[MUD-Dev] Future of MMOGs

[Koster]

From: Crosbie Fitch

> THEREFORE
 
> The answer is to have a non-commercial MMOG.
 
> A peer-to-peer based system where players provide the
> infrastructure and resources, and can provide content too.

The first difficulty would be making such a beast. It's not exactly
simple (though it is *simpler* in that if it's truly non-commercial
and so on, you don't need to invest the [significant] effort in
making sure that it's hackproof and secure enough for commercial
transactions).

Then there's the issue of content and intellectual property. If you
had a network like this, and people uploaded content freely, it's
naive to suppose that it would be user-generated content. It'll be
user-pirated content too.  Basically--whatever the Web is, this
would be. Expect to see alternate (and better!) versions of Star
Wars and Star Trek and Pern and Disney and whatever. Worse, expect
to see areas for trading college papers or copyirhgted music or
whatever. (Just like we have now). Oh, and porn, of course.

There's a whole thorny thing there, and any given answer is liable
to be ideological, of course.

> Given there is probably a market for quality content, there's
> nothing to stop people selling quality content to the players of
> such a public MMOG.

How about, market forces? How many people succeed right now at
selling quality content on the Web? Those who do succeed do so via
the subscription model--eg, the commercial MMOG. Micropayments just
aren't here yet, and the primary barrier to adopting them is how the
credit card system works, with its near-fixed transaction cost.

> However, as we see with the Web, it's difficult to sell quality
> content (cf Salon et al) when there's so much quality content
> provided for free already.

Exactly. And as we're also seeing, other forms of revenue, such as
ads, are also faltering in the face of technology which can skip
them or elide them out of existence.

People are very able to do without content. Content I haven't
already experienced is way off on the luxury end of the
subsistence-luxury scale. I never miss reading IGN articles that I
am not subscribed to. The classic means of getting people to
subscribe to content is to give them a free taste first so as to
make it feel valued.

> Just as with the web, users avoid the crap sites, and frequent the
> good ones. It's all interest driven. Why not have a public MMOG
> comprised of PGC, given that players can hang out where they
> fancy?

Sounds great. Give me $20 million dollars to make it. Oh, wait. Who
wants to spend $20 million dollars with no hope of return? Hmm.

Let's get real for a second here. If a free, peer-to-peer virtual
reality cyberspace existed and were popular (let's call it The
Park), it wouldn't be free and it wouldn't be fully peer-to-peer
either. The fact is, the development and ongoing maintenance of
these things takes too much effort to be done solely as a public
service. It costs money, the question is really where the money is
coming from.

The classic model you're proposing is that each participant pony up
their own money to be on the Park. But then you get the "popularity
kills" effect--anyone who makes good free content is forced out of
the Park because of their bandwidth costs spiking. The
infrastructure they rely on is owned by someone, and what's more,
it's firmly under a commercial model at this point. Sprint and
Deutsche Telecom are not going to donate their bandwidth for the
future of virtual reality.

Making a powerful distributed system whereby people can contribute
their own content, maybe even make money off of it, link together,
and form a big ol' Sprawl or Matrix or Park or Net or whatever is
going to have to be commercially attractive or it won't happen. And
once it's commercially attractive, it will also have to be
IP-friendly, at least relatively so.

The Web followed the same path. It started out as free-for-all
cyberspace.  But of that free content you find out there is being
monetized by *somebody*, and usually, it's not the content creators
but the hosting services. If you like someone's blog, the money is
wending its very indirect way into the ISP's hands from both the
content producer and the content consumer.

> It'll be just like flowers and bees. The flowers bend over
> backwards to attract the bees so that they obtain
> publicity/promiscuity. The bees have fun flitting from flower to
> flower and get free food all the way.

Don't get me wrong. This is the game I want to make next, as it
happens. But despite the hacker ethic and the dreams of freedom of
information, it's gonna HAVE to be monetizable and *profitable* or
it won't get made. Food isn't free. The real question is whether you
think the content consumer should get a piece of the pie, or whether
it should ONLY go to the host.

-Raph

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