- MMO: Massively Multiplayer Online…
- MMOG: Massively Multiplayer Online
Game
- MMOPW: Massively Multiplayer Online
Persistent World
- MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer
Role-playing Game
A Question of Time and Place:
Sony is not complaining about having nearly 500,000 active EverQuest subscribers.
In fact, the company seems thrilled. At the same time, Sony spokespeople
admit that there is “churn” within the ranks. According to Sony
Online Entertainment spokeswoman Tamara Sanderson, the average EverQuest
subscriber moves on to other games after 10 months.
This is not a criticism. Try to think of a best-selling book, CD, or video
game that consumers have read, listened to, or played on a daily basis
for 10 months.
Since consumers are unlikely to stay longer, the most viable option is
to attract a wider audience. While there is wide disagreement about the
fine mechanics, there are two factors that almost everybody agrees need
to change.
“The most common answers [for attracting more people] are play for
less time so that it does not take as much time out of your life, and
broadening out of the subject matter. Nine-tenths of the market are elves
and what’s left is science fiction,” says Sony Online Entertainment
chief creative officer Raph Koster. “Those are popular genres, but
they are nowhere near the mainstream.”
Asked what MMOG publishers need to do to make their games appeal to the
masses, Michael Gartenberg, research director of Jupiter Research, sounds
a lot like Koster.
“There are a couple of things. One would be to balance the playability
of the game so that newcomers can get into the game with a minimal learning
curve and without an uphill battle against more experienced players. The
second would be that they need to expand the genre beyond the dungeons
and dragons themes to something with a more broad appeal.”
Cutting the time investment and broadening the genre seems to be the general
consensus.
“EverQuest, the most popular of the first generation MMOGs here
in the United States, is really a leveling up treadmill,” says NC
Soft’s Richard Garriott. “The game mechanic is based upon
how quickly players can advance their characters to keep up with their
friends or get ahead in the sense of wealth and power. If you don’t
keep up with your friends, the people you started out with will leave
you behind and not be willing to travel with you because you will be a
liability versus an asset to their activities.”
Garriott knows of what he speaks. The creator of the Ultima games, he
helped pioneer the RPG genre. Ultima Online was the first financially
successful MMOG and is still in the top five MMOGs in the United States.
“It [a mass market MMOG] would need to have a very shallow learning
curve,” adds Mythic president and CEO Mark Jacobs. “It cannot
be a game that people spend weeks learning how to play. That is number
one.
“Number two, it should be a game that does not need to be played
every hour of the day, every day of the week in order to reach the end-game.”
There is wide agreement about the importance of adding new genres to the
MMOG market, but there is some profound disagreement in this area as well.
“Science fiction probably won’t appeal to the masses any more
than fantasy,” says John Taylor, managing director of Arcadia Investment
Corporation. “I think that elves and fairies have an audience, and
science fiction has an audience, and sports has the biggest audience.”
Here, however, Garriott, who has made a 20-year career publishing best-selling
fantasy role-playing games, sharply disagrees.
“Throughout my whole career, I have had people try to tell me how
a genre is popular or dead,” says Garriott. “I cannot tell
you how many times various publishers have tried to talk me out of making
Ultimas because medieval swords and sorcery was dead. I’ve always
responded by saying, ‘If you think a genre is dead this year, it’s
because there are no good games in that genre this year. It’s not
because people got tired of a particular fictional setting.’”
But genre and time investment are not the only concerns. Another stumbling
block between MMOGs and the mass market may hit both sides where it hurts
most, in their wallets.
Billing:
Along with genre and time investment, Mythic’s Mark Jacobs lists a
third obstacle for the mainstream market—billing.
“Massively multi-player games cannot be expensive to play,”
says Jacobs. “The masses do not want to pay $15 per month in addition
to other charges, including buying the box, for an online game.”
When it comes to subscription fees, price is only one of many concerns.
Analysts worry that mass market consumers do not understand why they should
pay a retail price for a game then pay a subscription fee to play it.
A sizeable segment of the consumer market still resists giving its credit
card information over the Internet.
“Paying a subscription fee for an online environment is actually
a hardcore gamer activity,” says Garriott. “They understand
what they are going to get for their investment and their level of participation.
If you go to the casual market, it’s fine to make a retail purchase.
The people understand getting a box in their hand and paying a fee for
it; but they are not as willing to subscribe to something when you are
not sure what their level of participation will be and they are not sure
what value they will get.”
The Sims/SimCity creator Will Wright says that realities within the current
market do stand between making a working MMOG and appealing on a mass
market basis.
“There are certain design branches that massively multi-player games
drive you towards that pull you away from the mass market,” says
Wright. “There are certain business realities, primarily the subscription-base,
that pull you away from the mass market.
“Working on The Sims Online, subscriptions were a big problem. If
you go out and ask everybody who plays The Sims why they did not sign
up for The Sims Online, I think eight-out-of-ten would say, ‘I’m
not about to pay a monthly fee.’
“Right there you have lost the mass market.”
When it comes to billing concerns, Korean-based NC Soft may have come
up with a practical solution—an episodic MMOG. ArenaNet, a division
of NC Soft made up of former Blizzard Software employees, is currently
working on Guild Wars, an MMOG which employs a territory-based fee structure.
Instead of paying a monthly subscription, consumers will purchase territories
within Guild Wars. By purchasing the basic package, players will buy on-going
access to the main continent of the game. Should players wish to explore
new areas, they can purchase periodic expansion packs that will give them
unlimited access to new continents.
“After you finish the first continent, if you want to move on to the
next continent, you need to buy the expansion pack,” says Garriott.
“Instead of having a subscription fee, you pay to add new content.
You get over the feeling of having to pay money even if you are not sure
you want to participate. On the other hand, the game self-markets.”
A Whole New World:
In discussing the reasons MMOGs
have not been able to break into the mainstream market, almost everybody
seems anxious to discuss The Sims, Electronic Arts’s attempt to
adapt the best-selling PC game of all-time for online purposes.
When The Sims Online launched in the first part of 2003, it got an amazing
send off. Electronic Arts had sold more than 6 million copies of the single-player
version of the game. Newsweek did a cover story on The Sims Online, and
stories and publicity for the game appeared everywhere.
With subscribership in the neighborhood of 100,000, The Sims Online has
not sold as well as expected. That said, The Sims Online is hardly a failure.
It achieved profitable status prior to this year’s Electronic Entertainment
Expo, and is currently the fifth most subscribed to MMOG on the U.S. market.
Nonetheless, post-morteming was a popular activity among those interviewed
for this article.
“There are some games that have attempted to break the treadmill
mode—for example, The Sims Online,” says Richard Garriott.
“The problem with The Sims Online is that though the high concept
was fabulous, the game suffocated under its own development weight. It
substantially missed the mark of creating a social environment in which
people could interact with each other socially while doing hobbies that
kept everybody engaged.
“The principles that guided The Sims Online were well founded. I
believe that a Sims Online kind of product will ultimately succeed. I
just think The Sims Online was the wrong execution.”
In typical fashion, Will Wright, creator of The Sims, pokes fun at himself:
“The Sims was the poster child for massively multi-player games
going wrong with the mass market. There was a lot of hype around the launch
of The Sims Online, and I think we launched too early. Everybody says
that they launched too early.”
According to Wright, The Sims’s concept was a good one for the mass
market, but the implementation was wrong.
“The biggest single competitor to The Sims Online wasn’t Star
Wars Galaxies or some other massively multi-player game, it was The Sims
offline. A lot of the people who were playing The Sims Online, when they
stopped playing, they went back to The Sims.”
And the reason for this, according to Wright, is that The Sims and The
Sims Online are not the same game.
“If you look at the screens of The Sims Online and The Sims offline,
they look remarkably similar. When you play the two games, they play quite
differently. Even though they are set in the same world and they have
the same title and the same graphics, the actual play experience is radically
different.
“Assuming that we were giving the game away for free, we would still
have the problem that people do not have the free range and the control
that they have in the offline game. There are certain aspects that we
had hoped to get in that turn out to be technically very difficult—to
allow people to bring in their own custom content. Once that can be addressed,
that will help bridge the gap between the online and offline experience.”
MOG vs MMOG:
Earlier in this article, analyst John Taylor was quoted as saying that
sports is the biggest genre. Taking that thought further, Taylor believes
that one of the keys to breaking into the mass market might be to take the
“massive” out of massively multi-player online games.
“I think online play has a better chance of reaching a mass audience
than massively multi-player,” says Taylor. “There are people
who are technology-forward and are into doing stuff in cyberspace with
strangers; but I think the mass market, if you define it as kids, women,
girls and boys, is more interested in playing with friends.”
Asked what is the future, Taylor says he can sum it up in two words—“team
play.”
“Maybe two answers—team play and tournaments... not just tournaments,
prizes. Electronic Arts is going to roll out some tournaments this fall
with the view that they will have it ready to go full-bore next year.
“It will be sports-based, so you might see it with NBA Live. They’re
really experimenting with it to see if they can get the mix right and
build some loyalty and monetize the traffic.”
Microsoft has also homed in on sports tournaments. XSN, Microsoft’s
sports league, confirms the company’s focus on sports as a way to
draw consumers to Xbox.
Along with sports, companies like Vivendi, Activision, and Electronic
Arts have thriving audiences for non-massive multi-player games such as
Counter-Strike, Quake III Arena, and Battlefield 1942.
Thousands of players log in to play these games on a daily basis, and
leagues and tournaments could well promote these games to an even higher
level.
It should be noted that selling on a mass market level and breaking into
the mainstream are two very different goals. Nintendo sold 17 million
copies of Super Mario 3 at a time when people considered video games a
fad for pre-teen boys. Nintendo sold 17 million copies of the game, a
mass market accomplishment, without necessarily penetrating the mainstream.
The Sims, on the other hand, sold 6 million copies, the majority of which
were sold to women. The Sims market can be considered a mainstream market,
plus the game was a mass market success.
Once the mainstream Internet becomes comfortable with the Internet as
a place to play, MMOGs may indeed become a mainstream product and a mass
market success. By that time, however, you may see more genres than fantasy
and science fiction, more welcoming play mechanics than leveling-up of
an RPG, and different billing models than the $9.95 per month that currently
dominate the field.
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