, decent gameplay and graphics, and all those other features we have all come to expect, it has to appeal to a large market and disappoint each of us in one way or another?

Please share your thoughts.

Helleri · July 2015

MMO's are niche. Like as a genre. It's hard to get micro-niche. And, define a healthy population? TIbia and UO have been kicking along with populations as low as 10k at times for years. Active worlds has had maybe 300 users at any one time for the last 7-8 years. They still subsist. And, don't show signs of actually going any where. Now, when talking about things like wildstar...wasn't that a sub game that went f2p pre-launch angering a lot of people (or something like that)? I am not convinced that catering to such a tiny audience or so specific a demand is a reason for failure in this genre.

aRtFuLThinG · July 2015

I don't know, EVE is pretty niche, they seem to be doing just fine.

It actually seems to me that mmos that tries to cater for too many different type of audiences in 1 game that are didn't well (for example, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning).

Azaron_Nightblade · July 2015

Niche MMOs can thrive, yes. As long as they are well designed and they have a clear focus in what they're going for.

VengeSunsoar · July 2015

This thread confuses me. Your asking if they can work, when there are hundreds of MMO"s on here with less than 50k population, some with less than 5k population that are slowly adding more things and have lasted fore years (from that we can infer they are at least covering costs).

So it seems like a big... Duh. Your asking if something can exist that has already existed for years.

Vantor · July 2015

Actually, I think niche is the way to go. Now I could be wrong, but this is what I have seen. I have been playing MMOrpgs since Ultima online. MMOs were doing great, and there were lots of great ideas coming out for them until WoW, now I'm not bashing wow. I played it and I had fun during my time there, however there is no denying it changed the course of MMOs because it became the formula in which everyone copied. Now the reason I bring this up is everyone not only copied the formula that wow did so well, no one but maybe Rift was able to make a really good copy of and it was just ran into the ground to the point that no one would risk making something that wasn't a wow style clone because they wanted to jump on bandwagon and get a piece of wows huge success.

Now, just look back before wow. You had EQ, UO, Star wars galaxies, City of heroes to name a few. Now, none of them were like wow but all of them awesome. Some had dungeons some didn't, but they all had a very niche style of play.

Star wars galaxies for instance, MMO sandbox. Didn't have wow style dungeons or raids, but it did have a wonderful community and was a game that kept pulling you back. Housing all over worlds, all the best gear was made by the players and same items were different depending on quality and skill of the craftsman, Player made cities and malls. You would go searching the world for a players store on the other side of the planet because they were said to have had the pistols or something. Even with it's flaws it's been one of the best MMOs ever made. Everquest had dungeons and raid, but also took months and months to hit level cap, was hard, and you could lose xp. Which really was a huge adventure, and after you hit level cap you had AA points and there was just a near endless amount of content out in world, planes, etc to explore and grind lol. UO was hardcore, had housing, fully lootable pvp, and had a serious risk vs reward. City of heroes of course had superheroes crazy detailed customization, sort of randomized instances, a few raid type things but it did everything it wanted to right and felt great. A very wonderful game.

Now, my point is this. MMOs used to do their own thing. The developers had a vision and they ran with it and made some truly awesome games. Again not bashing wow, but after wow and because of its success, everyone feels they have to fit in all the elements wow had. Even when making games with action rpg elements. So, they feel they need to add in pve, pvp, battleground, open world pvp, etc and don't get me wrong all this is awesome. HOWEVER, if they would have a vision and stick to an idea and just run with a good solid niche idea, polish it, and try to make it just incredible, instead of trying to add in all of this other stuff into it. I think we would have a lot better MMOrpgs.

Now not everyone would like each game, but many would try them and the ones that didn't like them would leave. But the game would be so good the people that it was meant for would love it. Now, this brings me to what I feel is the last and one of the worst problems with them now days. The Player and Dev interaction! What?! Why would I say that? Now, while I feel it is good for the Devs to take what the players say seriously and help mold their game, some winy players get very vocal on forums who we know are the very vocal but also very small minority of players and end up pushing devs to do shit over and over and over. Now sometimes this will only cause nerfs to things that may or probably don't need nerfed but sometimes it actually gets shit added that don't need to be and in some cases totally changes and ruins a game. Because they have now strayed too far from their vision and spent all this development time into adding shit and systems and adding in these new pvp mechanics to a game that was never meant to have pvp, which now results in them having to put in time to balance the pvp which changes the classes which takes the whole development team from working on what the game was really intended to be, 4 months later no new pve content but now we have shitty pvp and broken systems instead of building what they wanted in the first place.

Now keep in mind, I love pvp, I just used that as an example, and it would work either way. I know this sounds like a bit of a rant. But these are my feelings on the subject. I'm not claiming to be right, this is all just my opinion and I'm sure plenty of people will disagree. But I just want to finish by saying, YES I think if they made them more Niche, focus, and polish on what makes their game special and not try to cram everything for every type of player into it and just focus, would help MMOs.

JamesGoblin · July 2015

Originally posted by FomaldehydeJim
The thread is specifically about MMOs, as niche single player games can and do work on a regular basis.

I saw a comment in the Crowfall sub-forum stating that it was a niche game (and by implication dismissing anyone who did not belong to that niche from showing an interest or holding an opinion on said game). I immediately thought of another relatively recent niche release, namely Wildstar, which appealed to a "hardcore" crowd. Now don't get me wrong, I personally don't think that "hardcore" was the problem with Wildstar, I think it had many other fundamental design issues that resulted in the well documented decline, but that is another thread. There are other FFA PVP niche games that have suffered a similar decline.

This led me to wonder:

Can a genre that largely relies upon a healthy population, and enough features to maintain that healthy population for a significant period of time, really operate within a small niche market?

Does targeting a niche market result in such a limited budget and limited features that the game is inevitably feature-light and unpolished?

Do we have to accept that for a game to have longevity, polish, varied content, customization, decent gameplay and graphics, and all those other features we have all come to expect, it has to appeal to a large market and disappoint each of us in one way or another?

Please share your thoughts.

You will excuse me for taking Crowfall (I could also write couple textwalls on Camelot Unchained`s budget and quality, but you mentioned CF) as an example, since it is actually quite heavyweight indie, budgetwise. Still I guess it is on topic.

Tech is advancing and getting cheaper, also Important thing is that small budget = much lower "success" bar. Speaking of Crowfall, small budget? Certainly not for an indie game, even what they have at this point is around 5m, and "under ten" by launch is (possibly humble) assessment by G. Walton, so "such a limited budget" doesn`t fit well with this game - thou you likely had on mind indies in general.

Talking further about budget, quality and polish - there is more sides to it. Say, compared to Vanilla WoW, they will likely spend more money on PvP (the crucial CF feature - basically that`s what they will be spending money on), and it would be interesting to compare CF`s PvP investment (and final result) to, say, that of SWTOR!? Another important detail is that CF will likely have truely continued PvP investment and polish, as opposed to typical AAAs with PvP tacked on.

Speaking of green part of your post - thousand times NO! - and I hope CU/CF will confirm that. I guess DAoC is good historical example - 2.42m was it`s exact pre-launch budget per Mark Jacobs. Anyway huge part of AAA`s money goes into expensive trailers, IPs & voiceovers, PvE, butt sliders and such, certainly not the measure I use for quality of my MMOs. I guess many will be disappointed thou

The most interesting part to me is what crowd is Crowfall actually targetting, both in initial sales and long term. I suspect that (besides obvious "hardcore PvPers" whateverthatmightbe) they are secretly hoping for a chunk of Wizard 101 (Todd`s previous - and widely successful - project, thou it`s audience is somewhat different!?) and they are certainly hoping to capture a number of SWG fans (and Kosterites in general etc. but their initial playerbase will likely have mostly modern AAA experience (WoW, ESO etc.)

I guess ending with only "hardcore" might easily turn out to be too niche, additionally shared with EvE, CU and god knows what else, and it seems that CF team is well aware of that. I also predict huge initial sales (these guys are very good with hyping stuff) but longTermWise crucial will be the conversion rate of modern short attention span & instant gratification casuals (campaigns will last for months), the rate will naturally be low but with high enough initial numbers and aforementioned low budget = low success bar and couple tens of millions later...

TLDR: Can they...? Sure, the question is only will they, or better to say who and when will do it first?

Wizardry · July 2015

I don't see Crowfall as niche,not in the very least.

My overall picture of Crowfall is budget game,tons of seen there been there done it gamer design and pvp.

Pvp leads to point 1,it is SIMPLE,easy to put into a game,it takes literally no content or effort to put it into a game.Developers hope that by having pvp it will keep players interested when there is no content.

There is only so much you can do in these games,the developer needs to supply the content and make some interesting enough that players look forward to it.My perfect example?FFXI Besieged,13 years later and players still look forward to it,THIRTEEN years !!!Even the Campaign was a solid idea however they began to cheap out on effort at that point,but it could have also been the kind of content that keeps players coming back.

Anyhow my point is that Crowfall is not a niche game and there really are few ideas left out there to find that niche.The smartest approach is to give them some actual FUN content,as on this day EVERY developer relies on 1 that pvp i talked about and 2 end gear grinds,all done in a boring manner.

When is the last time you read a post about pvp asking for anything other than open pvp looting,almost never so it shows how shallow the thought process has been behind pvp.

Axehilt · July 2015

Ran the numbers once and it did seem like niche MMOs could work from a business perspective. It was a 100-200 person team creating a subscription game (forget where we ended up with the subscriber count assumption. Somewhere between 200k and 500k I think.) Granted, I would still go F2P with a niche MMO so using subscriber revenue was perhaps a flimsy choice of convenience.

Loktofeit might remember more of the details. At the time I thought niche MMOs weren't viable, and he ran a numbers breakdown that was pretty close to the mark on game company expenses, and it really did look viable.

The lowish dev count (from an MMORPG perspective) would imply a lot less content than a typical MMORPG. You wouldn't be able to produce a WOW/EQ2/GW2 with that team, but you could probably produce a better version of Darkfall/EVE/etc. Games which are mostly about casual (world) PVP, which have limited PVE content to produce.

Vrika · July 2015

Niche MMO can work really well. MMOs like EVE Online, Star Stable and Dofus are all proofs how a niche MMO can find its own playerbase and be really successful.

I think the problem is that most so-called niche MMOs aren't even seriously trying to find a niche with little competition. They just implement and re-implement the same WoW-style gameplay over and over and create WoW with flavour instead of a niche game.

mgilbrtsn · July 2015

The definition off 'niche' will be argued to death, but I think most people know what you are going for. I would say EVE is the standard success story of a niche game. However, I think TSW falls in the category. Not a huge success by any standard, but isn't doing too badly.

Bladestrom · July 2015

200-500k isn't niche on the MMO genre it's normal and healthy I would say. You only need to look at eve which been running for nearly a decade, good sized expansions pumped out regular as clockwork. It is worth noting that you don't see vast amount of resource being pumped into balancing passes in eve (and other mmorpg) and I think this is a key factor, the gear based theme parks devs are constantly burning resource firefighting , a fundemental design flaw.

SpottyGekko · July 2015

How do you define a "niche" MMO ?

Some people call EVE a niche MMO, but it has more subscriber (gasp !) accounts nowadays than most of the mainstream MMO's from the early years of the genre. Is today's "niche MMO" equivalent to yesterday's blockbuster ?

I sincerely doubt that Wildstar actually set out to be a niche MMO. A great deal of their marketing was tongue-in-cheek and seem to lean towards attempts at reverse psychology (e.g. "Do YOU have what it takes to play Wildstar, cupcake ?"). There was a lot of talk about hardcore gaming, but it was entirely absent from the game design until you hit endgame raiding. That's not niche.

How many MMO's "fail" nowadays because they aren't generating sufficient revenue, as opposed to actually making a loss ? Big multi-million dollar developers/publishers are more interested in the ROI of the game than whether it's simply profitable.

And how many of the AAA MMO's released in the last 15 years have been shut down because of lack of revenue ? They may have dwindled to mere shadows of their launch-day glory, but they're still out there.

Jaedor · July 2015

Sure, I think niche mmos definitely have a place. But it would be important to manage expectations on the business side. Eve, Ryzom, and TSW are all great examples of niche mmos that are very popular with their fan base.

Axehilt · July 2015

Originally posted by Bladestrom
200-500k isn't niche on the MMO genre it's normal and healthy I would say. You only need to look at eve which been running for nearly a decade, good sized expansions pumped out regular as clockwork. It is worth noting that you don't see vast amount of resource being pumped into balancing passes in eve (and other mmorpg) and I think this is a key factor, the gear based theme parks devs are constantly burning resource firefighting , a fundemental design flaw.

Balancing passes make games tactical and deep, rather than allowing 1 thing to remain overpowered or allowing players to circumvent the need for balance or player skill entirely by having the game revolve around progression or population advantages. The lack of balance is a key factor in why games with shallow casual PVP (like EVE) are not as popular as those with deeper more hardcore PVP (LoL, BF, SC2, etc)

Bladestrom · July 2015

I didn't say you shouldn't do balancing passes, what I'm saying us certain designs cause more balancing issues, balancing isn't content it's a mechanical correction. As for eve having shallow pvp, I think we all know better than that.

Daranar · July 2015

If you don't think Niche MMOs can work, then why is EQ1 still going? Why is EVE RAKING in the dollars? They work if they are good.

Loktofeit · July 2015

Originally posted by VengeSunsoar
This thread confuses me. Your asking if they can work, when there are hundreds of MMO"s on here with less than 50k population, some with less than 5k population that are slowly adding more things and have lasted fore years (from that we can infer they are at least covering costs).

So it seems like a big... Duh. Your asking if something can exist that has already existed for years.

Yeah, I was wondering if the OP is just new to MMOs because small, successful MMOs for niche audiences within the genre have been around for as long as MMOs have been around. Some examples are : ATITD, Puzzle Pirates, Sociolotron, Furcadia and Dransik/Ashen Empires.

Bladestrom · July 2015

I can only think if a handful of decent budget mmorpg that have actually failed, the norm is success.

moonbound · July 2015

Of course they work thats why eq has lasted so long, the problem is when they become so nich they lack features to make them great. I think nich is truly the way to go you will never appeal to the masses we are seperated from casual to non rpg lovers to hardcore who look for games to play in an mmorpg i have no idea why non rpg players even play mmorpgs but they do.....

Axehilt · July 2015

Originally posted by Bladestrom
I didn't say you shouldn't do balancing passes, what I'm saying us certain designs cause more balancing issues, balancing isn't content it's a mechanical correction. As for eve having shallow pvp, I think we all know better than that.

When the tight balance of skill and loadout is trumped by bringing 20x the players and crushing your opponents, then yes that's a design where there will be less balance issues related to loadouts (and it will be shallower because skill is less important too.) Whether one finds that acceptable depends on whether they're a casual PVPer or not.

Loktofeit · July 2015

Originally posted by Axehilt
Originally posted by Bladestrom
I didn't say you shouldn't do balancing passes, what I'm saying us certain designs cause more balancing issues, balancing isn't content it's a mechanical correction. As for eve having shallow pvp, I think we all know better than that.

When the tight balance of skill and loadout is trumped by bringing 20x the players and crushing your opponents, then yes that's a design where there will be less balance issues related to loadouts (and it will be shallower because skill is less important too.) Whether one finds that acceptable depends on whether they're a casual PVPer or not.

Your working on the assumption that wars in EVE Online have been won solely based on ship battles, or that any are based on a single battle. While the battles do affect control and resource, they are only part of what determines the outcome of a war in EVE.

Bladestrom · July 2015

He is doing his usual and avoiding the point, il bake it simple:

A game has skill A & B

Overtime due to 'gear scaling' in the game A becomes more powerful than B. developers spend Time and resource fixing this imbalance.

Another game has skills A & B. there is no head scaling, over time A stays equal to B developer cost is Therefore lower, and in fact it's less costly to add C, there is no expotential increase in balancing complexity.

This the the point I was making, not that that Eve is a symbol of design perfection.

Bladestrom · July 2015

I should add eve has less balancing issues because everything does not need to be balanced, the game allows people and skill diversity to normalise imbalances - rather brilliantly I may add, and hence less dev resource spent on balancing, lower cost.

Axehilt · July 2015

Originally posted by Loktofeit
Your working on the assumption that wars in EVE Online have been won solely based on ship battles, or that any are based on a single battle. While the battles do affect control and resource, they are only part of what determines the outcome of a war in EVE.

Sure, I'm mostly calling its combat shallow. The rest of it might be deep, although things are very well-obscured by massive timesinks and spammed design complexity, so I'm not sure.

Bladestrom · July 2015

What are you Blathering on about? Eve gameplay is well known and is very complex. There is no 'might' about it. Asside from this, that has for bugger all to do with the points made (again)

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