Quote:
Originally Posted by gloine36
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MMO's are economically feasible. The problem is corporations don't view games like players do. The suits want to invest money into something that returns that money for many, many years as a veritible money stream. An awesome MMO will possibly last for 10 years. We don't know yet because while EQ is now 13 years old how much real profit is it producing? WoW is almost 8 and I think we can assume it will still product profit for several more years.
The suits see WoW as what they want in an MMO. What they don't get is that it came from a company that built games for several years and had an existing fanbase that was international in scope. Wow may be a game that never gets replicated. That doesn't mean games can't be made that are just as good or better and make good money. There are games out there that are smaller and making money for their owners. The problem is that the money men want WoW every time.
The business world is insane right now. It used to be if you invested x dollars and made 2x that back in a few years you did good. Now they want multiple X dollars back or the investment is a failure? I think the best games are going to come from smaller teams of builders who create their worlds before they get the big money. Once they have a good product ready for the final polishing the money men can step in and spend the big $$ needed to market it, put together the CS teams, and do the expensive stuff.
Good grief, the technology today to build a good game is there and it's not crazy expensive. You don't need cutting edge graphics. You need content and design. Seriously, look at the WoW graphics. Then look at the EQ2 graphics back in 04. They were so awesome few people had the power to run the PC to play them at their best setting. That's what killed EQ2. The game was good. It was just that too many people didn't have enough PC to play the game at any acceptable mode while they could play WoW at good or high settings.
Let's be honest. We could take EQ's graphics and classes, mix it with any game world we want, and somebody could build a new world for a fraction of what it would cost to build a EQ Next or some really heavy duty WoW killer. If the content is good and the game playable and fun, it'll make money.
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Unfortunately the initial cost of games, particularly MMOs has skyrocketed because of the player expectation level. While I understand what you are saying about the content of the game being more important than the flashiness no company is willing to risk investing money into a game which may be considered sub-par. At launch MMOs now normally have or are expected to include:
- Voice Acting
- Auction Houses
- Hundreds of quests from the start
- Sprawling realistic landscapes
- Sizeable end game content
- Full support for a large number of environments
- Fully implemented tradeskills
- A world populated by NPCs that all have some level of player interaction
And much much more. Even though WoW had cartoonish characters they still had to employ about 2 to 3 times as many artists as they had programmers. The reason you don't have any more EQs is no one wants to invest millions of dollars into a game with a niche market.
I love EQ but it also got away with a lot of crap that people wouldn't really deal with now when a game launches. Lack of support for several sound cards, broken quests, frequent patching with server downtime, a ton of NPCs that don't interactwith the players. EQ players kind of accepted that a lot of stuff hadn't been done before so leeway was given.
I don't really like the ideals of super easy play presented in WoW but I do understand that it is a very well made and very polished game. Many other MMOs have run into a problem where they run out of money and time before getting to the level of content expected. Even when not trying to compete directly with WoW or other established MMOs you are competeing with the perceptions of what a game should include based on games that have been undergoing development for nearly a decade.