Why MMO games fail
It occurs to me that the MMO, as it currently stands in the industry, is something of a hit and miss affair. The average gamer, equipped with a console and every shooter ever made, generally only ever hears about the very biggest MMOs or, failing that, the MMOs that manage to crash and burn the hardest.
This was brought back home to me last week when I received a comment on one of my articles in which the commenter believed most MMOs are destined to fail, and fail quickly. Rather than take that statement at face value, I’ve been thinking through why that would be; what makes a game that has had thousands of hours of development hours plugged into it just fail?
APB, for instance, a game that was in the press for months and months before release, lasted a little less than 3 months before shutting down. The first time I read into it, I was editing an article – an impressions piece from after the Beta – in which the author stressed how unique, how enjoyable the experience was. Less than a few months later, the MMO had come and gone.
How could that be? A game with lots of publicity, average to good reviews and plenty of action just disappeared off the map. There was a lot of post-close reasoning on the internet; it cost too much to subscribe, there was cheating throughout (and it was easy to set up as well), you needed a pretty decent PC, the management didn’t know how to manage their money.
And that last one was constantly accused by ex-employees, not least of all Luke Halliwell who, via Wordpress, shared his experiences at Realtime Worlds in a series of articles he wrote about the downfall of the company.
“We were complacent about game design,” Halliwell writes in the third and final part of his series on what went wrong, “papering over APB’s obvious shortcomings and telling ourselves it would somehow come together at the last minute before release (an argument that was strengthened by the experience of seeing Crackdown do just that). We were complacent about business planning, deciding to spend all our investment getting APB to launch, assuming that we would sell zillions of copies and over-spending on server hardware. When we were told we were being made redundant, we were told something along the lines of “the market is just so bad right now … we could never have predicted this … even our worst sales projections were so much higher than this”.”
APB failed because the interest in the game never quite reached what the developers expected from it. But I think it’s a pretty rare thing for a developer to have had previous success, especially on the scale of Crackdown, when they begin developing and marketing their MMO. Perhaps in their case, things went wrong because they didn’t stick to what they knew could work. Maybe if they’d just made a Crackdown MMO and marketed it to people who bought the original game, Realtime Worlds would have spent less money and would still be around.
Sure, they wouldn’t have been able to implement any of the big plans they had for APB, but that’s all they ended up being any way, plans.
With the relaunch of APB coming soon and with the announcement earlier this year that the game will be free-to-play, we see a continuation of a new trend. More and more MMOs, including the mighty World of Warcraft, are increasing their overall sales by not charging their users anything to get into the game.
Is this the way forward? There are people arguing for both sides, many believing that allowing access to anyone without any sort of behavioural check (like charging real money)leads to an influx of low-skilled, less interested users and, ultimately, hackers.
But it also brings with it a collection of people who wouldn’t play the game otherwise, some of them bringing along their wallets. And while the long-time players of a game might do nothing but complain about the state in which going F2P will leave their favourite pass-time, ultimately a company is going to want the extra revenue that comes with new players.
Star Wars: The Old Republic, which we’ve spoken about before, announced its subscription costs the other day. At £8.99/$14.99/€12.99, a month’s worth of Star Wars action seems like a steal. But I’m interested, with the sheer amount of MMOs going free to play - 9 to choose from on Steam alone - how is this going to affect the sales of a game that the developers feel is still worth a monthly subscription? Does the old adage “You get what you pay for” still hold true? That’ll be something to watch over the next 18-24 months.
One thing I’ve noticed while doing my research for this article, and I write this knowing the reaction it could have from certain people, is that WoW seems to receive almost all of the blame when an MMO goes under. “All people want is a Warcraft clone (Is TERA a Warcraft clone?),” it’s a common phrase and it’s difficult to discount. At one point, MMOs could tick along quite nicely with a very small userbase, now they need to compete with a game that has millions of subscribers, years of on-going development and the backing of a publisher with even more money to spend – that’s even before launch.
WoW holds a monopoly on the genre and, as a result, has become the MMO to beat. In 99.99% of cases, beating Blizzard is unthinkable of course, but creating a similar game ends up being the plan. When a small amount of WoW players break off to play the new game for a little while, they do so fully knowing that they can go back to Azeroth whenever they choose. After a few weeks, maybe months, they inevitably switch back and the new game loses subscribers rapidly. It’s a story repeated time and time again on forums throughout the internet.
Is this a bad thing? Knowing that there is a high quality game on the market which is being supported by a top class developer can’t entirely be a bad thing, but that doesn’t stop Warcraft from being blamed for the genre’s stagnation. Nobody wants to create something new, people protest, why should they when the WoW formula works so well?
MMOs fail on almost a daily basis. For the most part they’re games that you haven’t heard of and, if you had heard of them, you wouldn’t play them either way. But I think it’s important for people to remember that these games don’t necessarily fail because they’re bad games or because the market is dropping out of the genre, there are hundreds of reasons – some which stem back as far as the initial conversation in which the developers outlined their ideas.
For a new MMO on the market, the important thing is to learn from the mistakes of those games that are no longer playable. Learn why they failed and avoid repeating. And most importantly, if forum-goers are to be believed, don’t just make World of Warcraft-lite.
Mat Growcott
Copyright 2011 DevilsMMO.com
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Comments
In most of the cases, it is "you get what you pay for". I know with today's economy, it does get harder to spend cash on the game and then turn around and pay the fee. But we know it can be done as we've seen with WoW now for years. Most of the time, it doesn't take much to get someone to play. It's the elements that games need to KEEP players which are missing in alot of games.
There are clear design motivations behind each business model:
For P2P games, ensure the game play is stellar and production values high with good content to ensure the subscriber remains. Would be costly to undertake and far riskier in today's market but IMO still a viable model.
For F2P its about ensuring you provide LOTS of good reasons for non paying players to pay often at the cost of the F2P player, once they pay they are invested and will likely remain (and pay again) F2P players are there to provide liquidity and act as fodder, accept that and it stands a chance of being successful, ignore it and I promise you will fail.
Understanding these basic points at the early stages and understanding exactly what the MVP is (Minimum viable product) are the first points of ensuring you don't disappear shortly after the completion of what will be a lengthy and costly development.
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