Muckbeast

This is obviously not a healthy sign for Warhammer: Report: Layoffs Hit EA Studios Including Tiburon, Black Box, Redwood Shores, Mythic.

According to the report, Mythic lost 80 people or 40% of their staff.

EA had a recent investor conference call, and of course they avoided giving hard subscriber numbers for Warhammer. A 40% layoff pretty much tells the tale, however. I’d say this puts WAR well below 100k now, and my previous 6-12 month lifespan estimate is looking pretty good. I don’t see WAR lasting beyond Oct 2010.

I wish everyone luck who is parting ways from EA. There are a lot of great, smaller gaming companies out there, or you can even start your own. More talented people need to get away from this mega-behemoths and work on higher quality games from smaller, indie companies.

EDIT: More, potential insider details here. “Mythic laid off 80 people today, which is about 40% of the company and responsible for 90% of the content. According to a friend of mine who left before this happened, they’re putting Warhammer into “maintenance mode.”

I am going to try not to get too esoteric or philosophical. Lets eschew things like success as defined by making people happy, bettering the world, adding good ideas/concepts to the game design space, or all sorts of totally unmeasurable things like that. For the purposes of this discussion, lets focus a little more on the economic/business success.

TIME: How long does an MMO have to operate to be a success? This question came up when my wife and I were talking about a few teetering MMOs (Age of Conan, Warhammer, Champions Online) and a few MMOs that have already been shut down (The Sims Online, Auto Assault, Earth and Beyond, Matrix Online, Tabula Rasa.).  We both agreed upon 5 years.

MMOs take at least 2-3 years to develop, so 5 years is at least double the minimum development time. That seems fair. Some MMOs take a lot longer, but that is generally for reasons other than just the creation of the game (running out of money, small companies that have to shift resources to other projects, etc.). It takes about 5 years for a tv show to reach 100 episodes, and that is considered one of the key break points for whether a show is a true success (and is also really important for being sellable into syndication).

There’s something about 5 years. Its 1 more than it takes to go through college and high school. It is half a decade. I don’t have a purely numerical reason for this. 5 years just seemed right to us.

POPULATION: How many players/subscribers does an MMO need to be successful? On this issue I think it heavily depends. For a big budget, major publisher MMO, I think the baseline is 100,000. But more realistically, if you aren’t over 250,000 that’s pretty disappointing. I think 1 million is the mark for a blockbuster success. And I’ll also add this: if you make a niche title that monetizes itself well with a good business model, I think you can declare success at well under 100k players – even if you had a mega budget from a big publisher. Unfortunately, they might not agree.

For an indie developer, I think the number is much lower. Depending on the size of your staff, I think success comes at a couple thousand players. Through whatever business model you use, if you average $15 a month per player you only need 333 players per staff member to average $50k per year per staff member (assuming a salary range of $30-70k depending on experience.)  If your box sales cover your development and servers, that’s pretty darn good. With that math, a 10 person team only needs 4,000 players to do pretty well.

And that’s really all you need to be profitable in the long term – pay your staff, pay yourself, then save for the development of the next game.

Your opinions?

I read this signature file on an MMO forum today: “Remember, in MMO’s whoever achieved more than you is a nolifer, whoever achieved less than you is a noob.”

I chuckled at first, but it is sad how true that mentality is.

What do you think causes this?

… while counting their money?

I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.

Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions Online.

Continue Reading » Do WoW Devs/Executives Just Sit Around and Laugh?

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while. This article at MMORPG is the final push over the edge.

Most MMOs have gone with the shard/server approach. Each copy of the game has a distinct community. You make characters on a specific server, and the character can only be played on that server. Each server has its own copy of the world.

Champions Online eschewed this setup, and only has one “shard.” Instead, each zone is instanced depending on the number of people playing. The main advantage of this is that you never have to worry about whether a friend is on the same server.

But I think there are some pretty huge downsides, particularly in community. On other MMOs, each server developers its own sub-community of the game. Some tend to have more RP, or older players, or more hardcore raiders, or whatever. A culture evolves. Also, guilds and individual players can actually make a name for themselves. Becoming one of the best 10 weaponcrafters on a single server is not unattainable. But to be one of the top 10 weaponcrafters in the ENTIRE MMO might be.

One compromise might be a free server transfer setup that let people move characters whenever they wanted (perhaps with a 1 month cooldown). MMO companies have become enamored with that extra source of income (server transfer fees) so that’s doubtful.

So where are we? What is best? What do you like best?

The ugly way Roper drove Hellgate: London and Flagship into bankruptcy is legendary. The greedy subscription model for an action RPG Diablo clone was an exceptionally bad idea. His constant arguing and fighting against respecs was rancid icing on the rotten cake.

In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him and made him Executive Producer of Champions Online. I must admit, while I enjoyed a lot of things about Champions Online, I’d been waiting for and worrying about Roper’s influence.

With the full opening of the Champions Online microtransaction cash shop (C-Store), those fears were apparently well founded.

I never understood where the heck Cryptic got off adding a cash shop to a full price + monthly subscription game. That’s not just double dipping, that’s triple dipping. I am fine with meta-game functions having an extra cost (server transfers, character renames, etc.), but actual game content should not have a fee in a subscription based game.

Cryptic’s constant resistance to making a decent respec system for Champions Online had boggled my mind since the beginning. Any kind of build/spec type advancement system needs a good respec feature. CO’s fully open ability system absolutely REQUIRES it. The flexibility is great, but with flexibility comes the ability to easily and quickly screw up your character.

When I read the details of the C-Store, it all became clear: $12.50 for a character respec. They designed a system that effectively requires frequent respecing, and then charge $12.50 per respec. Amazing. And with almost weekly patches that dramatically change (nerf) abilities, it is impossible to know how a power you have today will perform tomorrow.

In most MMOs, respecing your character either has quests or a gold cost equal to an hour or so of game time (or less). But in Champions Online, you pay $12.50. Unreal. Absolutely unreal.

If CO were a stock, I’d be selling short right now. The population is plummeting, and the decision making behind this C-Store does not inspire confidence at all. One can only hope that Roper will go back to voice acting and writing manuals after he kills this game.

Intereting article on Gamasutra today: Opinion: If You’re Not Having Fun, Play Something Else

The part that really resonated with me:

Instead of thinking “core versus casual,” we’d be served to look at things like complexity, challenge, difficulty and tedium as components of specific genres, rather than universal concepts that must be reduced across the board for a title to be considered accessible.

But guess what? That’s why people who loved old adventure games loved them. Raise your hand if you’re thinking, “man, I wish they still made them like that.” If your hand isn’t up, then hey! You don’t like traditional adventure games! To Lewis and friends, I say: If you don’t like too many sidequests, then maybe you don’t like RPGs.

Wolfshead has started a really great discussion on his blog: Waiting for the Next MMO Revolution

The reason why I’m in a perpetual state of angst is that I feel that the MMO industry has squandered all of the great potential that was evident a scant 10 years ago during the first MMO revolution heralded by Ultima Online and EverQuest. Sadly, things seem to be paradoxically devolving instead of evolving. MMO after MMO has failed to inspire me. There’s a creeping sense of complacency and predictability infecting this genre right now that worries me.

I have a basic theory on how we got to where we are in the MMO industry. It basically goes like this:
Continue Reading » The squandered potential of MMOs

I want to revisit a favorite issue of mine. New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement.

When people read that article, they often get the wrong idea. I don’t hate quests (or missions). I don’t think a 100% mob grinding game is the way to go. What I hate is when a game simply replaces mob grinding with quest grinding and actually thinks it did something noteworthy or worthwhile.

Replacing one mindless grind with another ultimately solves and accomplishes nothing. You will simply piss off and alienate a different set of people. You will still alienate everyone – just at different rates and to different degrees.

Champions Online, a game I generally like, is a full on quest grinder. Mob xp is almost worthless.  This simple design mistake creates a cascade of problems that many of you are probably already predicting: what happens if you run out of missions? And yes, right now, that CAN happen in CO.

The key, in my view, is to provide multiple, alternate paths to character advancement and development. When someone wants to grind mobs, they can. When someone wants to do quests, they can. When someone wants to defend or assault bases (Tabula Rasa had a brilliant implementation of this), they can. When someone wants to PvP, they can. The holy grail is to create these different ways to advance and develop a character and make them available to people at all times (or nearly all times). The sooner we realize that as developers, the better.

As always, I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.

By now, many of you have read my article What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? Is it a failure? Since I wrote the article, new leadership really has not done much to address those issues. In a recent interview, the head dev. of Warhammer put the blame for WAR’s problems on the game being too easy, the lack of a good economy, and no need to make friends. Yeah… he missed the boat big time.

The game is down to 6 servers and population continues to fall. Aion and CO both delivered additional subscriber hits to the game.

So the logical question is: How much longer does Warhammer have?

I predict 6-12 months. I think in about 6-8 months they will announce the game is shutting down 2-4 months later. At some point they will give people 1-2 months free to login and participate in a last hurrah. During those final 1-2 months, people will at first wonder why the game died, then shortly realize how broken it still is and say “oh yeah, that’s why.”

What are your predictions?