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No Country for Old Gamers?
By Cameron Sorden | November 24, 2007
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about pulling community sites into the blogosphere and vice versa. Yesterday, the post was referenced at Elder Game, but not to discuss community– instead, Sandra examined the semantics of the word “hardcore.” While she brings up some interesting points about some people’s definition of the term (the older, previously accepted definition), I was more interested in Grimwell’s thoughts in response to it which can be found in his post Talking ’bout My Generation. The post extends the idea of changing MMO definitions to changing community standards and discusses how games that would have been a roaring success at the height of the big three would fail to meet community expectations today. An excerpt (emphasis mine):
Things that passed for ‘normal’ or ‘exceptional’ as the first wave of MMO’s launched are, quite often, seen as crap, substandard design, and lacking in polish. Times have changed, the audience has changed, and the standards have changed. Holding to the old standards and assuming the old audience is the equivalent of closing ones eyes to the passage of time.
Not surprisingly, that’s not a good way to do things. To ignore the present and deny the passage of time isn’t just a failure to embrace improvements and new ideas, it’s also ignoring the demands of the modern customer who you are hoping will embrace your game. You can build a game that people would have called kickass in 1999, but you can’t sell it in 1999 anymore… choose wisely.
See the bolded line? That’s what I find so irritating about massively multiplayer games today. Grimwell is essentially saying that if you don’t design for the WoW crowd, your game will very likely fail. This isn’t just Grimwell. This is every major player in the industry. Everyone sees WoW with 9.3 million players and tries to copy what they’re doing, even if they say they aren’t. Who can blame them? Everyone wants a piece of the WoW pie.
But the truth is that there is no “modern gamer.” It’s a myth. How exactly do you design for him? These days, the modern gamer is as likely to be a her as a him. It’s as likely to be a hardcore raider as a casual weekend player. It’s as likely to be an old-school MUDder as a console enthusiast who made the hop to PC. All of these gamers are MMO customers, and they all want different things from their games.
There is both room and demand for all kinds of games in the MMO space. I know that because I can look at all the games that still have active and passionate player bases despite being patently anti-WoW: Vanguard, EverQuest, DDO, and SWG, to name a few. People tend to dismiss them because they “suck” (in the “community” opinion) or because they don’t have the same population size that more popular games have, but that’s a critical mistake for the gaming industry to make. Ignoring players who enjoy games like that and labeling them as luddites and dinosaurs is as erroneous as it is insulting. These are games– abstract devices for fun and relaxation. Am I a dinosaur because I like the original Tetris more than 3D Tetris blast or whatever the latest one is?
The challenge for modern game designers isn’t designing for the “modern player,” whomever you imagine that to be. The challenge is in finding ways to appeal to all the different types of gamers present in the vast and varied community of MMO fans and presenting them with a compelling and engaging experience which is relevant to their personal interests. There is a blatantly obvious long tail scenario here, and whoever figures out how to tap it and monetize it is going to come out on top or at least be a major player in the long run.
Meanwhile, everyone else is going to be sitting around designing square peg games for the mythical “modern gamer” and wondering why it’s not fitting into the round hole of the MMO enthusiast community.
Topics: Random |
November 24th, 2007 at 11:29 am
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that folks clone WoW and then sit back and wait for the millions to come. As a business plan, that’s about as stupid as cloning launch EverQuest I and waiting to count dollars. Both ideas would fail because cloning is not a good business plan.
I don’t even think the challenge is to appeal to all the different player types out there with your game. That’s the way of the middle and while it can work for some, if that’s all everyone tries, there comes a point where there is no reason to try a new game unless it brings a significant graphics upgrade. It’s the same game after all.
The trick, is to identify who you are going to design your game for, and then build those people a great game. I wrote about this in a post recently (Designing for the middle) and I feel that this is a far better way to get a business return on the game you make.
Thing is, no matter which slice of the pie you design a game for, the “modern player” has certain assumptions, no matter which individual group you go designing for. These assumptions can be summed as follows:
“Beta will end before launch.”
The game will work on launch day, without major bugs that cause you to break through the geometry, or get stuck in it, or grossly unbalanced classes, or huge gaping exploits that were identified in beta, or graphics that would have passed for ‘great’ at the turn of the century, or moronic AI on mobs who just stand there and swing, or quests that involve nothing more than grinding the kill count, or a host of other things.
There are a number of things that you can do wrong, very wrong, in a MMO launch no matter who you cater the game to. When you do those things wrong, the community and bloggers will instantly point to the past and say “How could you ignore the lessons learned before and NOT DO THIS????”
They would be right. The modern gamer has some base expectations, it does not matter if he is a raider, or plays for thirty minutes per week. The Blizzard buzz word for this is “polish” and no matter what you call it, we all know it when someone misses the mark, because there are assumptions we all agree upon (unofficially) that you should meet before launch.
…and to end my prattle, if you are going to clone a game, clone EQII. WoW may have more players, no debate there, but EQII has a better game in my obscenely biased opinion.
November 24th, 2007 at 11:40 am
That’s entirely fair, and to be honest, I was probably picking on your post a bit to make a point. I knew what you meant.
I see I misspoke a bit when I said you should design for varied interests. I didn’t mean in a single game. You can’t design a game for everyone and you shouldn’t try (a mistake many companies are making right now). I meant the same thing you said– that when you design your game, you should know who you’re designing it for and plan for their tastes.
My beef is that lots of companies see WoW’s 9.3mil players and try to design for what they see as WoW players (as if you could identify WoW players under a collective blanket, which you can’t), ignoring the many other types of gamers or labeling them as irrelevant or “stuck in the past” simply because there aren’t as many of them.
November 24th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Is it greedy to make a medicore game for a large audience, instead of a great game for a medium audience? That’s how I read your question, Cameron.
EVE Online has 200k subscribers, and the fact that WoW has 9 million subscribers doesn’t make EVE any less of a financial success. SWG is often touted as a failure, but SOE clearly considers it profitable still (they’re maintaining not only servers for the game, but also content expansions). Financial success is having a good profit:expense ratio, not having big numbers or winning the jackpot.
Perhaps it’s a problem mainly with the expectations of MMO investors/publishers. I’ve heard developers complain that they feel forced to promise WoW-like numbers to get investment money.
But I agree with Grimwell that MMO players in general, including veterans like us, have some different expectations than players had a decade ago. As the industry grows and matures, gamers will become increasingly intolerant of bugs, delays, grinds, and host of other issues. You can expect tolerance from a computer-nerd who’s interested in how the game was made and operates. But the further into mainstream culture gaming goes, the harder it will be to find gamers who have much interest in the difficulties of game design or maintenance… the less people will care about how things are, and the more they’ll care about “how it should be”.
November 24th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
If you could efficiently monetize a small audience, we’d have a much larger variety of MMOGs. Unfortunately, MMOs tend to have enormous economies of scale. It’s much more profitable to operate one game that attracts 1 million people than 10 games that attract 100k each.
Furthermore, WoW has thrown the industry conceptions of efficiency way off kilter by being enormously successful, which I suspect is why it’s hard to find investment money without promising WoW numbers.
When someone can find a way to make a game profitable for as few as a few thousand people (including the cost of game construction, support, and continued development) while maintaining the standards that the modern gamer expects (which is what Grimwell is talking about), we’ll likely see an explosion of game types including a return to plenty of old styles that have fallen by the wayside. Currently, it’s nigh-impossible to do that.
I have more thoughts on this and comparisons to the way that MUDs evolved, but I think I’ve talked about it before and this could be a blog post in itself (plus my finance homework isn’t going anywhere at the moment).
November 24th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I wouldn’t say the modern gamer is a myth. I’ve been gaming since Pong but I have no desire to go back to those “classic” days of videogaming’s “golden age” either.
I have many opinions about the MMO whiners (read: EQ vets) but I’ll throw this one out there: a lot of you guys came from MUDs, etc. No graphics, just your imaginations, some text, and inputing action commands for every little thing. EQ came along and it was quite literally a graphical MUD. We’ve evolved beyond that now. Take all the “hardcore” stuff you guys miss about EQ and look at it. Was it truly “hardcore?” Was it truly “the only way an MMO should be?” How could it have been the only way when it was practically the only product out there? Perhaps those “hardcore features” just weren’t thought of at the time? Perhaps it was asking too much of the tech at the time? Who knows, but we have the tech now and we certainly have tons of competition. MMO’s are lining up like CVS and Starbucks on every corner.
These days I suspect many “modern gamers” (read: casuals or anyone who came into the genre in the past few “WoW era” years) want a good game not “just” a graphical MUD. That’s one area WoW has excelled at, and I think even the WoW detractors will agree: WoW is a great game. It may be a run-of-the-mill MMO but it’s a great game, and that’s a huge part of why it’s attractive to the “modern gamers.”
November 24th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
That’s exactly my point when I say that the “modern gamer” is a myth, Talyn — I’m not saying that people don’t want better games. I’m saying lots of people want lots of different things, and you can’t lump everyone together when you’re talking about a target market. WoW’s player base is as diverse as it is large. A quick glance at the standard hardcore v. casual forum fight can tell you that.
The mentality that the “EQ whiners,” as you call them, are irrelevant because they want a game more like EQ is exactly what’s wrong with the industry today. Why is it a bad thing to want a game like EQ? Just because more people think WoW is fun than EQ doesn’t mean that the EQ players should have to like WoW. It does, however, mean that it’s a lot likelier we’ll see games like WoW than like EQ.
This is where figuring out how to efficiently monetize small groups of players comes in (and why I compare it to long-tail retail situations). Right now, players who like old-school MMOs with more in common with MUDs than WoW are left out in the cold, despite being perfectly willing to pay to play a game like that, because there simply aren’t enough of them to make professional development of the quality we expect as “modern gamers” financially feasible or worthwhile.
As a minority within a sea of players that perceive themselves as largely homogeneous (although they clearly aren’t), their wants and concerns are brushed aside and even openly dismissed and mocked because they’re not profitable. That’s fine, and proper– it’s just business under the current conditions.
But it’s also money that’s sitting on the table just waiting for someone to find a good solution to the problem of defeating MMO economies of scale.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
On the other hand, if the old-school guys truly want the old-school MMO’s why aren’t they playing them? Why does someone need to make a game like EQ when EQ is right there? People whine that everything now is a “WoW clone” but every time I look… only WoW is WoW. Nothing else compares, good or bad.
If the old-school guys want a “new” EQ why aren’t they playing Vanguard? I was totally turned off by EQ so I never got into it. What I do like about Vanguard (myriad problems aside) is what other people tell me is exactly what they liked about EQ so maybe there’s something there for them? Or will be once (if?) SOE gets their crap together.
Does there have to be 500 EQ clones to choose from, or is it actually possible now that there are so many MMO’s out there for old-schools, new-schools, hardcores, casuals, and everyone in between to actually make a goddamn decision and play one instead of always looking for a New Shiny?
November 24th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
They are playing them. Most of the classic MMOs still have healthy player bases. Does the mere presence of something mean we shouldn’t build more things which have similar elements?
They are playing VG, and it is a lot like EQ, and it is a lot of fun. Still, it’s sorely lacking in raiding and content in many areas. It had a terrible launch, but eventually it will probably be one of the best classic-style games (if not the only one) of this generation.
No, there don’t need to be 500 EQ clones. Nor do we need 500 WoW clones. But we don’t necessarily have to be satisfied by what’s currently available just because some people are. When you say there are “so many MMO’s out there” for people to choose from, you’re right– but many of them fail the basic requirements of the “modern gamer” that Grimwell was talking about, and there aren’t as many palatable offerings as it might seem.
Why do you think it’s a bad thing for new games to be made that differ from the perceived majority desires? If there were a way to make it financially feasible to create games that both satisfy the polish expectations of the modern gamer and cater to small subsets of players (which was what I was originally discussing with this post), how could that be a negative thing?
November 24th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
I’m not opposed to it at all. I just re-read my previous comment and realized I probably came off sounding hostile or combative which was not my intent.
I’m in favor of two (potentially opposing?) camps:
1) Niche games rock, regardless of their popularity. DDO lacks the open world, the soloability, etc. you’d find in most other MMO’s but if the player opens their mind and enjoys it for what it is, damn there are awesome adventures in DDO with certain elements that can’t be done in other games.
2) Why can’t someone take Blizzard’s concepts to the next level and beyond? Blizz took the typical MMO content and polished it up to an unprecedented level of playability which 3 years later still hasn’t been matched, much less surpassed. I’d rather see a dev team (better yet, give me a dev team! haha!) take a look at what made the old school games tick; what makes the new ones tick; how can we combine those and give fun, valid content for each target subset of players rather than alienating them?
November 25th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
I wandered over here hoping for a chance to prove I’m not a Luddite (*grin*), but I got distracted by the ongoing discussion.
Cameron, you said:
“If you could efficiently monetize a small audience, we’d have a much larger variety of MMOGs. Unfortunately, MMOs tend to have enormous economies of scale. It’s much more profitable to operate one game that attracts 1 million people than 10 games that attract 100k each.”
That is a good point about the economies of scale — the world created with a team of, say, 50 can support 1 million players on 100 worlds as easily as 100k players on 10 worlds. And obviously the profit on 1 million subs is much higher.
But the profits from 100k players can easily support a game company. I saw it first hand on AC1. The problem is not monetizing a small audience — the problem is attracting the investment capital necessary to get the ball rolling. Three years of development before launch is a lot of ball to roll, and investors are not interested in a game that supports itself and earns a tidy profit. They want an astronomical profit. They need an astronomical profit — that’s what makes them good investors.
Of course, one of the big reasons that that investors are out for the megahit is because so many big-money MMOs fail. And I would argue that many MMOs fail because we don’t properly understand the needs and behaviors of our audiences. I’m really big on designing for a particular audience — and understanding that audience as explicitly as possible.
… which is exactly why I don’t like to use imprecise terms like ‘hardcore’ as a basis for game design. Certainly you, Cameron, weren’t using ‘hardcore’ for game design — you just provided a handy and interesting post that got the train of thought rolling.
November 25th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
You’re totally right about the start-up requirements necessary, especially for the level of polish required by today’s standards (referencing Grimwell again).
You’re also right about 100k being more than enough to keep a game rolling. Isn’t that right around the subscriber numbers for a few big-name games? Even EQ2 doesn’t get more than 200-400k, if I recall correctly.
When I talk about monetizing small audiences, I mean much smaller than that. Ideally, I’d like to see games that cater to an audience as small as a few hundred players (or even less than 100) with all of the polish we expect financially feasible. This would allow for a much finer degree of customization from game to game and players could find exactly what they were looking for. Under current conditions, there will never be a case when a regularly patched and expanded game will be able to keep its head above water or even recover development costs with a player base of that size.
The only way I can think of to make it work currently is to have a regularly updated code base, similar to a number of projects out there (HERO and Multiverse spring to mind) that takes care of the core engine components and updating of a game and leaves plug and play content updates in the hands of a small and talented team. In a situation like that (very similar to MUDs), I can envision worlds targeted at a group as small as a few hundred people.
This isn’t ideal for a number of reasons (similarity of worlds, for one), and it’s also why I’m hoping someone can come up with a better solution than that.
November 25th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
“Three years of development before launch is a lot of ball to roll, and investors are not interested in a game that supports itself and earns a tidy profit. They want an astronomical profit. They need an astronomical profit — that’s what makes them good investors.”
I also wanted to comment on that, now that I re-read your post. You’ve hit on two major issues barring more diverse game design in that paragraph. First, development is a HUGE project. When you’re talking about a three year project cycle, even the best producer/project manager is going to run into problems. Team members change, cash situations change (look at Perpetual), design changes…
Second, it’s REALLY expensive to make a game. Paying a full staff (even a small one) for three years, even if you’re contracting them and don’t have to worry about benefits, adds up real fast. Just ask any indie developer.
In my opinion, we’re not going to see any real progress on this front until we can squish the development cycle for a game like this down to less than a year and also find a way to cut the cost of development even further. The less risky and challenging you can make it for small teams or even talented individuals to do a project like this, the more you’ll see projects targeted at smaller subsets of players.
Again, I point to a common codebase as the obvious, if not best, solution.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I’m hoping to see MMOs that are able to start small and early (within a year of production) because they focus on dynamic and replayable content. Levelling can make for fun gameplay, but it’s what makes huge worlds necessary for MMOs at release. If faction warfare and other types of dynamic gameplay keep even the earliest content fresh for months, then the developer can get that content out early for profit and build the world gradually after release.
Much of the hardcore/casual debate is misleading. It directs attention to audiences when the problem is actually in the design.
Corpse runs, for example, do not represent hardcore gameplay; they represent poor design. Brad McQuaid told me once that the purpose of corpse runs in EQ and Vanguard is to add a dynamic element to the death penalty, whereas xp loss is the static element. The problem is that corpse runs usually end up like a loading screen in single-player games… but one that requires you to sit there and stare at the screen. They don’t engage the player meaningfully, so it’s basically just forcing the player to jump through hoops. Keep in mind, I’m talking about corpse runs as they have been in past games, rather than what they might be made into. Anyway, the point is that mentioning “hardcore” here is a red herring. That mechanic doesn’t make sense for any audience, but people bring up the hardcore/casual argument to try to explain away the problems the mechanic causes.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:53 am
There’s not much more to add to this discussion, so let me just say this.
The moment someone finds out what the magic recipe for success really is, it won’t work anymore. It’ll become the stereotype. The recipe will be hated because it’s all there is, and a new one will arise.
The best thing developers can do is make a game they actually like to play, that their testers like to play, and most of all that the focus testers they pick off the street like to play. Get real people playing the thing, not hardcore gamers, not beta applicants, not even QA people. Go to a mall, and get random people from your target audience to try it. Take their words as religion.
Why do I say this? Because it works brilliantly for Nintendo, the COD devs, Bungie, Retro, etc. They focus test their games, and it’s because of a combination of talent, funds, and LISTENING to focus testers that said companies are perennially successful both critically and commercially.
There, done rambling.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:59 am
In response to the focus tester thing, I wonder if it works for MMOs as well as for other types of games? The goal for an MMO is player recruitment and retention, while the goal for a traditional game is straight box sales.
The fact that a game is fun to play doesn’t mean it can hook people long term. Look at the Wii. How many people do you know that bought a Wii because it was fun (and it is) but then have it sitting at home on the shelf in the long run? I know that’s where mine is.
November 26th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
On the other hand, they say the “average” MMO player will stick with a game for 18 months, so while that’s longer than your typical non-MMO life, they’re still looking at a revolving door population.