Originally posted by Gudrunix

First off, the community here is 0.1% of the MMORPG market, if that.  We are not at all representative.  I would say 90% of MMORPG players are World of Warcraft players, and I would not at all be surprised if as many as half of those have never played another MMORPG for more than a month.  Just look at the numbers - 10 million for WoW, but very few other MMORPGs have ever broken a million subscribers, even for just a month - most are lucky to have a 100k subscribers.  This is a one-game market, even if there is a small but vocal community who try out a lot of different games.

.....

Yes, new MMORPGs launch all the time.  And they fail all the time.  They get decent numbers by PC game standards - but abysmal numbers by WoW standards, and nowhere near enough to cover the massive costs.  That means we are working our way through a wave of big MMORPG releases, but after this, it's going to be tiny studio F2P releases, because the big studios will see MMORPGs as big, expensive mistakes to be avoided at all costs.  Mythic is all but out of the MMORPG business - how many more times will SOE get burned before they give up?

Your point on network effects is a good one - yes, they really only need to fill up one server to have an active game environment.  But the larger picture is the guild issue - many players are loyal to their guilds, and guilds compete with each other for both players and progression, so the issue is not just of filling up servers, but getting guilds to move over.  And the history so far has been that it has been very difficult to get the largest and most influential guilds to leave WoW.  The biggest moves by guilds in recent years have not been to competing MMORPGs - they have been to MOBAs, and specifically League of Legends.  That alone says something about the futility of trying to convince MMORPG players to switch over.

Your numbers are wildly wrong.  First, scroll up to the top of the page.  For me, it says "Members:1,606,678"  The number will probably be a little bigger by the time you see it.  That's more than 10% of the active WoW players by itself.

The number of subscribers to SWTOR alone is more than 10% that of WoW.  The number of players of Aion is probably at least 10% that of WoW, considering how popular the game is in South Korea.  Same with Lineage 2.  That's likely also true of Jade Dynasty, even if most of its players are in China.  Guild Wars doesn't give active player numbers, but 7 million and some odd boxes sold is a lot.  Besides, 100k players here, 200k players there, 50k at that other game, and so forth sure adds up when multiplied by dozens of games.  WoW probably doesn't even have a majority of the MMORPG market today, let alone 90% of it.

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If high entry costs are a problem, that won't lead to lots of new entrants that fail.  It will lead to few or no new entrants.  Lots of new entrants, most of which fail, are what you'd expect if high entry costs aren't a new problem.  For an example where high entry costs are a bigger issue, when was the most recent new car company that you can think of?

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Guild loyalty is part of switching costs, not some new networking scaling feature.

Originally posted by Isane

MMORPGs have a great future.....

Sadly what people are calling MMORPGs these days are not what they claim to be.....

An MMORPG needs:

• Gameplay - Combat/Politics/Tradeskills Varuiety. Not just killing NPCs or other players. Skill based leveling which means you have choices.
• Depth -
• longevity - 2 Years of gameplay at least
• Community - Only ebver form if it has time to

Well, may be that is what you THINK It needs. None of those are necessarily for a GOOD GAME.

- people like violence and combat in games. That is why there are so many combat-centric games. Politics & trade skill focus? May be one or two niche games.

- Depth? There are plenty of combat mechanics depth in MMOs. You need to read a whole book & use software to optimize DPS.

- hmm ... we are talking about games. A SP one last a few weeks at most. There is no inherent reason why MMO needs to last 2 years. So what if people play and move on. If they have fun while they are at it, there is no problem.

- Community is way over-rated. Diablo 3 is a fun game with a few friends and random groups. LFD/LFR are hugely popular. People can have fun without a "good community".

 

What it does not need:

 

• Auto Everything (The COmmunity klillers)
  • Auction Houses - Player run shops local to the city that hosts them is good enough and provides diversity in game for players who like to craft and game.
  • Mail Systems - Part of communication in game is travel and working with other players this is key to community , travel should be a joy in these wonderous worlds that are created.
  • Guilds -  Should be replaced with ingame political structures, where peopel can vi for power and influence but as part of the game not some iconic guild who has no interest in the game world.
  • No End Game

Most players won't accept the hassle of buying/selling without a AH. AH has become a standard MMO feature. Ditto for mail system and guilds. You force people to do all the extra work in a GAME and you will have very few players.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Gudrunix

I blah blah blah but it is a whole lot easier to pull gamers away from LoL than it is to pry eight-year veterans away from WoW.

Do you have an example of a developer that is trying to be or beat MTG, LoL or WoW? Your wall of text seems to be based on that being a pursued goal, but i haven't seen anything to support that being the case.

Sure.  Back at the height of MTG's popularity, virtually every board and card game company in existence was trying to beat them at their own game.  There were so many Magic competitors, you would be hard-pressed to put a comprehensive list together:  Call of Cthulhu, Illuminati, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on and on.  How many of those are still around?  The CCG market is down to pretty much two or three:  Magic, and Yu-gi-oh or Pokemon.  SJG and FFG kept several titles alive (Illuminati, Call of Cthulhu), but only by converting them to a fixed-card format.  So a whole lot of companies jumped into the CCG business, and only a few survived, with Magic's hold on the industry never being seriously challenged.

The situation is more or less the same with LoL.  League has several million players, while its competitors, despite a new one coming out seemingly every week, not picking up more than a few players here or there.  The casualty list currently includes Demigod and Heroes of Newerth, but I am sure that many upcoming competitors will soon join that list.  I will say that LoL's position is not absolutely certain, and that they could get surpassed by an especially strong competitor, but I think that is increasingly unlikely.

As for WoW:  not many game companies are going to come out and say that they are trying to compete with WoW and attract WoW players, but that has very obviously been the hope as one fantasy-themed WoW clone after another has come from the game studios.  I know enough about business to be confident that private meetings with potential investors involved slides showing how many "MMORPG gamers" - translation, WoW subscribers - there are out there, with the implication that if only some of them could be convinced to subscribe to the new game, they could make huge amounts of money.  What they didn't say is that it may be easier to convince a casual computer user to switch from Windows to Linux than it is to convince an eight-year WoW veteran to switch to anything else.

Look at MMOs that have been out more than five years, and you will find WoW, with I don't know how many servers full of players - more than a hundred? - and below them, a long list of games that have either been shut down or are down to a few thinly-populated servers.  That tells you everything about the industry you need to know.

Originally posted by maplestone

It sounds like you want something that shakes up the development ecosystem - a way for lots of small developers to contribute and compete over different minigames/components of a shared world.

Yes, I would like to see something that shakes up the ecosystem - modding is a good idea, but it doesn't have to be the only one.  Minecraft and Terraria should have been big hints as to how large a market there is for original game play, but game companies have not gotten the clue.

Look, I am, more or less, with the rest of the community here in seeing the promise of MMORPGs, and having some fond memories of having played them in the past, but being very discontent with the current offerings.  But I see the core problem being that developers, and investors, and gamers, seem to so often have the same mentality:  if only we could build a better MMORPG, we could get people to move over from WoW.

What I'm trying to say is that that's the wrong mentality.  It's just not going to happen.  Players will try other games for a month or so, but they have made such a huge investment into WoW, and so many of their friends are still there, that very few will permanently switch over.

Instead, game companies just need to move in a whole new direction.  What direction?  I don't know - but looking at what hasn't worked is a start, as would be looking at what some of the surprisingly successful (non-MMORPG) independent games have done.

Originally posted by Neanderthal

Originally posted by Gudrunix

factor in that players are going to be very reluctant to switch games

It was a nice post but I would say that this point has already been proven wrong repeatedly.

How many people rushed to buy SW:TOR?  How many tried Warhammer?  Star Trek online?  Age of Conan?  And so on.

People aren't reluctant to jump into new games.  In fact, I would say it's just the opposite, people are too eager to try new games.  So eager that they buy games even if they suspect they won't like them or maybe they let themselves get caught up in the hype or whatever. 

Anyway, the problem for new mmorpgs isn't that people refuse to switch games; it's that after people have switched to the new game the new game fails to hold them.  We could argue why if you want but there is no doubt that it's true.

OK, good point.  Yes, players are willing to try new games.  But ultimately, they don't stay; and I think the reasons I highlighted are part of that.

One way of thinking about it is to realize that the investment the player has made in World of Warcraft is always there, waiting for the player to return to it.  That means that, for a new game to pull a player away from WoW, it has to be better by such a huge margin that the player is willing to give up on all that progression, and to have to learn a new game from scratch, to leave behind their friends, etc.

So, players will flirt with a new game for a month, but they won't file divorce papers with WoW.  That's the reality, and that's what we've seen over and over - a rush of new players for a new game for a month or so, then they quietly go back home to Azeroth.  And that's going to keep happening, until players tire of MMORPGs altogether and look for something different - and what I am saying is that computer game companies should forget about trying to compete head-to-head with WoW and be looking for that something different, the place that gamers will end up when they have tired of MMORPGs altogether.

I think that actually LESS mmorpg's due to many devs shifting to MOBA's or CORPG like Vindictus or MMORTS / MMOFPS games could actually be GOOD for mmorpg's in LONG RUN.

Mmorpg market imho is oversaturated and investors 'best case scenarios' every is more or less secretly wishing for their game are too big.

I would far more prevent a 30-50 mln $ mmorpg that would cut costs on voice overs, cinematics and marketting and focus on gameplay and making massive virtual world experience than 60 mln $ up to 200-300 mln$ (Swtor)behemots mmorpg's we have today that try win massive WoW like crowds and doing games that are some bizzare design torn up between single player, co-op and mmo experience in result being no good at any.

MMORPG genre folding down +  going back to roots + reinventing actually could be good.

At least for me.

===========

Because mainstream mmorpg's are trying to pull off big WoW numbers & companies investing ridiculous amount of moneys into them - they want huge player numbers.

In order to that they make mmorpg experience extremly conveniant, easy, filled with automatic mechanics + cutting down on community systems & mechanics they LACK STAYING POWER.

Originally posted by Gudrunix

What I'm trying to say is that that's the wrong mentality.  It's just not going to happen.  Players will try other games for a month or so, but they have made such a huge investment into WoW, and so many of their friends are still there, that very few will permanently switch over.

It is really hard for me to approach an MMO with the old-fashioned attitude of "I'm looking for a place to set roots for the next decade".  I've been spooked by mutating business models.  I've become a little more distrustful of how companies view IP (it was actually Spore's one-sided "we own everything you make" EULA, not an actual MMO that changed my attitude here).  Older game worlds seem to be having a lot more trouble upgrading through new waves of technology than I expected.  And I've begun to look back a little more critically at how few footprints I've actually left in the worlds I've walked.

the RPG part looks bleak.  the mmo part is starting to come into it's own though.  with fps, action (whatever that means), and rts mmo's opening the genre to a whole new audience.

Originally posted by Neanderthal

Originally posted by Gudrunix

factor in that players are going to be very reluctant to switch games

It was a nice post but I would say that this point has already been proven wrong repeatedly.

How many people rushed to buy SW:TOR?  How many tried Warhammer?  Star Trek online?  Age of Conan?  And so on.

People aren't reluctant to jump into new games.  In fact, I would say it's just the opposite, people are too eager to try new games.  So eager that they buy games even if they suspect they won't like them or maybe they let themselves get caught up in the hype or whatever. 

Anyway, the problem for new mmorpgs isn't that people refuse to switch games; it's that after people have switched to the new game the new game fails to hold them.  We could argue why if you want but there is no doubt that it's true.

I think that most players are already sick of jumping to new games and see them fail but in so way WE are always looking to for the NEXT BIG THING(won't say WoW because I never played it). Games will keep coming and keep failed to be the WoW, but once players stop jumping to new games we will probably start seeing great games.

After SWTOR failed I swear to myself I wouldn't pre-orde anymore mmo but I just payed for TSW. I wonder when Will I change...we will change.

Originally posted by Gudrunix

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Gudrunix

I blah blah blah but it is a whole lot easier to pull gamers away from LoL than it is to pry eight-year veterans away from WoW.

Do you have an example of a developer that is trying to be or beat MTG, LoL or WoW? Your wall of text seems to be based on that being a pursued goal, but i haven't seen anything to support that being the case.

Sure.  Back at the height of MTG's popularity, virtually every board and card game company in existence was trying to beat them at their own game.  There were so many Magic competitors, you would be hard-pressed to put a comprehensive list together:  Call of Cthulhu, Illuminati, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on and on.  How many of those are still around?  The CCG market is down to pretty much two or three:  Magic, and Yu-gi-oh or Pokemon.  SJG and FFG kept several titles alive (Illuminati, Call of Cthulhu), but only by converting them to a fixed-card format.  So a whole lot of companies jumped into the CCG business, and only a few survived, with Magic's hold on the industry never being seriously challenged.

The situation is more or less the same with LoL.  League has several million players, while its competitors, despite a new one coming out seemingly every week, not picking up more than a few players here or there.  The casualty list currently includes Demigod and Heroes of Newerth, but I am sure that many upcoming competitors will soon join that list.  I will say that LoL's position is not absolutely certain, and that they could get surpassed by an especially strong competitor, but I think that is increasingly unlikely.

As for WoW:  not many game companies are going to come out and say that they are trying to compete with WoW and attract WoW players, but that has very obviously been the hope as one fantasy-themed WoW clone after another has come from the game studios.  I know enough about business to be confident that private meetings with potential investors involved slides showing how many "MMORPG gamers" - translation, WoW subscribers - there are out there, with the implication that if only some of them could be convinced to subscribe to the new game, they could make huge amounts of money.  What they didn't say is that it may be easier to convince a casual computer user to switch from Windows to Linux than it is to convince an eight-year WoW veteran to switch to anything else.

Look at MMOs that have been out more than five years, and you will find WoW, with I don't know how many servers full of players - more than a hundred? - and below them, a long list of games that have either been shut down or are down to a few thinly-populated servers.  That tells you everything about the industry you need to know.

That's not examples. It's your assumption that the TCG and MMO developers wanted to be the "[game] killer" of their genre.

I know enough about business to be confident that private meetings with potential investors involved slides showing how many "MMORPG gamers" - translation, WoW subscribers - there are out there, with the implication that if only some of them could be convinced to subscribe to the new game, they could make huge amounts of money.

I don't think anyone questioned that. Drawing from the largest existing pool is Marketing 101. I work with many of the people involved in the TCGs you mention and I work in the MMO industry. With the exception of possibly Trion, I can't think of another game developer that has set out to unseat the current rulling game in their genre.

If developers were setting out to beat the existing ruling game, I would agree that the future looks bleak, if for no other reason than it would mean their executive board members and marketing teams were all on crack. The games didn't fail because they set out to beat WoW - each one had plenty of other reasons for their closure. 

As for TCGs, they are like bars and clubs. They have a limited lifespan and the business plan is built around that. Get in, make your money, and start the next one before the existing one runs its course.

Look at MMOs that have been out more than five years, and you will find WoW, with I don't know how many servers full of players - more than a hundred? - and below them, a long list of games that have either been shut down or are down to a few thinly-populated servers.  That tells you everything about the industry you need to know.

It tells me some MMOs failed.  Still doesn't say that any of them tried to beat WOW.  You also leave out that there are plenty of successes, but i get the feeling that if it didn't beat WoW, you don't consider it a success.

Originally posted by Mexorilla

the RPG part looks bleak.  the mmo part is starting to come into it's own though.  with fps, action (whatever that means), and rts mmo's opening the genre to a whole new audience.

Sounds about right. MMOs are expanding beyond RPGs and the level-based class-restricted fantasy games that the platform has been flooded with to date.

Originally posted by Corthala

I think that most players are already sick of jumping to new games and see them fail but in so way WE are always looking to for the NEXT BIG THING(won't say WoW because I never played it). Games will keep coming and keep failed to be the WoW, but once players stop jumping to new games we will probably start seeing great games.

After SWTOR failed I swear to myself I wouldn't pre-orde anymore mmo but I just payed for TSW. I wonder when Will I change...we will change.

I agree but I also think that the new game designers needs to stop comparing everything they do make in the game to Wow and to stop trying to make the next Wow.

They need to focus on making a fun game that gives a new and interesting experience, we don´t want a new Wow with better graphics, the old Wow is still good enough if you want Wow.

I frankly wish there were a few teams that just played pen and paper RPGs and had never even seen a MMO that started from scratch and make new mechanics instead of just using the same one Meridian 59 created so long ago.

The copy-paste developing need to stop both for MMOs and other genres. It is the main reason so many players jump all the time, after a few days the new ame feels exactly like the old one and if I liked that I would still have played the old game.

Originally posted by Corthala

 

I think that most players are already sick of jumping to new games and see them fail but in so way WE are always looking to for the NEXT BIG THING(won't say WoW because I never played it). Games will keep coming and keep failed to be the WoW, but once players stop jumping to new games we will probably start seeing great games.

I don't see why players shouldn't or don't want to jump around. After all, you finish content in one game, it is natural to jump to another.

And games do not have to make WOW revenue to be successful. Rift, Aion, DC Univers, DDO, LOTRO .. all have an audience .. all are striving with content update and stuff. Obviously they can make enough money with people jumping around.

It is a fallacy to think that MMO players will only play one game forever.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Mexorilla

the RPG part looks bleak.  the mmo part is starting to come into it's own though.  with fps, action (whatever that means), and rts mmo's opening the genre to a whole new audience.

Sounds about right. MMOs are expanding beyond RPGs and the level-based class-restricted fantasy games that the platform has been flooded with to date.

Agreed, but the real problem is that those games are D&D clones. P&P RPGs are a wide varity, some are really strategic with rather advanced combat systems like Gemini, others are fast but strategic like Amber, some are close to boardgames like Warhammer fantasy RPG and many of them have stuff that are RTS like where you play lords and ladies who rule a realm or lead an army...

There were really 2 translations of P&P games into MMOs: Meridian 59 and Ultima online. All other MMORPGs build on one or both of those games and that is kinda sad but RPG is a rather complicated genre. And D&D is the first mechanics ever made but even Gygax admited that it was far from perfect.

I would love to see the P&P mechanics of Shadowrun getting tranlated into a MMO (the magic system is great), or Warhammer fantasy RPG. Neither of those games have levels and both are more advanced and fun than TSW.

Of course there is actually someone doing this: CCP is making a new translation of Vampires mechanics for WoDO and it will be interesting to see how it will go. :)

Shopping for a MMORPG will be like shopping for a pair of shoes. Just look at how many games are in the market now.

Originally posted by StoneRoses

Shopping for a MMORPG will be like shopping for a pair of shoes. Just look at how many games are in the market now.

Yeah, only problem is that all the shoestores only sell Adidas shoes and copys of them... and I want a pair of boots.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Corthala

 

I think that most players are already sick of jumping to new games and see them fail but in so way WE are always looking to for the NEXT BIG THING(won't say WoW because I never played it). Games will keep coming and keep failed to be the WoW, but once players stop jumping to new games we will probably start seeing great games.

I don't see why players shouldn't or don't want to jump around. After all, you finish content in one game, it is natural to jump to another.

And games do not have to make WOW revenue to be successful. Rift, Aion, DC Univers, DDO, LOTRO .. all have an audience .. all are striving with content update and stuff. Obviously they can make enough money with people jumping around.

It is a fallacy to think that MMO players will only play one game forever.

Forever probably not but to actually have a game hold interest for 5-6 years the way EQ and DAOC did for me would be nice. MMO's were about character progression, in whatever form that took, now theres nothing to progress since the generation Me gamers have showed up.

...And your analogy to the CCG industry is exactly the opposite of your argument. The CCG industry is actually a good example of why MMORPGs won't fail and have a pretty bright future.  

The CCG industry's biggest game is MTG.  But yet Pokemon and Yuigioh both still have very popular circuits.  These are the three high rated CCGs and aren't going anywhere. That doesn't mean that other CCG's have not been successful and thrived.  As a matter of fact, there are a dozen or so CCGs that have smaller, but active circuits.  And this is competing with MTG, which has existed for 20 years.  So even after 20 years of market dominance, where, by your logic, the CCG market should have failed, it is still thriving and companies see it as a lucrative enough market to bring out new products all the time.

Now, whereas right now, wow has the same number of players at MTG, it certainly is very different in terms of what it can present.  MTG has undergone several major changes.  You can say that, MTG has had 3 or 4 different major editions (reversing the stack, entirely new mechanics (not just tweaks), a complete rewrite of the history.    In video game terms, this qould be equivalent to several different sequels.   WOW is still on its first iteration, and would need to survive 3 or 4 iterations at MTG is. IN the game industry, that is just not going to happen. Graphics get more powerful, computers get better and games begin to look old and archaic.  With the addition of free to play, its far easier to get another bored friend to jump on ship to a modern game. 

Let's look at a longer running market than CCGS to see an example of how it is very easy to unseat "the megacompany".  Warmhammer was thought to be the endall and be all of miniature games.  But, a young upstart company, Privateer Press listened to what fans wanted and began making smaller scale miniature games to compete with Warhammer.  10 years later, we have a company who is on the same scale noteritety wise with Game Workshop.  Their ability to do someting "different" than what Warhammer was doing will help them get there.  

So yes, your synospis is correct in that, companies trying to make easy money will steer away from WOW, but, those who understand that if you present something new and different, will eventually take a large chunk or at least create an equal chunk of the same revenue. 

Originally posted by Jaylanonyous

I think the whole Competing and unseating World of Warcraft is a horrible thing to think about while making your game.

And it may possibly be one of the most popular Urban Myths that gamers regularly firmly believe in.

Winner in the same category?  "MMOs are dooooomed!"

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Mexorilla

the RPG part looks bleak.  the mmo part is starting to come into it's own though.  with fps, action (whatever that means), and rts mmo's opening the genre to a whole new audience.

Sounds about right. MMOs are expanding beyond RPGs and the level-based class-restricted fantasy games that the platform has been flooded with to date.

Agreed, but the real problem is that those games are D&D clones. P&P RPGs are a wide varity, some are really strategic with rather advanced combat systems like Gemini, others are fast but strategic like Amber, some are close to boardgames like Warhammer fantasy RPG and many of them have stuff that are RTS like where you play lords and ladies who rule a realm or lead an army...

There were really 2 translations of P&P games into MMOs: Meridian 59 and Ultima online. All other MMORPGs build on one or both of those games and that is kinda sad but RPG is a rather complicated genre. And D&D is the first mechanics ever made but even Gygax admited that it was far from perfect.

I would love to see the P&P mechanics of Shadowrun getting tranlated into a MMO (the magic system is great), or Warhammer fantasy RPG. Neither of those games have levels and both are more advanced and fun than TSW.

Of course there is actually someone doing this: CCP is making a new translation of Vampires mechanics for WoDO and it will be interesting to see how it will go. :)

And that's the biggest misconceptions from those who aren't familiar with pen and paper games.  MMOs, as is, are not DnD clones. They are as far from DnD clones as you can be. Ask any hardcore RPGer and ask them if their adventurers mirror those of an MMO and they will say the same thing NO.

Now, look at some good RPGs, and I can compare quests (ultima, old final fantasy series) to how dnd adventures go.   

MMOs are what DnD look like to people who don't realy play DnD. Oh, that guys a priest so he must heal, and that guys a fighter so he must fight...etc.  MMOs missed skills, made crafting an integral part of the game (15 years of DMing,  i've never had a player concentrate on crafting ) and summed up a complex system of checks and balances into the holy trinity.  

Now, if there ever is an MMO that feels like DnD, it would make billions.  Some games are on the right path, we just have to see where they go.  The first thing they'd have to do is eliminate all of the quests. In DnD players are uusally on one quest at a time and may have a bunch of side goals they can accomplish.  They'd have to figure out a way to add things like tracking, climbing, swimming, deducing, using knowledge skills.  Pretty much they'd have to demphasize combat.  In your typical dnd game combat is maybe a 1/3 of the game sessions.