Why developers are turning MMO

Apparently, according to Yahoo and reported here last weekend, more and more video game developers are getting into MMOs. Whether they’re newly trained – fresh faced and looking for an outlet on their newly proven skills – or industry veterans, people with the right skills are deciding to get into massively multiplayer online gaming and that can only have a positive knock-on effect on us. Will we get more games or games polished by larger teams? It’s hard to say, but somehow the industry is finding somewhere to put all those interested and it can only be a good thing.

Why now?

But why, all of a sudden, are they interested in turning MMO? Where the dream once was to work on the next Final Fantasy or Resident Evil, why are developers dropping their interest in the big-hitting titles and turning their talents onto smaller, online worlds? What does this say about the industry as a whole? It’s a massively interesting trend and one that, frankly, I’m surprised by, because the average gamer thinks that the MMO world is full of closing games, no profits and unoriginality. The average non-gamer thinks there are only 4 MMOs in existence and there are only five people playing each, but in all fairness this is part of the problem and is something that we’ll discuss later.

Where are they coming from?

Firstly, where are all these people coming from? It’s fair to say that the average video game developer – not the sort of people you follow on Twitter, but the guys that work for 15 hours on a few frames of animation only to be told on the internet how much it stinks –isn’t exactly a celebrated individual. If reports are to be believed, a huge amount of the people who made LA Noire possible weren’t even credited within the game; EA Louse claimed that management was poor and that bad ideas flowed like cheap cider at a party organised by 14 year olds. Can I say with any certainty that there are more unhappy people working for the big publishers than there are working in any other industry? No, I can’t, but it seems that when somebody speaks out against the company they’re working for, they aren’t doing it as a joke with the management, they’re doing it because the management are a joke.

So perhaps “coming home” to a smaller, more focussed publisher is a nice idea when compared with the overworked, underpaid nature of what some developers need to put up with, especially close to launch. If that’s an accurate portrayal of the two different sorts of games is unlikely, a smaller team needs to do more work to compete for a spot on the market, but we’ve all had jobs we’ve hated and the grass is always greener on the other side. As people get better internet and alternatives to World of Warcraft start to become more mainstream, more money is pouring into the industry and, with that money, more developers can be hired to work on expansions, sequels and new games entirely.

Genre is more popular than ever

Talking of more money pouring into the industry, it’s without a doubt that I say that the genre is more popular now than it has ever been. There are a lot of titles out there and that means there are less people playing each one but, overall, things are looking good. If there have been three million people leave World of Warcraft, it’s so that The Old Republic can gain four million and if more people start joining MMOs in that way, it’s going to continue to grow. Anything popular is going to generate interest and discussion and, from that interest and discussion, new ideas can form and the developers can innovate, creating more interest, bringing in more money, and granting the ability to hire more people to do the grunt work. The circle of digital life is complete.

MMO generation

This popularity is to do with a trend for online gaming within the industry as a whole. This whole generation of gaming will be looked back upon as the true beginning of the online competitive age. There were things before but next to the extent that it could be enjoyed by anybody of any age in almost any financial situation. As I wrote in one of last week’s articles: next generation will be all about bringing as many people together as possible within the same space, taking advantage of rising bandwidth and lowering costs. Whether it happens as vividly as I imagined, with even features on the console being part of some global MMO, is yet to be seen, but no developer anywhere will come to any harm by having a role in an online game that gets big. There’s a huge focus on the online portion of regular games and MMOs/fully online games, and that’s not going to ever change.

As popularity increases and the lines between MMO and multiplayer begins to blur even more, the genre will end up being showcased to more and more non-gamers. South Park arguably brought World of Warcraft to the masses and there’s no reason to think people are going to get more ignorant about the happenings in the MMO world. With the release of The Old Republic (Star Wars), Bioware proved that people are ready to buy into MMOs based on popular franchises – both within the gaming world and from other sources – in a way that perhaps they weren’t ready for when things like The Matrix Online was kicking about.

With every new MMO, especially free-to-play MMOs, that get into the mainstream media, more people are converted from the old way of thinking – that it’s far too extreme a form of gaming to be interesting – to thinking that, actually, it can be fairly fun. People that believe socialising should be limited to people within two miles of their own back door are starting to log onto social media sites and with that comes the gateway to a wide world of people, interests and, yes, digital entertainment.

Gaming is heading this way

More developers are coming to the MMO because that’s where gaming is heading. Getting in on the ground floor is important because, like in previous generations, new development houses that prove themselves now can be guaranteed a powerful position going forward. What they do with that position will vary, but for now, they’re following the trends. It’s hard to say how the gaming world on the whole will adjust to so many more quality MMOs being released, but for the more dedicated it’s going to be a very, very interesting couple of years. Watch for news, because I can’t help but think we’re on the cusp of being blown away.

M. Growcott