If you aren't blizzard, the subscription, big budget, PC MMO is a very difficult business to succeed in. It's basically impossible - there's such a huge time investment that most players are unlikely to play more than one game at a time. Plus, to compete with WoW head on you have to spend their kind of budgets, which is an arms race you would be very likely to lose. Like competing with google, it's best to take an indirect approach.
I like the comparison between Blizzard and Google, because they both have tremendous momentum in their favor.
It would be an incredible feat for a company to make a better game than Blizzard. I've watched some QA sessions with Blizzard project leads, and they rarely seem to make assumptions about what works and what doesn't -- they rely on hard data, and the goal is always to maximize playability.
Same with Google, their search has been incrementally improved over many years. They know what works and what doesn't.
That might be why smaller game companies seem to be succeeding (social gaming, flash games), and domain-specific search engines are also doing well (video search, job search, travel search, etc..)
it's not even that it is boring. it's that it is not really a game. MMO's tap into the same compulsion that cults often do, put a little number next to someone's name and they will kill themselves trying to make it higher (or lower as the case may be). In the case of WoW, this has been perfected to an art. You're always just a little bit of playtime away from making some number related to your character go higher. It's basically a drug.
The wish to improve one's "self" with respect to some numeric metric, and especially in comparison to others, has broader application than cults: academic performance. work performance. sports performance. money. also karma.
I don't get it. The conclusion doesn't follow from the arguments.
He writes: "Jennings points to the ballooning costs of MMORPGs-- World of Warcraft is estimated to have cost $40 million to $50 million to develop, and while Age of Conan cost just $25 million, the game is having retention issues, largely because the budget wasn’t big enough, he says. By contrast, he notes, small companies produce low-budget web-based MMOs like Club Penguin and RuneScape that post far higher profits."
How does the fact that low-budget MMO's are more profitable than high-budget MMO's mean that the subscription model is broken?
I think those low-budget MMOs are not subscription-based; they have a freemium model where most people play for free and some people pay to pimp out their character. So the article is saying that non-subscription MMOs are more profitable than subscription MMOs. It's basically Web 2.0 for games.
Hmmm. What are the core differences between the "Freemium" model and the subscription model? I'm most familiar with Club Penguin, which does allow non-paying a limited subset of the functionality, but I've always thought of it as a "subscription model" (as that is what I pay for my children....)
yeah articles like this that hit front page annoy me (although i know this comment is helping it stay) .... still it says basically cause x (a person) is leaving the business model is broke
I don't know if the business model is broken NOW, but perhaps the guy he was interviewing (or quoting) was saying in the future it will break from these cracks. He's saying that the huge budget is causing the subscriptions, but there is no true innovation in the actual product. Therefore, the fact that businesses have to charge monthly to post a decent profit margin will be their downfall. Interesting theory :).
Club Penguin and RuneScape post far higher profits than World of Warcraft? Does somebody have a source for that? Based on a quick Google search it's estimated Blizzard makes about $100m a year off WoW after costs. I can't imagine free MMOs matching that unless they have paid memberships that offer all the stuff people actually want, which doesn't really count as a "free MMO" anymore
I'm pretty sure they mean ROI: profit/investment. Which is profit normalized for investment. It enables the profitability of different-sized businesses to be compared.
seems like it should be higher. if even 10% of subscriptions are active accounts that's 180 million a year. doesn't seem like it should cost 6.6 million a month plus to run the servers and pay staff.
From the outside, the subscription-based business model seems anything but broken. You get your players to pay $15 every month, for many of them over a period of one or two or three years, you get a much longer shelf life than regular games which likely make most of their sales in the few months after release, and in some cases you can have your cake and eat it too - if you manage to get away with the $60 upfront purchase AND the $15 monthly fee.
Sure, it's competitive. Sure, some studios end up spending millions on crappy games that no one wants to play. How is any of that different from regular, non-subscription based games?
A serious gamer might buy 10 traditional games per year, but only one MMO. If you create the 5th-best game of the year you can make significant money, but if you create the 5th-best MMO, you fail.
Yes, the market is smaller. That's almost self-evident, since subscription MMOs are a subset of overall gaming.
The numbers are different. It's a lot easier to create the 5th best MMO than to create the 5th best game of the year. If you spend $100K on your MMO and it ends up 5th best, you're happy. If you spend $50 million, you're not. None of this implies that the subscription-based model itself is broken.
he's not saying the system is broken for the players, he's saying it's a broken economy, because new games can't enter and compete. very high barriers to entry, and players will only play one game, so it's very hard to enter the market.
It's more like the MMORPG game model itself is broken. It's based on imagery and art direction, social dynamics, and variable schedule of reward. The most similar thing in the real world are casino resorts. Second Life is showing us the way, as is Spore. There is a whole lot more scope for emergent, user generated content.
Having been an avid gamer ever since the first time I got my hands on a Commodore 64, let me weigh in.
The subscription model does have its flaws, yes, but it is far from broken. One reason that gives rise to it is the sheer quality of 'free' MMOs. The games themselves always end up with very little depth, very poor art and style and come across as a game you once played. Five years ago.
Now I am not saying that high-budget MMOs (World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, City of Heroes/Villains, etcetera) are the best. But they can and DO use this money to build incredible depth into things.
Another thing that always causes strife in free MMOs, is the payoff. Advertising always tends to cause your players to run off, as seeing an ad for "Degree Men! The latest in protection!" or whatever in your medieval hack'n'slash really ruins the atmosphere. So you end up with 'Freemium', in which you give players bonuses for having paid. Which means that you end up having a small group of paying customers, a large group of free ones and a game that is barely worth playing.
Now, I'm not saying this model does't work. Far from it. But until the quality of these games gets to where people can't pick huge holes in the weft of their fabric, the traditional models will still win.
