[MUD-Dev] expansion packs

[Matt Mihaly]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> Playing AC2 really reminded me that it's going to become harder
> and harder to launch new MMOs given that the old ones keep getting
> polished and enhanced. Launching a sparse game and planning to pad
> it out for two years is looking increasingly unviable.

I was thinking about this yesterday. It seems like there are two
forces at work, at least with the current models.

  1. Existing games keep releasing more and more content in the form
  of expansion packs. This makes the bar for a new game increasingly
  high, especially as it's nearly impossible to really know what's
  going to work until you've got players actually playing the
  game. That gives games that have been around for awhile the
  ability to tweak here and there in small ways that add up to a
  huge incumbent advantage, potentially.

  2. The more expansion packs a game releases, the less impact each
  one is going to have on existing players, and on new players. If
  you're a new player, do you really want to buy 4 or 5 boxed
  products to get "everything" available in a game (like Everquest),
  or will you want to purchase one of the new boxed games, that may
  have features (mounts or whatnot) available only in the expansion
  packs of existing games?

Do those of you working on the big games think this is a problem? 
Will players get "expansion pack fatigue"? It's one thing for text
games to continually add content for years and years, because there
are no downloads, and usually no cost to enable the extra features,
but I would find it very daunting to approach EQ as a new player and
see all those expansion packs I know I'm going to have to buy. My
girlfriend has experienced something similar with the Sims and all
their expansion packs.

--matt


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