Category: MMO Musings

A Limit on Subscription MMOs?

Posted on by Gazimoff

With Star Wars: The Old Republic being less than a month away, the game seems to be treading the well-worn path of other top-flight MMOs in charging a subscription. For $14.99 or £8.99 a month you’ll be able to clash lightsabers as much as you like. But is a subscription the right model to be using?

At face value a subscription seems to be ideal. Play as much as you like with all the content you want for a single monthly fee. You have the same character slots and the same bank space as everyone else. The only difference is in the box you buy and the extra goodies that come with it.

On the flip side though, subscriptions are also incredibly limiting if you want to play more than one game. It makes sense to pay monthly when you’re only playing one game, but if there’s another that you might only play occasionally you start to question the value of the subscription. It’s something that I’ve struggled with when trying to divide my time between Warcraft and Rift.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic – First Impressions

Posted on by Gazimoff

The NDA for Star Wars: The Old Republic has now been lifted and I’m finally free to share my opinions with you. In theory this would mean that I’d be unleashing a huge mega-post containing details of every single nuance about the game. I’m going to resist the urge and scale back a little bit on this, instead focusing on a couple of key areas.

I’m going to go into a bit of detail about my experiences with the two “caster” force classes in the game: the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor, along with the Jedi Sage and Sith Sorcerer advanced classes. I’ll also be talking a little bit about how SWTOR advances the MMO genre and the areas in which it falls back a little.

I’ll be concluding this post with a look about how the game performs on a range of systems. If you’re wondering if your PC will handle SWTOR or whether you should upgrade then feel free to skip ahead to this section.

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The Supermassive Beta

Posted on by Gazimoff

How many beta testers does it take to change a lightbulb?

The rather surprising answer is 89.

  • Fifty to just carry on as if light doesn’t matter and continue killing swamp rats or whatever.
  • Ten to raise a ticket complaining about the complete lack of lightbulb operation and DEMANDING that it be rectified THIS INSTANT.
  • Two to proclaim that lightbulbs themselves are overrated, and that when they started playing MMOs all they had was candles. And they jolly well liked it.
  • Five to argue that lightbulbs could actually do with a buff
  • Six to counter-argue that it’s actually daylight that needs to be buffed, and that lightbulbs themselves are slightly overpowered.
  • One to troll the entire discussion by stating that “lightblbs r for lozers lol”
  • Fifteen to give up the mission in frustration, going on a textual tirade about the pointlessness of lightbulbs and asking who designs a stupid quest around lightbulbs anyway.

And one level designer who sighs inwardly as he moves the light switch to a more prominent location.

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The Unknown Warcraft Subscriber

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a flurry of commentary recently on the recent earnings call by Activision Blizzard, where they provide some highlights on their third quarter performance. If you’re interested in reading through the entire transcript of the call you can find it at Seeking Alpha.

There are a couple of quick facts to pull out: Warcraft has dropped by nearly 2 million subscriptions to 10.3 million worldwide. Most of the loss is thought to be in China, an area which represents over 50% of the total subscriber base. The estimated rough split is approximately 5 million subscribers in the Far East, 3 million in US/Aus and 2 million in Europe/Russia.

There’s also the news on how much money Blizzard has made in the last quarter. The developer made nearly $300 million in revenue and $140 million in income – that’s a healthy profit margin of around 40% once tax gets factored in. Whichever way you slice the cake, Blizzard’s in a strong position considering that it’s not had a major release this year.

There’s only one snag with the information that’s been given to us. Although it’s easy to judge the overall performance of the company, it becomes difficult to judge the performance of Warcraft as an MMO. People will point to subscriber numbers going down and predict that this means doom for the game. That’s just simply not possible to do with the information we have available.

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The Necessity of End Game

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Honor’s Code.

Let me put on my armchair Game Designer hat for a moment. Put yours on as well and join me as we think about AAA MMOs.

I think we can agree on the goal. All of us, from the bean counters at production houses, to the developers, the QA Testers, to the players themselves, want a great game. What we want to create is a great ride, an experience if you will. We want an experience that can be picked up and enjoyed and shared with a wide variety of people. This is necessary to create a reliable and sustainable fan base which in turn brings in enough revenue, with whatever business model is used, to keep the servers running and keep us and our employees gainfully employed.

While we can all agree on the goal, how to get there is the topic of vigorous debate. At a high level, we want an immersive world with many fun activities to engage in. We know that different people find different activities fun, so we will need a wide range of activities. We don’t want to force any players to do things they find ‘unfun’ so many of those activities will need to be optional.

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Mobile MMO Missteps

Posted on by Gazimoff

At the moment I’m on holiday, which probably explains why I’ve been a bit lax on updates. While for some that might mean hitting the nearest beach and putting their head into a good book, for me it means working out just how many of my glorious gadgets I can take with me.

What started out as a sackful of handheld games consoles, MP3 players and so on has nowadays shrunk down to a smartphone and a laptop. While having the laptop is handy for occasional sessions in Warcraft when I can get a good wifi connection, I tend to use my smartphone for my mobile gaming needs.

This predictably ended up with me giving mobile MMO gaming a try. Buoyed on by Massively’s MMOBility column I downloaded a few titles and gave it a go. Unfortunately the experience was incredibly disappointing, and while I share Beau Hindman’s optimism about the future of the genre I think that these games make several important missteps.

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The Declining MMO Market

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a couple of great articles recently about the situation at CCP, publishers of EVE Online. The theory is that the company hasn’t been doing as well as it hoped following the White Wolf Publishing acquisition and has been losing both staff and subscribers ever since. I’d suggest reading Tobold’s summary of the situation if you’d like to know more there.

The question it creates is where this leaves MMO gaming as a whole. The general feeling is that we should be set for a decline in the popularity of the genre. Studios may end up closing doors and games may end up being taken offline. It’s a bit of a grim scenario.

There’s a question that I have to ask though – how much of this is to do with players getting tired of a particular game? If the universe you’ve been playing in hasn’t changed much in the past few years then wouldn’t you get bored and move on? Likewise, has the developer looked at chasing new customers to replace the ones that have left?

Ultimately there’s a known truth – players will only try your game for so long before they get bored or tired of it and move on. You need to have alternatives out there that players can easily switch to when that happens, otherwise they’re likely to become someone else’s customers.

You can see Blizzard do this with Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and Titan – a range of game styles for people to switch between. It’s also been the strategy of Perfect World, NCSoft and others. This is where CCP has been stuck. As EVE becomes less popular they have no alternatives to offer. World of Darkness was supposed to be that, but it’s been kicked into the long grass.

I do agree with Tobold to an extent. The MMO market is due for a shake-up. But while I think that some games may change fundamentally, I don’t think that we’ll see any switch off completely. There’s always a way to to keep an old game running.

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Hobbyists, Indies and the Doom Moment

Posted on by Gazimoff

Have you ever wanted to change something about your favourite MMO? Maybe write your own questline or create your own models? Perhaps build your own game world or maybe even write your own game? Have you wanted to go from just being a passive consumer to an active creator within the genre?

If you do, I know how you feel. I’ve been looking at creating my own online games to play around with various concepts and ideas I have, and it’s been a real struggle. The current techniques that most MMO publishers permit are restricted to user interface addons and extensions, which is great if you want to build your own UI but not much good for anything else.

I’m a lot like the legions of other coders who’ve experimented with creating their own in-game content. From Doom through to Half-Life and beyond, some gamers have taken their games apart like clockwork wristwatches just to see how they work, before tinkering and experimenting with them to change the game in new ways.

I’m not yet sure if MMO developers and publishers are coming round to this way of thinking, but there’s a little glimmer of hope.

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The Kitten Standard Economy?

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I wrote about the possibility that Titan, Blizzard’s next MMO, would feature a real money auction house. This followed on from Diablo 3, which introduced the concept in order to provide a safer alternative to the grey market that emerged around item trading in Diablo 2.

The main argument at the time was that Blizzard would never put in a real money auction house because it would affect the core dynamic of how players gain power. There was a claim that because Diablo 3 is a dungeon loot fest with no competitive play that there’s no harm to other players in buying high quality items for real cash.

The problem occurs when you try and apply the same logic to Warcraft. Currently the most powerful items and equipment are earned through either raiding (for valour points) or PVP (for conquest points). There is no way to shortcut buying them – no amount of gold will help you, while only breaching the Terms of Use and paying someone to play your character for you will get your character geared up quicker. Not something I’d encourage.

Sure there’s a few good quality BoE items from the top tier raids that can be sold on the auction house, but they’re few and far between. As a result, would it really harm the Warcraft mechanic of playtime=power if a real money auction house existed?

My hunch is that it wouldn’t.

Of course there’s the argument that it would ruin the feel of the game, or that Diablo needs this in order to stop a grey market for items springing up. But that still doesn’t make any sense. Warcraft has its own problems, from the gold farming to account hacking. The illicit trade in gold is huge.

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No Competitions For You!

Posted on by Gazimoff

We all like winning free stuff, right? There’s that warm glowy feeling that we get when we tear open a prize parcel, or the surprise when our numbers come up on the lottery. Even the chance of winning something makes us feel better.

It’s also not much of a surprise that competitions help companies to make fans. Whether it’s making your existing customers more loyal or reaching out to new ones, giving stuff away is one sure-fire way to grab our attention. Conversely, not giving stuff away or (even worse) being selective about how you do it is a sure-fire way to lose that attention.

Say that you’re running a large multinational corporation. You sell your products globally and have offices in a number of different countries. You invest in localising your products for local markets in order to win more customers. Your products are so well-loved you have fans worldwide.

The moment of your annual corporate shin-dig is approaching, the time when you welcome fans from across the globe in order to show them what you’re working on. You’re even selling live video streams of the event internationally for those fans that can’t make it.

So you look at building hype by starting some competitions to get the fans all fired up. All’s well and good until they come across this bit of small print in the competition rules.

Entrants in this Fancypants Contest to Win Free Stuff (the “Promotion”) must be legal residents of the U.S. and Canada (Rhode Island and Quebec excluded)

Your fans doubt themselves, asking how this can be. Then they see a succession of competitions organised by show sponsors, again with that same small print. It reinforces the point – your international fans just aren’t as important to you as the ones you have at home.

The usual defence in this situation is to point to laws governing competitions and prizes, wailing that “it’s too hard” to run contests that everyone can enter. Yet you still managed to cover off employment law, retail law, corporation law and tax law when you set up your overseas offices. Surely you could have done your homework? You’d just spend the money once, draw up a contests template and away you go.

I’m not going to lecture you on how your international fans feel – read the comments on almost any competition announcement and it’s always the same. Thanks for ignoring us. Again.

Before you say that this is just some British guy with an axe to grind, think again. There’s the folks in other European countries. There’s the gamers in Australia who put up with some horrible lag just to play your game. There’s the people in China, Japan and India who are so important to you that you make localised versions of your game just for them.

Yet where are their competitions? You like their money well enough, but you’re not prepared to give a little back? Disappointing.

In the end all it takes is for a single publisher who’s done their homework to start pulling fans away from you. Don’t make their job even easier by telling international fans they’re not important to you any more. You may end up being the biggest in the US, but if the rest of the world is playing a different game it’s small potatoes.