Scott Jennings: 2009: That Horrible Year
Scott Jennings returns with his column this week to talk about the year that was, in 2009, and the trail of destruction that it left in its wake... at least where MMO development is concerned.
Column By Scott Jennings on December 23, 2009
Queen Elizabeth once memorably referred to a particular drama-filled year in her life as an “annus horribilis”, which shows that any phrase, even “horrible year”, sounds grave and fraught with meaning if you say it in Latin. And as far as game development in 2009 - well, it may well be time to bring out the dead languages, because last year was decisively an unpleasant year to be an MMO developer.
The Great Recession: When “Developers, Developers, Developers” turned into “Layoffs, Layoffs, Layoffs”
The hardest challenge facing MMO developers in 2009 was, umm, remaining an MMO developer. As the global economy imploded at the end of last year, the gaming industry showed that, contrary to the opinion of some clueless analysts, gaming is very much not immune to a recession. Just ask the folks at SOE. Or Turbine. Or Funcom. Or Mythic (twice). Or NCsoft. Or.. uh... me. Or... anyone at EA, as the gaming behemoth shed 1,500 workers (including the Mythic layoffs listed above).
;)
"We are pretty good at keeping people
focused on the deep depression."
- Bobby Kotick, CEO Activision Blizzard
Even at the larger, more successful companies such as Blizzard, job security wasn’t a sure thing. In fact, Activision Blizzard’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, literally bragged about how he was leveraging the current climate of insecurity to make his employees work harder out of stark fear. And he could get away with it, because, well, hey. Recession. 10% unemployment. What are you going to do, leave? Making things even worse, many of those lucky to be not technically unemployed were hired as ‘contractors’ (including, again, myself) with their employers avoiding having to give any benefits such as insurance, holiday pay, or, well, any assurance of stability whatsoever. (EA studios in particular switched many of their positions to contract labor in the past year.) You can talk about whatever challenges in design and production you like - if you’re not able to meet payroll or pay medical insurance? That tends to overwhelm any other issues.
The constant drumbeat of layoffs throughout 2009 changed the MMO industry. Before 2009, it was difficult to find qualified people for many positions on MMO teams, and experienced MMO developers were actively headhunted by competing companies, with some of the ruder recruiters literally calling you at your desk asking “Hi, want a new job?”. Those recruiters don’t call much any more (maybe they’re looking for work themselves). Instead, every job opening posted is instantly swamped with qualified (and overqualified) applicants. Many formerly vibrant cities (such as my own Austin, Texas) are seeing so many people leave the area for the few still functioning development hubs, such as Seattle and Montreal, that it’s hard to see any new studios forming easily there. Many game developers are leaving the industry entirely - even though the prospect of employment in the wider economy isn’t much better. The result: far fewer MMOs in development, and the few that make it out the gate take less risks. (Oh, and many of my friends are out of work, still.)
Facebook saves the gaming industry! Not.
2009 was the year everyone discovered that everyone else was playing Farmville. The usual suspects rushed out the door to proclaim that Facebook was the new gaming platform to end all gaming platforms. This was because the usual suspects didn’t actually play any Facebook games. Most of the games on Facebook, limited by what the platform can do, are overly simplistic, intentionally easy (aiming at the ‘mass market’ which some luminaries apparently believe are functionally incapable of playing anything more challenging than Bejeweled) and more often than not less “games” and more Trojan horses aimed at collecting demographic data and micro-transaction fees. This robber-baron attitude was personified by Zynga, the Facebook gaming behemoth responsible for Farmville and Mafia Wars (itself so much a clone of an earlier game that Zynga was sued for $10 million), whose modus operandi is to acquire games developed by others, make them as spammy as possible to irritate your friends and garner free “viral” advertising, and monetize the unholy hell out of them, by whatever unethical means are necessary. No, really, whatever it took. Just ask the CEO.
;)
Guess what's being farmed here!
Hint: it's not beets.
I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, [bleep], now. Like I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs*
And it worked! For Zynga, anyway, who’s now one of the largest online game providers in the world, with 60 million daily users for their various products. Too bad they left such a trail of destruction that Facebook finally introduced a “lite” version that, not coincidentally, removes all application-related spam from a user’s feed. Hey, Zynga’s already got their market share.
Ironically, although this will probably spell death for smaller game developers dependent on viral spam to get the word out on their titles, more experienced game development studios who have a clue on how to market games without blasting updates into everyone’s Facebook feed may have a leg up in the emerging post-Zynga Facebook market. And as someone who’s looked at the current offerings and cringed, there is certainly room for a Facebook-centric game with, oh, I don’t know, actual gameplay as opposed to endless multi-level marketing scams.
Free to play or Subscriptions? Oh hell, let’s just do both. No one will notice.
This trend didn’t start in 2009, but it was certainly embraced by anyone with a will or, seemingly, a pulse. As developers started casting about desperately for new revenue opportunities to try to stave off even more layoffs, increasingly, and irksomely, studios decided to hit up the people already paying them for more money.
;)
When Blizzard just said,
"Oh well, why not, they'll buy ANYTHING."
Sony Online at the start of the year introduced an item shop pushing micro-transactions into all their games - including venerable subscription-based games such as Everquest and Everquest 2. Blizzard continued a trend of picking off the stray nickel at the edges, adding more and more “value added” services such as race change surgery and finally, just adding their own pet mall. And in what may be the most egregious example of holding paying users upside down and shaking them until quarters came out, Champions Online started selling full skill “respecs” for $12.50, after insisting that adding them to the game was a bad idea.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m all for game developers making money. I mean, I’m a game developer, and I like money. But treating players -- paying customers -- as an endlessly renewable resource to be mined for candy is not only ethically suspicious, it’s counter-productive. Because in today’s economy the pocketbooks of your customers are as tight as yours are, the last thing they’re going to want to do is shell out $20 for a shiny +12 suit of Extra Special Value Chain Mail, and if you design your game so that +12 Value Chain Mail is necessary, your users will inform you that no, it’s not necessary because your game is not necessary.
At which point, you get to go back to the point about “layoffs, layoffs, layoffs”. Which really is the keystone for 2009, which, for MMO development, truly was a horrible year.
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Aside from this column, Scott is also currently contracting with NCsoft.
Every Wednesday he provides us an insider's look at the MMO industry.
What game companies need to be doing is finding out why people stop subscribing to their games and add content that will either bring back former subscribers or bring in new ones. trying to squeeze extra $$$ out of already paying customers is just plain greedy and needs to stop...and i don't care if it's only 'cosmetic' mt's either.
lets hope 2010 is the year the companies start to listen to their customers instead of lining their pockets.
Good article, i liked it. Just goes to show that corporations are greedy. There is no other word for them.
2009 was indeed a terrible year.. but we're lucky it's almost 2010 ^^
hey scott...you really oughta remove turbine from that list of devs forced to layoff due to the recession.
the reason being that those folks let go last year around the release of MoM were all long term temps hired specifically for the duration of the Mines of Moria expansion and for the most part were all QA related jobs.
so i for one would not categorize folks let go at the end of their contract as recession forced layoffs.
This isn't true. Turbine had opened a satellite studio in California which was believed to have been focused on console development. I had heard that the entire CA studio was shut down as part of those layoffs (although it looks like they've been staffing it back up a bit based on job postings, but more for associated LOTRO development then console work.)
In any event, uh, laying off QA still counts. Especially, you know, if you're in QA.
I honestly get tired of the " Its the Recession" waggle.... I stil have a hard time believing MMO gaming was hit at all. The only company I can really see people pointing to, to solidify the claim is EA/Mythic and I honestly think that was not a recession based layoff... that was EA cutting the fat from an Mmo they predicted would go nowhere ( much to my chagrin ).
Scott works in the industry, I simply feed that industry so I will bow to those who should know better.... but I am still skeptical.
I wouldn't be too sure about that.
If this holiday season fails in terms of game sales, we could see much more carnage in 2010.
I have many out-of-work friends, acquaintances, and former co-workers who were laid off from companies not named EA or Mythic who would beg to disagree.
I have many out-of-work friends, acquaintances, and former co-workers who were laid off from companies not named EA or Mythic who would beg to disagree.
It was a bad gaming season all around, not just in the Mmo field. Which I still think had nothing to do with the recession. Its been a year full of flops, and very few sucesses on every platform. Are the layoffs a direct result of the recession, which would imply consumers are not buying games like they did prior to... or is it that combined with a bad year of games being unleashed, bad press.. and then that the looming " Theres a Recession " scared the companies into cutting their numbers?
I'd like to see data on game sales across the platforms to support a " The Recession caused gaming developers to cut employes" if you understand what I mean.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10241545-235.html
Interesting read in regards to game sales in April
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10309560-235.html
Another read in August.
Generally people are questioning whether its a recession proof industry, the article lists a few key reasons why sales are down that don't begin with R and end with the dust bowl .
I see the " Its the Recession" as a clever scapegoat... alot of business's and people find it very easy to just jump on the wagon... but demonstrating with data the corelation they won't do. For the gaming industry it seems pretty open and shut :
1. Few large sucesses
2. Reduced prices on all systems, games, and accessories ( Remember the prices were all higher last year, so you may be selling the same amount.. but the sales figures will show a stark drop)
3. Few guaranteed hits being released. ( Madden and MW:2 being the exceptions )
Combine all that with a climate ( The Recession ) and it seems easy enough to see why people were laid off. Did the Recession directly cause the layoffs, or did they simply force the hands of the companies?
I'd go on .. but I am in danger of blaming the waggle of "Its a Recession" on everything... Panic does horrid things... if the media states we are in a Recession, get ready.. because if we arn't .. we will be soon.
Same thing was said in 2008, 2007, 2006....
I don't have high hopes for 2010 to be honest.
Yes. IIRC I read another article about this somewhere that said the slump in games sales started before the depression?
(It's late so I won't be hunting for it now - sorry)
As a consumer, my purchases have declined dramatically over the past decade - not because of the recession - but because I am not satisfied with what is on offer.
It's very difficult to argue that the gaming industry suffered record layoffs (and they did - EA's 1,500 alone is a huge, industry-shattering number in an industry of 50,000 people, and estimates are that the total carnage last year is around 8,000) in 2009, not because of economic conditions, but because all the games released in 2008 and 2009 were just really bad.
On the one hand, all the games released *weren't* really bad (EA for example released Dragon Age, which is one of the best CRPGs in recent memory). On the other hand, game releases haven't slowed in terms of sales (see: Modern Warfare 2's record-breaking release). And on the gripping hand, you essentially are arguing that not only were games in the past year so bad that they caused layoffs, but they were uniquely bad as opposed to years prior. Which just doesn't make sense.
Yes. IIRC I read another article about this somewhere that said the slump in games sales started before the depression?
(It's late so I won't be hunting for it now - sorry)
As a consumer, my purchases have declined dramatically over the past decade - not because of the recession - but because I am not satisfied with what is on offer.
I purchased twice as many games this year than I did in 08. /shrug
It should if you go back and re-read it.
Was a work in progress... should be easier to ascertain my points now.
Forgive my lack of acceptance of the typical " Its a Recession" excuse. I was laid off at the begining of the " Its a Recession" blame game. Was I laid off because of the Recession? No.. I was laid off because for the past year the company was hemoraging money due to poor decisions on the corporate level. Myself and several others had been blowing the whistle far prior to the layoff about our spending practices. That atleast is where I am coming from in the debate.
In my mind, games (MMO's in particular) still offer darn good value for money entertainment wise. While any job loses are regrettable, a lot seem related to the game industries own issues ("hit" driven) rather than the macro economy (although it's not entirely dodged obviously).
EA has been declining for some time and are using it as an excuse to clear shop, Mythic bet the bank on WAR and lost. The way Cryptic are playing about at the minute I don't think they would have survived without the cash injection from the rather sub par Champions Online. A lot of the big name games got pushed from this year to next, which has useful accounting mechanisms - This year sucks because of "the recession" next years is awesome because all the hits you pushed back hit then, hey investors look at our recovery!
Alas I don't have the figures to hand, but does the huge rise of iPhone gaming make any headway into the losses of the mainstream industry? Them be gold in them thar mountains for sure...
Shame Zynga ate all the facebook pie, that was looking like a good inroad for a while too.
Good point But lets face it, two games does not a castle make. The truth is more likely both the economy and quality are factors in a slumping industery. I myself feel the economy has had the harder impact on these companies with many titles being sub par in quality being another hit to stability.
Same thing was said in 2008, 2007, 2006....
I don't have high hopes for 2010 to be honest.
Indeed. I think there are still a lot of people working in the industry who simply don't deserve to be - judging by their results.
We could really simplify the debate and keep it only to Mmo's and their Dev teams.
Lets look at who saw layoffs : Funcom, Ea/Mythic, Turbine, Soe.
Despite Turbine, who laid off many after MoM was finished...Funcom and Mythyic/Ea rolled out MMO's who are continually declining in population. Soe is a touch diffrent, they have had several titles on life support for the past few years: Potbs, Vanguard, EQ, SWG. So was it the Recession that caused the lay offs, or was it the Companies decisions?
Seems pretty open and shut.
Very interesting article.
However I have to point out these companies could have avoided all this buy making a quility product. Lately a lot of companies just do so so. Then you player base leaves and your stuck in the red.
Turbine has not learned this leason yet. I know they had temp hires for MOM, but they also closed an entire office in ca devoted to a console game. The players paid the price. The entire year was the tune of fix this part of the release fix that part of the release, and we still have quality issues. Instead of getting 4 updates we got 2 updates and a ton of patches. Still no leason learned. With the new SOM about 60% of the o content is instanced, using the same fail model that DDO had before going F2P. I will not be giving turbine any more cash after that update.
Really if companies gave the their players quilty games that are fun they would not have this problem of having to lay off folks, it just became way to easy for them to stick it to the player and do the same old thing.
What players want is new and fun, a lot of games are not fun any more and these dev's and companies need to figure it out.
Part of the problem is a glut of MMO's now on the market both paid and F2P, so they think we will just do an ok job. I think a lot of things need to happen with a lot of these companies closing shop and getting their act together and comming out with something new and fun.
The only thing I can say is i feel for the guys let go, its not fun being unemployed having got the axe myself this past year.
Despite the grim tidings of the article, I enjoyed reading the content.
Although layoffs have happened and are still going on, I still have hope for the future. As someone who is interested in getting into the industry (even if I go indie), I have an eye on seeing where the job market is going. It seems that considering the way the companies are acting, we may see the rise of new, smaller developer companies made up of the very people that were laid off. I'm keen to see if this will be the case. Any thoughts on this, Lum?
I won't talk about Facebook... it makes me too sad right now.
In regards to subscriptions, I think it's a time of experimentation. With Eastern games being more F2P with item malls, and Western games having a more subscription-based model, they were bound to interact eventually. I think, over the next few years, we'll continue to see this chaotic scrambling of payment models (cut-throat, in some cases) before it either separates again or finds a satisfactory middle ground.
I happen to apperciate certain item shops. I like in EQ2 how I can buy a full bar of rested xp. In DDO, I love buying contract hirelings, and potions. The thing I don't like is how expensive it is(DDO has a fair price on some items others are laughable). I 've rarely bought the item shop enhancements, because of the ridiculous price. If it cost 15 dollars a month to play the game. I'm not going to buy too many 10 dollar potions that last for 2 hours(hello EQ XP potion that I never bought) . That is more than a movie, and it cost the devs nothing to get me this virtual item. If they slashed the prices in half they woud probably end up selling more.
Another point is when one is deciding to continue one's subscription they will take into account the item mall price. I did this for EQ and EQ2, and I unsubscribed. The price of the game(sub + expensive item mall), and the lack of people just wasn't worth it. IMO, DDO got it right. Most items are fairly cheap, and lots of people are playing.
Very good article, and I particularly like the last point made.
Games should stick to either P2P or F2P. Value added services and item malls are nothing but greed driven money grabs in a P2P game. The subscription is supposed to cover the cost of the game and it's services, not to serve as the entry fee into a game where you're bombarded by ingame advertising for game related 'services' or a long line of charging your credit card to advance.
No offense, but I really get the feeling that readers don't understand economics.
Gaming companies were/are affected by the recession primarily due to lack of credit and tightening of credit rules/interest rates. No credit from lenders = less cash to shell out for new projects and in some cases, not enough cash to make payrolls. I get it that most of that is invisible at the retail end where we buy and play their games, but it's all connected. So it's not hard to understand that companies are looking for ways to generate more cash flow because business is run off it.
Nice article. :)
Good point.. almost.
Your missing the fact that Gaming was/is considered Recession proof... so the impact of the tightening of credit applications is minimal, if anything banks would have placed more money in Devs hands based on the economic reports that its safe. Interest rates dropped.. so thats a non-factor. For every investor thats a Bank, theres an investor that has the capital on hand.
Although games with established subscription bases have an income to keep them afloat, new company startups (which would ordinarily be thick as flies thanks to all the talented people looking for work) have been almost completely shut down thanks to difficulty in getting funding.
You also have to look at the indies that have and/or ARE releasing.
Darkfall, Fallen Earth, MO, Global Agenda, Earthrise... and the list goes on.
What promising Indies have been shut down? I can't think of any..
If anything the SUCESS of Indie Devs this year demonstrates the safety of MMO's in this "Recession".
Might as well put 2010, 2011, 2012 and onward on your list because game designers lack creativity any longer and all they wish to do is give us the same old, same old, or poorly designed and implemented games. It's all about how fast and simple they can push a game to market and or how some indie company pushes out a crap game that they hype up with tons of promises of innovative game play that they cannot deliver on. Just look at games like DF, MO and FE. Crappy animations, crappy graphics, crappy game play, crappy MOB AI, crappy combat, crappy worlds. Though they tried, they failed miserably. Better luck next time.
We need game designers that love their game enough to make it truly epic. The old school designers of Asheron's Call, now they loved their game and it showed it. Same goes for Blizzard and how they did WoW and payed attention to details. old school DAoC with it's innovative RvR. What we need is designers like these that have focus and creativity to design a game that brings back the magic that these older games once had. What we're getting is garbage any more and I refuse to pay for it.
Ouch.
Does this mean indie developers will have to rely on working for free (or on a very low budget from smaller investors) to get their games created and published? How do you think this is going to affect the industry's future?
P.S.: I'm still VERY new to the developer's perspective, so please forgive the questions that may have very obvious answers. I'm still out doing research on my own time.
Indie Devs will always have to rely on a small budget. As I stated above.. the Indie Dev field was not hit like was stated... we have seen more Indie Sucesses this year than any other I've been around to see.
Ah, chalk another point up to my lack of information retention.
Thats no it at all, I won't pretend to be the end-all say on the topic. I just don't see the points adding up... its a typical " The Recession" scapegoat as I see it.
Indeed. I think there are still a lot of people working in the industry who simply don't deserve to be - judging by their results.
Agreed, but I don't necessarily blame the developers. It's mainly execs and marketing monkeys pulling the strings. And they've pulled pretty damn hard in 2009. The jury is still out as to whether or not they get away with all the crap they've pulled this year. And while we wait to see the verdict, the snake oil salesmen and women in the MMO industry will claim they're breaking new ground in the business, causing others to jump on board. Then the pendulum will swing. 2010 is going to be a doosy of a ***edit*** - up (borrowed from TUX), but I have high hopes for 2011 when publishers start to realize people are on to them, and that word of mouth/reputation is important (that's right I'm looking at YOU SOE).
I don't think there isanything the developers can do about unemployed customers.
I get what you're saying, but at least as far as I've seen this past year, being considered recession proof didn't mean it actually was. Kind of like nice theory and all but... no. Lenders stuck together and adjusted rules, rates and criteria to stay competitive. And if the gaming company is public, it was dealing with a very volatile and emo stock market that drives the share value down and adds to the challenge of finding a lender to back your line of credit.
Enough about economics.
I was more engaged in gaming in 2009 than ever before, so I don't see the year as "horrible" at all for games. I tried a few new games (and left most of them) and stayed with others just like every other year. I look forward to 2010's rollouts for their creativity and imagination but that's based in appreciating what I already have.
And even though I don't agree with Scott a lot of the time, I really like the way he writes. :D
I love his articles... and I enjoy the perspective he gives. Its just this one instance I have to voice my points of objection.
"Because in today’s economy the pocketbooks of your customers are as tight as yours are, the last thing they’re going to want to do is shell out $20 for a shiny +12 suit of Extra Special Value Chain Mail, and if you design your game so that +12 Value Chain Mail is necessary, your users will inform you that no, it’s not necessary because your game is not necessary."
If only these GOLDEN WORDS were hammered into every game developing company's entry!
From a gamer's perspective 2009 has not been so horrible, but at least full of mediocre stuff. And that Facebook thing. Isn't it fading already? I mean for a while I was active on it myself, but after half a year or so, I thought WTF am I doing here? And ever since I stopped my Facebook involvement at all. Quite a silly way to waste time IMO.
It was a horrible year for sub and big-studio MMOs you mean. Both indies and free-to-play games seem to have done fine. I haven't heard of any of the f2p ones close at all, and there are tons active and thriving. They are so successful that western developers are now emulating their approach.
I've noticed that a lot of industry people have tunnel vision and tend to define "MMO" as "Western-Developed big-budget game." If you look at the larger picture, the market isn't as bad as you think.
Great article!
My thoughts on this went a few different directions.
1) There will ALWAYS be a market for MMOs. The pricing is reasonable for the entertainment you are given, so if someone puts out a great MMO, it WILL succeed, even in the worst of markets. It will probably do better than most other forms of entertainment, because the dollar will stretch a lot furter (heck, even playing an hour a day on average is completely worth the price of admission on a great MMO). As others have said, what we need is a truly great MMO, something with a great plot, some amazing gameplay, and the respect for the playerbase to not mictrotransact the bejeebers out of it (that link to the CO respec REALLY got me hot...).
2) It makes me very sad that even the gaming industry isn't immune to the recession. I have a variety of skills and a lot of education, and I too thought I would be immune to the recession, but found out rather surprisingly that I am not. Still, I found that while nothing can change the reality of how things are, my attitude toward such challenges has a tremendous impact on how that reality affects me. For those who are struggling during these difficult times, reach out to others, share your story and reinvent yourself in meaningful ways. The world, and the US especially, admires innovation, so direct such energies inward, and it will bear fruit. I know for me, one big step was when I stopped playing MMOs as a form of escapism, and began playing them for fun and social interaction.
Here's wishing you all a happy holiday!
My favorite part of the article was actually the following caption, that you had next to a WoW race change ad/graphic:
When Blizzard just said,
"Oh well, why not, they'll buy ANYTHING."
The irony is, I'm starting to truly believe that this is the mindset of most of these companies today and therefore the real cause for the mess we are in and most likely the culprit behind these layoffs, as well.
These companies, ie Funcom and Mythic took us for a bunch of fools. Due to Blizzard's success, they had these huge dollar signs in their eyes with overconfident expectations and champagne and caviar dreams. All the while, trying to pass along unfinished products with misleading advertising, with their hands on our wallets and a snickering laugh.
Hopefully 2009 is the year where developers have learned that we are not the fools that some mistook us for and that we will not settle for half-finished garbage products wrapped in a golden bow of lies and deceit.
Don't count on it. Look at the number of fools that spent money on games like Aion and Champions. Guess what theose same people will be buying games like Mortal Online and Star Trek and later SW:ToR...and nothing will have changed. The game companies will continue to pump out garbage game after garbage game because they know that gamers right now are so looking for the next good game that they are willing to shell out money on anything they (the game publishers) put on the market and that is a shame. If the majority of games(like some of us) had the will power to just stop buying these games maybe then we can force some real change on this genre. Until then...they'll just keep putting out half-baked garbage.
Don't count on it. Look at the number of fools that spent money on games like Aion and Champions. Guess what theose same people will be buying games like Mortal Online and Star Trek and later SW:ToR...and nothing will have changed. The game companies will continue to pump out garbage game after garbage game because they know that gamers right now are so looking for the next good game that they are willing to shell out money on anything they (the game publishers) put on the market and that is a shame. If the majority of games(like some of us) had the will power to just stop buying these games maybe then we can force some real change on this genre. Until then...they'll just keep putting out half-baked garbage.
Not sure you can lump Aion in with those other titles. While someone could argue that Aion was a grind it was nowhere near as buggy and problematic as the majority of other games that have been released. I can only hope that the list of games coming out in the near future are released with as much polish as Aion.
While Aion may not be your cup-of-tea, I wouldn't go as far as calling it half-baked garbage.
With all the half baked mmo this year there no surprise some people lost their jobs,
Hopefully we will see an end to half ass games being released.
Hope all works out for those that lost their jobs
Nice article. Better summary of the trends of the year than most. And, I agree with others that say this was probably the THIRD bad year in a row for mmo's...which doesn't make '10 look promising.
I don't know that the whole "recession vs. bad games" debate can be completely solved now, as it usually takes years to truly assess that effects of major economic climate changes. I think there are a lot of good points here, and the data, both empirical and not, is pretty solid, so I think the discussion is nice. I just don't know that anyone will have a simple answer ("this caused the hardship in the market") right now.
But...because all the great posts here got me thinking, let me offer up one "compromise" possibility: What if the Recession AND "bad products" caused the retraction of the industry this year? Let's say that many (most?) mmo's run on investment dollars, both from individuals and publishers. A recession hits, and those individuals and companies have left themselves vulnerable (say because they were basically running on loans to cover payroll). They need to see a QUICK influx of cash from somewhere to keep THIER company afloat. What do they do? They push (force?) the mmo company they are funding into an early release in order to start recouping investment via sales/subscriptions. The investors hope that the influx of money, at least right away, will replace the no longer available loans.
The problem is...the game isn't ready for release. So, the devs rush out a bad game, it gets crushed by the public, and the sales don't happen. A "bad game" doesn't generate any income. Maybe that causes layoffs. Or, perhaps, a next step. Investors try to force the dev company to get them their promised returns. Does that lead the dev company to layoffs?
Overly simplistic example, I know...but just a thought about how both the economic changes, and bad products, could be combined into a "retraction" of the workers in the industry.
Again, great article, and great discussion.
Great read.
I do beleive games, mmo's in particular are immune to recessions however.
It was also nice to read about the facebook game scams, and the unethical practices it takes to make the kind of money off free games w/ microtrans that the usual suspects are going after. Though the games themselves are highly addictive and enjoyed by millions. (why the scams worked). Those little social minigames that were thrown out of the mmorpg genre years ago. A shame that potential playerbase is still ignored.
That is a good point, and a plausible one given all the half baked releases these last few years. It comes down, for me, to which came first... The Chicken or the Egg.
Perhaps it can be answered with a simple question :
If sales figures were up across the board, if subscriptions were up and being retained, would people have still been laid off because of the "recession"?
Be careful though, its a trick question.
I just want to say F2P games are doing great. IJJI.com had it's biggest year this winter, so many new games and updates. My head is still spinning.
I don't think there isanything the developers can do about unemployed customers.
i understand that they will have lost some customers due to the economic situation. but i just feel that if you sign up for a game thats subscription based, then thats all it should ever be...not subscription based and then a couple of years down the road throwing in item malls and mt's..it's just plain wrong in my book.
what ive always liked about subscription games is your an equal to every other player and how good you are is all down to skill, the time you put into it and hard work, rather than the f2p with item mall games where you basiclly pay to win/be the best, which basiclly shafts everyone but the very rich.
If times are tough, then they just need to tighten their belts like some companies have done with job cuts (although i'd rather this was a last resort), have more time limited promotions like discounted subscriptions for new players, have a free access week for old subbies and things like that, which will get more people playing/coming back. when times get tough people tend to look for value for money more, which is what game companies should be looking at providing a lot more during tough economic times.
Anyway, lets see how next year fares, at the end of the day it's profits that decide how successful subs+mt's are and if they just don't work then i can see em vanishing pretty quickly (crosses fingers).
This isn't true. Turbine had opened a satellite studio in California which was believed to have been focused on console development. I had heard that the entire CA studio was shut down as part of those layoffs (although it looks like they've been staffing it back up a bit based on job postings, but more for associated LOTRO development then console work.)
In any event, uh, laying off QA still counts. Especially, you know, if you're in QA.
And also, laying off QA counts if you play the game. 'Cause QA is the only thing keeping any software (or any product, really) from sucking.
I feel as much sympathy for an unemployed MMO industry worker as I do any other, but that's also a sign of how badly the industry was overemployed. Just as the general IT industry was way overemployed in the dot-bomb era, so it was in 2009 with the MMO industry. It's very sad that technical schools just churn out as many people as they can get tuition from regardless of the need for their skills in the real world.
Don't count on it. Look at the number of fools that spent money on games like Aion and Champions. Guess what theose same people will be buying games like Mortal Online and Star Trek and later SW:ToR...and nothing will have changed. The game companies will continue to pump out garbage game after garbage game because they know that gamers right now are so looking for the next good game that they are willing to shell out money on anything they (the game publishers) put on the market and that is a shame. If the majority of games(like some of us) had the will power to just stop buying these games maybe then we can force some real change on this genre. Until then...they'll just keep putting out half-baked garbage.
You can't blame us players though, if that's all that is out there for MMOs, what else are you going to play with your friends?
And unfortunately, anyone that isn't a customer has no power to effect any change. The decision-makers do not listen to "the person on the street", they listen to the person with the customer survey results. Scott Jennings also had an article here a week ago that mentioned this very issue - game companies do not listen to non-customers and therefore really don't know what to do to get new ones.
It was a bad gaming season all around, not just in the Mmo field. Which I still think had nothing to do with the recession. Its been a year full of flops, and very few sucesses on every platform. Are the layoffs a direct result of the recession, which would imply consumers are not buying games like they did prior to... or is it that combined with a bad year of games being unleashed, bad press.. and then that the looming " Theres a Recession " scared the companies into cutting their numbers?
I'd like to see data on game sales across the platforms to support a " The Recession caused gaming developers to cut employes" if you understand what I mean.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10241545-235.html
Interesting read in regards to game sales in April
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10309560-235.html
Another read in August.
Generally people are questioning whether its a recession proof industry, the article lists a few key reasons why sales are down that don't begin with R and end with the dust bowl .
I see the " Its the Recession" as a clever scapegoat... alot of business's and people find it very easy to just jump on the wagon... but demonstrating with data the corelation they won't do. For the gaming industry it seems pretty open and shut :
1. Few large sucesses
2. Reduced prices on all systems, games, and accessories ( Remember the prices were all higher last year, so you may be selling the same amount.. but the sales figures will show a stark drop)
3. Few guaranteed hits being released. ( Madden and MW:2 being the exceptions )
Combine all that with a climate ( The Recession ) and it seems easy enough to see why people were laid off. Did the Recession directly cause the layoffs, or did they simply force the hands of the companies?
I'd go on .. but I am in danger of blaming the waggle of "Its a Recession" on everything... Panic does horrid things... if the media states we are in a Recession, get ready.. because if we arn't .. we will be soon.
I just finished a contract in a totally recession-proof company (electricity industry). They did not lose money at all because of the downturn. They literally can't. But people lost their jobs regardless, because management had to be seen to be "doing something about the recession" by chopping budgets and pushing necessary, time- and money-saving projects back.
No managers lost their jobs of course, just employees. The one I knew personally that lost her job was an awesome worker, respected and liked at the senior manager level, and was easily head and shoulders above the "more experienced" (longer tenure) members of her department. But her projects were taken away by the senior people when theirs were pushed back or cancelled, so she had to exit the company.
However, like all awesome people, after a short time of regrouping, she now has a better job, is kicking butt at it, and has just referred me to them as well :D
Great article!
Jennings is the best writer on MMORPG.com :)
lol, that's why I lost my job. Even though our sales shrunk by 10% our future pipeline was solid and the general health of the company was very good.
So most of our office got laid off.
good times.
Not much to crow about in this industry this year. I have found nothing worth subscribing to. Next year does not look much better at present.
I think the industry, at least the MMO part of it is undergoing a realignment. The me too designs released with half finished games has made many of us highly suspectful of any new releases. Next year we are looking at another half finished game releasing in STO. Don't these developers ever learn?
I just wish someone would put the fun back into MMO's.
The state of the economy makes the near future pretty dismal for gaming, as well. In the next 1-2 years the short cycle of browser development will mean major companies (SOE) will be putting out applications for this format. Much less risky to capitalize on a current trend than to put out something that tries to break the mold.
Microtransactions, cash services, etc. will be used to increase margin. Lots of projects will dry up. It's not going to be pretty.
Well i can only speak for myself.
most years i spend 1000$ a year in the PC industry. Games hardware, sub... etc..
this year iv spent arround 400$ on PC gaming in all.
Iv never bought or spent money on consul.
Well this year for the first time iv spent 1000$ with Nintendo.
Iv said this beffor in my post on this web site.
I feel like the PC is one big train reck. nothing is compatible, games crash over and over again. etc.....
They need to wake up!
Well in all it was a good year for me in the end I lost 60 pounds and i feel great.
I support company's that innovate.
While I may agree that the economy was a contributing factor, I have to think quality has as much, if not more, to do with companies not seeing the figures they want to see.
This year was especially rife with big name, big hype games that offered little for players to stick around after their initial 30 days. The quality was not there. The genre is maturing and so are the players, but the development houses on the whole seem to be regressing. The keep on regurgitating the same crap in different IP wrappers with nothing innovative to speak of. The result is players who have many choices that will not stick around for your game if it stinks or is the same as the game they left. WAR, AoC, CO, Alganon are all examples of this in action.
Like many others here, I usually spend quite a bit on this genre in any given year but the last few years I Have not spent anything close to what I have in the past because quite frankly, not much has piqued my interest.
This. But they don't have to have creativity anymore as they aren't designing MMO's as deep worlds rich in lore and in things players can do (and do, 50 different ways to PvE combat or PvP combat is NOT the answer). They are making shallow arcade-like games.
Somewhere along the line the Quake and Halo folks seemed to have taken over and the table-top dungeon Masters have been kicked out. Maybe it was due to all the whining about "combat is boring" on various forums that allowed this regime change but one thing is for sure:
Combat isn't king.
There's a serious need to get back to world building in an early TSR, Margaret Weis/Tracy Hickman storytelling, D&D yesteryear way than this modern wave of so-called world builders who don't seem to as the questions "why" and "how" when putting things into a world.
I can believe there have been job losses due to recession, but at the same time I have to say, as a customer, that the games coming out these days are not very good. There is no originality, no support after the sale, and in the case of MMOs, the developers really have no clue path before a release and are easily swayed into making bad game-breaking decisions.
Take Champions Online for example. That game is pretty good as far as mechanics of combat, but its boring as hell. Its like playing a single player game because the way the game was designed doesn't support a community very well. People sign on in droves, hoping for the next best thing and suddenly everyone is suprised when the subscriptions fall off drastically after a month. The same day that game was released they decided to make sweeping changes because the game was too easy? Huh?
Same goes for Warhammer Online, which I know wasn't released this year, but has suffered a seriously decline of players. Now the game is free for everyone level 10 and below and they ripped apart tier 1 to do it. I could go on and on about the engine and other complaints I have with the game, but whats the point? I'm not here to complain about Warhammer Online.
There really isn't much in quality MMOs to choose from these days. WoW has been out forever and is really just an endless grind. Sure its fun, but after so many years people are looking for something different. Game designers and publishers need to stop complaining about the economy and start getting innovative again. I do feel bad that some of you lost your jobs due to the economy, but seriously, some of you lost your job because you are not making good games. You have lost the vision of gaming and its more about the almighty dollar (like everything else in this country) than providing a lasting and unique gaming experience.
Take RTS games for example. When is enough going to be enough? Where is the innovation in this category? Nearly all of them are copies of StarCraft, Warcraft or Command and Conquer with different graphics.
Games have been seriously dumbed down for the console market. Now, instead of PC games being released for the PC first, we have to deal with games designed to work on a console and ported to our precious PCs. You know what? I'm not going to buy a game like that. Game publishers - I will move on to something else. Bring me Ultima. Bring me Fallout 1 and 2. How about Wing Commander? Civilization? Master of Magic? Master of Orion? The list goes on and on, as the quality of our PC games goes down and the graphics go up.
FPS games.. How long will you idiots release games without co-op? Surely you don't think we can sit around shooting eachother forever? What do you think made Doom so popular? It wasn't the deathmatch. It was good for a laugh, but it got old. Playing Doom with my family wondering when that imp would jump out, now that was fun.
Listen to your customers - make innovative games and put in features we ask for. Then you might have more jobs because your games will sell. Or you could make another failed wow-clone because you listened to some suit who doesn't know jack about gaming.
I'd like to work for Blizzard right now. $200 million a month from subscriptions alone? Yes please.
I think both arguments are right. Because in a recessed economy consumers will take into account how important their dollars are more-so than when the economy is doing good. When people shop for things they are more tentative to what they are buying and why. And the quality over quantity stands out...
So people looking for a game will sit back and read reviews and check out demos more-so now and decide weather or not to buy a game. I've noticed myself and other coworkers doing so as well. So unless it's doing great with reviews most people are not impulse buying games as much now as they may have did in the past. Because I know I used to just buy a decently cheap game just because i was bored and didn't have anything else to play and was waiting for the next big thing from bioware or something like that. but now i'd rather download one of the many f2p mmos out there and kill time or replay something i've already played or download extra content for my already great games than get a new random game to check out.
Or maybe people are just getting fed up with all the sub-par games that have been released in recent past and it has stained the gaming industry as a whole. hard to say...
But I think you are both right, poor game developing and poor economy have played a role to some degree or another...
While the big guys feel the pain and lay off their workers, AV (Darkfall's company) is growing and has moved twice to bigger offices.
Looks like the little guy won (ganked) 2009.
2009 was always going to be the crap year for MMO's. For memory the 'biggest' releases set for this year (back in 08) where Darkfall and Champions online. Already its a poor start. Couple that with all the other crap that has happened and you have easily the worst year for MMO's in the last 10 years.
That being said 2010 will be better...mostly because nothing could be as bad as this year.
The way you've worded that statement it comes off as EA was the developer of Dragon Age.
It wasn't. Bioware was; who while owned by EA did not undergo ANY layoffs. And that's not even to mention that Dragon Age has been almost 6 years in the making, and of those 6 only 2 were under EA rule. While the EA stench can be felt on Dragon Age's marketing (blood galore), it's move to consoles (DA was explicity going to be PC title ONLY), and even it's DLC distribution, the actual core of the game is entirely EA-taint free. It's pure Baldur's Gate Bioware. Dragon Age is a Bioware game. To call it anything else is disingenuous.
So I can see the point you're making (faking), "Dragon Age sold well but EA still had massive layoffs" but the spin-free edition of what you're trying to say is "Dragon Age sold well and Bioware had no layoffs, not only that but Mythic was essentially folded under the umbrella of Bioware leadership." So in essence Bioware has grown as a company during this recession and thrived.
As you may have realized at this point, the spin-free edition of your point does not favor your argument, it in fact favors your opponent who said Devs who released quality games didn't get hit by the recession (ie, Bioware).
Now, does that mean I personally buy into the argument. Not so much, not that I really care though.
Still, I get annoyed when people fubar the details to try and win an argument.
The simple fact that you'd actually have the gall to clump Bioware in with the likes of Mythic, Funcom, Cryptic, etc, shows how out of touch with reality your viewpoint is and why it should be summarily dismissed as inane rambling.
It should if you go back and re-read it.
Was a work in progress... should be easier to ascertain my points now.
Forgive my lack of acceptance of the typical " Its a Recession" excuse. I was laid off at the begining of the " Its a Recession" blame game. Was I laid off because of the Recession? No.. I was laid off because for the past year the company was hemoraging money due to poor decisions on the corporate level. Myself and several others had been blowing the whistle far prior to the layoff about our spending practices. That atleast is where I am coming from in the debate.
So you're dismissing the economy outright because the reason yourself and others you know were laid off in your particular case had nothing to do with it? You believe that your example disproves every other case, or at least casts it in serious doubt? Really? Wow.
Take a look around. The recession has been affecting *everyone*, everywhere. My last job laid off at least 10 people (in a company that only had around 40 to begin with) because business had slowed. Business had slowed because the businesses they provide a service to stopped spending money, because the economy hit them as well. It's a ripple effect.
Are the lay-offs at companies like EA/Mythic at least partially to do with poor performance of a MMO like WAR? Sure, I can believe that... at least in part. But I also think that to believe the economy isn't to blame for many lay-offs these days, because your personal experience didn't play out that way, is incredibly myopic.
Just wanted to say congrats and to keep up the great work!
I was a personal trainer for almost 7 years, so I know how hard that can be for most people. That is a great accomplishment and you should feel proud.
2010 isn't going to be much better, very few interesting titles, and expect many push backs, we will all be waiting for 2011 very soon
It's not the recession's fault that all these companies put out sucky MMOs. Even broke people need something to do for entertainment, and $15 a month for a MMO is cheaper than a couple movies or a few drinks at the local pub.
2009 wasn't all that bad, I got a 65" Sony Bravia TV and a PS3 and saved $1100, BOOM. My PS3 that I paid $600 for wouldn't start up one morning. Go figure, if you play something ~20 hours a day it will break after a couple years hehe.
Yeah it wasn't too great for MMOs though. I used to work for Blizzard, keywords "used to". I didn't see it announced anywhere, but alot of thier GMs that are hired by 3rd party companies got "fired" (yay contract workers). Consoles though seem to be doing ok this year, I got picked up doing pretty much the same job, just for Xbox 360s.
I'm from Austin too, and it did seem for awhile that I would never get another job in the gaming industry. Thanks to my mom though (she saw an ad in the paper), I got a job just in time to make enough money for christmas :)
No doubt your 'enlightened' viewpoint is based on all the successful MMORPG's Bioware has created.
Oh wait.... never mind, they haven't yet.
its pretty simple only a handful mmos are not worth the 15 dollars a month standard sub to the average mmo player where they may be worth 5-10 or the freemium model . its the dogmatic approach on the behalf of a lot of developers which is the problem and the idiots that ll problerby respond to this post saying i m happy to pay 15 dollars a month rather than another subscription model . well all i can say to them of course you are most likly your playing one of the handful of games that are worth it . and not the likes of warhammer , vanguard , everquest 2 , age of conan the list goes on and on . the game that appears to have got it right is dungeons and drgaons online offering both freemium and subscription options . thats the way to go for 95 percent of mmos in my opinion or if your game is older and unable to to attract the numbers of subs in once had . drop the price . if you offer the game at a third less and attract 50 percent more players ( for example) then your increasing your revenue .
its pretty obvious which way mmos will go because like any market competition will eventually lead to price wars in sub fees . its only the most dogmatic fanbois who does nt have an idea what the real world is like would suggest the current status quo of 15 dollars a month standard subscription fee for all mmos is sustainable or even an attractive prospect .
talk about turkeys voting for christmas
i would rather the option of paying less or not at all unless i got into a game enough to want to buy moduals or expansions and be able to play several mmos a month on the side of one of the games that are worth a 15 dollar fee like eve , warcraft or lord of the rings .
Subscription cost is not the problem with the majority of games on the market. They simply are not worth investing time into. Gameplay doesn't get better when the price is dropped from $15 to $5.
Overall I get the basic of what you are trying to say, but it doesn't really factor in the real currency most people value, their play time.
I disagree that 2009 was a bad year for the role-playing genre. Borderlands was a great change of pace and Dragon Age was one of the best roleplaying games I've played in years. Meanwhile, I was disappointed with my experiences playing WAR, AOC, and Champions Online.
I also wanted to add that except for a few developers, a lot of MMOG companies don't get "it." We're in a recession - which means that only is money in short supply but also time. If you're working, you're probably pulling a lot of extra hours to keep your job. If you're unemployed or in school, you still need to spend a lot more time studying or looking for work in order to get anywhere. The PC Gamer review of Aion hit it on the head - the end game is great, but you need to spend dozens of hours getting there. Nobody has the time to just grind out boring content anymore for the dangling carrot. So far, only WOW and to some extent LOTRO with the new expansion have done a good job of creating fun, "bite-sized" content that you don't need 4-5 hours a night to complete.
I also agree that Scott's name and cartoony avatar remind me alot of the late Waylon Jennings....
..wait, guess i'm offtopic here.
Have to say it...IMO, this has been the best discussion thread I've seen on this site in a while. Just a great read, from start to finish, so far.
I hope that in 2010, this site can have a lot more discussion like this. *fingers crossed*
While Borderlands and Dragon Age are great games, neither of them is an MMO, which is what we're discussing. And yes, its been a horrible year for MMOs, gotta agreee with the article and many of the posts. 2009 (and late 2008 in respect to WAR) has been a horrible year as far as MMO developers bringing anything truly unique and new to the table, even after promising repeatedly to deliver it. Its just been nothing but the same old stale gameplay with a new skin (and in some cases even worse graphics) weve had for several years already and lots of unfinished/unpolished, buggy, no content garbage that many of us wouldnt have even bothered with if it were F2P, but unfortunately got screwed out of paying full price & sub fees for games that a couple years ago wouldnt have even been passed as being in Beta stage yet.
Not sure you can lump Aion in with those other titles. While someone could argue that Aion was a grind it was nowhere near as buggy and problematic as the majority of other games that have been released. I can only hope that the list of games coming out in the near future are released with as much polish as Aion.
While Aion may not be your cup-of-tea, I wouldn't go as far as calling it half-baked garbage.
There isn't any end game to speak of, and even though ncsoft claimed to spend 6 months on westernizing the game, the only difference between the west and east is that western players don't have access to cash shop services (coming soon in feburary!) and you can't afk (even on the login screen) for more than 30 minutes. The 1.0 content that was "beta" tested for 3 months is fine but after that you find quests that lack dialog or can't be accessed at all unless you change your language from english to something else. Go read the main story line then read it in korean. It wasn't custom tailored, it was translated word for word...
Gaming is ressesion proof, and people will buy anything at least once. It's entertainment, cheap entertainment, and unless you are living in a cardboard box with no computer, you can scrape together that 10-15 dollars a month to have an unlimited source of packaged fun. Mmo players are essentially addicts and no matter how bad the economy is, a junkie WILL get his fix one way or another.
The thing is, people are still logging in but not necesarily into the same game. Consumers may all be gulliable fools but they are not brain dead retarded. They will only listen to lies of "soon" for only a set period of time. What I've been seeing happening are people continously moving on to the next best thing or laying low in the laughable "free" to play game subgenre. Aion is doing fine now but it's going to lose a bunch of it's user base when the next best thing comes out. Aion is pretty with one of the most complex character creation tools available but there is absolutely nothing to do once you hit level 50... which is really messed up when you consider the entire game is balanced around level 50.
I really don't believe in the bad game scenario. People will play anything if the company gives it enough support. Players are people, a lot of them are sterotyped as sad and lonely people but people nontheless and if they feel they are being listened to and taken care of they will continue to pay their subscriptions or buy from the item mall or both! Just look at uo. It's a "bad" buggy and old game by 2009 standards (say, when you compare it to aion) but people still play it after 10 years. Even if a minimal amount of effort is made, one can be rewarded with a huge amount of customer loyalty.
The number one problem isn't the economy, it isn't even the players, it's the those CEOS sitting in their ivory towers thinking that they all can have the 12million+ customers blizzard had 5 years ago, and if they can't have them... by god they will still get paid like they did. Because they have all the cohesive synergy and wear powerties. How do they make this fantasy a reality? They cut support and staff and pocket the difference.
Wow's success will never happen again. Wow brought in a bunch of people to the mmo scene and they have all dispersed over different subgenres over time. Wow was their first taste of mmos and they sorta liked it... but now they have matured and grown to like their own personal flavors. These people will never again unite under a single subscription and companies need to stop running theirs games into the ground, neglecting the current subscriber base while they clamor to eat up everyone else. Taking care of the "newbies" is a good thing, you want that first experience to be a good one so they stick around but so many companies do so at the direct expense of the older player base.
While pretending you are in a consensual s&m relationship with your customers sorta kinda worked in wow it isn't going to work in your game. This should be posted in every development studio: You aren't blizzard, you aren't bringing in a couple million naive first time mmoers and they are not going to put up with this nonsense when 10 other titles are promising to treat them better. At the end of the day, it just leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth and they never look back when they jump ship to the next best thing that promises them the moon. So you lose subs and someone writes an article about how shit your game is while downloading the next, then some big wig reads it and uses it as an excuse to lay off people he was planning to lay off anyway to make the quarterly reports look good and the cycle begins itself anew.
Best article by scott so far.
Its hard to argue that 2009 wasn't a bad year for MMOs. What is becoming more and more aparent is that its not about the games or the gamers (if ever it was) - its just about the buisness and the money. And that means...you get the buisness and the money any way possible. Thats on its own is not good for gaming.
I think that MMOs are gonna be hit even harder in 2010 than they were in 2009. Its not only the resession that is hiting hard atm (Quality bandwith on peak times is expensive ) but also I feel that both developers and publishers are realising that making a MMO that will be played by millions of ppl - is not as easy as they thought it would be.
But... when it comes down to it... The reason why most of the 2008-2009 MMOs are not played by millions... is because they were not created for the gamers at all...
Unlike many others - I feel that the resession will do alot of good things for gaming. Games don't have to be 50GBs and with DX 2000 graphix to be enjoyable. Its maybe time for many of the developers and the publishers to create QUALITY GAMES - instead of software that is sold as Pre-order and then fixed up a bit to make it playable over the next 2 years. Its time that we see a game that is DEVELOPED online as free to play with STRONG quality gameplay that is then developed futher for a charge (any form).
And lastly - I really think that the sadest part about 2009 is BLizzard adding item malls into WOW. Its for me a disgrace to see a company that was build on games for the gamers - go full circle and now start item mall for the BUISNESS - instead of offering it as part of their normal subscription fee.
Shame on you BLizzard.
Again - good article Scott.
One thing I would to add here tho.
Not every MMO company got hit with layoffs. CCP (Eve online) is adding some 200-300 new staff to future programs - both existing and new games. Eve online is also the game that would be voted by many to be the most "diffrent" MMO game of them all - showing that a good game with a good strong core systems that you build upon - will be played and subed for.
But at the same time other companies (Funcom with AOC and Mythic with WAR) have been changing pretty much every system of their game back and forth for month after month cause quite frankly....cause those games had no real strong true vision when it came down to it. It was buisness... Pre-orders... money... And core systems, good gameplay and features were not in high priority compared to the PR squads and the pre-order campaigns put in place to make THE BUISNESS some MONEY.
Blizzard didn't add an item mall. Learn your facts.
I say GOOD!
Cut the fat of the industry. The current crop of talent has shown that they pretty much fail at knowing what we want in an MMORPG. I think the future looks bright, after this culling period is over.
Subscription cost is not the problem with the majority of games on the market. They simply are not worth investing time into. Gameplay doesn't get better when the price is dropped from $15 to $5.
Overall I get the basic of what you are trying to say, but it doesn't really factor in the real currency most people value, their play time.
total rubbish . i guess thats why t1 is busy in warhammer online now its free and ddo is a revived game . i agree some mmos arnt worth investing time in them but that certainly does nt apply to the vast majority of less popular mmos . i would certainly maintain a sub to the likes of warhammer and age of conan at 5 dollars a month and i dont think i d be alone in that . i quite like elements of both those games as i do other mmos like city of heroes and everquest but not at the price they ask .
you just wait and see , when price drops and freemium models become a reality how much it ll boost some flagging games . its inevitable now . a couple of years ago i argued that ddo should try some sort of free to play model . i had loads of smart comments from people could nt see the wisdom of changing the buisness model . i was proven right about that and i ll be proven right about this .
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of World of Warcraft trampling your 'enlightened' viewpoint.
me thinks you mixing up BLIZZARD(makers of WoW) with BIOWARE(makers of SW:ToR-their first entry into the MMO market)
No. I'm well aware that Blizzard is not Bioware. My point was that the haters came out in full force BEFORE World of Warcraft's launch saying Blizzard may have made a bevy of exceptional games but they had never made an MMO. These people used that as a justification for predicting WoW's doom before the game even launched, or even worse, belittling Blizzard's extensive experience in producing good games.
Needless to say, 5 years and 11.5 Million players later...the doomsayers are sucking dirt and all things considered, only a troglodyte would use the "Bioware's never made an MMO argument" in a post World of Warcraft world.
Besides the simple bottom line is, an MMORPG at its core doesn't stray too far from its RPG roots (these games are mmoRPGs after all). The skill-set in developing the latter will definitely transfer and help into developing the former. If people are so blinded by their seething and irrational hatred they can't make out that simple fact then they are unworthy of me taking the time to fully explain their folly. A simple one line snide remark will do for them.
I hope that clarifies my point for you.
Their wouldnt be layoffs if game companies could actually produce a decent MMO for the masses. People wont buy crap games anymore and that ultimately impacts who has a job in the gaming industry and who doesnt 2008-2009 sucked for online gaming pretty much. For the first time in many many years i'm gameless and i don't see that changing anytime between now and the release of Guild Wars 2 which if done right will be a overly serious competitor to World of Warcraft a game in a slow decline already.
well in all of this you really should mention a beacon of hope. CCP.
not only are they not firing people, but they are increasing in size. not to mention the country they reside in went bankrupt :)
if you ask me it has to do with the retention rate of eve. sure most people leave the moment they log in, but those that stay, stay for good.
not sure why its so, maybe its cause eve is different, not trying to be like other mmos out there.
they are also still providing two free expansions each year and when they asked the CEO he assured us that eve expansions will always be free.
they are also releasing a free to play fps mmo in 2010...its for consoles though :(
Free to play or Subscriptions? Oh hell, let’s just do both. No one will notice.
And in what may be the most egregious example of holding paying users upside down and shaking them until quarters came out, Champions Online started selling full skill “respecs” for $12.50, after insisting that adding them to the game was a bad idea.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m all for game developers making money. I mean, I’m a game developer, and I like money. But treating players -- paying customers -- as an endlessly renewable resource to be mined for candy is not only ethically suspicious, it’s counter-productive. Because in today’s economy the pocketbooks of your customers are as tight as yours are, the last thing they’re going to want to do is shell out $20 for a shiny +12 suit of Extra Special Value Chain Mail, and if you design your game so that +12 Value Chain Mail is necessary, your users will inform you that no, it’s not necessary because your game is not necessary.
That was pretty much the reaction I (and many others had) when Cryptic finally admitted - several months after the existence of their item mall - that CO would use both a subscription and microtransactions.
Bill Roper went on and on and on about how the microtransactions were all fluff, nothing to be worried about, hey microtransactions are fun! etc. etc. And so soon after release they drop in paid full skill respecs in a game with insane power imbalances.
Even after having witnessed all of their other shenanigans, this one gobsmacks me.
I might be able to help you there.
I really enjoyed Eve. It was so much better than I'd ever imagined - but one rather serious game design flaw made me leave after a month.
Theoretically young players are protected in the high security areas.... which is good. Implants and ships are expensive and you're almost guaranteed to lose both if you're killed. Pod death for new players is particularly unpleasant. I didn't enjoy it.
But there's now so much money floating around in the game that the possibly once prohibitive bribe required to convince npc guards in high security regions to ignore your attacking members of a particular guild means that that safety net is paper thin.
Eg. there's a guild specifically set up to help new players in Eve ( Eve University) but because everyone knows they include a lot of new members (i.e. easy pickings) they are almost constantly at war and their members aren't safe anywhere. I was so warned when I made enquiries about joining.
It struck me as incredibly stupid, and stacked on top of the many gaps/flaws in the starting mission arc and associated help files it left me wondering what other horrible flaws might lie in wait. So many new players all asking the exact same questions on the help channel desperately hoping that someone will notice their question amidst the incessant gold spamming and reply...
First impression count and Eve makes a very mixed one.
I played just about every free to play and pay to play game that came out in 2009 and left all of them with disappointment and all but one or 2 required you to use the in game cash shop once you get a decent way into the game. If you don't, well you end up sucking so horribly that you end up killing hundreds or even thousands of enemies that are lower level than you to try to get that last level. Sadly I did not do this or buy from most of their cash shops as some others had done I simply left the game. In 2009 I am forced to say I have lost all faith in MMOs and there are multiple games I will refuse to even buy because of that exact reason. A free trial is almost absolutely required if you make a good game because of this exact reason. Which brings in the problem of bots and people making multiple trial accounts spamming "$20 for 800 gold at <insert site name here>" which also makes your game no longer want to be played. So, the developers limit the accounts and such in an attempt to stop this but what really else can you do. The down side to this is you are also limiting your actual players. In multiple games I would get message like "you are sending messages to frequently" in area chat channels. Online games are pretty much dead to me unless the are peer to peer meaning you play with your friends and thus avoid issues stated above. I am currently wanting to become a game developer and am reading up on 3d game development as I type this message. I have plans to make a game where it will end up no one knows but if perchance it does become successful I will do everything in my power to try to stop things like this from happening to my game.
Well, when the economy goes bad some companies go down and many loses their job. That is tragic but the question is if the genre didn't need some weeding out now, far to many devs have thought "lets just copy another game instead of making a new one, we will still get enough players" and that has turned so many MMOs into new versions of EQ the last few years.
When the economy gets good enough will hopefully the surviving companies and the upcoming ones learn to make new fun games instead of giving us the same thing over and over.
A good game will sell no matter what the economy is, not as great as when everyone has jobs of course but enough. A game that is just OK will lose a lot of subs or even die at the same time.
A fine article from Mr Jennings pointing to many of the problems that have led MMOs into a hard place.
Bobby Kotick empitamises the corporate mentality that has become an albatross around the neck of MMO’s. Lets look at what he says:
BK:“employee incentive program so it "really rewards profit and nothing else."
-MMO’s should be about gameplay, nothing else. With sterling gameplay you get great profits, but this concept is beyond the ken of the corporate mind.
BK:"You have studio heads who five years ago didn't know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO's office pretty regularly,"
-Studio heads, who should be thinking about nothing other than making the greatest game possible are spending time arguing about finance and its allocation. Mr Kotick is a professional who cannot see beyond his on own disipline, that of running a buisness. So making everyone in the company be concerned with and think about his disipline is to him of extreme importance. The bottom line is that the studio heads will meet the bottom line and produce a poorer game that will not sell well.
The Facebook games are yet anther F2P scam you have to wonder how long will people take to realise that F2P is crap? How many games like this do you have to get your finegrs burnt on before you say “Ouch!”?
Indeed, but when players want features that are not about gameplay what do you expect to happen? MOAR RACES, MOAR CUSTOMIZASHUN, MOAR USELESS FEATURZ- no wonder the games fail. Maybe the devs should stop listening to the players for once and just do what they think is right. And woah- we might get a game we like to play for a change.
Quite honestly, the industry is in need of some new blood. It seems the same people cycle from company to company and it is the same trash being put out. Blizzard succeeds because they put out a decent MMO but moreso because no one has risen to be a serious competitor.
Moreso, the MMO industry is plagued with undeserved or earned egos which is detrimental to the elements of game design. As a long time player of one of the more popular MMOs, I've seen changes made that have done nothing to add fun and in fact had the effect of upsetting a lot of the player base. This seems to be a common theme among MMOs, developers put in what they want and to hell with anyone who doesn't like it.
There is a new generation about to enter this space in 2010 and 2011. Assuming they learn from the common mistakes that plague the industry now, my bet is we will be eventually seeing a changing of the guard (and I don't mean someone taking down WoW, I mean the horrendous methods of business in the MMO industry today need to change).
Totally agree.
2009 was the year of "greed".
Those "cosmic" and not "gamebreaking" things that several of the well known game producers are charging money for is making them look like they are desperate to squeese out some extra cash from their games.
Many of us MMORPG players love the "cosmetic" things and we love to EARN them! by doing stuff in game making you feel you have worked for it. I don't want to buy them. Even if I HAVE money.
Microtransactions is the sadest and most annoying thing that have happened to MMORPGs and I fear that many of the people making desicions about this don't see the forrest anylonger, because there are too many trees. Or they are people that don't play games, but office people behind desks with their noses deep into debit and credit books.
Many games lost their integrity in 2009 due to greedy developers.
I hope many devs. manage to turn around in time and let 2010 be a better year!
I see some inconguencies in the article and the replies to it, mostly in the assumptions that the layoffs in 2009 had everything to do with the games released in 2009, are we forgetting just how long MMO's take to develop?
The "recession" itself is not directly to blame, no. However, the real culprit lies with the economics of MMO's & "future projects" which will have either been canned or drastically hemmed in due to the difficulties in finding adequate funding for the ambitions.
I'd wager that the impact of all the layoffs in 2009 will not mean that 2010 is a great year for MMO's, or indeed gaming in general, quite the opposite, I expect a worse year in 2010 as a direct result of all the layoffs, cancelled projects, cutbacks & "restructuring".
If you thought 2009 was annus horriblis, expect worse to come, the impact of all these layoffs & the damage to the industry has yet to be really felt, I would be surprised if a recovery in the industry happens before 2011, & the results of fresh investment & building up of MMO development post 2009, will not be seen until early 2012 at the eariest.
Sites like this are going to be scratching in the dirt for news stories for a while yet.
It was inevitable. Gamers are becoming whinier mono-focused extremists who largely ignore everything but the ego boost from meaningless achievements. They scream about graphics, graphics, graphics, and give short shrift to game play. The demand bizarre changes to games that make no sense within the context of the game itself then /ragequit in anticpation because they know no one can meet their ludicrous demands. Those are just the vocal ones, the majority just disappear without a sound because they're so sure their perfect game is just over the horizon even though no one else on the planet would want to play it. The people who find something of interest in a game just shrug and carry on enduring an incessant barrage of abuse from a society where everything is either perfect (nothing) or so damnably bad as to have no redeeming value (everything). Instead of going after the stable one hundred to one hundred fifth thousand license to print money subscrition base using a well developed game they chase the million subscriber chimera that is here today and gone in thirty days. EVE's example has been in front of them for years but completely ignored. A Developers first public statement should always be "We're not trying to please everyone." but the marketing departments would have kittens. It's OK to tell people No, even potential non-customers.
F2P games shouldn't be so smug either. They'll find they're sitting on a expanding bubble at the elastic limit. Nothing is free forever and the leaches will drag you down in the end.
When an industry is hit particularly hard by a recession it's because it was economically weak to begin with.
Hey gamers, You can't always get what you want but if you try some time you just might find you get what you need.
I think the problem is that game developers saw the success of games like World of Warcraft and just assumed that the money lies within MMORPGS. That's why we're seeing hundreds of new ones each year, and they all dissipate and die because they are trying to replicate the wrong things instead of invent their own game world.
Then we have games like Darkfall, Fallen Earth, the somewhat indie stuff with lower production values. They come out and recieve no critical acclaim, no praise and get small subscription bases. The fact is these kind of games are actually on the RIGHT track and because they do somewhat poorly, their style of game will just dissapear in favor of what the ego-based 12 year olds want to play, thus we get F2P with item shop games that are subpar (Or P2P games with item shop, yuck) and have no aspects of sandbox or freedom.
Oh well though, every industry eventually becomes greedy and gets ruined. Music, console gaming, everything.
Wow another bitch and moan about item shops.
Main reason 09 was a crap year is because allot of games that came out where crap, its as simple as that.
If these games where good very playable games it wouldnt be half as bad.
There hasn't been a great mmo since the launch of WoW. Just about everything has been either rushed with a ton of bugs or polished but the game design is bad. Oh and yeah, the subscription fee+microtransaction greediness is just plain awful. People always like to complain but yet they are the ones still paying that monthly fee and microtransaction models. if people really want to send a message then you stop playing mmos until developers start doing the right thing for players.
if you looked at his post history you would see he plays Eve. He also has a point, all you have to go off of is Bioware's singeplayer games to guess if the game is going to be good. And judging by the amount of bugs in Dragon age (and the lack of real content for a game in development for 5 years), it doesnt look good. Its hilarious how touchy these fanboi's are getting, just mention a game next to others not released and they get upset.
Well as long there are people willing to pay subscription and keep playing even when game gets item malls or whatever means of try getting your money its up to player to deside to keep playing this game or not.
There is still not a gun agains there head that force them to play such games and pay for subscription and item malls or pay for skill chance.
Im belong to those who refuse to play games with anyform or item shops or that can e give disadvantage to rest of players not willing to pay more then subscription.
If all mmo's in future be like this ill prolly wont play mmo's anymore or go for that other market witch is free play.
But i see a very dark future for gaming in general, and i mean they controll more and more how you should spent your money and how you should play there game with more and more limited freedom to choose what you want:(
I'm going to bullet point (well as much as forum formatting allows) this for you for ease of readability:
1) What does EVE Online have to do with...anything.
2) Dragon Age is no more or less buggy than your average PC game at launch. I suggest you uninstall Evony, you'll experience less bugs with all games that way. It may even fix your caps key so you can convert your is into Is.
3) In Bizzaro-land Dragon Age is a short game that can be beaten in 10 hours. In Reality-land it's an epic RPG that can span 60+ hours.
4) It's hilarious how you think its and it's are interchangeable.
1) what does WoW have to do with anything? Or was it that just a flame? You know you can get banned for that.
2) true not all games are released bug free, but dragon age had a large amount of them that even bugged the hell out of me (no pun intended), and i'm pretty good about overlooking things.
3) I actually beat it in around 35 hours, and am on my second play through to see if i missed anything, and all i see are cheasy side quests with little substance. For a game thats been in development for 5, yes f-i-v-e years, i expect more out of the game. Especially more then one little market district with a few other buildings in the largest city in Ferelden.
4) lol cant think of anything better to insult me with then my spelling? I think i'll just leave out as many apostraphes as i can and spelling errors if it makes you feel any smarter then me.
Its hilarious how touchy these fanboi's are getting, just mention a game next to others not released and they get upset.
1) I already spent an entire post in this thread relating the relevancy WoW has to TOR. I'm not going through it again here. L2Read.
2) Ah, so because you personally ran into a few bugs the game is unplayable?. Yet by your own admission none of those bugs were gamebreaking, or annoying enough, to keep you from playing since you said you've already beaten DAO. So really then...they weren't that bad were they? Hyperbole much?
3) You didn't "beat" Dragon Age. You blew through the main quest line, probably ignored the majority of dialogue options, skipped the majority of content, then ran online to complain about the game's length? Really? And news flash buddy, 5 years in development isn't all that uncommon for most games. Then again, you seem like you subscribe to the Madden mentality, push 'em out once a year.
4) Take comfort in the history of your life; that even though you sped through it, ignoring the majority of the world's content and dozing through it's many dialogue options all in favor of playing a glorified screensaver, nothing you do will be as bad as what you just did to the English language. It's alright, you're going to beat the real world around the 35 mark anyways.
so many bad assumptions ..... so many wrong assumptions.... This discussion is off topic and talking to fanbois who refuse to read and make blind assumptions leads nowhere. Honestly if you have no idea about the bugs, you should look at the main DA:O forums, the PC tech support forum has more threads in it then the main campaign forum. I guess ignorance is bliss.
I've been a Blizzard subscriber since the WCII era. I've followed the launches of all products since. WoW's production became the company's coup de grace in the gaming world... and then we saw the company go from caring about games and its fans and worry about subscribers and shareholdings (indisputable timing of product releases since WoW 1.0).
I quit WoW, but figured it was just that the beast got out of control for Blizzard to keep a handle on, but that the other IPs would remain controlled. But this whole CEO (the guy at the top, of *all* people) coming out and stating he's happy that he's able to keep 'folks focused on the depression'. Holy sharkbites batman. Where there was smoke, obviously there was fire.
Guess Blizzard just lost a fan.. guess they're just another industry titan now. Here's to hoping someone comes out with something big to bring gaming back to gamers.
I haven't come across any bugs in DA. It took me over 100 hours (110) for my first run through, but then I actually read all of the quests and book entries. I think you played it like an mmo and not an rpg.
Bobby Kotick. If we were to smash his body into a fine powder we could distill pure evil from it.
Ever since I read his "article" on terrifying his employees into submission I made it a personal life-goal to outlive this germ. I plan to go riverdancig on his grave. I've got the shoes and everything.
Indeed. Of the couple of million people currently playing Dragon Age a few 100 are having issues with it and that all of a sudden means it's a bug infested game? Please.
Honestly I just think he's lying through his teeth to try and make a point. 35 hours? Was he playing the game by rolling his face on the keyboard? It sure would explain a few things...
Sadly, it doesn't work like this. There's no innovation in MMOs because there's too much money at stake, failure rates are astronomical, and profit margins with the exception of a couple of games are quite thin. And, of course, MMOs are software and production cycles for MMOs are suspiciously similar to production cycles for business applications. There's no check box for fun.
I think the worsed that happened in 2009 is that... well actually it ain't a simple thing. But the feeling I got most of all was that no lessons have been learned.
We get the same old korean grind games like Aion with barely any story or quests between the endless grinds. We get bad launch after bad launch. We got promising games like that Fallout wannabe ignoring the world as a market (There are COUNTLESS payment providers in the world who have made it their job to support every way to transfer money for a tiny fee, USE THEM)
We have seen companies try to squeeze the customer, we seen bad decisions.
The MMORPG market is potentially a huge one, as soon as game makers are ready to accept TWO important lessons.
To make sure everybody understands them I will translate them to FPS terms.
Rule 1: Learn from others, EVERY FPS should have a quick save a quick load button. F5 and F9 are perfectly fine, it works, has been proven to work, learn from those who came before.
Rule 2: Not EVERY game has to be the same, Valve changed Quake and now they are bigger then the company whose engine they licensed. Not every MMORPG has to have P2P or a gear grind. And introducing it, won't make your game suddenly appeal to another audience. If MMO developers had made Half-Life they would have ripped out the set pieces to appeal to the Quake players.
In 2010 we will have some potentially intresting games coming out. Star Trek Online, a very serious piece of content produced by a company known for its simplistic MMO's. Star Trek Nerds vs Console wannabe gaming company. It remains to be seen wether the game appeals to anyone? To nerdy for the Champions Online fans and to casual for the Star Trek fans?
SWTOR will be the second attempt to make a Star Wars MMO. Yet with the first failing because it wasn't WoW (according to Lucasarts, not the fans) and then failing even more when they attempted to change it into WoW, the Bioware devs as far as I read them seem to be aiming the first part of the game at those who love lots and lots of story (not the WoW crowd) and the end at raiding (WoW crowd) so... who will actually play both parts of the game?
The Secret World... well... the only thing we know about it is that Ragnar is producing it, who made the Longest World and so it must be good... except he also made Dreamfall which wasn't as good and seems determined to force his fans who like very slow adventures to PvP.
And that is perhaps I think the ultimate problem with MMO's at the moment. A lack of focus on a specific audience. Final Fantasy 13 is currently selling like hotcakes in Japan and it does so because it has a clear audience who know what to expect.
But what audience does SWTOR have? For that matter, what audience does Dragon Age have? Its trailers have some kind of metal music attached to it, while the entire game has classical music as a score. You don't have that in FF. It is clear who it is for, and if you don't like it, then though. You are not their intended buyer.
It is time for MMORPG developers to focus. And not just on WoW's subscription numbers. Those are a fluke. WoW when it came out had made some clear choices. It didn't appeal and still doesn't, to the graphics junkies. It said "fuck you" to anyone who craved realtime combat. Skill based fighting? Go somewhere else. And this attitude got them 10+ million subscribers.
Pick your audience and stick with it, it works. Try to appeal to everyone and you endup being liked by nobody.
Ask any failed MMORPG, most of the ones that launched in 2009 are among them.
It is a bad year for MMORPG's and I feel sorry for those laid off. As I look over the past two years production companies are not producing quality products. They all want Blizzard's subscriber numbers and that is currently not going to happen. EVE is successful because they have a vision and foundation and have stuck to their model since the start of the game. They do not need the Blizzard's numbers to turn a profit and listen to their playerbase. They are turning a profit! The bigger studios need to pay attention to this success.
WOW does this well too and have stuck to thier business model. Honestly graphics do not make a game and some will argue that point. I state this as AOC and Aion are beautiful MMORPGs and yet they have or are losing players. Warhammer was mismanaged and over hyped by almost all of the internet and mangazine writers and is in bad shape.
Instead of Mythic listening to its playerbase and fixing the glaring problems they released 4 new classes, now compunding problems. Players got fed up and left..
I am leary of MMORPG's that are trying to be WOW killers and I do not even play WOW. So many publishers have promised the moon and delivered crap these past couple of years.
I think a dev needs to have vision of what the game is going to be and publish a game that is entertaining.
Let's take Aion for an example. As most of youy know you could participate in the pay for a beta event. They showed us level 1-30 and no more and for the most part the game was indeed all they stated it was. Once live after level 35 the game became what alot of people here stated a darn grind and it requires a person to basically be grouped after level 38 until level 50 unless you want to grind the same mob that gives you maximum xp until you level and rinse repeat. PVP is a joke as the Abyss is full of level 50 players ganking lower level players.
AOC was the same way.
Publisher's and game reviewer's need to be honest with players interested in the game and be up front with them. (LOL I do not think this will ever happen) A MMORPG is a long term investment and investor's are thinking shot term and until they realize making money in the long term is the way to go, we will be getting crap for a while.
Economically a MMORPG is cheap entertainment and can thrive during an economic downturn if it is fun.
I am currently subscribed to 0 MMO's not do to the recession but because for me they are at the core the same thing. Whether it be EQ, EQ2, WoW, WAR, AoC, DaoC, Lineage 2, Final Fantasy, LotR, ect they are all basically SAME game I have been playing for years simply with different graphics and some tweaks. I liked all of those games, but I have played that style of game to the point I have 0 interest in ever playing it again. I have the money to spend but not on the same product I have been playing for more than a decade.
One of the many reasons MMO's are bleeding subs in shorter and shorter amounts of time is because we are BORED with the same thing and after the new wears off we cancel and either go back to WoW who does the same old better than anyone else or wait for the next same old thing hoping it will not be.
I am waiting and it appears 2010 will be not much different than 2009 or 2008 or 2001, or 1999........
I think the video game industry has been very recession proof this year. Those companies failed in their profit reports because they failed to deliver games people wanted to play. The economy might have affected it but the recession can't be given all the credit for this, i mean there were games that broke sales records this year...
And anyone watching STO should re-read this and think about it.
STO may be a great game - we really don't know. But there are a lot of restrictions on the Beta which should be a big concern to anyone who has followed any MMO releases in the past two years.
Great article.
I've been out of the MMO picture and last games I played a lot were WoW and EvE. Played a lot more in-between and yeah, everything was the same with a different setting.
Maybe everything has been done? Lol, I don't know, but console games can still kick ass sometimes and innovate. Seems like for an MMO do that is too hard.
Let's see what will happen, but I predict more shitstorms.
Good article.
I guess I understand the recession thing, but like with so many gamers outside the industry, it's not really what rides me.
It's the MMO design "strategies", the failed big titles, the f2p models and the asian business influences, the wow induced greed and all the inept "playas" in it's wake, Zynga and the games that aren't really games apps, the piss poor player "communities" and the list probably goes on.
There are points of light too, but meh,. my overall impression: bad year.
Those who think the worst is over with the economy, better buckel up. Its gonna be a bumpy ride.
The media like to boast that the economy is improving with unemployment at 10%. That number are only those receiving benifits. The real numbers in parts of the country are horrible with 80% unemployment in Mendota California or 50% in Detroit Mich.
this all effects not just gamming, but ALL of us.
This atricle can explain it better.
Link: http://www.dollarish.com/718262472/whats-the-actual-unemployment-rate/
What's The Actual Unemployment Rate?
Of late, the media has been abuzz with cheerful-ish news—the country's unemployment rate is down from 10.2% to 10% as of November. But some experts are questioning the validity of both this percentage and the alleged decrease, according to DailyFinance.
The unemployment rate we see in newspapers and the like is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which interviews state unemployment offices for its numbers. The thing is, these offices can only report numbers on laid-off employees collecting unemployment benefits; thus, if you're in the BLS's 10%, you are:
?Recently laid-off. Eventually you will stop qualifying for unemployment.
?Someone who was fired after 14 or more weeks of employment. Any less and you can't get any benefits.
?Probably not self-employed. Only self-employed workers with unemployment insurance are eligible for help from state offices.
?Still a member of the workforce. If you become "discouraged" and stop looking for a job, or take yourself out of the workforce for any other reason, you are no longer counted as unemployed but rather "marginally attached." There are an estimated 2.3 million "marginally attached" workers in the country.
But before we start hating on the BLS, DailyFinance reports that the agency does actually calculate a more comprehensive rate of unemployment, we just don't know about it. For example, BLS researchers use household surveys to figure out more gray-area data, like the 9.3 million part-time workers who can't find full-time work.
When you add up these unhappy part-timers, the "marginally attached," and the laid-off workers collecting benefits, the unemployment rate is 17.2%—a lot higher than 10%.
Exactly.
During economic depressions, relatively cheap products tend to experience a slight boom. For the amount of entertainment you can get from it, $15 a month for an mmo is excellent value for money.
I haven't seen 2009 figures, but during 2008 (also a GFC year), the subscription mmo market boomed with overal 22% growth and 27% growth outside of WoW and market analysts forecast continued growth in 2009.
The GFC is just a convenient scapegoat.... until you look at the real figures (i.e. above) and realise the simpler truth - bad products don't sell.
This article made me laugh harder than Bobby Kotick on the way to the bank.
All of this is so true. However, I'm happy with my MMO which seems to be slowly getting better. AoC will be my game of choice in 2010 unless something else manages to wow me, but that's not very likely.
That posting with the Roberto Alfonso poster really does break it down and show it like it is. I do hope Bobby dies in a fire for what he's done to his company and (subjectively here) his products. Thanks btw, for that link. Personally, I found it insightful.
Small inconsistency in your posting: bad products don't sell, but yet growth outside of our industry's giant is a fully 10% higher than the giant itself. If there are 'no good products' outside of the giant, then why is growth higher? Again, this study being done on P2P models- the isolated common denom in this.
From the O.P.
"Because in today’s economy the pocketbooks of your customers are as tight as yours are, the last thing they’re going to want to do is shell out $20 for a shiny +12 suit of Extra Special Value Chain Mail, and if you design your game so that +12 Value Chain Mail is necessary, your users will inform you that no, it’s not necessary because your game is not necessary."
Hit the nail on the head. I've chosen not to play MMOs for this (and only this) reason. I'll pay a reasonable fee for monthly entertainment, but don't want extra fees tacked onto that for good loot or respecs. I'll also play an item shop game if it has no subscription and I get a licence to use the item for a certain period of time. No way I'm shelling out real dollars to a company who thinks they can delete the virtual item I just paid for any time they want (e.g. SOE). Some games give you the item for a specific time and guarantee that it will be funcitonal, and not nerfed. If it breaks, gets deleted or nerfed, they give you a refund for the time left on your licence. That's consumer-friendly imo. They get my money, I get a good entertainment service with no nasty surprises.
after reading numberous posts from ppl in this topic i think its funny how ppl think WoW was the 1st sucessful morpg and no other morpg existed before them lol.
I'd rather talk about MMO's of 2009 and now how bad 2009 was....because myself a person who live in California with it's unemployment rate now past 15% it's hard to look at that and be happy. The recession has hit hard and for this state and many of states it's been a struggle...but now it's looking like it's slightly getting better. The Bay Area is going to be the green place and hopefully in the next few years 50 to 150k jobs will be there for those ppl that have been on those extended unemployment advances. All I can hope for is, more jobs come out to ppl and we slowly get back to solid grounds and beginning enjoying life.
The gaming industry had it hard, closing of companies , one of my favorites Midway. These companies need to look at the recession as a learning trial, gaming prices at what they are, means we buy less. When we have no money, we save more to buy a game and that means we buy less. I hope Games on Demand or Digital Downloading becomes more a big ticket in the next few years. If i could buy games for half or 1/3 less the cost of what I'm paying now, I can buy more. As of 2009 I waiting to buy more games then ever before and I purchased more used games this year then I have ever in my life time.......
And now lets talk about some great things in the MMO world for 2009
Well 2009 was the year for F2P games and here's a few to list.
Free Realms with it's Arcade like presents, probably the best thing Sony has done in a long time.
Dungeon Fighters 2D Side scrolling RPG, I'm still enjoying this day ever since it's beta launch.
Dungeons and Dragons OEU, they made it F2P and now it's the best shape the games ever been for the company.
Runes of Magic: this game is probably the best Clone of EQ / WOW out there and it's pretty amazing.
Monthly Sub games:
Champions Online: I enjoyed it for probably the 1month after Beta and then grew tired of it.
WOW came out with two huge patches, bringing everyone that spent some time away from WOW back into Blizzards stronghold.
Aion, which was a great game in my book, the constant spam blocking preformed when entering new areas and the huge amount of grinding..started to become tiresome. The gameplay, music, animations and art direction were dead on for what I wanted to see in the MMO world. I may come back to this game, in the near future, after a few big patch updates.
I know there's a lot more that came out and is probably better then what I posted, this is just the ones I was able to sample see what was out there.
2010 games:
Star Trek Online ( minus the Klingon's being a PVP class) , Star Wars The Old Republic , Final Fantasy X1V and DC Online ( hoping it's much better then Champions Online, even though from the video I've seem of it, it looks to be a big improvement of the let down from CO.
Yeah, you are talking about Everquest perhaps? Ultima Online? Meridian59(or whatever its exact name was)? Star Wars Galaxies?
When WoW was still in the design phase, people discussed how the market was getting saturated and that any new MMO could only hope to steal customers away from existing game, a pool of in total perhaps a million gamers with no game coming above half a million.
Then WoW came along and sold more games then any other had in total and went on to gather 10 million active accounts. In any graph, WoW has to be excluded or all the other Pay To Play MMO's are a mixed up line at the bottom.
There had been succesful MMO's before WoW, and then WoW redefined what it meant to be succesful. SOE thought that a great commerical success was half a million active accounts during the peak... 1/20th of what WoW has been having for the last couple of years.
There were legendary drivers before Michael Schumacher, and then he came along and redefined what it meant to be the best.