Monthly Archives: September

A nice (and true) citation from Warhammer Online’s Associate Producer Joshua Drescher:
“Seventy-five percent of the titles on the market that claim to be ‘MMO’ are actually single-player or limited group-oriented games that just happen to have lots of other people running around, doing the same things and having no impact on one another. In my view, to truly be a ‘massively multiplayer’ experience, the extant population of the game world has to have some sort of impact on you – regardless of whether or not they’re in your raid group or guild. Otherwise, you’re basically just regarding those thousands of other people as window dressing and they might as well be NPCs at that point…“

Read all comments on the genre and the term MMO of various developers after the jump.

You may have noticed them in our latest bunch of screenshots: Scavengers—a frequent sight on Qubus’ Island. Scavengers are a motley crew of pirates, marauding landsknechts and soldiers of fortune, populating dungeons. Sometimes they also run smallish scavenger-settlements consisting of a stronghold and a rogue-merchant.

MMO markets, especially in the US and South-Korea are saturated, that is the opinion of J. Mark Hood, co-founder of Seattle-based free-to-play MMO company Reality Gap, as reported by Gamasutra:

“I think it is saturated here, and I think there’s a real simple reason why most people [release free-to-play games],... the basic reason is—how do you compete with [the massive budgets] that Activision Blizzard and EA are doing right now? Unless you have a huge company and a huge amount of capital, there are not a lot of ways to do that.“

I think that quite a few game-developers would strongly disagree, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many newcomers throwing their hats into the ring. I don’t want to sound old-schoolish, but what is the definition of a saturated market? It means that the whole population already has a bought a certain product (i.e. nearly everybody owns a car) and new products will not be sold unless the population grows or the old products break down (or in case of car-manufacturers, if your government springs for a cash for clunkers program).
As for the MMO-industry, there is no reliable data on how many more newbies might get into playing MMOs or how many MMO-players will adopt a second, third or more MMOs, depending on the commitment of time and money those games demand. Also, there is no way to predict how many small-scale game-developers will close down and how many newcomers will show up. Taking all these uncertainties in account, I would say that the markets are far from saturated and there is probably plentiful of opportunities. What Mark probably meant was that “currently there is quite a lot of competing game-developing companies”—but of course, that wouldn’t have made a nice headline.

From my point of view the MMO industry is currently (and for the next few years) in the stage of growth. That is why we see an explosion of new F2P-games; which is quite good for the industry as a whole, because it might get more customers interested in the field and help to speed up the production- and market-cycle (which is currently very slow, because it just takes so much time to make a MMO.)
But if you surf through lists of F2P-MMOs, you are often greeted with dead links, even for games which were published just last year. There will be more consolidation to come in the next years as the industry transitions to the stage of maturity.

My two cents about what will happen next: besides all developers getting more boot-strapped, it will very probably depend on the type of the business-model of each game. Blockbuster- subscription-based-games will compete in price (increased production values, but decreased time-to-market and lower distribution-costs and increased competition). This is eventually also true for free-to-play games which are purely based on micro-transactions. As for free, ad-based games like Coobico, it will be a fight for quality (as your price can’t get lower than zero) and for more relevancy for more members (to get better advertisement deals.)

The gallery is now updated with a bunch of new up-to-date screenshots—please take a look after the jump.