The Future of MMOs - Why Are There So Many WoW Clones? - Extra Credits

[Music] hey folks welcome back this week we're going to talk about MMOs why because every week James is getting emails asking two questions why do all modern MMOs fail and what do you think the future of MMOs is well those are good questions and there's no time like the present so let's do this those two questions are pretty intimately tied but let's start by tackling the first one one why do modern MMOs fail short answer because no one's thinking outside the box longer answer well it has a lot to do with psychology in business so you know buckle up the principal reason that MMOs fail today is money you know how much it cost to make one of those things 60 to 100 million doar with that kind of money you could buy a video game every 10 minutes for the next 20 years and never run out if you carry that much money around in $1 bills it would weigh slightly more than a walrus for most Studios a gamble of that size as a life

or death risk almost no independently funded Studio has the capital on hand to even attempt a venture like that that means that everybody who's making MMOs has to answer either to a publisher or a group of investors investors want to know that they're investing in a company not a project because individual games tend to be very hit or miss and they don't provide the kind of long-term stability most investors are looking for this leads new MMO Studios to try and develop multiple games at once or create a web portal or start publishing games before they've even finished developing their first product and while that might make sense on on paper in reality it's suicide for a starting developer investors will eventually become more Savvy about the game world but the way things are now MMO developers are having to split their resources and their focus in order to appease those investors and the result has been a pile of shoddy products and cancellations alternatively MMO developers can work with larger Publishers to get the funding they need but the large Publishers tend to be conservative when it comes to game design historically they've preferred to reskin game types that they know will work rather than trying to push the envelope and as much as we love to push inov here I have to admit it's a good

business policy heck it's given us a lot of good games it just doesn't work for MOS why because console games are launched and then done you beat the single player you mess around with the multiplayer for a little while but then you move on they're not Perpetual games MMO RPGs on the other hand thrive on how much of the players time they consume they're designed to be played to the exclusion of everything else people just can't play two MMO RPGs at once besides MMOs are Perpetual by Nature they're continually being updated and expanded creating an effectively illimitable amount of content for the player to explore couple that with the social bonds that people form in these games that keep them from leaving and you have a very limited market you see what I'm saying let me put it more simply World of Warcraft is enormous it owns everything nobody can compete with it because users aren't willing to play two MMO RPGs at the same time and unless users migrate in Mass players will end up finding other games less fun because all their friends still play wow this means that many MMO players spend their entire enire MMO life cycle in this one

game and the size of the market for traditional MMO RPGs isn't that large it's probably close to its cap at about 20 million users now but because blizzard is making a billion dollars a year on this thing everybody wants to compete with it unfortunately it's so expensive to make an MMO RPG that anyone who can afford to doesn't want to take any risks so they simply clone World of Warcraft the problem with this strategy is that no amount of minor mechanical or graphical improvements will make a world of warcraft clone better than World of Warcraft World of Warcraft has an enormous player base a robust player-driven economy and well everyone you know is playing it add to that that it has 10 years of development and content behind it and it's simply impossible to build a wow Killer by cloning wow and yet billions of dollars have been spent attempting to do just that so is it hopeless should we just wait until Activision Blizzard comes out with World of Warcraft 2 or call of guitar craft or you know whatever they've got planned should we just give up on the idea of making alternate MMOs entirely well no of course not but it

would probably be better for everyone if we stopped trying to make World of Warcraft clones so what should we do what will the future of MMOS look like well first we have to ditch the idea that the terms MMO and MMO RPG are synonymous today all we have are MMO RPGs because everyone's trying to fight blizzard over that little niche but think about how many other genres are out there we could have MMO firstperson Shooters MMO racing games MMO realtime strategy and Brawlers and puzzle games I mean why not why don't we see any of these things around well I guess we kind of do do I we we can see the first hints of the future of MMOs by looking to some Korean games like cart Rider or combat arms or smaller Western Productions like puzzle Pirates or shots online in the next 10 years I think we're going to start seeing the MMO brought to every genre why because they don't compete with World of Warcraft and they are much less expensive to make a lot of those sorts of games wouldn't need the enormous 3D worlds that we've come to expect because they aren't RPGs these games could get away with smaller shared Hub areas and private rooms for most of the social interaction way cheaper than building a big 3D World and that lower

cost means that companies will be able to take some more risks and experiment in ways that they couldn't afford to with mmor RPGs which will in turn give us a new set of highquality games we're also going to see social games Blossom and evolve you might argue that Farmville isn't an MMO yet and certainly isn't that deep but the next generation of social games will start to blur the line between themselves and web-based MMOs but I have a feeling that most of you are still kind of wanting to know what will happen with MMO RPGs specifically well if I had to venture a guess about their future which is always good for sticking with one's foot in one's mouth I think the dominance of World of Warcraft will slowly come to an end in a few years of course by then blizzard will probably have released some new MMO to pick up the slack but there will probably be enough players who got their first taste of MMO RPGs through wow and are ready to move on to something a little different at that point the landscape may open up enough for a few smaller MMO RPGs to get a foothold so long as they aren't just World of Warcraft 2 clones I think one Trend we'll start to see will involve more Uncharted worlds worlds where all of the players play in the same space kind of like EV on line I think we'll

start to see more emphasis on story too eventually graduating to player driven story lines we'll start to see a few Ventures into user generated content which will meet with some limited success and a strong Trend away from subscription based gaming at first these games will likely move to microtransactions Via in-game purchases and eventually evolve into more mutually beneficial systems such as uh like watch this ad get some credit or allow us to use 3% of your CPU to Crunch data and you can play for free we'll probably ALS see a lot more and a lot better web- based MMOs and last but not least we'll see the first attempts to cross over between MMOs the web and reality your future games might end up sending you on quests to the local Starbucks or to Alternative rev streams.com potentially tacky yes but it could be used in some interesting ways as you can see there's still a lot of room for the MMO model to evolve and grow and it's going to be pretty exciting to watch it happen but I think we're out of time for now until next week feel free to email us your questions thoughts comments violent assertions misspelled accusations or

undying praise you can find our email address in the closing credits your questions will help us to pick future topics so send us some emails later [Music] [Music] uh in the back uh