I was reading through the comments of VirginWorlds Podcast #117, and Scytale2 said, “Why not have MMOs which are fun but have less content, but attract lots and lots of players for limited timescales?” While I think it’s an interesting concept for sure, I don’t think this would work, at least not when thinking about MMO’s in the traditional sense. There are three major problems that I see here:
1) There are simply too many people and too many resources involved in MMO’s to expect them to live short-term. If he was speaking from the concept of “10 for $5m instead of 1 for $50m” and the employees can jump from one game to another once each project is complete, I doubt they would be willing to work on a project for six months and be done with it and have to go look for another job. If they did jump from one project to another, they would have to completely switch gears, flesh out a whole new concept and all of the minor details, put it together, and ship it out. If they didn’t switch, and the studio wanted to work simultaneously on all of these MMO’s, they are going to have to hire enough employees to build them all at the same time. Depending on how many people you have working on the game this could work, but the more employees you have working together, the faster it’s going to be ready and the more content/polish it’s going to have. That said, if you are in a time crunch and don’t have much time, you are going to have to fork over more money up front to hire more people, which means higher production costs. Plus, when they were done, they would simply be out of a job (or at least the vast majority of them.)
2) This is going under the assumption that the MMO’s that they build are going to be flawless when they come out, which everyone knows isn’t possible. They usually take about six months after launch before they really have everything smoothed out and they are on to other things like adding content. It sounds like Scytale2 was shooting for games that kept players going for about this length of time, which would mean that only by the time the game was dying would it truly be up to snuff.
3) The last time I checked, MMO’s made the vast majority of their money through subscriptions, not through “box sales.” You aren’t going to be able to charge $50 for an MMO that’s expected to last six months when games like World of Warcraft are charging the same price ($20 for original, $30 for Burning Crusade) and have the potential to be played for 2-5 years. So with that said, you would probably have to charge $20 or less, and if you charged say $6-$10 a month for a subscription (remember, less content, less money) that means that the most you are going to get out of a player is 50 to 80 dollars. If you are starting with a $5 million budget for the game, that means that you would have to sell 60-100k subscriptions just to break even. This is not an easy feat by any strech of the imagination.
Innovation has to come from somewhere, however, I don’t think that this is a viable way to do it. There are simply too many things pushing against this for it to work. MMO’s aren’t perfect at launch, so a short-lived version would be working against this in a horrible way. You either need to hire too many employees, or it’s going to take quite a long time for a smaller team to complete them. There a very strong reliance on subscription fees when it comes to profitability in MMO’s, so if you cut this out of the equation, your profit margins are minimized beyond feasibility.
I think if you do want to head this route and make an online game that is built to entertain for six months or so, you are either going to have to bend the conventions of the genre, or completely do away with it, and in so doing build something that wouldn’t even be considered an MMO in the first place. I think there is a place in the game industry for this type of game, I just think the traditional MMO can’t work like this.
~Kanthalos
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