A new credo has erupted in the MMO-space these days: Adapt or die. In today's Devil's Advocate, we take a look at that premise. See what you think and then leave your thoughts in the comments.

The basic premise of MMO Darwinism is based around the understanding of finite resources. Of all the people in the world, there is only a subset of that that plays games, and a smaller subset of that group plays online games. Thus, unless more people play online games, there is only a specific amount of money going into online games to pay salaries, development costs, upkeep, and other things.

Read more of Victor Barreiro Jr.'s The Devil's Advocate: MMO Darwinism.

One thing a lot of these failing MMOs need to do is simply lower the price till the demand increases. Get rif of the $59 client purchase, and lower sub price to $10 or $5, and offer a free trial. Im not sure F2P brings in enough money to stay afloat, and many people would pay $5 for a month of play time, but not $15 as that is the price for a AAA MMO.

MMO sub price remains the same but the number of p2p has increase alot over the years I wonder when will they realise that players have alot of offers for same price and allways end up with the "next big thing"

Here's a unique idea. Make games that people actually want to play, and more importantly pay to play. Quit trying to know better than the gamers that play the games, and instead look at what they like, and *shock* give it to them . I know that's a hard concept for all you "mmo gaming experts" out there telling the development houses how they should "innovate" and "distinguish themselves from WoW", but .......

Also quit releasing games before they have enough finished.

Well I agree with the first poster.  Prices have to change, players are not going to stick with your game long if you don't change them, especially in the fantasy realm.  I don't think a lot of f2p games make much money, there are just too many of them.

Unless you are in a niche without much competition like Eve, these games better start finding a way to differentiate themselves from the pack or face declining population.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Well I agree with the first poster.  Prices have to change, players are not going to stick with your game long if you don't change them, especially in the fantasy realm.  I don't think a lot of f2p games make much money, there are just too many of them.

Unless you are in a niche without much competition like Eve, these games better start finding a way to differentiate themselves from the pack or face declining population.

 

 Only speaking of big titles (LotRO, DDO, etc) I've heard they get even more subs when it's optional than when it's mandatory.  I do agree that the market is too flooded with cheap and just plain bad F2P games.  It also has a whole host of great one's though.

Side note, the shooter market has really exploded with F2P in a good way lately.  Blacklight, SMNC, Tribes, etc.   All pretty fun games not requiring you to shell out a ton of cash and not P2W (in my exp. anyway).

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Well I agree with the first poster.  Prices have to change, players are not going to stick with your game long if you don't change them, especially in the fantasy realm.  I don't think a lot of f2p games make much money, there are just too many of them.

Unless you are in a niche without much competition like Eve, these games better start finding a way to differentiate themselves from the pack or face declining population.

Yeah, and theres a lot of games I would pay to try if I didnt have to spend $40. Like xyson. Companies simply need to start pricing their MMOs competitively. $15 may be too cheap for some MMOs. $15 is definetly too much for other MMOs. Maybe more of them need to go to a GW model and have a pay once model.

Originally posted by Kitane

Here's a unique idea. Make games that people actually want to play, and more importantly pay to play. Quit trying to know better than the gamers that play the games, and instead look at what they like, and *shock* give it to them . I know that's a hard concept for all you "mmo gaming experts" out there telling the development houses how they should "innovate" and "distinguish themselves from WoW", but .......

Also quit releasing games before they have enough finished.

 

Maybe, just maybe, all these "mmo gaming experts" are gamers.  And maybe they are right in telling companies to innovate.  Look at GW2, hype is off the scale because they made a game that people wanted, they innovated to the extreme instead of cloning WoW, and they took their time in development.  Now look at SWTOR, the devs decided that they would clone WoW and made a garbage game with no innovation.  And it is failing so hard that EA had to fire 1000 people. 

Perhaps we could call it Darwinism. But is it evolution or devolution? Often when conditions in a specific habitat or eco system gets worse the creatures living in it degenerate and turn into lesser less advanced life forms. The more advanced animals cant survive because the food and other necessities they needed are no longer available.

I believe this is what is really going on. And its sad...

Victor,

I'm all for "Darwinisim" in terms of the Free Market....it's what our system is based on...and companies that can't deliver a good product/service at a competitive price and make a proffit doing so, neccessarly need to make way for ones that can.

The one thing I would be a bit carefull about is using "Darwinism" to describe some of the TRENDS in MMO's as you did. That's not really accurate... at least in the way most people commonly understand the Term (which is not neccesarly representative of the scientific understanding). Most people commonly consider  "Darwinism" to represent Progression from less efficient/suitable mechanisms to more suitable ones. Alot of the "Trends" you tend to lump into that label, I would argue, actualy aren't that at all...they are more descriptive of currently popular TASTES. Tastes in popular entertainment, IMHO, are a little bit more like FASHION then technology....there is no clear sense of "Progress" in that one is inarguaebly superior to another...that's a little bit like saying "blue" is inarguably superior to "yellow" or "strawberry" to "vanilla".... in this context, things shift into and out of vogue....one set of tastes that's all the rage today (i.e. "casual", "F2P", etc) may become completely unpopular tomorrow....while some other taste/preference that was considered to have fallen by the wayside 20 years ago,  suddenly makes a come-back and becomes all the rage again tomorrow . Popular tastes in entertainment....whether you are talking about games, movies, books, muisic, art, etc... are fickle and ever-shifting things...that tend to shift back and forth. That's really not so much what "Evolution" is about in the common (non-scientific) understanding.

There MAY be some things involving MMO's that ARE really "Evolutionary" in nature....but those are really more driven by the purely technical side of things..i.e. more sophisticated A.I., reduced latency, better graphics, etc.... which you aren't really addressing, what you seem to be mostly addressing would fit more aptly into what I would consider Fashion or Taste.

The mmo genre has not gotten any better since the early days, it's not evolving.  MMOs are only failing or going p2p because there's a lot more of them now, competing with each other.

MMO devs seem to be either incompetent or clueless.  Just look at what happened with SWTOR and details gleaned about ESO.  Basically games that NO ONE wanted to be made out of those franchises.  Seriously clueless.

Evolution is happening, but with no natural predators humanity is not bound to "Survival of the fittest" anymore.

I thought this was the Devil's Advocate section? Everything there sounded perfectly logical and correct, to me.

Also the whole M2 debacle, I found that hilarious. It's still a shame, but how the hell does that happen? How do you not have constant back-ups of an online world where information is constantly changing and evolving? That just boggles the mind. 

                       "An American monkey,after getting drunk on brandy, would never

              never touch it again. And this makes it wiser than most men."

                                                                             -Charles Darwin

Originally posted by GrumpyMel2

I'm all for "Darwinisim" in terms of the Free Market....it's what our system is based on...and companies that can't deliver a good product/service at a competitive price and make a proffit doing so, neccessarly need to make way for ones that can.

Nature has a way of balancing itself, however nothing manmade is natural, and hence does not "evolve" as it should. Ideally, good games would succeed while bad and overpriced games would fail. Unfortunately things dont work this way in a world where marketing muscle becomes more prevalent than the product itself.

The industry does not evolve or devolve. It is controled. Controled by the publishers with the most money. They determine what the developers make, and what consumers "want".

Originally posted by BigHatLogan

Originally posted by Kitane

Here's a unique idea. Make games that people actually want to play, and more importantly pay to play. Quit trying to know better than the gamers that play the games, and instead look at what they like, and *shock* give it to them . I know that's a hard concept for all you "mmo gaming experts" out there telling the development houses how they should "innovate" and "distinguish themselves from WoW", but .......

Also quit releasing games before they have enough finished.

 

Maybe, just maybe, all these "mmo gaming experts" are gamers.  And maybe they are right in telling companies to innovate.  Look at GW2, hype is off the scale because they made a game that people wanted, they innovated to the extreme instead of cloning WoW, and they took their time in development.  Now look at SWTOR, the devs decided that they would clone WoW and made a garbage game with no innovation.  And it is failing so hard that EA had to fire 1000 people. 

 

The problem with SWTOR isn't that they "cloned" WoW. It's that they didn't "clone" WoW enough. They partially cloned WoW. They offered the bare skeleton, and nothing more.

Evolution doesn't happen with radical changes happening overnight. Evolution happens slowly. What SWTOR needed to do was take what WoW did, and then add successful innovations to that already successful model.

THAT is evolution.

Instead, Bioware took what WoW did, but removed many of the things that WoW has done to keep it at the top of the food chain all this time.

That is in fact de-evolution, and de-evolution, or lack of evolution, is what kills off species more than anything else.

I absolutely hate it when people horribly mis-use the term "Darwinism."  Darwinism only refers to the selection process of animals and species.  The selection process of animals and species is too often compared to market economics.  The laws that guide these are different from those that guide natural selection.

Natural selection tells us that when there is too much of something that disease and starvation can kill off the species.  As well if there are TOO FEW of a species they can die off to predators.

This isn't how it works in economics.  In economics it is entirely based off of supply (how much of that quantity is there) and demand (how much people want it).  So having too many or too few of a genre only effects an "evolution" depending on the demand of it.

In first person shooters for example there is currently no need to "evolve" their concepts because the tried and tested Counter Strike and Modern Warfare 3 models are working fine.

The gaming world is not Darwinistic by any means.  The gaming world is paradigmatic.  Thomas Kuhn came up with paradigm theory because every single asshole stranger philosopher out there was trying to akin every single phenomon out there to evolution.

You saw social evolution which stated black people are inferior to white people, you saw economic evolution that saw the rise of the central bank ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE!), and you saw ideological evolution stating that how we think is based on a natural process of slowly changing how we think.

Thomas Kuhn came up with this brilliant idea that worked so much better than evolution.  His idea was so great that many people feel evolution might work like this (the introduction to X-Men was from Thomas Kuhn, not Darwin).

The idea is simple.  We exist in a current paradigm in which we have to work within a certain framework.  This means that in the existing paradigm you can only operate within the premises and set practices of the paradigm.  In science for example Dark Age scientists had to work within the premises set by Aristtotle because that was the paradigm.  However every now and then there is a paradigm shift.

A paradigm shift is a mold breaker.  It is when the old way of doing things is fully discovered and so utterly broken that a new paradigm is required to replace it.  After the new paradigm comes people look to discover the whole paradigm until it is broken again and a new one comes.

You can see this paradigm shift happen between something like Ultima Online which was the standard top down fighter to Everquest a third person perspective MMO.  You can see the shift again between Everquest and World of Warcraft that is a shift from an MMO being a game to an MMO being a social activity.

Please stop mis-using Darwinism.  Darwinism is not a tool to explain everything.  Darwinism is only a tool to explain evolution of species.

^Yeah some more economic terms would be more accurate eg maturing market etc. Red in tooth and claw is also a little misleading (not in the article hasten to add) as it's mainly intra-species competition which is the primary driver with ecosystem relationships coming behind that for eg. ;) such as rabbits competing most fiercely with rabbits then foxes are driving behind that.

Problem is risk -> high development costs -> expectation that players will settle down and have a home in any given mmorpg, when players are fickle animals at best.

It's a tough racket.

Some sort of mmorpg.The.Network for types of players to join/affiliate to ie to subdivide the genre and organize players according to groups where they'll pool their vested interests together for the type of mmorpg they are gunning for could be an interesting way for the market to change botton-up? Problem of players dropping off the internet suddenly never goes away but it might be a starter. Some sort of mmorpg.linkedin? "Manage your mmorpg.identity".

Originally posted by troublmaker

I absolutely hate it when people horribly mis-use the term "Darwinism."  Darwinism only refers to the selection process of animals and species.  The selection process of animals and species is too often compared to market economics.  The laws that guide these are different from those that guide natural selection.

Natural selection tells us that when there is too much of something that disease and starvation can kill off the species.  As well if there are TOO FEW of a species they can die off to predators.

This isn't how it works in economics.  In economics it is entirely based off of supply (how much of that quantity is there) and demand (how much people want it).  So having too many or too few of a genre only effects an "evolution" depending on the demand of it.

In first person shooters for example there is currently no need to "evolve" their concepts because the tried and tested Counter Strike and Modern Warfare 3 models are working fine.

The gaming world is not Darwinistic by any means.  The gaming world is paradigmatic.  Thomas Kuhn came up with paradigm theory because every single asshole stranger philosopher out there was trying to akin every single phenomon out there to evolution.

You saw social evolution which stated black people are inferior to white people, you saw economic evolution that saw the rise of the central bank ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE!), and you saw ideological evolution stating that how we think is based on a natural process of slowly changing how we think.

Thomas Kuhn came up with this brilliant idea that worked so much better than evolution.  His idea was so great that many people feel evolution might work like this (the introduction to X-Men was from Thomas Kuhn, not Darwin).

The idea is simple.  We exist in a current paradigm in which we have to work within a certain framework.  This means that in the existing paradigm you can only operate within the premises and set practices of the paradigm.  In science for example Dark Age scientists had to work within the premises set by Aristtotle because that was the paradigm.  However every now and then there is a paradigm shift.

A paradigm shift is a mold breaker.  It is when the old way of doing things is fully discovered and so utterly broken that a new paradigm is required to replace it.  After the new paradigm comes people look to discover the whole paradigm until it is broken again and a new one comes.

You can see this paradigm shift happen between something like Ultima Online which was the standard top down fighter to Everquest a third person perspective MMO.  You can see the shift again between Everquest and World of Warcraft that is a shift from an MMO being a game to an MMO being a social activity.

Please stop mis-using Darwinism.  Darwinism is not a tool to explain everything.  Darwinism is only a tool to explain evolution of species.

 

You wrote a very good post, and make some excellent points, however your use of the term refers strictly to the biological use of the term.

It has been bastardized if you will for quite some time and a quick internet search returned things such as Economic, Finanical Social, Universal, and Quantum Darwinism just to name a few.

You may not like what people have done to the original term, but like many words, there can be multiple meanings and this one is used rather broadly, even if it isn't quite accurate in how it's done.

The OP raised some good points, MMO's go through an evolutionary process where they either adapt (see EVE, WOW) and thrive or fail to adapt and wither away and die (see well, literally dozens of titles)

Just as in real evolution, there are far more failures and dead ends compared to the few yet very notable sucesses.

So the analogic comparison is not surprising, but again, perhaps not to your agreement or liking.