« EA's Lord of the Rings RPG | Main | Pre-order now and rule the world! »

July 28, 2006

Wake up and do something about it...

Dan's been dreaming... And for the most part, he's right.

Obviously, as a publisher I get a lot of exposure to other companies and their thoughts about the MMO space. This particular quote is so accurate it gave me the chills.

There’s a palpable sense of fear and terror amongst mmo developers right now. They’re scared shitless of WOW. They see it, believe it’s insurmountable, tuck their tails and go the opposite direction.
What does that mean?
It means you’re going to have company after company fucking around with smalltime, smallscale free products. Myspace Killers, Habbo Killers, Runescape Killers, you name it.

You make some great points, Dan. So, are you just going to point out the obvious while you sit at home being armchair exective producer in your underwear, or are you actually going to do something about it?


Posted by SunSword at July 28, 2006 12:36 AM

Comments

I fully agree with both points of views, the view of Dan that companies are looking to build smaller or industry word ‘niche’ games instead of just building overall fun games to play that will appeal to more than just a handful of the users out there. Its almost like they think if the user does not like their game that they must like World of Warcraft. Wake up and smell the roses, World of Warcraft is not that great of a game, it is an easy game to play and thus it has held on to its player base for the most part. They’ve opened up in more countries than other MMO games to date which does not hurt subscription numbers if your one to keep count or fearful of the numbers they have.

There are many ideals still out there waiting to be implemented in to games, there are more types of gamers our there than there are game types in the MMO genre. Why haven’t we looked to build Military MMO’s outside of the World War II era? Where are the other Sci-Fi MMO’s? Heck even the traditional fantasy or High Fantasy still has a ton of room for improvement and World of Warcraft did not ‘nail it’. If you want to compete against World of Warcraft, just build a fun game to play, not a boring game with ‘innovative’ features, it not rocket science. Fun games attract people to them, boring games with exceptional marketing attract people to them. But people talk about fun game more-so than boring games and the look to bring in their friends.

Now I know some of these other MMO genre games are in the works, but it does not mean the genre only needs those games, heck, with the recent track record of MMO’s some of those games won’t even see the light of day of a retail spot at the stores. There are way too many things ‘outside the box’ that need to be looked at and thought of. Combat systems, city life, mob AI just to name a few.

Posted by: Boon™ [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 25, 2006 02:24 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?