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Understand Your Customer
By Cameron Sorden | November 26, 2008
The recent announcement that Tabula Rasa is shutting down has me thinking about the success rates of mainstream MMOGs. Why do certain MMOGs fail where others succeed? I don’t think it’s as simple as “the market is saturated” or “no one can compete against WoW.” If anything, those statements just show a lack of imagination on the part of the speaker. The answers to why these MMOGs fail are probably as varied and numerous as the games themselves, but I think a key factor to consider is who the game was built for.
On some level I just have this feeling that the design discussions for Tabula Rasa went something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a game where X” instead of “What our customers want is X.” It probably helped enormously that the speaker in this case was Richard Garriot, but we’re all seeing how well that turned out now. Not to knock Garriot, of course. As Darren said, TR at its core was a fun game — It’s just that no one played it. Whose fault was that? Whoever greenlighted the project without doing the proper market research, of course.
While just making your vision and putting it out there might net you a few lucky wins, in most cases that’s a perfect recipe for crashing, burning failure. Lets be honest: the MMO industry isn’t Field of Dreams. This is a business. If you build it, they might come… but you need them to stay to be profitable, and what you’re competing for is people’s time. You have to have something very compelling to part people from their personal time in the long run. Making what you think would be cool and throwing in a few dashes of what you think people expect doesn’t cut it. Innovation is important, but innovating a AAA game in a random direction is a very expensive way to perform market research. I’m sure NCsoft learned some very expensive lessons there (and hopefully the rest of the industry is auditing this course).
I think that it’s absolutely possible to build a AAA MMOG that can be competitive — even with an 800-lb Warcraft-flavored gorilla in the room — but it’s not going to happen by blind chance or luck. WoW raised the bar in a lot of ways that the industry is still grappling with four years later, and one of them is that you absolutely have to know who your customer is and what they want. You can give Blizzard as much grief as you like, but the one thing they really do well is that they get their core customers. They don’t innovate so much as iterate with twists, and they know exactly who they’re building something for when they build it.
If you’re just firing blind into a direction you think is right, you’re doing it wrong.
Topics: Game Design, Massively Multiplayer, Videogame Industry, World of Warcraft |
November 26th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
On the flip side, a design discussion could have gone something like this at Blizzard several years ago:
Dev: Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we made one of those MMORPGs that are getting so popular? We could take the sides from our Warcraft RTS games and plop the players down into that world to grind raids just like we’re doing in EQ every night!
Marketing: I dunno, Dev, we have no experience in that genre, it takes a ton of money and time to develop and maintain one, and they’re incredibly risky. Besides, all our feedback leans towards our customers *really* wanting Starcraft 2. And they want it yesterday. Followed by Warcraft 4 in a year or two.
Dev: Ah forget that stuff! RTS’ are passe, it’s all about the MMOs now. C’mon, we can take the whole Horde and Alliance ongoing history of war, and they can all kill wolves, spiders and murlocs together! And some other monsters! And then RAID!!!
Marketing: Wait… weren’t all our Warcraft games about Horde *versus* Alliance? And all about PvP online? And you’re telling me we have three games worth of that but you want to go kill wolves? And murlocs?
Dev: Yeah? And then RAID!!!
Marketing: …
Blizzard themselves have said repeatedly WoW was blind luck. The odds of it happening again anytime soon are slim to none but that’s not even the point.
Regarding Tabula Rasa, I got caught up in the pre-beta hype, nearing the verge of becoming a fanboy maybe. From the interviews and everything else at the time, I had a mental image of what TR would be like and how it would play. Then I got my beta slot and it wasn’t like that at all. It’s been a year now, and I just picked the game up because I heard they were finally adding first person camera to the game and in general I’ve heard a lot of positive comments about the direction the game has been going, other than moaning a lack of population. I’ll found starting next month til it shuts down what it was about but I think a lot of TR’s problem was over-promising and under-delivering from the dev team, but also from the player’s the same hypocrisy I point out all the time: we cry for something “new” or “different” but as soon as anyone delivers new and different, we whine because it’s not the same as our “old.”
November 26th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I’m going to disagree with you on a few points here:
First, when has Blizzard ever said that WoW was blind luck? There are a lot of things that were lucky about WoW’s timing and execution, but there were also a lot of things that were the result of careful planning. They took a successful and fun concept (EverQuest), added elements of an incredibly successful game of their own (Diablo), and streamlined it for gameplay that was both addictive and fun, improving upon it only incrementally. They knew exactly who their audience for the product they were building would be, and it turned out that they actually underestimated the amount of interest that people showed in their game.
That’s not what a lot of more “innovative” games do at all. They take a concept that’s a lot more out there, unprecedented, and unproven (MMO-FPS hybrids of a few different breeds, for example, or AoC’s pseudo-action combat), and then jam “familiar” MMO trappings on top — WoW’s quest system, MUD-style inventory, etc. It’s an opposite approach. While it innovates a lot more quickly and explosively, it also tends to fall flat on its face a lot.
I don’t think it has much at all to do with hypocrisy, frankly. Players do want new and innovative games, but there has to be a comfortable level of innovation in them. In TR’s case, it might be that there was a disconnect in expectations and results because of who they were marketing the game at. They said it wasn’t really an MMO, but to whom did they market it? Primarily MMOG players, if I recall correctly.
If they marketed it to both MMOG and FPS players, that tells me that their messaging was mixed… and that they didn’t even know who would really be interested in their game.
Besides, say what you will about players “whining”… I call that feedback. If consumers don’t use a product, you don’t blame the consumers, man — it’s probably either a problem with the product itself, or the positioning of the product (IE, the marketing).
November 27th, 2008 at 6:27 am
You pretty much nailed it, Cameron. It’s all about managing expectations. I know why studios pimp their service as the Second Coming of MMOs, they want to grab headlines and turn heads. They’ll normally get what they want, pre-release fans will start blogs, magazines will print interviews with folks and the anticipation is so high that it has nowhere to go but down. Not only that, but all this hype is usually built on vague statements heavily laden with buzzwords like ‘innovative’ and ‘revolutionary’ which are so loaded with subjectivity that everyone gets a different impression of what’s really happening inevitably leaving a vast ‘fan base’ ticked off that their vision wasn’t the final product.
Marketers are just doing what they get paid to do, but with a long-term revenue stream at risk, companies have to reign in their PR teams pre-release in order to avoid the slide into the “Only $0.98 on Steam” bin.
November 27th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Yes, Blizzard has said many times that despite their careful R&D, they have no idea why WoW specifically is such a runaway success.
I don’t blame “the consumers” but I do harp on the “MMO Hoppers” (that’d be us bloggers and forum posters who jump on every shiny new MMO — and we’re a much smaller segment of the overall consumer audience) because we’re the ones constantly writing about wanting “new” without ever putting a definition of just what “new” we’re seeking. It seems time after time we don’t want anything actually new and different, we want [insert our first MMO "love/addiction" here] with a fresh coat of paint.
TR wasn’t marketed as an MMO? I missed that one, then. In fact, I remember Richard Garriott’s catch-phrase was “In other MMO’s…” last year when describing every single feature of Tabula Rasa he was trying to pimp as improved in his MMO.
It’s a risky proposition, making an MMO, especially one that strays so far from the norm, even if only on the surface.
Why haven’t sci-fi MMO’s (or pseudo-MMO’s) taken off? Do “levels” not work in sci-fi? EVE is the only success and it has no levels. As broken as the old SWG was and the NGE *did* improve many aspects of “the game” it’s using a levels system now so all the freedom is gone. TR and HGL also used levels. (Not saying levels were the reason they failed, mind you.) Could it also have to do with some subconscious shift in mindset when our characters have guns? Funny how when we’re decked out in fancy armor and weapons we’re perfectly content to just ride our mounts around the world and explore or craft or just chat, but give us a gun and we just want to shoot it. Does that also mean we’ll chew through content even faster if we’re all wired to go shoot our guns?
If Blizzard re-skinned WoW into Worlds of Starcraft, which is mostly using various ranged weapons would that even work? Do guns and hotbars mix? I’d actually love to see Blizzard do that… put an art team on the job for a starter zone, a kind of “Windows Mojave” experiment just to base the player reaction.
November 27th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Well, being a runaway success is different than being successful. I think Blizz made a game that they expected to succeed… the blind luck was the fact that it was such a hit.
Maybe I’m thinking of Hellgate: London when I say they weren’t marketing it as an MMO, actually, but if that’s the case then I’m still not sure they were targeting the right audience for TR. I don’t see a whole lot of hardcore FPS interest or activity in the MMO population, in general.
I actually do think that gun thing is part of it… I don’t believe that they do mix with hotbars very well, because hotbars are very much about playing the UI (especially when they look like WoW’s hotbars) and shooters are all about keeping you in the action. I think Garriot talked about this a lot, actually.
Also, I think players expect the gun experience to be faster and more exciting, and I just wonder if it’s not very adaptable to an MMO experience that’s meant to be drawn out over time.
November 27th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Also, do guns and PvE work? Most shooter players get hot and bothered for the online PvP aspect. Although at the same time, I really enjoy the PvE (I guess I can call it that?) of some of the shooters with a story-driven single-player campaign. COD4 I felt was very immersive and intense during its campaign. The multiplayer part didn’t do anything for me. The Tom Clancy games on 360 (and PC) are also very, very good at this, and they’re typically slower-paced. Given that Ubisoft is making an MMOG (they haven’t called it an MMORPG) based on the Clancy IP’s, I wonder if players would take to something like the GRAW series, which is slower, more methodical and tactical and could have an AI system — a combination of GRAW and L4D — where AI could stand in for players in your squad. I think they may have to design for a lack of a monthly fee though, like The Agency is doing.